"Ghosts, apparitions, phantoms, demons, monsters, and miracles all inhabit postwar references to the Holocaust. They constitute recurrent, though often neglected, tropes in testimonies and memoirs of survivors, but also increasingly come to the fore in contemporary engagements with the Holocaust. Fantastic, spectral, supernatural, monstrous, and uncanny figures permeate personal accounts of the Holocaust that stretch across generational lines, inform artistic and literary practices, and, as a recent development, also academic writing. Whether as incarnations of “ultimate evil”,concoctions of post-Holocaust imagination, or figurations of its continuous relevance and resonance, their presence establishes a set of new themes through which to address the Holocaust and its experiential, affective, cultural and political impact. Focusing on this fertile and, to a large extent, unexplored research terrain, this conference aims to investigate the role and implications that the whole range of fantastic figures and phenomena have for past and present-day approximations to the Holocaust, including their usage in popular culture (cartoons, new media, video games, etc.).
We open up space for debates on the various meanings these figures assume in relation to the Holocaust. For this, we are equally interested in the ways they shape individual and collective perceptions and representations of the event, become means of conveying its experience (both first-hand and vicarious), and influence private and social/cultural imaginaries. Our intention is to locate this debate in a historical, political and epistemological plane that goes beyond the questions of trauma, and of representation and representability, and beyond current explorations of fantastic and supernatural phenomena in the Holocaust in terms of magic realism or ‘trauma fiction’. In a similar vein, we distance ourselves from conceptualizations that associate the fantastic and supernatural merely with escapist trajectories in literature and genres of evasion. Instead, we wish to address the complex and multifaceted aftereffects of the Holocaust and the phenomena that epitomize and embody the event’s haunting presence. Thus, rather than approaching them primarily as literary epiphenomena or aesthetic gestures of failed or successful imitations of the Holocaust’s realities, we suggest examining the ways in which certain aspects and experiences of the Holocaust live on in fantastic figures.
We seek papers from a wide range of disciplines, including literary/film/media studies, cultural and memory studies, anthropology, history, psychology, and philosophy.
Continuity/discontinuity of fantastic depictions with pre-Holocaust traditions
Epistemologies and ontologies of the post-Holocaust fantastic, spectral, supernatural,
monstrous, and uncanny
Political/representational/affective dimensions of post-Holocaust ghosts and their cultural/regional variations
The fantastic and the ghostly between private/public and personal/political
Temporalities and spatialities of the ghostly, monstrous, fantastic and uncanny
Paper proposals should include a title, an extended abstract (700-1000 words), institutional affiliation, and contact information. Please submit proposals to [email protected] by 16 February, 2020. Authors, whose papers were accepted, will be asked to send a preliminary draft of their presentation (minimum 10 pages) two weeks before the workshop begins and to suggest another article/chapter written by another scholar, which introduces a theoretical or otherwise useful venture point for the discussion."
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