CAIS (Canadian Association for Italian Studies) conference

Orvieto, 13-16 June 2019 - Call for Papers (Session)

Session title: Wartime encounters in the contact zone

Mary Louise Pratt defined ‘contact zones’ as ‘social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in context of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths’ (1991). Although the term was originally used in the context of the seventeenth-century Spanish colonial conquest of the New World, it can be profitably used to address modern wartime occupation scenarios as well.

This session aims to investigate multicultural encounters taking place in contact zones caused by or emerging from conflicts in the twentieth-century. Specifically, the panel intends to explore, within the space of a military occupation in which the Italians were involved, how ideas of otherness and identity shaped the relationship between occupiers and occupied, how the various actors entangled in these zones of conflict interacted, and how their perceptions of the other developed and changed

over time.

We welcome proposals investigating these issues from a variety of different perspectives including works on history, literature, cinema, oral history, memory studies, visual media, and any other field of the Humanities. We favour papers related but not limited to the following scenarios:

Italian colonialism;
The First World War;
The Italian occupations in the Axis War;
The Nazi occupation of Italy;
The Allied occupation of Italy;
Italian involvement in contemporary conflicts.

Please submit abstracts up to 250 words accompanied by a brief biographical note (used by the session’s chair for introducing the speaker) and affiliation to session organizers Fabio Simonetti ([log in to unmask]) and Guido Bartolini ([log in to unmask]).

The deadline for submissions is February 20th, 2019.

For more information on the conference, see: http://canadianassociationforitalianstudies.org/Conference-2019.

I look forward to meeting you in Orvieto.

With best wishes,

Fabio Simonetti

Fabio Simonetti

Doctoral Researcher

Collaborative Doctoral Partnership

University of Reading

Imperial War Museums