The Conference on “Entangled Memories: Remembering the Holocaust in a Global Age, ” will be held October 9 – 11, 2014, at the University of Hamburg, Germany.
The field of Holocaust Studies has taken a transnational turn in recent years. Whereas scholarly attention used to focus on specific national memory cultures, it has now, almost seventy years after the onset of the Second World War, increasingly shifted towards comparative, interdisciplinary, and border-crossing perspectives. Paradoxically, within literary and cultural studies, which have traditionally been at the forefront of addressing intercultural phenomena, national parameters continue to dominate the research agenda. The persistent separation of national perspectives on the Holocaust and its artistic representation not only opposes current theoretical trends, but also contradicts the political and socio-cultural realities of the Nazi crimes. In a global age, Holocaust commemoration has undergone a process of “cosmopolitization” (Levy/Sznaider 2001), which manifests itself on multiple levels, such as, for example, in the emergence of a supranational Holocaust memory and in the transnationally inflected canon of “Holocaust art”.
The objective of the conference is to explore the transnational entangled memories of the Holocaust in Western and Eastern Europe, Israel, and North and Latin America after 1945. The organizers broadly invite proposals that investigate one of the two following thematic aspects:
i) The specifics of national commemorative cultures and their historical variability. How has the Holocaust been remembered and represented in distinct national memorial cultures and when, and why have established conventions of representation been challenged?
ii) The interplay between national, local and global perspectives in the medial construction of the historical event. How have interdependencies between and cultural appropriations of specific national memories contributed toward the emergence of transnational patterns of Holocaust commemoration?
Potential topics, submission details, and other pertinent material may be found in the full Call for Papers.