The conference invites papers and proposals for panels that contribute to and extend this project’s investigation into aesthetic resistance to ‘the concentrationary’ between 1945-1985. It aims to expand an understanding of aesthetic responses to totalitarian terror beyond the specific forms of the concentration camps of the Second World War, to include, for example, colonial violence, the camps of communist-dominated societies of Eastern Europe, and those of right-wing and/or military totalitarian dictatorships outside Europe.

The conference invites the submission of papers and/or panels that will analyse the aesthetic strategies by which writers, poets, film-makers and all those involved in the cultural production of memory sought to represent and challenge the novel horror of totalitarianism; the different instances of political and racial violence in a broader understanding of the totalitarian as that which cannot be confined to ‘a single time and place’ (Cayrol) or be considered as a past episode, but was the perpetual menace to be monitored and resisted in all its forms (Arendt).

Abstracts of 200 words for papers or complete panels of 3 papers should be submitted by 30 September 2008.