This conference addresses the representation or self-representation, interpretations, or history of those exiled or self-exiled, and migrant “Others” created between 1914-1945 by two world wars and the reformation of national, ethnic, racial, classed, and gendered identities and cultures, centers and margins, and diasporas.

We welcome paper proposals that address national and diaspora literatures and identities, and other art forms such as film, photography, architecture, painting and sculpture, dissident political and sexual expression, cultural and ethnic mythologies, environmental and geographical interventions, and revivals and interpretations of such cultural artifacts as ancient languages, national dress, dance, folklore, music, and oral traditions.

Possibilities include:

• Artists, intellectuals, filmmakers, reformers
• Exiles—from World War I, the Spanish Civil War, Nazism and Nazi Occupied Europe
• Marginalized Gay and Lesbian Culture
• Old and New, Rooted and Rootless Cosmopolitans and Cosmopolitanisms
• Geographies of the “Other” (ghettos, migrant farming communities, concentration camps, company towns)
• Representations of the Armenian genocide and forced exile
• Weimar Germany and post-WWI Vienna
• Palestinian and Hebrew culture in Palestine
• Political “Others” (political prisoners and dissident activists)
• Responses to displaced children
• Development of vernacular literatures

Keynote speaker: Jonathan Freedman, University of Michigan, author of The Temple of Culture

Please send 300 word abstracts or inquiries to: Phyllis Lassner: phyllisl@northwestern.edu
by December 31, 2007