Books
Mediating Historical Responsibility Memories of ‘Difficult Pasts’ in European Cultures, 2024
Mediating Historical Responsibility brings together leading scholars and new voices in the interd... more Mediating Historical Responsibility brings together leading scholars and new voices in the interdisciplinary fields of memory studies, history, and cultural studies to explore the ways culture, and cultural representations, have been at the forefront of bringing the memory of past injustices to the attention of audiences for many years. Engaging with the darkest pages of twentieth-century European history, dealing with the legacy of colonialism, war crimes, genocides, dictatorships, and racism, the authors of this collection of critical essays address Europe’s ‘difficult pasts’ through the study of cultural products, examining historical narratives, literary texts, films, documentaries, theatre, poetry, graphic novels, visual artworks, material heritage, and the cultural and political reception of official government reports. Adopting an intermedial approach to the study of European history, the book probes the relationship between memory and responsibility, investigating what it means to take responsibility for the past and showing how cultural products are fundamentally entangled in this process.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Carocci, 2023
Il libro offre il primo studio approfondito dei modi in cui la letteratura italiana del secondo d... more Il libro offre il primo studio approfondito dei modi in cui la letteratura italiana del secondo dopoguerra ha rappresentato le guerre di aggressione e i regimi di occupazione dell’Italia fascista durante la Seconda guerra mondiale, una serie di eventi che vengono qui chiamati “Guerra dell’Asse”. Grazie a una metodologia innovativa, che combina teorie dei memory studies, storiografia, narratologia e critica tematica, il volume delinea un viaggio testuale lungo tre decenni che attraverso lo studio di figure di ripetizione quali topoi, temi e masterplots esplora il contributo delle opere letterarie alla formazione di una memoria della guerra e del fascismo. Passando in rassegna i numerosi contenuti etici di questa spesso dimenticata letteratura di guerra, il testo indaga il rapporto fra letteratura e memoria collettiva chiedendosi fino a che punto la letteratura della Guerra dell’Asse sia stata in grado di aiutare i lettori a sviluppare un senso di responsabilità per i crimini del passato.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Annali d'Italianistica 41 2023
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Palgrave Macmillan, 2021
The book investigates the representation of the Axis War – the wars of aggression that Fascist It... more The book investigates the representation of the Axis War – the wars of aggression that Fascist Italy fought in North Africa, Greece, the Soviet Union, and the Balkans, from 1940 to 1943 – in three decades of Italian literature. Building on an innovative and interdisciplinary methodology, which combines memory studies, historiography, thematic criticism, and narratology, this book explores the main topoi, themes, and masterplots of an extensive corpus of novels and memoirs to assess the contribution of literature to the reshaping of Italian memory and identity after the end of Fascism. By exploring the influence that public memory exercises on literary depictions and, in return, the contribution of literary texts to the formation and dissemination of a discourse about the past, the book examines to what extent Italian literature helped readers form an ethical awareness of the crimes committed by members of their national community during World War II
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Questo libro nasce dalla rielaborazione della tesi di laurea magistrale di Guido Bartolini sulla ... more Questo libro nasce dalla rielaborazione della tesi di laurea magistrale di Guido Bartolini sulla relazione tra letteratura classica e cultura moderna
all’inizio del 900. Il centro attorno a cui si sviluppa questo studio è
il concetto di classico, con i suoi plurimi significati, i suoi riusi e le
sue contraddizioni. Il mondo classico
occupa oggi giorno una posizione periferica all’interno del campo
degli studi letterari; tuttavia esso ha costituito per secoli il baricentro
della cultura Occidentale ed anche il XX secolo non ha mai smesso
di interrogarsi sul rapporto tra cultura antica e contemporaneità.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Conference and Seminar Organisation
The conference has been curated by Dr. Guido Bartolini as part of his FWO Senior Postdoctoral fel... more The conference has been curated by Dr. Guido Bartolini as part of his FWO Senior Postdoctoral fellowship. The conference has received financial support from the FNRS, the FWO, the UGent Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, the UGent Department of History, the Centre for Literary & Intermedial Crossings (CLIC) at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, the UGent Department of Literary Studies, the UGent section of English, the UGent Human Rights Research Network (HRRN), and the UGent section of German.
Programme available at: https://www.literatureofoccupation.ugent.be/programme/
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
This round table aims to take stock of current debates about Belgian memory of World War II by ad... more This round table aims to take stock of current debates about Belgian memory of World War II by addressing the history of collaboration in Belgium and the role that cultural products, including literary texts and digital resources, have played in the articulation of a memory of the past. The round table opens the international conference ‘Complicities in the Second World War: Literature of Occupation, Collaboration, and Impure Resistance’, which takes place in Ghent on 4 and 5 October. For more information visit www.literatureofoccupation.ugent.be and https://www.cmsi.ugent.be/round-table-history-and-memory-of-world-war-ii-occupation-in-belgium/.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Complicities in the Second World War:
Literature of Occupation, Collaboration, and Impure Resista... more Complicities in the Second World War:
Literature of Occupation, Collaboration, and Impure Resistance
Date: 4-5 October 2024
Location: Monasterium Poortackerey, Gent, Belgium
Deadline to submit a paper proposal: 6 May 2024
The global impact of World War II has been profound and enduring. Narrated across the globe in a myriad of ways — as a just struggle by democracies against oppressive forces, as a testament to the resilience and heroism of nations, as a past that refuses to go away and demands confrontation, as the source of liberation from fascism, as the catalyst for the end of colonial domination, as the birth of new illiberal regimes and occupations, or as the acme of destruction and genocidal violence — World War II has constituted a cornerstone of collective memory leaving an indelible mark on the conscience of humanity.
As a result of its importance, the memory of World War II has acquired a strong ethical dimension and has become a source of metahistorical reflections, prompting questions about human agency and the burden of guilt and responsibility for injustices. These ethical considerations come into sharp focus in the context of military occupations. The territories occupied by the Axis Powers and the Allies during World War II constituted a “contact zone” (Pratt 1992) between people of different nationalities endowed with asymmetric power that confronted the members of the occupied communities with weighty choices of collaborating, resisting, or navigating the complex spectrum in between.
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 past 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 invites scholars working on the literary representation of World War II across any cultural context and language to present case studies that, through the analysis of the complex positionalities that literature constructs, can address the ethical issues woven into the fabric of military occupations. In particular, scholars are encouraged to explore the complicities of collaborators, the responsibilities of implicated subjects, and the form of resistance that Mihaela Mihai (2022) calls “impure”, which rather than promoting idealised heroic models foster a multifaceted understanding of the ethical complexities inherent in the struggle against occupation.
Topics that scholars can address through the study of literature include, but are not limited to:
The agency of perpetrators under occupation.
The relationship between occupiers and collaborators.
Indirect participation in genocide and war crimes.
The thematisation of guilt and responsibility for collaboration.
Ethical dilemmas faced by collaborators and resistants.
“Impure resistance” and its manifestations.
The use of violence in resistance movements.
Multiple positionalities and cases of “complex implication”.
Narratives that challenge silence and taboos in a memory culture.
Self-serving representations that fail to engage with the complexity of occupations.
World War II occupations and decolonisation.
Please submit a paper proposal (300 words) and a short academic bio by Monday 6 May 2024. Please note that the working language of the conference will be English.
Submissions and any queries should be sent to Dr Guido Bartolini at Literatureofoccupation@gmail.com
Further info: https://www.literatureofoccupation.ugent.be
Bibliography
Afxentiou, Dunford, Michael Neu, and Robin Dunford. Eds. Exploring Complicity: Concept, Cases and Critique. New York: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2007.
Erll, Astrid. Memory in Culture, trans. by Sara Young. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011a.
Meretoja, Hanna. The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History and the Possible. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.
Mihai, Mihaela. Political Memory and the Aesthetics of Care: The Art of Complicity and Resistance. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022.
Niemi, Minna Johanna. Complicity and Responsibility in Contemporary African Writing: The Postcolony Revisited. New York: Routledge, 2021.
Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 1992.
Rigney, Anne. “The Dynamics of Remembrance: Texts between Monumentality and Morphing.” Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Eds. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning. Berlin/New York: De Gruyter, 2008. 345–356.
Rothberg, Michael. The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019.
Sander, Mark. Complicities: The Intellectual and Apartheid. Durham, N.C.; London: Duke University Press, 2003.
Sanyal, Debarati. Memory and Complicity. Migrations of Holocaust Remembrance. New York, Fordham University Press, 2015.
Young, Iris Marion. Responsibility for Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Although the world seems to be drifting towards the conflictual opposition between large geopolit... more Although the world seems to be drifting towards the conflictual opposition between large geopolitical blocs, and the pandemic and the war in Ukraine have reshaped the dynamics of globalisation, there is no doubt that many of the key issues of our time are global in nature and scope. Indeed, we could argue that the most important social and political battles of the twenty-first century are fought in the global arena. Climate change, international migrations, pandemics, neoliberal capitalist exploitation, racialised patterns of exclusion and discrimination, gentrification are just some of the global challenges that characterise our time. As Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò argues in Reconsidering Reparations, because slavery and colonialism fundamentally shaped the world we live in, we should be thinking more broadly and holistically about how to remake the world system. Moreover, since human beings have become a geophysical force capable of radically affecting the climate system of the planet as a whole, the ‘planetary’ is also emerging as an analytical category and as a matter of human concern. Indeed, as Dipesh Chakrabarty points out in The Climate of History in a Planetary Age, ‘in our own awareness of ourselves, the “now” of human history has become entangled with the long “now” of geological and biological timescales, something that has never happened before in the history of humanity’ (p. 7). We therefore need to connect the planetary with the global, the geologic arc of the Anthropocene/Capitalocene with the time of human history and experience, with a particular attention to the colonial, racial, and gendered oppressions that link the human world to the vast processes and timescale of the Earth system.
Bringing together literary and cultural studies, art and film studies, critical race theory, environmental humanities, and philosophy, this international conference will explore how different cultural texts might facilitate our critical and political engagement with forms of violence and injustice that are global in nature and scope. Drawing connections between the concepts and the practices of ‘global responsibility’ and ‘habitability’, the conference will discuss how different natural, social, and cultural forces shape the habitability of different environments on Earth, as well as our individual and collective responsibility for making the world not just habitable but also compatible with the flourishing of different beings.
The key questions that this conference seeks to address are:
How can literature, film, and other forms of art help us to think through the notions of ‘global responsibility’ and ‘habitability’?
What makes the Earth habitable, and how does human culture, action and neglect affect that habitability?
To what extent and in what sense are we responsible for making the Earth a place where different forms of human and nonhuman life can live and thrive?
What are the conditions for a good life and how are these conditions represented in mass culture?
How and to what extent can cultural work challenge political and social structures of oppression?
How can different cultural texts and artistic media develop our political imagination and sense of responsibility?
How does the past influence habitability and life conditions in the present?
How do ongoing patterns of violence, injustice, and accumulation affect habitability and life’s capacity to flourish?
What does it take for life to survive and flourish?
This international conference welcomes scholars across the arts & humanities working in all geographical areas and theoretical frameworks, and encourages proposals that take an interdisciplinary or cross-disciplinary approach.
Suggested topics include (but are not restricted to):
Literature, film, art, philosophy and the question global responsibility
Critical perspectives on what makes an environment habitable sociologically, culturally, and ecologically
Intersectional analyses of ‘global responsibility’ and ‘habitability’
How the global racial empire affects ‘habitability’ and ‘global responsibility’
Cultural texts that address forms or patterns of injustice that are global in nature and scope
Cultural work, differentiated solidarity, and the challenge of ‘elite capture’ (Táíwò 2022)
Literature, film, art, philosophy and the struggle of ‘remaking the world’ (Getachew 2019)
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
The World Wars are two historical events that were characterized by an abundance of documents wri... more The World Wars are two historical events that were characterized by an abundance of documents written by individuals. The upsurge of popular writings concerned all the countries that were involved in both Wars. These documents are important both historically and linguistically. The study of war writings has always been extremely important but it has been characterized by a new vigour due to the recent centenary of the First World War, and because of the emergence of new theories, such as gender and conflict theories, or the development of new tools, for example the Digital Humanities.
Our aim is to take stock of the state of studies on war writing at the turn of the two world wars.
The focus of this conference is to start from a comparative and multilingual perspective and then move on to the specific case of Italy. These two days of study form part of the MSCA-funded project Last Letters from the World Wars: Forming Italian Language, Identity and Memory in Texts of Conflict that will be presented during the event.
The first day will be devoted to English-language contributions on European war writing. We would like to propose an overview of war writings in European countries in several languages such as English, French, Spanish, Irish, etc. for the first day. The subsequent day will be dedicated to Italian studies and papers in both English and Italian will be accepted.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Online Seminar Series and Symposium hosted at University College Cork on April-May 2022.
The e... more Online Seminar Series and Symposium hosted at University College Cork on April-May 2022.
The event is generously supported by the Irish Research Council (IRC), The National University of Ireland (NUI), the ERC project ‘Translating Memories: The Eastern European Past in the Global Arena’ funded by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, and The Centre for Advanced Studies in Languages and Cultures of University College Cork (CASiLaC).
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Online Symposium hosted on 19-20 May 2022 at University College Cork.
The event is generously s... more Online Symposium hosted on 19-20 May 2022 at University College Cork.
The event is generously supported by the Irish Research Council (IRC), The National University of Ireland (NUI), the ERC project ‘Translating Memories: The Eastern European Past in the Global Arena’ funded by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, and The Centre for Advanced Studies in Languages and Cultures of University College Cork (CASiLaC).
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Online Seminar Series and Symposium hosted by University College Cork.
Registration Link: https:... more Online Seminar Series and Symposium hosted by University College Cork.
Registration Link: https://linktr.ee/Memory_Past_Dictatorships
Seminar Series:
12 April 2022, 5.00 – 6.00 pm
Michael Lazzara (University of California, Davis)
¡Desobedientes!: Implicated Subjects, Memory, and Responsibility in Post-Dictatorship Chilean Documentaries
27 April 2022, 5.00 – 6.00 pm
Juliane Prade-Weiss (Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich)
Implication in Commemoration: On Current Interests in Past Complicities
4 May 2022, 5.00 – 6.00 pm
David Martin-Jones (University of Glasgow)
Remembering Cold War Pasts Across a World of Cinemas
Symposium (19 - 20 May 2022):
8 Panels with more than 30 speakers from all around the world.
2 Keynote addresses by Minna Johanna Niemi (The Arctic University of Norway) and Jie-Hyun Lim (Critical Global Studies Institute, Sogang University, Seoul).
1 Roundtable discussion with Michael Lazzara, Juliane Prade-Weiss, and David Martin-Jones.
The event is generously supported by the Irish Research Council (IRC), The National University of Ireland (NUI), the ERC project ‘Translating Memories: The Eastern European Past in the Global Arena’ funded by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, and The Centre for Advanced Studies in Languages and Cultures of University College Cork (CASiLaC)
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
This Symposium brings together scholars working on the representation of past dictatorships throu... more This Symposium brings together scholars working on the representation of past dictatorships through the study of cultural products. Adopting Michael Rothberg’s concept of implication as a common thread, the Symposium aims to investigate the ways in which cultural products engage with the ethical dilemmas of complicity, guilt, and responsibility that dictatorships create. In representing past dictatorships, how do cultural products construct and problematise the notions of victim, perpetrator, beneficiary, bystander, collaborator, and implicated subject? How can cultural products help us think about the ways ordinary citizens are involved in dictatorial regimes? What are the benefits and limitations of using aesthetically refined works to pose ethical questions about the past? By approaching these issues in a global, comparative, and transnational perspective, the Symposium also aims to explore the tensions between local and global circulation of narratives of implication assessing which visual and narrative tropes and templates are used to appeal to both global and local audiences.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
The Department of Italian at University College Cork and The Society for Italian Studies are deli... more The Department of Italian at University College Cork and The Society for Italian Studies are delighted to host a two-day online Workshop for Early Career Academics (ECAs), which will address Methodologies and Theoretical Approaches within the Humanities and their application to the study of Italian language and culture. The event will also host two professional development sessions, which are designed to enhance the professionalisation of Early Career Academics. These consist of a session on ‘Publishing your first academic book’ delivered by an editor from an academic press, and a roundtable on ‘What we look for in an article submission for an academic journal’, where the Editors of the journal Italian Studies, Professor Ruth Glynn, Dr Catherine Keen, and Professor Giuliana Pieri, will present on what they think constitutes a strong submission, while also identifying common pitfalls. They will also advise on writing an effective Book Review.
The workshop is structured around four dedicated sections, each one of which will comprise a panel of ECA speakers in dialogue with a keynote speaker:
1) Digital Humanities
Keynote: Prof. Massimo Riva, Brown University
Organiser: Dr Ana Stefanovska, UCC
2) Mediating Subjectivities
Keynote: Prof. Loredana Polezzi, Stony Brook University
Organiser: Dr Valentina Mele, UCC
3) Intermediality
Keynote: Prof. Giancarlo Lombardi, City University of New York
Organiser: Dr Guido Bartolini, UCC
4) Deconstructing Whiteness
Keynote: Dr. Gaia Giuliani, University of Coimbra
Organiser: Dr Guido Bartolini, UCC
Workshop Dates: 24-25 June 2021
Mode of Delivery: The event will be held online
Full Programme available here: SIS ECA Workshop 2021
Book of Abstracts available here: Book of Abstracts ECA 2021
This conference is generously supported by The Society for Italian Studies and the Department of Italian, UCC.
Register for free on Eventbrite using the following link: https://www.eventbrite.ie/e/italian-studies-theory-and-practice-an-sis-workshop-for-ecas-tickets-156425335389
Please note: All participants will need to be registered members of The Society for Italian Studies by 1 June 2021. http://italianstudies.org.uk/the-society/membership/
PANEL DESCRIPTIONS:
1) Digital Humanities
Panel Description: In recent years, the interdisciplinary area of Digital Humanities has promoted numerous projects carried out by researchers from all over the world. By bringing together theoretical approaches from the Humanities with new digital tools, the field has introduced innovative ways of approaching art, literature, history, and geography. The two-fold dimension of Digital Humanities, or the interest in the wide-ranging digital instruments that set the stage for new ways of studying Humanities, and the ongoing humanistic debates on the extent to which technology impacts today’s cultural studies, allows us to examine more in depth how this new field has enriched Italian studies, as well as the ways in which it has contributed to the creation, promotion, and reception of new cultural products in Italy. This panel welcomes papers interested in taking notice of the various forms of interaction between Digital Humanities and Italian culture, including digital archives, monographs, and online resources for the study and teaching of Italian language and literature, as well as papers that question the most recent ways of storytelling through digital platforms, from the Italian hypertext fiction to the social media phenomena such as Instapoets.
2) Translating Subjectivities
Panel Description: Translation is a crucial process contributing to the reception of Italian culture. This panel seeks to explore the many ways in which Italian authors and works have been appropriated, distributed, and canonised over the centuries, and by whom, aiming to investigate the complex dynamics of translation and reception as well as their impact on the construction of literary subjectivities and cultural histories both within and beyond Italy. Why and how have some authors received particular attention in a specific historical period, and how have translations of their works shaped and influenced current ways of reading and interpreting them? This panel welcomes proposals considering translation according to a broad meaning, including artistic, cinematic, and political translations, as well as theories and practices of translation and self-translation, and addressing ways in which these forms of articulating subjectivity emblematise or divert from a given historical and cultural context.
3) Intermediality
Panel Description: In the last two decades, the study of intermediality has grown into a lively field of research in the Humanities, allowing scholars to go beyond the notion of intertextuality and develop a particularly productive perspective on cultural production. Today, thanks to the language of intermediality, not only can we valorise boundary-crossing artistic practices, but also gain a deeper understanding of the dynamics of cultural transmission, shedding new light on interartistic exchanges, canon formations, reception processes, and the circulation of cultural memories. While the creation of a specific terminology for the study of intermedial relations among the arts constitutes a development of contemporary culture, intermedial phenomena are not new per se and have long characterised Western culture, as the notions of ekphrasis and the Renaissance debate on the sister arts testify. For this panel, we welcome paper proposals that can address forms of intermediality in any era of Italian culture, focusing either on theoretical notions, such as those of multimediality, transmediality, and remediation, or specific case studies that offer examples of intermedial relationships within Italian cultural production.
4) Deconstructing Whiteness
Panel Description: The idea of whiteness has become increasingly important in the study of the construction of Italian national identity. Scholarship has shown that beyond overtly racist discourses that dominated Italian culture at different times, such as nineteenth century Lombrosian inspired science and the policies promoted by Fascism, the idea of Italianness in itself has been articulated in accordance with implicit racial ideas (Patriarca and Deplano 2018). Such racialised discourse has long remained unexplored in scholarship, also because of the universalist perspective that informed the political discourse of the Italian Republic, which objected to the use of the category of race. From this came the necessity of works that could use this conceptual tool in order to expose the role that whiteness played in the Italian identity process (Giuliani and Lombardi Diop 2013; InteRGRace 2018). This panel welcomes proposals that could either address the construction of whiteness across Italian cultural production or put such a racial trope into question by considering forms of hybrid identities and post-colonial perspectives within Italian culture.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
The Mediated Memories of Responsibility seminars bring together scholars working on the cultural ... more The Mediated Memories of Responsibility seminars bring together scholars working on the cultural representation of the violent past of the twentieth century across a variety of media and cultures. The seminar series examines the contribution of cultural products to exposing the crimes of perpetrators and disseminating a sense of responsibility for the past in relation to events such as colonialism, wars, and dictatorships. Interdisciplinary in nature, the seminars will explore the construction of the idea of responsibility for past wrongdoings across textual and visual media while addressing ethical questions stemming from the study of past atrocities. Bringing together scholars working across the disciplines, the series aims to foster a cross-fertilisation of ideas and approaches in Modern Languages, History, and Memory Studies.
This seminar has received generous support from the Humanities and Arts Research Institute (HARI) of Royal Holloway University of London, and University Council of Modern Languages (UCML)
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
The IMLR Graduate Forum is a monthly meeting, taking place in Senate House, run by and for gradua... more The IMLR Graduate Forum is a monthly meeting, taking place in Senate House, run by and for graduate students from the Colleges and Institutes in and around London, working on any cultural aspect of those parts of the world where Germanic or Romance languages are spoken. Forum members have the opportunity to present their research and discuss their work in an informal setting. As well as stimulating intellectual debate, the Forum is a great social occasion, giving students of the humanities, from their first year to the writing-up stage, the opportunity to meet and be inspired by each other’s work.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
This postgraduate conference offered a platform for the discussion of the phenomena of war and co... more This postgraduate conference offered a platform for the discussion of the phenomena of war and conflict in Italian culture. Considered in their wide implications, war and conflict constituted two categories particularly fruitful for the exploration of the culture of an often divided and polarised country such as Italy. The conference had a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approach in order to reflect the variety of research carried out by the postgraduate members of the SIS.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Other
Featured Member shines a spotlight on the diverse research interests of, and the exciting project... more Featured Member shines a spotlight on the diverse research interests of, and the exciting projects undertaken by, those affiliated with the Cultural Memory Studies Initiative. In this thirteenth instalment of the series, we speak to Guido Bartolini, a postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University working on the memory of Fascism in contemporary Italian literature. Dr Bartolini’s current project builds on and extends his previous research on the representation of the Second World War in pre-1989 Italian literature. While his peripatetic career trajectory has taken him from Italy to Belgium via the UK and Ireland, his overall research focus has remained remarkably constant, allowing him to make a singular contribution to literary studies, memory studies, and Italian memory politics. Some of the topics discussed in this conversation are the origins of Dr Bartolini’s interest in issues of memory, his hopes of generating societal impact, the notion of self-absolution for involvement in Fascism and how it is being counteracted, and the pros and cons of finding oneself at a distance from one’s object of study.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Uploads
Books
all’inizio del 900. Il centro attorno a cui si sviluppa questo studio è
il concetto di classico, con i suoi plurimi significati, i suoi riusi e le
sue contraddizioni. Il mondo classico
occupa oggi giorno una posizione periferica all’interno del campo
degli studi letterari; tuttavia esso ha costituito per secoli il baricentro
della cultura Occidentale ed anche il XX secolo non ha mai smesso
di interrogarsi sul rapporto tra cultura antica e contemporaneità.
Conference and Seminar Organisation
Programme available at: https://www.literatureofoccupation.ugent.be/programme/
Literature of Occupation, Collaboration, and Impure Resistance
Date: 4-5 October 2024
Location: Monasterium Poortackerey, Gent, Belgium
Deadline to submit a paper proposal: 6 May 2024
The global impact of World War II has been profound and enduring. Narrated across the globe in a myriad of ways — as a just struggle by democracies against oppressive forces, as a testament to the resilience and heroism of nations, as a past that refuses to go away and demands confrontation, as the source of liberation from fascism, as the catalyst for the end of colonial domination, as the birth of new illiberal regimes and occupations, or as the acme of destruction and genocidal violence — World War II has constituted a cornerstone of collective memory leaving an indelible mark on the conscience of humanity.
As a result of its importance, the memory of World War II has acquired a strong ethical dimension and has become a source of metahistorical reflections, prompting questions about human agency and the burden of guilt and responsibility for injustices. These ethical considerations come into sharp focus in the context of military occupations. The territories occupied by the Axis Powers and the Allies during World War II constituted a “contact zone” (Pratt 1992) between people of different nationalities endowed with asymmetric power that confronted the members of the occupied communities with weighty choices of collaborating, resisting, or navigating the complex spectrum in between.
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 past 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 invites scholars working on the literary representation of World War II across any cultural context and language to present case studies that, through the analysis of the complex positionalities that literature constructs, can address the ethical issues woven into the fabric of military occupations. In particular, scholars are encouraged to explore the complicities of collaborators, the responsibilities of implicated subjects, and the form of resistance that Mihaela Mihai (2022) calls “impure”, which rather than promoting idealised heroic models foster a multifaceted understanding of the ethical complexities inherent in the struggle against occupation.
Topics that scholars can address through the study of literature include, but are not limited to:
The agency of perpetrators under occupation.
The relationship between occupiers and collaborators.
Indirect participation in genocide and war crimes.
The thematisation of guilt and responsibility for collaboration.
Ethical dilemmas faced by collaborators and resistants.
“Impure resistance” and its manifestations.
The use of violence in resistance movements.
Multiple positionalities and cases of “complex implication”.
Narratives that challenge silence and taboos in a memory culture.
Self-serving representations that fail to engage with the complexity of occupations.
World War II occupations and decolonisation.
Please submit a paper proposal (300 words) and a short academic bio by Monday 6 May 2024. Please note that the working language of the conference will be English.
Submissions and any queries should be sent to Dr Guido Bartolini at Literatureofoccupation@gmail.com
Further info: https://www.literatureofoccupation.ugent.be
Bibliography
Afxentiou, Dunford, Michael Neu, and Robin Dunford. Eds. Exploring Complicity: Concept, Cases and Critique. New York: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2007.
Erll, Astrid. Memory in Culture, trans. by Sara Young. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011a.
Meretoja, Hanna. The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History and the Possible. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.
Mihai, Mihaela. Political Memory and the Aesthetics of Care: The Art of Complicity and Resistance. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022.
Niemi, Minna Johanna. Complicity and Responsibility in Contemporary African Writing: The Postcolony Revisited. New York: Routledge, 2021.
Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 1992.
Rigney, Anne. “The Dynamics of Remembrance: Texts between Monumentality and Morphing.” Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Eds. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning. Berlin/New York: De Gruyter, 2008. 345–356.
Rothberg, Michael. The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019.
Sander, Mark. Complicities: The Intellectual and Apartheid. Durham, N.C.; London: Duke University Press, 2003.
Sanyal, Debarati. Memory and Complicity. Migrations of Holocaust Remembrance. New York, Fordham University Press, 2015.
Young, Iris Marion. Responsibility for Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Bringing together literary and cultural studies, art and film studies, critical race theory, environmental humanities, and philosophy, this international conference will explore how different cultural texts might facilitate our critical and political engagement with forms of violence and injustice that are global in nature and scope. Drawing connections between the concepts and the practices of ‘global responsibility’ and ‘habitability’, the conference will discuss how different natural, social, and cultural forces shape the habitability of different environments on Earth, as well as our individual and collective responsibility for making the world not just habitable but also compatible with the flourishing of different beings.
The key questions that this conference seeks to address are:
How can literature, film, and other forms of art help us to think through the notions of ‘global responsibility’ and ‘habitability’?
What makes the Earth habitable, and how does human culture, action and neglect affect that habitability?
To what extent and in what sense are we responsible for making the Earth a place where different forms of human and nonhuman life can live and thrive?
What are the conditions for a good life and how are these conditions represented in mass culture?
How and to what extent can cultural work challenge political and social structures of oppression?
How can different cultural texts and artistic media develop our political imagination and sense of responsibility?
How does the past influence habitability and life conditions in the present?
How do ongoing patterns of violence, injustice, and accumulation affect habitability and life’s capacity to flourish?
What does it take for life to survive and flourish?
This international conference welcomes scholars across the arts & humanities working in all geographical areas and theoretical frameworks, and encourages proposals that take an interdisciplinary or cross-disciplinary approach.
Suggested topics include (but are not restricted to):
Literature, film, art, philosophy and the question global responsibility
Critical perspectives on what makes an environment habitable sociologically, culturally, and ecologically
Intersectional analyses of ‘global responsibility’ and ‘habitability’
How the global racial empire affects ‘habitability’ and ‘global responsibility’
Cultural texts that address forms or patterns of injustice that are global in nature and scope
Cultural work, differentiated solidarity, and the challenge of ‘elite capture’ (Táíwò 2022)
Literature, film, art, philosophy and the struggle of ‘remaking the world’ (Getachew 2019)
Our aim is to take stock of the state of studies on war writing at the turn of the two world wars.
The focus of this conference is to start from a comparative and multilingual perspective and then move on to the specific case of Italy. These two days of study form part of the MSCA-funded project Last Letters from the World Wars: Forming Italian Language, Identity and Memory in Texts of Conflict that will be presented during the event.
The first day will be devoted to English-language contributions on European war writing. We would like to propose an overview of war writings in European countries in several languages such as English, French, Spanish, Irish, etc. for the first day. The subsequent day will be dedicated to Italian studies and papers in both English and Italian will be accepted.
The event is generously supported by the Irish Research Council (IRC), The National University of Ireland (NUI), the ERC project ‘Translating Memories: The Eastern European Past in the Global Arena’ funded by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, and The Centre for Advanced Studies in Languages and Cultures of University College Cork (CASiLaC).
The event is generously supported by the Irish Research Council (IRC), The National University of Ireland (NUI), the ERC project ‘Translating Memories: The Eastern European Past in the Global Arena’ funded by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, and The Centre for Advanced Studies in Languages and Cultures of University College Cork (CASiLaC).
Registration Link: https://linktr.ee/Memory_Past_Dictatorships
Seminar Series:
12 April 2022, 5.00 – 6.00 pm
Michael Lazzara (University of California, Davis)
¡Desobedientes!: Implicated Subjects, Memory, and Responsibility in Post-Dictatorship Chilean Documentaries
27 April 2022, 5.00 – 6.00 pm
Juliane Prade-Weiss (Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich)
Implication in Commemoration: On Current Interests in Past Complicities
4 May 2022, 5.00 – 6.00 pm
David Martin-Jones (University of Glasgow)
Remembering Cold War Pasts Across a World of Cinemas
Symposium (19 - 20 May 2022):
8 Panels with more than 30 speakers from all around the world.
2 Keynote addresses by Minna Johanna Niemi (The Arctic University of Norway) and Jie-Hyun Lim (Critical Global Studies Institute, Sogang University, Seoul).
1 Roundtable discussion with Michael Lazzara, Juliane Prade-Weiss, and David Martin-Jones.
The event is generously supported by the Irish Research Council (IRC), The National University of Ireland (NUI), the ERC project ‘Translating Memories: The Eastern European Past in the Global Arena’ funded by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, and The Centre for Advanced Studies in Languages and Cultures of University College Cork (CASiLaC)
The workshop is structured around four dedicated sections, each one of which will comprise a panel of ECA speakers in dialogue with a keynote speaker:
1) Digital Humanities
Keynote: Prof. Massimo Riva, Brown University
Organiser: Dr Ana Stefanovska, UCC
2) Mediating Subjectivities
Keynote: Prof. Loredana Polezzi, Stony Brook University
Organiser: Dr Valentina Mele, UCC
3) Intermediality
Keynote: Prof. Giancarlo Lombardi, City University of New York
Organiser: Dr Guido Bartolini, UCC
4) Deconstructing Whiteness
Keynote: Dr. Gaia Giuliani, University of Coimbra
Organiser: Dr Guido Bartolini, UCC
Workshop Dates: 24-25 June 2021
Mode of Delivery: The event will be held online
Full Programme available here: SIS ECA Workshop 2021
Book of Abstracts available here: Book of Abstracts ECA 2021
This conference is generously supported by The Society for Italian Studies and the Department of Italian, UCC.
Register for free on Eventbrite using the following link: https://www.eventbrite.ie/e/italian-studies-theory-and-practice-an-sis-workshop-for-ecas-tickets-156425335389
Please note: All participants will need to be registered members of The Society for Italian Studies by 1 June 2021. http://italianstudies.org.uk/the-society/membership/
PANEL DESCRIPTIONS:
1) Digital Humanities
Panel Description: In recent years, the interdisciplinary area of Digital Humanities has promoted numerous projects carried out by researchers from all over the world. By bringing together theoretical approaches from the Humanities with new digital tools, the field has introduced innovative ways of approaching art, literature, history, and geography. The two-fold dimension of Digital Humanities, or the interest in the wide-ranging digital instruments that set the stage for new ways of studying Humanities, and the ongoing humanistic debates on the extent to which technology impacts today’s cultural studies, allows us to examine more in depth how this new field has enriched Italian studies, as well as the ways in which it has contributed to the creation, promotion, and reception of new cultural products in Italy. This panel welcomes papers interested in taking notice of the various forms of interaction between Digital Humanities and Italian culture, including digital archives, monographs, and online resources for the study and teaching of Italian language and literature, as well as papers that question the most recent ways of storytelling through digital platforms, from the Italian hypertext fiction to the social media phenomena such as Instapoets.
2) Translating Subjectivities
Panel Description: Translation is a crucial process contributing to the reception of Italian culture. This panel seeks to explore the many ways in which Italian authors and works have been appropriated, distributed, and canonised over the centuries, and by whom, aiming to investigate the complex dynamics of translation and reception as well as their impact on the construction of literary subjectivities and cultural histories both within and beyond Italy. Why and how have some authors received particular attention in a specific historical period, and how have translations of their works shaped and influenced current ways of reading and interpreting them? This panel welcomes proposals considering translation according to a broad meaning, including artistic, cinematic, and political translations, as well as theories and practices of translation and self-translation, and addressing ways in which these forms of articulating subjectivity emblematise or divert from a given historical and cultural context.
3) Intermediality
Panel Description: In the last two decades, the study of intermediality has grown into a lively field of research in the Humanities, allowing scholars to go beyond the notion of intertextuality and develop a particularly productive perspective on cultural production. Today, thanks to the language of intermediality, not only can we valorise boundary-crossing artistic practices, but also gain a deeper understanding of the dynamics of cultural transmission, shedding new light on interartistic exchanges, canon formations, reception processes, and the circulation of cultural memories. While the creation of a specific terminology for the study of intermedial relations among the arts constitutes a development of contemporary culture, intermedial phenomena are not new per se and have long characterised Western culture, as the notions of ekphrasis and the Renaissance debate on the sister arts testify. For this panel, we welcome paper proposals that can address forms of intermediality in any era of Italian culture, focusing either on theoretical notions, such as those of multimediality, transmediality, and remediation, or specific case studies that offer examples of intermedial relationships within Italian cultural production.
4) Deconstructing Whiteness
Panel Description: The idea of whiteness has become increasingly important in the study of the construction of Italian national identity. Scholarship has shown that beyond overtly racist discourses that dominated Italian culture at different times, such as nineteenth century Lombrosian inspired science and the policies promoted by Fascism, the idea of Italianness in itself has been articulated in accordance with implicit racial ideas (Patriarca and Deplano 2018). Such racialised discourse has long remained unexplored in scholarship, also because of the universalist perspective that informed the political discourse of the Italian Republic, which objected to the use of the category of race. From this came the necessity of works that could use this conceptual tool in order to expose the role that whiteness played in the Italian identity process (Giuliani and Lombardi Diop 2013; InteRGRace 2018). This panel welcomes proposals that could either address the construction of whiteness across Italian cultural production or put such a racial trope into question by considering forms of hybrid identities and post-colonial perspectives within Italian culture.
This seminar has received generous support from the Humanities and Arts Research Institute (HARI) of Royal Holloway University of London, and University Council of Modern Languages (UCML)
Other
all’inizio del 900. Il centro attorno a cui si sviluppa questo studio è
il concetto di classico, con i suoi plurimi significati, i suoi riusi e le
sue contraddizioni. Il mondo classico
occupa oggi giorno una posizione periferica all’interno del campo
degli studi letterari; tuttavia esso ha costituito per secoli il baricentro
della cultura Occidentale ed anche il XX secolo non ha mai smesso
di interrogarsi sul rapporto tra cultura antica e contemporaneità.
Programme available at: https://www.literatureofoccupation.ugent.be/programme/
Literature of Occupation, Collaboration, and Impure Resistance
Date: 4-5 October 2024
Location: Monasterium Poortackerey, Gent, Belgium
Deadline to submit a paper proposal: 6 May 2024
The global impact of World War II has been profound and enduring. Narrated across the globe in a myriad of ways — as a just struggle by democracies against oppressive forces, as a testament to the resilience and heroism of nations, as a past that refuses to go away and demands confrontation, as the source of liberation from fascism, as the catalyst for the end of colonial domination, as the birth of new illiberal regimes and occupations, or as the acme of destruction and genocidal violence — World War II has constituted a cornerstone of collective memory leaving an indelible mark on the conscience of humanity.
As a result of its importance, the memory of World War II has acquired a strong ethical dimension and has become a source of metahistorical reflections, prompting questions about human agency and the burden of guilt and responsibility for injustices. These ethical considerations come into sharp focus in the context of military occupations. The territories occupied by the Axis Powers and the Allies during World War II constituted a “contact zone” (Pratt 1992) between people of different nationalities endowed with asymmetric power that confronted the members of the occupied communities with weighty choices of collaborating, resisting, or navigating the complex spectrum in between.
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 past 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 invites scholars working on the literary representation of World War II across any cultural context and language to present case studies that, through the analysis of the complex positionalities that literature constructs, can address the ethical issues woven into the fabric of military occupations. In particular, scholars are encouraged to explore the complicities of collaborators, the responsibilities of implicated subjects, and the form of resistance that Mihaela Mihai (2022) calls “impure”, which rather than promoting idealised heroic models foster a multifaceted understanding of the ethical complexities inherent in the struggle against occupation.
Topics that scholars can address through the study of literature include, but are not limited to:
The agency of perpetrators under occupation.
The relationship between occupiers and collaborators.
Indirect participation in genocide and war crimes.
The thematisation of guilt and responsibility for collaboration.
Ethical dilemmas faced by collaborators and resistants.
“Impure resistance” and its manifestations.
The use of violence in resistance movements.
Multiple positionalities and cases of “complex implication”.
Narratives that challenge silence and taboos in a memory culture.
Self-serving representations that fail to engage with the complexity of occupations.
World War II occupations and decolonisation.
Please submit a paper proposal (300 words) and a short academic bio by Monday 6 May 2024. Please note that the working language of the conference will be English.
Submissions and any queries should be sent to Dr Guido Bartolini at Literatureofoccupation@gmail.com
Further info: https://www.literatureofoccupation.ugent.be
Bibliography
Afxentiou, Dunford, Michael Neu, and Robin Dunford. Eds. Exploring Complicity: Concept, Cases and Critique. New York: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2007.
Erll, Astrid. Memory in Culture, trans. by Sara Young. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011a.
Meretoja, Hanna. The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History and the Possible. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.
Mihai, Mihaela. Political Memory and the Aesthetics of Care: The Art of Complicity and Resistance. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022.
Niemi, Minna Johanna. Complicity and Responsibility in Contemporary African Writing: The Postcolony Revisited. New York: Routledge, 2021.
Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 1992.
Rigney, Anne. “The Dynamics of Remembrance: Texts between Monumentality and Morphing.” Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Eds. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning. Berlin/New York: De Gruyter, 2008. 345–356.
Rothberg, Michael. The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019.
Sander, Mark. Complicities: The Intellectual and Apartheid. Durham, N.C.; London: Duke University Press, 2003.
Sanyal, Debarati. Memory and Complicity. Migrations of Holocaust Remembrance. New York, Fordham University Press, 2015.
Young, Iris Marion. Responsibility for Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Bringing together literary and cultural studies, art and film studies, critical race theory, environmental humanities, and philosophy, this international conference will explore how different cultural texts might facilitate our critical and political engagement with forms of violence and injustice that are global in nature and scope. Drawing connections between the concepts and the practices of ‘global responsibility’ and ‘habitability’, the conference will discuss how different natural, social, and cultural forces shape the habitability of different environments on Earth, as well as our individual and collective responsibility for making the world not just habitable but also compatible with the flourishing of different beings.
The key questions that this conference seeks to address are:
How can literature, film, and other forms of art help us to think through the notions of ‘global responsibility’ and ‘habitability’?
What makes the Earth habitable, and how does human culture, action and neglect affect that habitability?
To what extent and in what sense are we responsible for making the Earth a place where different forms of human and nonhuman life can live and thrive?
What are the conditions for a good life and how are these conditions represented in mass culture?
How and to what extent can cultural work challenge political and social structures of oppression?
How can different cultural texts and artistic media develop our political imagination and sense of responsibility?
How does the past influence habitability and life conditions in the present?
How do ongoing patterns of violence, injustice, and accumulation affect habitability and life’s capacity to flourish?
What does it take for life to survive and flourish?
This international conference welcomes scholars across the arts & humanities working in all geographical areas and theoretical frameworks, and encourages proposals that take an interdisciplinary or cross-disciplinary approach.
Suggested topics include (but are not restricted to):
Literature, film, art, philosophy and the question global responsibility
Critical perspectives on what makes an environment habitable sociologically, culturally, and ecologically
Intersectional analyses of ‘global responsibility’ and ‘habitability’
How the global racial empire affects ‘habitability’ and ‘global responsibility’
Cultural texts that address forms or patterns of injustice that are global in nature and scope
Cultural work, differentiated solidarity, and the challenge of ‘elite capture’ (Táíwò 2022)
Literature, film, art, philosophy and the struggle of ‘remaking the world’ (Getachew 2019)
Our aim is to take stock of the state of studies on war writing at the turn of the two world wars.
The focus of this conference is to start from a comparative and multilingual perspective and then move on to the specific case of Italy. These two days of study form part of the MSCA-funded project Last Letters from the World Wars: Forming Italian Language, Identity and Memory in Texts of Conflict that will be presented during the event.
The first day will be devoted to English-language contributions on European war writing. We would like to propose an overview of war writings in European countries in several languages such as English, French, Spanish, Irish, etc. for the first day. The subsequent day will be dedicated to Italian studies and papers in both English and Italian will be accepted.
The event is generously supported by the Irish Research Council (IRC), The National University of Ireland (NUI), the ERC project ‘Translating Memories: The Eastern European Past in the Global Arena’ funded by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, and The Centre for Advanced Studies in Languages and Cultures of University College Cork (CASiLaC).
The event is generously supported by the Irish Research Council (IRC), The National University of Ireland (NUI), the ERC project ‘Translating Memories: The Eastern European Past in the Global Arena’ funded by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, and The Centre for Advanced Studies in Languages and Cultures of University College Cork (CASiLaC).
Registration Link: https://linktr.ee/Memory_Past_Dictatorships
Seminar Series:
12 April 2022, 5.00 – 6.00 pm
Michael Lazzara (University of California, Davis)
¡Desobedientes!: Implicated Subjects, Memory, and Responsibility in Post-Dictatorship Chilean Documentaries
27 April 2022, 5.00 – 6.00 pm
Juliane Prade-Weiss (Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich)
Implication in Commemoration: On Current Interests in Past Complicities
4 May 2022, 5.00 – 6.00 pm
David Martin-Jones (University of Glasgow)
Remembering Cold War Pasts Across a World of Cinemas
Symposium (19 - 20 May 2022):
8 Panels with more than 30 speakers from all around the world.
2 Keynote addresses by Minna Johanna Niemi (The Arctic University of Norway) and Jie-Hyun Lim (Critical Global Studies Institute, Sogang University, Seoul).
1 Roundtable discussion with Michael Lazzara, Juliane Prade-Weiss, and David Martin-Jones.
The event is generously supported by the Irish Research Council (IRC), The National University of Ireland (NUI), the ERC project ‘Translating Memories: The Eastern European Past in the Global Arena’ funded by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, and The Centre for Advanced Studies in Languages and Cultures of University College Cork (CASiLaC)
The workshop is structured around four dedicated sections, each one of which will comprise a panel of ECA speakers in dialogue with a keynote speaker:
1) Digital Humanities
Keynote: Prof. Massimo Riva, Brown University
Organiser: Dr Ana Stefanovska, UCC
2) Mediating Subjectivities
Keynote: Prof. Loredana Polezzi, Stony Brook University
Organiser: Dr Valentina Mele, UCC
3) Intermediality
Keynote: Prof. Giancarlo Lombardi, City University of New York
Organiser: Dr Guido Bartolini, UCC
4) Deconstructing Whiteness
Keynote: Dr. Gaia Giuliani, University of Coimbra
Organiser: Dr Guido Bartolini, UCC
Workshop Dates: 24-25 June 2021
Mode of Delivery: The event will be held online
Full Programme available here: SIS ECA Workshop 2021
Book of Abstracts available here: Book of Abstracts ECA 2021
This conference is generously supported by The Society for Italian Studies and the Department of Italian, UCC.
Register for free on Eventbrite using the following link: https://www.eventbrite.ie/e/italian-studies-theory-and-practice-an-sis-workshop-for-ecas-tickets-156425335389
Please note: All participants will need to be registered members of The Society for Italian Studies by 1 June 2021. http://italianstudies.org.uk/the-society/membership/
PANEL DESCRIPTIONS:
1) Digital Humanities
Panel Description: In recent years, the interdisciplinary area of Digital Humanities has promoted numerous projects carried out by researchers from all over the world. By bringing together theoretical approaches from the Humanities with new digital tools, the field has introduced innovative ways of approaching art, literature, history, and geography. The two-fold dimension of Digital Humanities, or the interest in the wide-ranging digital instruments that set the stage for new ways of studying Humanities, and the ongoing humanistic debates on the extent to which technology impacts today’s cultural studies, allows us to examine more in depth how this new field has enriched Italian studies, as well as the ways in which it has contributed to the creation, promotion, and reception of new cultural products in Italy. This panel welcomes papers interested in taking notice of the various forms of interaction between Digital Humanities and Italian culture, including digital archives, monographs, and online resources for the study and teaching of Italian language and literature, as well as papers that question the most recent ways of storytelling through digital platforms, from the Italian hypertext fiction to the social media phenomena such as Instapoets.
2) Translating Subjectivities
Panel Description: Translation is a crucial process contributing to the reception of Italian culture. This panel seeks to explore the many ways in which Italian authors and works have been appropriated, distributed, and canonised over the centuries, and by whom, aiming to investigate the complex dynamics of translation and reception as well as their impact on the construction of literary subjectivities and cultural histories both within and beyond Italy. Why and how have some authors received particular attention in a specific historical period, and how have translations of their works shaped and influenced current ways of reading and interpreting them? This panel welcomes proposals considering translation according to a broad meaning, including artistic, cinematic, and political translations, as well as theories and practices of translation and self-translation, and addressing ways in which these forms of articulating subjectivity emblematise or divert from a given historical and cultural context.
3) Intermediality
Panel Description: In the last two decades, the study of intermediality has grown into a lively field of research in the Humanities, allowing scholars to go beyond the notion of intertextuality and develop a particularly productive perspective on cultural production. Today, thanks to the language of intermediality, not only can we valorise boundary-crossing artistic practices, but also gain a deeper understanding of the dynamics of cultural transmission, shedding new light on interartistic exchanges, canon formations, reception processes, and the circulation of cultural memories. While the creation of a specific terminology for the study of intermedial relations among the arts constitutes a development of contemporary culture, intermedial phenomena are not new per se and have long characterised Western culture, as the notions of ekphrasis and the Renaissance debate on the sister arts testify. For this panel, we welcome paper proposals that can address forms of intermediality in any era of Italian culture, focusing either on theoretical notions, such as those of multimediality, transmediality, and remediation, or specific case studies that offer examples of intermedial relationships within Italian cultural production.
4) Deconstructing Whiteness
Panel Description: The idea of whiteness has become increasingly important in the study of the construction of Italian national identity. Scholarship has shown that beyond overtly racist discourses that dominated Italian culture at different times, such as nineteenth century Lombrosian inspired science and the policies promoted by Fascism, the idea of Italianness in itself has been articulated in accordance with implicit racial ideas (Patriarca and Deplano 2018). Such racialised discourse has long remained unexplored in scholarship, also because of the universalist perspective that informed the political discourse of the Italian Republic, which objected to the use of the category of race. From this came the necessity of works that could use this conceptual tool in order to expose the role that whiteness played in the Italian identity process (Giuliani and Lombardi Diop 2013; InteRGRace 2018). This panel welcomes proposals that could either address the construction of whiteness across Italian cultural production or put such a racial trope into question by considering forms of hybrid identities and post-colonial perspectives within Italian culture.
This seminar has received generous support from the Humanities and Arts Research Institute (HARI) of Royal Holloway University of London, and University Council of Modern Languages (UCML)
To contribute to transnationalising the study of cultural memory of World War II, I am interested in building a network of scholars who work on the representation of World War II in national cultures of former Axis Powers states or in states that were associated to the Axis through collaborationist regimes. If you are a researcher working on this topic through the study of any kind of cultural products (literature, cinema, graphic novels, etc…), please get in touch by writing to Dr Guido Bartolini at axis.cultural.memory@gmail.com.
The analysis of the primary literature centres on those figures of repetition (topoi, themes, masterplots) that characterise the texts of the corpus and that have been taken as points of connection between literary representations and collective memory narratives. Through the study of the most recurrent tropes across the corpus, this thesis pinpoints the existence of dominant structures that affected the literary representation of the Axis War, which have strong links to the ways in which the Second World War and the Fascist past have been narrativised in postwar Italy.
The literature of the Axis War represents the Italians as innocent victims, it abstains from portraying them as perpetrators of violence, and develops textual strategies that avoid conveying to their readers any sense of guilt, with only a minority of texts resisting this overbearing representation. These aspects are analysed through a series of close readings, which, whilst forming the backbone of the thesis, intersect with the examination of several theoretical issues, such as collective memory, the literary concepts of themes, motifs, and masterplots, the idea of silence in war writings, and questions of individual and collective guilt.
Partendo dalle numerose pellicole prodotte nel dopoguerra, già oggetto di recenti indagini scientifiche (Fantoni 2018), l’articolo mostra che a questa iniziale, acritica, ma ampia produzione, incentrata sui valori del nazionalismo cattolico, che recuperava stilemi del tardo cinema di guerra fascista (Ben Ghiat 2015; Zambenedetti 2017), è seguita una fase di progressiva estromissione della guerra dell’Asse dal panorama cinematografico italiano. Per illustrare tale processo l’articolo prende in esame una serie di film progettati negli anni 50 e 60 che, a seguito di meccanismi censorii diretti ed indiretti, non furono mai realizzati, come le sceneggiature sull’occupazione italiana in Grecia di Ugo Pirro e Renzo Renzi e gli adattamenti dei testi letterari di Renzo Biasion e Mario Rigoni Stern, che avevano attratto l’attenzione di registi del calibro di Roberto Rossellini ed Ermanno Olmi. Anche in conseguenza del fallimento di tali progetti, nei decenni successivi solo un numero esiguo di film ha trattato in modo specifico la guerra dell’Asse, dandone una rappresentazione edulcorata e auto-assolutoria, tutta incentrata sul mito identitario degli Italiani brava gente. L’articolo analizza questa costruzione discorsiva, che si è progressivamente affermata come perno centrale della memoria italiana della seconda guerra mondiale (Focardi 2013), concentrandosi su due film, I due colonnelli di Steno e Italiani Brava Gente di Giuseppe De Santis, mostrando il ruolo fondamentale della rielaborazione cinematografica nella trasmissione della memoria pubblica del passato (Erll 2011).
I due filoni principali della rappresentazione italiana della guerra dell’Asse indagati da questo articolo, ossia quello acritico nazionalista, dominante nel dopoguerra, e quello successivo, più rado, ma costante, incentrato sull’idea autoassolutoria degli italiani buoni ed innocui, hanno mascherato il ruolo di aggressore dell’esercito italiano sotto il fascismo, impedendo che il cinema potesse fungere da piattaforma per una riflessione sulle colpe e responsabilità degli italiani in relazione alla seconda guerra mondiale. L’articolo si chiude sondando se una rappresentazione diversa della guerra dell’Asse, che consentisse una riflessione critica sul passato, sia mai stata tentata dal cinema italiano, offrendone esempi tratti dai film Le soldatesse di Valerio Zurlini e Il generale dell'armata morta di Luciano Tovoli.
In this paper I would like to explore the representations developed by the Axis War literature in three decades after the end of the Second World War. I will show that among literary vectors of memory three texts, written in the 1950s by Pirro, Terrosi, and Lunardi, helped readers gain awareness of Italy's role as a repressive power, thanks to representations of the Italian use of violence and a thematisation of the protagonists' sense of guilt. However, the paper will highlight that a similar narrativisation of the war years, which encouraged readers to take on responsibility for Italy's Fascist past, has constituted an exception. The majority of narrative texts dealing with the Axis War presented the Italians as victims of war and adopted a series of topoi that conveyed the idea of Italy's innocence. This overbearing representation, continuously remediated across Italian society, hindered the formation of a responsible memory of the Axis War and contributed to evading Italy's responsibilities for Fascism.
In this paper, I would like to argue that there is another approach through which literary texts can be studied in connection to collective memories, which consists in investigating the various forms of repetition (e.g. topoi, motifs, themes, and masterplots) that characterise the given narrative works. By identifying and analysing these figures of repetition within a broad body of texts dealing with a specific subject, it becomes possible to develop an entirely textually-based approach through which both the texts’ memory-reflective function and their memory-productive capacity can be revealed.
The paper will initially discuss the theoretical bases supporting the development of such an approach, examining theories drawn from both Memory Studies and Thematic Criticism. Then, the last part of the paper will exemplify this approach by considering a series of case studies offered by the Italian literature of the Axis War published in the first three decades after the end of World War II.
13-16 June 2019, Palazzo dei Congressi, Orvieto.