Complicities in the Second World War:
Literature of Occupation, Collaboration, and Impure Resistance
(3-5 October, Ghent, Belgium)
Pre-conference Event
(3 October 2024)
De Boekentoren – Rozier 9, 9000 Gent
18:00-19:30: History and Memory of World War II Occupation in Belgium: A Round Table Discussion
Bruno de Wever (Ghent University)
Chantal Kesteloot (CegeSoma/Archives de l’Etat)
Kevin Absillis (University of Antwerp)
Chair: Koen Aerts (Ghent University)
19:30 – 20:30: Reception
Day 1
(4 October)
Monasterium Poortackere
(Oude Houtlei 56, 9000 Gent)
8:30 – 9:00 Registration and Welcoming
9:00 – 10:45 Parallel sessions
Panel 1 – Holocaust literature beyond the concentrationary universe
Chair: Juliane Prade-Weiss (LMU Munich)
Simone Ghelli (Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa): The «Latent Infection» of Fascism: Primo Levi’s Antifascist Education Between Oppression and Resistance
Jenny Watson (University of Edinburgh, UK): Other Germans, Other Complicities: Black Sea Germans and the ‘Holocaust by bullets’ in Markus Berges’s Die Köchin von Bob Dylan (2019)
Irina Rebrova (TU Berlin): “The German Monsters have Escaped, but the Entire Hitler System is in the Dock:” Literary Responses of the Soviet Open Trials in Post-war Society (the North Caucasus Case)
Panel 2 – World War II and the colonial world
Chair: Maaheen Ahmed (Ghent University)
Wambua Muindi (University of Nairobi): “This war sounds like the beginning of something very stupid”: Re-imagining WW2 in the Horn of Africa
Arlenea Herdimansyah (Independent): Indonesian folklore and the heinous history of occupation in Eka Kurniawan’s epic novel Beauty is a Wound
Désirée Schyns (Ghent University): The Sétif-massacre of 8 May 1945 in Le cadavre encerclé (1954/1955) by the Francophone Algerian writer Kateb Yacine (1929-1989)
10:45 – 11:15 Coffee Break
11:15 – 13:00: Panel 3 – The complexity of history and the power of literature
Chair: Guido Bartolini (Ghent University)
Adrian Armstrong (Queen Mary University of London): The Ghost Townscape: Catachresis and Not Really Knowing in Hugo Claus’s Wonder
Juliane Prade-Weiss (LMU Munich): Striving for Commemorative Purity: Justice, Fact, and Fiction in Kinstler’s Come to this Court and Cry
Tijana Matović (University of Kragujevac): Reconfigurations of narrative identities in Kazuo Ishiguro’s memoryscapes
13.00 – 15:00 Lunch
15:00 – 16:40 Parallel sessions
Panel 4 – Italian Fascism and Complicity: After-life and Alternative History
Chair: Stefano Serafini (University of Padua)
Charles Burdett (School of Advanced Study, University of London): Ciro Poggiali’s Diario AOI 1936–1937 and The Representation of The Italian Colonial World on the Eve of the Second World War
Patricia Chiantera-Stutte (University of Bari): The missed revolution debate between fascists and liberals
Andrea Meyer Ludowisy (Senate House Library, University of London): “Selves on the shelves”: archives, libraries and museum collections as powerful vehicles for nationalism and cultural order
Panel 5 – Resistance in European literature
Chair: Rebecca Glasberg (Stanford University)
Martina Biavati (University of Reading and Cardiff University): “La mamma Agnese viene con noi”: representations of female agency of the Italian Communist Resistance between official commemorations and autobiographical accounts
Domantė Vaišvylaitė and Gabija Bankauskaitė (Vilnius University): The Archetype of the Hero’s Journey as a Metamorphosis of War Consciousness in Algirdas Landsbergis’ “Five Pillars in the Market Square”
Sophia McDaniel (Columbia University, Paris): Simone Veil’s Biography in Bande Dessinée: An Illustrated Legacy of Occupied France and Perpetual Resistance
16:40 – 17:00 Coffee Break
17:00 – 18:30 Keynote Lecture
Ivan Stacy (Beijing Normal University): Long Occupations and Fallen Cities: Fictions of World War Two in Asia
Chair: Arvi Sepp (VUB)
18:30 – 19:00: Collective Discussion: The cultural memory of World War II in the twenty-first century
Chair: Guido Bartolini (Ghent University)
19:30 – 22:00: Conference Dinner
Day 2
(5 October)
Monasterium Poortackere
(Oude Houtlei 56, 9000 Gent)
9:00 – 10:30 Keynote Lecture
Mihaela Mihai (The University of Edinburgh): Structural Violence and the Limits of Polyphonic Memory
Chair: Stef Craps (Ghent University)
10:30 – 11:00: Coffee Break
11:00 – 12:45: Parallel sessions
Panel 6 – Multidirectional transformations of WWII memories
Chair: Arnoud Arps (University of Amsterdam):
Marie Jadot (University of Liège): Music to Remember the Long Second World War in Dutch Literature of Victimhood and Perpetration
Will Norman (University of Kent): Bad Faith and Organized Guilt: The American Afterlives of World War Two Complicity
Jan Miklas-Frankowski (University of Gdańsk): Recomposing national myths: Grzebałkowska’s literary reportage ‘Poland 1945’ and the diversification of WWII narratives
Panel 7 – Perpetrators and collaborators in literary depiction
Chair: Guido Bartolini (Ghent University)
Giuseppe Marrone (Università di Roma La Sapienza, Italy): «I balilla andarono a Salò». The characterisation of the fascist in the Salò narrative
Bérengère Darlison (Sorbonne University): In the Intimacy of the Perpetrator: Empathy, Repulsion, Manipulation in La Mort est mon métier (Death is My Trade) and Les Bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones)
Ruth Peeters (KU Leuven): Who is to blame? The problem of sympathy in two short stories by Clara Malraux
12:45 – 14:15 Lunch
14:15 – 16:15 Panel 8 – Justifications and Identity renegotiation in postwar literature
Chair: Stefano Serafini (University of Padua)
Marius Hentea (University of Gothenburg): Francis Stuart, or the Story of the Irish Artist
Jayne Persian (University of Southern Queensland, Australia): Revisiting Helen Demidenko’s The Hand that Signed the Paper: A War Crimes Investigation
Rizwan Akhtar (University of the Punjab, Lahore): The Ambivalent Territory of Resistance and Complicity in Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient
Anna Taglietti (University of Padua): Prigionia: c’ero anch’io” Italian Literature on Second World War Military Imprisonment Between Forgetting and the Construction of Memory
Coffee Break: 16:15 – 16:45
16:45 – 18:30 Panel 9 – The Ethical Labyrinth of War Collaboration
Chair: Guido Bartolini (Ghent University)
Arnoud Arps (University of Amsterdam): “Man lives for victory and then defeat or the other way around”:Multiple positionalities and complex implication in Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s Perburuan (1950)
Stefano Romagnoli (Sapienza University of Rome): Ambiguous Alliances: Asymmetrical Friendships, Mimicry, and Exploitation in Japanese-Occupied Territories
Rebecca Glasberg (Stanford University): From perpetrator to victim, or vice versa? Genocide and colonial occupation in Anouar Benmalek’s Fils du Shéol (2015)
18:30 Closing remarks