Rubble Poetics: Ecologies of Residual Trauma
Description
Historical and cultural destruction has long been examined through the lens of ruination—where the presence of the past haunts the fragmented yet legible form of the ruin. But not all histories can be told that way. In Berlin, for example, the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, bombed in 1943, was preserved in its damaged state following a public campaign in the late 1950s. It stands today as a monumentalized fragment of the past. By contrast, the synagogue once located on nearby Passauer Street—like so many other remnants of Jewish life —was dismissed as mere rubble, and a parking lot was later constructed over its remains. Jewish life in Europe thus persists as rubble, absorbed into other ecologies: graves overgrown with vegetation, or synagogue bricks repurposed into profane structures.
Rubble is a minor form of residual presence, yet it offers a powerful framework for understanding witnessing as ecological—interwoven with foreign histories and non-human actants. Unlike the ruin—a legible, anthropocentric remnant shaped by the Euro-American tradition—the figure of rubble signals a more diffuse, flattened material condition, already entangled with other human and non-human elements. A ruin is almost always the ruin of something. Rubble, by contrast, is contingent on its environment: absorbed into new ecologies, transformed, or rebuilt into something else entirely. While ruins—most famously in Walter Benjamin’s thought—serve as thresholds to historical consciousness, rubble is flat, dispersed, and temporally unstable.
This seminar asks: What does it mean for trauma and testimony to be transmitted—in material or literary terms—as rubble? How does this differ from the now-familiar discourse of ruinology? How does rubble reshape our thinking about heritage and transmission? In what ways might it invite an ecological perspective on witnessing—one that recognizes non-human timescales and decentered modes of presence? In doing so, Rubble Poetics seeks to accommodate new understandings of witnessing as intersecting lenses of material fragmentation, ecological entanglement, and multi-scalar perception.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Louise Laverty is a PhD student in Religion at Concordia University in Montreal, QC. Their doctoral research examines the tensions between European and North American feminine ideals, through the lens of female Canadian Jewish writers in the twentieth century. This project aims to highlight to the writings of first and second-generation immigrants, as their writings engage with the realities of women’s positionality in Canada as women and a ‘cultural other.’
Speaker Bio
Guoyuan Liu earned his PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Western Ontario in 2010. He has taught Chinese culture and literature at Huron University College, Western University since 2009. He is currently working on collective trauma and memory in Chinese film and literature.
Speaker Bio
YeSeung Lee is an independent scholar, having previously taught at University of Westminster, De Montfort University, and Royal College of Art. She is the author of Seamlessness: Making and (Un)knowing in Fashion Practice and the editor of Surface and Apparition: The Immateriality of Modern Surface, and has published journal articles in media, fashion, luxury, and cultural studies. Her current research explores the link between praxis, material culture, and identity via everyday surfaces.
Speaker Bio
Gai Farchi is a Minerva Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Cultural Semiotics, University of Potsdam. His research focuses on modern French thought, memory studies, and material culture, with particular attention to the entanglement of witnessing, rubble, and obsolescence in contemporary literature and theory.