[ecrea] CFP deadline extended: Figures of Transgression in War Representation

Due to a number of requests we are pleased to say that the deadline for 
abstracts for the following event has been extended to 1st February 2015.

Please circulate widely to interested colleagues, with apologies for 
cross posting.

Interdisciplinary Research Workshop, 11 May 2015, University of Reading

Figures of Transgression in War Representation


In periods of crisis, when national or cultural identity is unstable, 
contested, or openly destabilized; when binary oppositions between self 
and other, ‘us’ and ‘them’, can become both intensified and increasingly 
strained; and when the experience or memory of conflict ‘on the ground’ 
threatens to unsettle normative national or cultural narratives of 
legitimation, popular culture and particularly cinema provide topoi for 
the working through of anxieties.


War films above all seem to offer effective structures and motifs for a 
broad engagement with fears and uncertainties as the recent resurgence 
of World War II films in American and European Cinema indicates. A 
crucial presence in filmic representations of war are figures of 
transgression, that is, those figures that trouble normative boundaries, 
such as traitors, deserters, exiled persons, translators and 
negotiators. They are a key component – frequently occupying a marginal 
yet morally or emotionally pivotal narrative position – that permits the 
rehearsing, exploring, and transforming of those conflicting positions 
that are or become apparent in clashes between nations, cultures, and 
religions.


This workshop seeks to bring together scholars in a range of disciplines 
to better understand how conflict, change and cultural representation 
are related. With a focus on films covering conflicts from World War I 
to the ‘war on terror’, we will look at the functions of figures of 
transgression within war cinema as part of a wider cultural 
preoccupation with figures and connotations and consequences of 
transgression. We argue that these figures operate as a crucial site for 
culturally necessary processes of ‘thinking through,’ their liminal 
status permitting opportunity for visualizing and repositioning the 
enemy, the exploration of questions of legitimation and culpability, and 
the testing of moral and ethical grounds for future national and 
transnational or inter-cultural identity formation.



While existing scholarship has debated the political, structural and 
sociological concept of treason (Akerström 1991, Ben-Yehuda 2001, Parikh 
2009), very little work has been carried out on figures of 
transgression. Using an interdisciplinary lens that accommodates both 
analysis of the narrative and audio-visual depiction of these figures, 
and analysis of the socio-cultural, political, and historical contexts 
in which they emerge, the workshop sets out to understand the complex 
function of transgressors in representations of war and seeks to map a 
history of identity negotiation that can help us to comprehend better 
how conflict and cultural change intersect.


We seek 20-minute papers relating to films or other visual 
representations of a range of wars and violent conflicts, from WWI to 
the present day, responding to the following questions:

· - How are figures of transgression situated within Western culture, 
particularly film narratives, and to what ends?

· - How are figures of transgression codified by the various national 
institutions particularly cinema but also law, politics, history, the 
army and to what ends?

· - How might figures of transgression function in relation to cultural 
debates about conflict and identity?

· - Do they function to legitimate or problematize normative 
perspectives on other and self?

· - What are the connections and disparities between figures of 
transgression across different historical moments of crisis and reflection?

· - What is the function of the figure of transgression in films that 
represent popular returns to past periods of war and conflict?


Please send your 400-word proposal and a short biographical note to 
(u.wolfel /at/ reading.ac.uk) and (l.v.purse /at/ reading.ac.uk) by 16 January 2015.

Best wishes,


Lisa

Dr Lisa Purse

Associate Professor in Film | Department Director of Teaching and 
Learning | Theme Leader, Rights and Representation Faculty Research 
Theme, FAHSS

Department of Film, Theatre & Television, Room 202, Minghella Building, 
Whiteknights, Reading, RG6 6BT, UK
Email (l.v.purse /at/ reading.ac.uk)

Web www.reading.ac.uk/ftt


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