Passages of Exile

Data limite: 15 de Abril
Conference at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Center for Advanced Studies.
The photographer Hans Günter Flieg’s 1939 flight from Germany to Brazil finds visual expression in two images on an exposed strip of film. The last photograph that he took in Germany shows the view from his apartment in Chemnitz; the negative strip’s next image was taken three months later in São Paulo. What remains invisible between this pair of photographs is the multi-day journey between homeland and exile. These photographs by the exiled Flieg summarize a dilemma for researchers of exile, a field that tends to emphasize motives for emigration or to explore life and work in the country of exile. By contrast, passages as inspiration and source for artistic and literary work have received little attention. The paths taken into exile, the routes of migration and flight provoked artistic and literary reflection that until now has rarely been investigated. However, this is a highly significant literary theme, as in writings by refugees from Nazism such as Lisa Fittko’s memoir of helping hundreds of refugees—Walter Benjamin among them—-flee occupied France for Spain (Escape Through the Pyrenees, 1985/2000) or Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt’s autobiographical stories of his childhood spent in flight and in hiding (Die Absonderung [Separation], 1991). The theme is central too for contemporary authors, including Abbas Khider (The Village Indian, 2008/2015). The current mass migration of refugees across the Mediterranean Sea and its often-tragic consequences only underlines the pressing significance of research on the meaning and experience of the escape into exile.
This interdisciplinary conference will focus in on these routes as a realm of cultural experience. “Passages of Exile” will bring together researchers focused on a range of shifting locations from the twentieth century to the present, including exile during the Nazi period, routes of employment migration, and politically motivated flight in the contemporary moment. We welcome contributions that focus on passages of exile and their reflection in art, literature, and film. Specifically, we seek both case studies and analyses of specific works as well as theoretical approaches. Papers may address the following questions, although authors should not feel limited by them: how have the passages and routes of exile—even beyond the individual experience of flight—been represented by artists and writers? What techniques of recording are possible during travel under duress? How is that recorded during the trip later translated into formal representation? How do routes and modes of transport (ship, train, airplane, or car) influence the specific experience of migration? How formative are relationships of power (gender, race, sexuality) en route? To what extent are flight, transit, and passage later interpreted, reinterpreted, or repressed autobiographically? How is the change of languages during transit from the country of origin to the new country experienced? And how do pictures, objects, films, and texts apprehend the space between there and here, homeland and the foreign, the past and the future, or the “already” and the “not yet”?
For scholars selected to present, the conference organizers will cover hotel and return travel costs within Europe or, for those coming from other continents, a significant portion of return flights (details determined with acceptance).
+info/fonte: http://arthist.net/archive/12494