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October 24, 2007
CFP: “Divided Dreamworlds - The Cultural Cold War in East and West”
On Friday 26 and Saturday 27 September 2008, the Roosevelt Study Center (RSC, Middelburg), the Dutch Institute for War Documentation (NIOD, Amsterdam) and the Research Institute for History and Culture (OGC, Utrecht) organize a conference in Utrecht (The Netherlands) on ‘Divided Dreamworlds - The Cultural Cold War in East and West’.
This conference seeks to explore the ways in which the Cold War heightened the contest between these cultural dreamworlds of East and West while at the same time exposing their structural similarities. The conference encourages papers on other cultural agents who were active in this field but escaped (or tried to escape) the rigid East-West divide. This will allow a greater appreciation for the many actors involved and the multifarious agendas and ideals that were being expressed within, through, and around the norms of bloc politics.
The conference aims to build on the results of the April 2007 conference ‘European Cold War Cultures’, organized by the Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung (ZZF) in Potsdam, which specifically focused on European cultural identities in the context of the Cold War. We would like to attract contributions that address the following issues:
East-West divide:
How did cultural forms and cultural activity contribute towards portraying the respective capitalist and communist dreamworlds?
What was the role of the state in promoting these processes, either alone or with private partners, and how did this vary from country to country?
What was the relation between portraying the utopian dreamworld and demonising the enemy through stereotypes? Did the one rely wholly on the other?
Is Cold War essentially to be understood in terms of the bipolar divide, or have we gained new insights on the structural similarities between East and West which have gradually revealed themselves since the end of the Cold War? What was the range and impact of cultural dialogue or ‘flow across the borders’ (Marsha Siefert)?
Culture and politics:
To what extent did the context of the Cold War reduce culture to a political message, so that it became little more than propaganda? What were the effects of the ‘mobilisation’ of culture and cultural producers for political goals? How possible was it to escape the straight-jacket of Cold War interpretations?
Alternatively, what did the political engagement of cultural producers contribute to the discourse of ideological struggle? How did cultural forms shape the expression of political agendas?
Longue durée:
Which developments before WWII have to be taken into account for a well-founded understanding of the cultural Cold War?
How did these issues change over time, from the tensions of the early Cold War, through the period of détente, to the 1980s?
Please, send your proposal (c. 1.500 words) and a short curriculum vitae before 1 December 2007 to Joes Segal, Department of History and Art History, University of Utrecht, Drift 10, 3512 BS Utrecht, The Netherlands, or by e-mail: Joes.Segal@let.uu.nl.
Joes Segal
Department of History and Art History
University of Utrecht
3512 BS Utrecht
The Netherlands
Email: joes.segal@let.uu.nl
Posted by idareyou at October 24, 2007 03:13 PM