[ecrea] cfp: screening atrocity: cinema, decolonisation and the holocaust

CALL FOR PAPERS: SCREENING ATROCITY: CINEMA, DECOLONISATION AND THE 
HOLOCAUST

A one-day postgraduate workshop at Culture Lab, Newcastle University, 10 
January 2013


Keynote speaker: Professor Maxim Silverman

Traditionally, the fields of postcolonial, cultural, and memory studies 
have tended to regard the discourses of the Holocaust and the Algerian 
War of decolonisation (1954-1962) as separated by an invisible ‘colour 
line’- propagating a notion of collective memory as competitive and Nazi 
genocide as a paradigmatic, sui generis (singular) event which ‘differs 
from every case said to compare to it’ (Steven Katz). On the other hand, 
a comparatively nuanced approach to collective memory and discourse has 
recently emerged through the work of Michel Rothberg (2009), whose close 
analysis of cultural artefacts as sites of palimpsestic, 
‘multidirectional memory’ has had profound ramifications for the fields 
of Holocaust and postcolonial studies. Applying Rothberg’s theories 
exclusively  to the discourse of cinema, this postgraduate workshop will 
thus discuss the extent to which filmic representations of the Holocaust 
can be said to parallel (and diverge from) representations of France’s 
colonial legacy, through a structured, comparative exploration of 
cinematic themes and visual tropes (see below). This one-day event will 
ultimately involve the aim of re-inscribing both discourses within a 
dialogical space of intercultural convergence as opposed to 
inassimilable difference and alterity.



Twenty minute papers may address any style of filmmaking including; 
classical/hegemonic Hollywood cinema, American ‘Jewish Revenge cinema,’ 
Israeli Second Generation Cinema, East/West German cinema, the French 
New Wave, Left Bank, cinéma vérité, Algerian cinéma moudjahid 
(freedom-fighter cinema) and Third/Fourth Cinema (although this list is 
far from exhaustive). Participants are encouraged to focus upon either 
representations of the Holocaust or the Algerian War, whilst possible 
papers could focus upon the themes of;



·      - Gender and atrocity

·        Concentrationary spaces

·       ‘Screen memories’

·       Torture

·       Trauma

·       The concept of truth (la vérité)

·       The notion of home/homeland/Heimat

·       Nostalgia

·       The figure of the child

·       The figure of the ‘resistant’

·       The figure of the ‘survivor’

·       Fragmentations of identity

·       Testimonial narratives

·       Concepts of arriving and returning

·       Repression- ‘Vichy/Algeria Syndrome’



Please send abstracts of 250 words to either Mani Sharpe 
(m.sharpe /at/ newcastle.ac.uk) or Gary Jenkins (g.jenkins /at/ newcastle.ac.uk) by 
the 31st of October 2012



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