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 [log in to unmask]
Deadline for proposals 18th of November 2022