This interdisciplinary conference aims to explore the cultural contexts, manifestations, representations, and effects of war, as a four-decade state of combat, mobilization, upheaval, dislocation, anxiety, devastation, and unquiet aftermath between 1914 and 1945. The experience of war generated creativity and innovation as much as it did destruction and reactionary responses. Some vital questions might be addressed:
- How has historical interpretation of the period 1914-1945 affected how we conceive of the period, especially imagining intersections between historiography and cultural production in all forms?
- Did war foster or inhibit Modernism(s)?
- Did specifically classed or gendered experiences of war empower cultural production?
- How was popular culture influenced by the experience of war?
- How did war fought in colonies affect metropolitan cultural production?
- How politically-engaged, or apolitical, or subversive were the proliferation of “isms” or artists and writers of the interwar years?
- Are there connections between art, war propaganda, and the rise of mass media?
- How was the rationalization and systematization of violence reflected in art?
The Space Between Society welcomes papers that engage with any aspect of the relationship between war and culture in the years between 1914-45. We are eager to explore the multitude of ways the experience of war was reflected and represented in the lives and works of policy makers, writers, artists, musicians, architects, advertisers, dancers, filmmakers, educators, philosophers.
Please send 300-word abstracts by December 15, 2006 to David Boxwell (boxwell@usna.edu)
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