There’s still time to submit to this conference — deadline has been extended til August 29.
Jewish Museum in London January 6-8 2015.
Formerly locations of abject horror, the concentration camps have arguably been transformed into tourist hotspots, available as part of package deals complete with tour guides, audio-guide headsets, and pertinent photo opportunities. The concentration camps might have remained stationary in a physical or geographical sense, but their topography has not maintained its horrific essence, and their cultural meaning has shifted substantially. The diachronic shift of the last 70 years has thus – perhaps – facilitated a usurpation of the camps, which have come to be experienced simultaneously as loci of remembrance and profanations against memory.
Within the discussion of the Holocaust, the concentration camps hold a pivotal position: as the sites of mass destruction, and the culmination of the Nazi enterprise, the camps are the embodiment of Nazi cruelty and efficiency. This multidisciplinary conference will explore representations of the camps in literature and art in an attempt to discern the lessons and legacies of the Holocaust more broadly; historical accounts and sociological perspectives may also yield further insight into the role of the concentration camps in the perception of the Holocaust at large. This conference invites papers that explore the unresolved questions that the concentration camps pose within political, historical, and cultural discourses.
In addition to the main issue of the conference, organizers are also interested in papers that explore the following:
o Representations of concentration camps in art and literature
o Cultural Representations of Nazi persecution
o The Jewish Shoah
o Lessons and legacies of the Holocaust
o Historical accounts
o Sociological perspectives (e.g., gender roles in the concentration camps)
o The ethics of representation
o Perpetrator perspectives
o Geographical and topological explorations of the concentration camps
o Morality at and after Auschwitz
o Trauma and Survivors’ Narratives
Abstracts of no more than 300 words should be submitted to Vered Weiss and Jo Pettitt at tracingtopographies@kent.ac.uk by August 29, 2014.
See more details at http://tracingtopographies.wordpress.com/