CFP: Running from the Revolution: Rightist Exile in the Twentieth Century

Keywords: Exile, diaspora, migration, historical memory.

Interest in ‘Diaspora’, forced migration and exile has proliferated in recent years. Such themes have attracted scholars across a range of traditional disciplinary boundaries and brought together impressive collaborative research networks. The twentieth century, in particular, has proved a fertile breeding ground for analysis of these themes – a period marked by almost constant warfare between (and within) states, unprecedented state and military violence against civilians, profound clashes of ideologies, as well as repressive (and often exclusionary) authoritarian regimes.

Academic attention has long been drawn to groups fleeing persecution or enforced hardship at the hands of the authoritarian right. Understandably, the Holocaust – and Nazi persecution more broadly – has remained a dominant theme in this field. Increasingly, fascist and authoritarian persecution in Europe and Latin America is also attracting the interest of scholars, particularly in relation to debates over post-authoritarian transformation and ‘historical memory’.

Perhaps less evident in this burgeoning field of study in Diaspora, forced migration and exile is any attempt to chart the experiences of ‘rightists’. That is to say, those groups and individuals who fled their native or adopted lands owing to fears (justified or not) of persecution at the hands of ‘leftist’ or revolutionary regimes.

This interdisciplinary conference aims to bring together scholars working on all aspects of ‘rightist’ exile in the twentieth century. Proposals for individual papers or group panels are welcomed. Potential themes for the conference might include, but are not restricted to, some of the following:

• Paths to exile
• Is exile forced or voluntary?
• Experience of return and/or reintegration
• Political activity within exile communities
• Integration and exclusion amongst host communities
• Exile culture and identity
• Notions of ‘homeland’ in exile communities
• Historical memory

The conference will take place at the University of Nottingham from 10-12 June 2011. Outline proposals, together with an abstract (300-500 words) should be sent to gareth.stockey@nottingham.ac.uk no later than Friday 26 March 2011. A selection of papers will be considered for publication in an edited collection, as part of the series Nottingham Studies in Post-Conflict Cultures.