A major international conference, ‘Narratives of Violence,’ conceived by the International Consortium for Research on Antisemitism and Racism (ICRAR) and hosted by the Jewish Studies Program at Central European University.
Involving academics from all over the world, the conference will explore the ways in which violence against religious groups, ethnic groups and visible minorities, as well as against women and sexual minorities, has been incorporated into larger political projects and into the subsequent construction of different communities.
How have different narratives of anti-Jewish violence been imagined, constructed, and memorialized in various places and times? How have authors, artists and other actors implemented these narratives towards a variety of social, political and religious goals? Looking more broadly, we hope to understand what the analysis and deconstruction of these narratives of anti-Jewish violence can tell us about the nature of ethnic, religious and national communities since the Middle Ages. More specifically, we will ask what the comparison of these narratives with those of other communities can tell us about the deeper connections between narratives of violence and the construction of communities, as well as the integration of the memory of violence into regnant conceptions of society, self and other.
The approach is interdisciplinary, involving scholars of all fields, including history, literature, cultural studies and the social sciences. The intertwined themes covered in the conference include:
- Representations of violence in elite and popular culture (film, television, folklore, music, literature, visual arts, internet)
- Historiographical trends (use of oral history, documentation, historical commissions, genocide studies, and gender studies)
- Religious portrayals and memorialization (matyrologies, liturgy, religious ritual/ceremony)
- Ideological trends (violence in national narratives, political narratives, museums, monuments, lieux de mémoire)
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The Pears Institute for the study of Antisemitism is a founding member of ICRAR.