International Conference Out of Place: Migration, Memory and Emotions

Date: 14-15 November 2019
Venue: School of Arts and Humanities, University of Lisbon
Deadline for submission of proposals: 17 May 2019 – CLOSED
Notification of acceptance: 14 June 2019

 Please send your proposals (300 words) to outofplace2019@gmail.com

Throughout the 20th and 21st century, political and economic disruptions, wars, voluntary or enforced migrations, colonization and post-coloniality experienced by large communities all over the world have aroused feelings of loss and displacement. In face of new places and realities, people have been obliged to continuous translation or redefinition of their cultural identity, and they often had to deal with the aftermath of ideological and ethnic violence. Even when communities have found a new homeland elsewhere, the sense of dislocation, strangeness or restlessness remains. Its artistic expression may enable displaced subjects to overcome the loss of home and language in the new setting and to cope with the emotions triggered by that uprooting. It may in fact organize emotions, feelings and ways of thinking, which are initially distinct from those of the host culture. In recent years, literature and the other arts have focussed on the positive overcoming of displacement and on welcome cross-pollinations and transcultural interactions. The phenomenon of transculturality, understood as the formation of multifaceted, fluid identities resulting from diverse cultural encounters or possible disencounters, must be taken into account.
This conference seeks to foster critical reflection on the emotions and memories of migrants, refugees and expatriates, as represented in literature, the arts and cultural practices, considering the political social and cultural contexts within which they take place.

We welcome contributions across the domains of migration, cultural, literary, film, art, and memory studies as well as other relevant fields.

 Keynote Speaker: Birgit Neumann, Heinrich-Heine Universität Düsseldorf

The scope of the conference includes but is not limited to the following topics:

Fractured identities

Gendered experiences of migration

The refugee experience

Displacement and trauma

Xenophoby and otherness

The postmigrant condition

Culture conflicts, problematizing integration, ghettoization

Entangled memories

Walls, borders and thresholds

Memories of return, longing to return, longing to belong

Regarding/narrating the pain of displacement

Imagined communities

Registration fee: 100 euros general public / 50 euros students (early bird until 14th July 2019); 150 euros / 70 euros after July 14th