The Venice Ghetto Collaboration: A Memory Space that Travels

This talk traces the origins of the Venice Ghetto Collaboration, providing the necessary context to put the other two panelists’ papers into productive conversation. As our mission statement outlines, the collaboration is an interdisciplinary and mutually supportive working group of humanities scholars interested in a set of shared questions. Individually and as a group, we develop projects that examine both the specificity of the Venice Ghetto and the symbolic power of ghettos more generally. Our scholarship investigates the history, conditions, physical space, and lived experience of the Venice Ghetto, as well as broader questions about the legacy of the ghetto, how and why the ghetto became a paradigm, and how comparisons have been drawn between compulsory, segregated, and enclosed spaces in discourse, literature, and academic research. Underlying this work is a desire to re-orient our scholarship towards its spatial and historical origins. The Col-lab-oration was formed after the group visited the Venice Ghetto in the summer of 2016, and found that the experience of walking the physical space added to the empathy and explanatory power of our research and writing. To this end, we encourage and support the creation of digital projects that help recreate the space, views, and movement of the historical, literary, and contemporary “ghetto” spaces that we study. Resistant to the idea that the space of the ghetto is “empty", we instead use it as a launching point for creative engagement. We conceive of the Venice Ghetto as a “memory-space that travels.”