Come along to the next in the Stout Research Centre’s Family Seminar Series
Part 1 – Nick Bollinger
In New Zealand in the 1970s, the popular music scene was dominated by a pair of parallel performance circuits. One was run by New Zealand Breweries and their flamboyant entertainment manager Richard Holden; the other by a former student arts councillor and part-time drug dealer called Graeme Nesbitt. I initially set out to tell the story of these two individuals and wound up writing a memoir. I will discuss how I arrived at the form I finally used for telling this story, and how I drew on the personal to illuminate the historical.
Nick Bollinger is a writer, critic and broadcaster. He has been a music columnist for The Listener and presenter of the music review programme The Sampler on RNZ National. He is the author of How To Listen To Pop Music, 100 Essential New Zealand Albums and Goneville, which won the Adam Prize for Creative Writing in 2015. He is currently a visiting researcher at the Stout Research Centre and working on a history of the counterculture in New Zealand.
Part 2 – Giacomo Lichtner
My mother was born in Rome on 21 July 1944, of a Catholic mother and a Jewish father, Rodolfo Passigli. Rodolfo was not around for the birth of his third daughter: arrested in his native Florence in the spring of 1944, he was deported to Fossoli and then Auschwitz, where he was gassed in April. In this presentation, I will reflect on the process of weaving together the story of my mother’s life with the history of post-fascist Italian anti-Semitism. As well as briefly considering the resilience of stereotypes and assumptions about citizenship – which seem of transnational relevance today – I will reflect on the difficult yet fertile coexistence of macro- and micro-history: how do we write ourselves into history without making it about ourselves?
Giacomo Lichtner is Associate Professor of History at Victoria University of Wellington. He is Associate Editor of the journal Modern Italy and serves on the board of the Holocaust Centre of New Zealand. His research focuses on the long Second World War and on the politics of its commemoration and representation in film. Lichtner is the author of Film and the Shoah in France and Italy (2008, 2015) and Fascism in Italian Cinema Since 1945: the Politics and Aesthetics of Memory (2013). His latest project is a study of the search for meaning in Holocaust cinema.
Date: Wednesday 10 April 2019
Time: 4.10 p.m. Tea and coffee at 3.45 p.m.
Venue: Stout Research Centre Seminar Room, 12 Waiteata Road, Kelburn