About The Workshop
SW 25– What Fits Inside My Father’s Suitcase: Memory and Oblivion in the Work of Orhan Pamuk
Convenors: Marcelo Galuppo; Mônica Sette Lopes
Contact: marcelogaluppo@uol.com.br ; monicasette@uol.com.br
This special workshop proposes an interdisciplinary discussion at the intersection of law, literature, and memory. The workshop explores how memory and forgetting operate not merely as literary themes, but as normative problems that resonate deeply with legal theory, political responsibility, and collective identity.
Pamuk’s oeuvre is permeated by a persistent tension between remembrance and oblivion. From Istanbul: Memories and the City and My Father’s Suitcase to The Black Book, Snow, and The Museum of Innocence, memory appears both as a burden and as a moral imperative. Forgetting, in turn, is never neutral: it may function as protection, denial, repression, or violence. This ambivalence provides a fertile ground for philosophical reflection on law’s own complex relationship with memory—particularly in contexts marked by authoritarian pasts, cultural trauma, and contested histories.
Law is, in a fundamental sense, an institutionalized practice of memory. Legal systems preserve precedents, testimonies, archives, and judgments; they decide what must be remembered, what can be forgotten, and under what conditions. At the same time, law also produces forgetting: through amnesties, statutes of limitation, transitional arrangements, and silences embedded in legal narratives. Pamuk’s literary treatment of memory offers a powerful lens through which to interrogate these juridical dynamics.
The workshop will take Pamuk’s metaphor of the “father’s suitcase” as a conceptual axis. The suitcase symbolizes a fragile repository of personal memory, cultural inheritance, and unfinished narratives, where many other stories also fit, even the autobiographic one. It raises questions that are equally central to law: What do we carry from the past? What do we choose to transmit? What remains unsaid, unread, or deliberately abandoned? How our lives connect with other people’s livrs?
Particular attention will be given to the tension between individual and collective memory. Pamuk’s characters frequently inhabit a space where personal recollection conflicts with official history. This is especially visible in his treatment of Istanbul as a city shaped by loss, melancholy (hüzün), and selective remembrance. Such narratives resonate with contemporary debates on constitutional memory, historical injustice, and the role of law in acknowledging—or erasing—past wrongs.
The workshop also aims to connect Pamuk’s work with broader theoretical discussions in law and humanities, including:
– memory and identity in constitutional and political theory;
– forgetting, denial, and legal silence;
– narrative, testimony, and truth;
– archives, museums, and the juridical imagination;
– post-authoritarian and post-imperial legacies.
Methodologically, the workshop adopts law and literature approach, treating literary texts not as mere illustrations of legal concepts, but as sites of normative insight. Pamuk’s narrative strategies—fragmentation, metafiction, doubling, and self-reflexivity—challenge linear accounts of truth and responsibility, inviting jurists to reconsider the forms through which law tells stories about the past.
By situating Pamuk’s work within the context of memory studies and legal theory, the workshop seeks to contribute to a richer understanding of how societies confront their histories. It also invites reflection on the ethical demands placed upon both writers and jurists: the duty to remember without mythologizing, to forget without erasing injustice, and to acknowledge the limits of any single narrative.
