Conference Programme: Complicities in the Second World War: Literature of Occupation, Collaboration, and Impure Resistance
Complicities in the Second World War: Literature of Occupation, Collaboration, and Impure Resistance
4-5 October 2024
Monasterium Poortackere (Oude Houtlei 56, 9000 Gent)
Registration (€100)
Further info: www.literatureofoccupation.ugent.be
This conference delves into the complex ethical dimensions of World War II as represented in literature. By examining the nuanced portrayals of occupation, collaboration, and resistance, the event seeks to explore how literature uniquely configures the memory of wartime complicities. Scholars from around the globe will present case studies that shed light on the diverse positionalities constructed in literary works, addressing the ethical questions woven into the fabric of military occupations. The conference will cover topics such as the agency of perpetrators, indirect participation in war crimes, “impure resistance,” and the challenge to silence and taboos in memory culture. Through this interdisciplinary lens, the event aims to move beyond binary conceptions of guilt and innocence, offering a multifaceted understanding of World War II’s impact on cultural memory.
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.
Conference Porgramme
Day 1 (4 October)
8:30 – 9:00 Registration and Welcoming
9:00 – 10:45 Parallel sessions
Panel 1 – Holocaust literature beyond the concentrationary universe
Simone Ghelli (Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa): The «Latent Infection» of Fascism: Primo Levi’s Antifascist Education Between Oppression and Resistance
Jenny Watson (University of Edinburgh, UK): Other Germans, Other Complicities: Black Sea Germans and the ‘Holocaust by bullets’ in Markus Berges’s Die Köchin von Bob Dylan (2019)
Irina Rebrova (TU Berlin): “The German Monsters have Escaped, but the Entire Hitler System is in the Dock:” Literary Responses of the Soviet Open Trials in Post-war Society (the North Caucasus Case)
Panel 2 – World War II and the colonial world
Wambua Muindi (University of Nairobi): “This war sounds like the beginning of something very stupid”: Re-imagining WW2 in the Horn of Africa
Arlenea Herdimansyah (Independent): Indonesian folklore and the heinous history of occupation in Eka Kurniawan’s epic novel Beauty is a Wound
Désirée Schyns (Ghent University): The Sétif-massacre of 8 May 1945 in Le cadavre encerclé (1954/1955) by the Francophone Algerian writer Kateb Yacine (1929-1989)
10:45 – 11:15 Coffee Break
11:15 – 13:00: Panel 3 – The complexity of history and the power of literature
Adrian Armstrong (Queen Mary University of London): The Ghost Townscape: Catachresis and Not Really Knowing in Hugo Claus’s Wonder
Juliane Prade-Weiss (LMU Munich): Striving for Commemorative Purity: Justice, Fact, and Fiction in Kinstler’s Come to this Court and Cry
Tijana Matović (University of Kragujevac): Reconfigurations of narrative identities in Kazuo Ishiguro’s memoryscapes
13.00 – 15:00 Lunch
15:00 – 16:40 Parallel sessions
Panel 4 – Italian Fascism and Complicity: After-life and Alternative History
Charles Burdett (School of Advanced Study, University of London): Ciro Poggiali’s Diario AOI 1936–1937 and The Representation of The Italian Colonial World on the Eve of the Second World War
Patricia Chiantera-Stutte (University of Bari): The missed revolution debate between fascists and liberals
Andrea Meyer Ludowisy (Senate House Library, University of London): “Selves on the shelves”: archives, libraries and museum collections as powerful vehicles for nationalism and cultural order
Panel 5 – Resistance in European literature
Martina Biavati (University of Reading and Cardiff University): “La mamma Agnese viene con noi”: representations of female agency of the Italian Communist Resistance between official commemorations and autobiographical accounts
Domantė Vaišvylaitė and Gabija Bankauskaitė (Vilnius University): The Archetype of the Hero’s Journey as a Metamorphosis of War Consciousness in Algirdas Landsbergis’ “Five Pillars in the Market Square”
Sophia McDaniel (Columbia University, Paris): Simone Veil’s Biography in Bande Dessinée: An Illustrated Legacy of Occupied France and Perpetual Resistance
16:40 – 17:00 Coffee Break
17:00 – 18:30 Keynote Lecture
Ivan Stacy (Beijing Normal University): Long Occupations and Fallen Cities: Fictions of World War Two in Asia
18:30 – 19:00: Collective Discussion: The cultural memory of World War II in the twenty-first century
19:30 – 22:00: Conference Dinner
Day 2 (5 October)
9:00 – 10:30 Keynote Lecture
Mihaela Mihai (The University of Edinburgh): Structural Violence and the Limits of Polyphonic Memory
10:30 – 11:00: Coffee Break
11:00 – 12:45: Parallel sessions
Panel 6 – Multidirectional transformations of WWII memories
Marie Jadot (University of Liège): Music to Remember the Long Second World War in Dutch Literature of Victimhood and Perpetration
Will Norman (University of Kent): Bad Faith and Organized Guilt: The American Afterlives of World War Two Complicity
Jan Miklas-Frankowski (University of Gdańsk): Recomposing national myths: Grzebałkowska’s literary reportage ‘Poland 1945’ and the diversification of WWII narratives
Panel 7 – Perpetrators and collaborators in literary depiction
Giuseppe Marrone (Università di Roma La Sapienza, Italy): «I balilla andarono a Salò». The characterisation of the fascist in the Salò narrative
Bérengère Darlison (Sorbonne University): In the Intimacy of the Perpetrator: Empathy, Repulsion, Manipulation in La Mort est mon métier (Death is My Trade) and Les Bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones)
Ruth Peeters (KU Leuven): Who is to blame? The problem of sympathy in two short stories by Clara Malraux
12:45 – 14:15 Lunch
14:15 – 16:15 Panel 8 – Justifications and Identity renegotiation in postwar literature
Marius Hentea (University of Gothenburg): Francis Stuart, or the Story of the Irish Artist
Jayne Persian (University of Southern Queensland, Australia): Revisiting Helen Demidenko’s The Hand that Signed the Paper: A War Crimes Investigation
Rizwan Akhtar (University of the Punjab, Lahore): The Ambivalent Territory of Resistance and Complicity in Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient
Anna Taglietti (University of Padua): Prigionia: c’ero anch’io” Italian Literature on Second World War Military Imprisonment Between Forgetting and the Construction of Memory
Coffee Break: 16:15 – 16:45
16:45 – 18:30 Panel 9 – The Ethical Labyrinth of War Collaboration
Arnoud Arps (University of Amsterdam): “Man lives for victory and then defeat or the other way around”:Multiple positionalities and complex implication in Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s Perburuan (1950)
Stefano Romagnoli (Sapienza University of Rome): Ambiguous Alliances: Asymmetrical Friendships, Mimicry, and Exploitation in Japanese-Occupied Territories
Rebecca Glasberg (Stanford University): From perpetrator to victim, or vice versa? Genocide and colonial occupation in Anouar Benmalek’s Fils du Shéol (2015)
18:30 Closing remarks