Symposium Thinking the Twentieth-Century. Perspectives from the
twenty-first century

Call for papers

The twentieth century emerged as a problem in different fields of the
social sciences and humanities, even before the end of 2000. The
coincidence between the end of the century and some of its most emblematic
political phenomena – such as communism in Eastern Europe and the Cold War
– seemed to reinforce the need for examination and new narratives. The
century thus appeared as an ‘age of extremes’ (Eric Hobsbawm) – and
twentieth-century Europe as a ‘dark continent’ (Mark Mazower) –, a world of
‘dreamworld and catastrophe’ (Susan Buck-Morss), in-between utopian promise
and fall into the abyss, or, to quote the titles of some more recent
histories, a journey ‘to hell and back’ (Ian Kershaw), swaying between
‘barbarism and civilization’ (Bernard Wasserstein), in need of a ‘history
in fragments’ (Richard Vinen).

As these titles suggest, the century’s dramatic dimension was inseparable,
for many, of the narrative forms unfolding throughout the period. It is in
this sense that one can speak of ‘modernist events’ (Hayden White), that
is, events whose scope requires the creativity of modernism, or of
modernist forms themselves as the expression of a century traversed by
‘antagonism’ (Alain Badiou). The image of the century could even coincide
with the gaze of a modern art form, cinema (Francesco Casetti wrote about
the ‘eye of the century’), or even with one of its most striking artistic
techniques, as when Georges Didi-Huberman speaks about montage as the ‘eye
of history’ in the twentieth-century.

The twenty-first century itself is often thought and represented in
relation to the many versions in which the previous century is seen as ‘the
last catastrophe’ (Henry Rousso), a temporal marker of contemporary
history. Over the two last decades, historiography, philosophy, political
science, the arts, among many other fields, have insistently reflected on
the present from the multiple narratives produced throughout the twentieth
century or using the twentieth century as its referent. More than a
specific historical period, last century is thus constituted as a concept,
or imaginary, one that defines forms of political thought and social and
artistic representations. Its proximity, on the other hand, the tragic
aspects of some of its most recognizable events, along with the
proliferation of audiovisual forms traversing it, turn the twentieth
century into an object particularly prone to the production of memory and
to the deployment of new sources, archives and historical mediations.

The symposium Thinking the Twentieth-Century. Perspectives from the
twenty-first century aims to intervene in current debates on the history,
memory and heritage of the twentieth century, contributing to diversify and
complexify its narratives and representations. It, therefore, invites
contributions from multiple fields of research on the twentieth century –
and on the relation between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries –,
including (but not restricted to) history and memory, art history, cultural
studies, literature, philosophy, media studies, pedagogy, digital
humanities, economy, social sciences, climate and the environment, sciences
and technology, urban studies and mobilities.

Date 1st, 2nd and 3rd of February 2023

Venue University of Coimbra

Organization Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies – CEIS20

Submission Criteria Proposals should be sent in the form of an abstract,
between 300 and 500 words, in Portuguese, English, French or Spanish to
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Deadline for proposals 18th of November 2022