Event: Complicities in the Second World War: Literature of Occupation, Collaboration, and Impure Resistance `- Audience

Registration via https://event.ugent.be/registration/ComplicitiesWII from 04-09-2024 08:30 until 03-10-2024 12:00

Description

Complicities in the Second World War:

Literature of Occupation, Collaboration, and Impure Resistance

 

Date: 4-5 October 2024

Location: Monasterium Poortackerey, Ghent, Belgium

 

Keynote speakers:

Professor Mihaela Mihai (The University of Edinburgh)

 

Professor Ivan Stacy (Beijing Normal University)

 

The ethical questions and dilemmas inherent in military occupations constitute a crucial component of the vast literary production that throughout the decades has represented the Second World War. Cultural memory scholarship reveals how literature holds a unique position in addressing the memory of occupations: not only can it configure the past in meaningful, memorable, evocative, and immersive ways (Erll 2011; Rigney 2008), but it can also challenge instrumental national accounts, break silence, and compel readers to grapple with the most unsettling and difficult aspects of history. Literature’s capacity to generate complex ethical reflections about occupations aligns with the interdisciplinary scholarship that has sought to address past and present injustices over the last twenty years. In doing so, scholars have emphasised the need to move beyond binary conceptions, such as the guilty-innocent or victim-perpetrator dichotomies, and they have advocated the use of nuanced understandings of the ideas of complicity (Afxentiou et al 2007; Sander 2003; Sanyal 2015), responsibility (Young 2011; Niemi 2021), and implication (Meretoja 2018; Rothberg 2019). Literature constitutes an extremely fertile ground for cultivating these complex perspectives on history and, as such, it stands as a crucial domain for addressing the ethical dilemmas posed by World War II occupations.

This conference includes scholars working on the literary representation of World War II across a variety of cultural contexts and languages who have been invited to explore the complicities of collaborators, the responsibilities of implicated subjects, and the form of resistance that Mihaela Mihai (2022) has called “impure”, which rather than promoting idealised heroic models foster a multifaceted understanding of the ethical complexities inherent in the struggle against occupation.

 

The event will be preceded by a round table discussion on the history and memory of the Second World War occupation in Belgium - participation in the roundtable is free of charge but requires separate registration.  

Further information: https://www.literatureofoccupation.ugent.be 

Register Option Description Location When? Cost in EUR Available Seats

Complicities in the Second World War: Literature of Occupation, Collaboration, and Impure Resistance `- Audience

Monasterium Poortackere (Oude Houtlei 56, 9000 Gent)

04-10-2024 08:30 - 05-10-2024 18:30

100.00

14

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