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The Afterlife of Yizker bikher in Contemporary Jewish Writing

A lecture by Marianne Windsperger (Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies) in the frame of the seminar on Modern Jewish History organized by the Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences, CEFRES and the Prague Center for Jewish Studies.

Where: CEFRES Library, Na Florenci 3, 110 00 Prague 1
When: from 5:30 pm to 7 pm
Language: English

Abstract

In my PhD dissertation project on “Revisiting and Retelling the Shtetl: Narratives of Searching for Traces in American Jewish Writing” I devote a chapter to references to the yizker bukh tradition in contemporary Jewish writing. The Yiddish term yizker bikher has come to describe a large body of books commemorating destroyed Jewish communities in Eastern Europe. These books have been put together in displaced persons camps immediately after the war or in the hometown societies, the landsmanshaftn. A large number of the yizker bikher include various materials such as maps, photographs, documents as well as lists of names. In narratives that seek to draw transgenerational connections to concrete places, these memorial books are consulted to gain or verify knowledge on specific sites and as a repository of names of the former inhabitants. In this chapter I will carefully trace forms of collecting and writing in contemporary Jewish literature connected to the yizker bukh tradition. Traces of the diasporic medium of the yizker bikher can be found in contemporary American writing, in Argentinian literature as well as in French and German works. Through a comparative approach I will map the afterlife of this genre in world literature and show how these books draw together various writing traditions.

Trajectories of Romani Migrations and Mobilities in Europe and Beyond (1945 – present)

International Conference

When: 16-18 September 2019
Where: Vila Lanna (V Sadech 1, Prague 6)
Organizers: Prague Forum for Romani Histories at the Institute of Contemporary History (Czech Academy of Sciences), Seminar on Romani Studies (Department of Central European Studies, Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague), Faculty of Social Sciences and Economics at University of Valle, Colombia, The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, CEFRES in Prague
Financial support: Strategy 21AV of the Czech Academy of Sciences, CEFRES in Prague and Bader Philanthropies
Language: English (simultaneous translation into Czech is offered for the whole of the conference program)

The conference will bring together scholars from across a variety of disciplines to present empirically grounded accounts of the multiple dimensions of Romani mobilities since 1945 in order to analyse connections between various forms of past mobilities and migrations and the most recent movements of various Romani groupings. The conference will be held in Prague on September 16-18, 2019.

Over the past decade, a growing number of research projects, publications, and media have focused on Romani migrations and mobilities. However, most of these studies have only rarely combined the study of historical continuities and social trajectories shaping the present-day migratory movements. Anthropological and sociological accounts have documented contemporary strategies of Romani migrants, the production of legal classifications, and explored the politics shaping Romani mobilities. Additionally, the trope of “nomadism” has continued to inform the discussions as a foundational concept (often as a simplified “straw man”) that researchers embrace or oppose to explain their arguments. We invite researchers to interrogate the utility and limitations of this binary and to move beyond it through conceptually innovative analyses of movement, circulation, migration and the concomitant social and existential mobilities they imply in the context of the post-World War II era, bearing in mind that a large part of local Romani communities have been part of the European sedentary population.

The conference also aims to contribute to the incipient field of comparative studies of Romani mobilities with a focus on the second half of 20th century and from intersectional perspectives. Whereas recent research has documented the suffering and persecution of Romani groups during World War Two, post-war developments have not received the same measure of attention. These include, for instance, Romani experiences of returning to destroyed homes, government attempts to resettle and disperse Romani populations by force, labor and other internal migrations in search of better lives enchanted by the opportunities available in more industrialised cities, or navigating through ‘compensation schemes’ introduced by various state and international agencies.

Many members of previously persecuted minorities, including Roma, hoped for a better future in the context of massive post-war projects to restructure European states. In Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe most of the local Roma aspired – together with others – to greater social mobility and full membership through socialist citizenship. Socialist projects to reach the ‘greater common good’ and societal equality, however, also entailed forced displacements and new regimes of disciplining the Romani bodies to cultivate working-class citizens out of Romani/Gypsy groupings. On the other hand, post-war aspirations and trajectories of (social) mobility of the Roma in the ‘West’ remain largely unexplored, as well as the participation of Roma in movements and navigations across the East-West divide (and beyond).  Similarly, relatively few studies explore the social mobility of Roma linked with gendered changes and (re)negotiation of inter-community relations, as well as other mechanisms and dispositifs along which members of Romani communities renegotiated their (stigmatized) ‘Gypsyness’ in post-war times.

Thus, we invite various contributions to explore a wide range of mobilities and different intersections and/or entanglements between often contradictory developments, which can be understood as a condition for mobility, including physical movement and a change in social position. Additionally, the conference organisers welcome empirical and theoretical discussions of Romani mobilities as oscillating between modes of dispersal and containment, between forced mobilities and efforts to carve out autonomous movements and spaces.

Conference themes and areas of interest
The conference aims to bring together various empirically grounded and historically informed studies exploring different kinds of mobility and immobility in Europe and beyond. Locating these mobilities in the broader political, social, historical and cultural contexts and forces, contributors are invited to reflect on both voluntary and forced migration, patterns of seasonal mobility, and various forms of mobility (e.g. existential, physical, social) as a reaction to oppressive conditions as well as newly opened possibilities. We welcome in particular proposals that focus on one or more of the following areas:

  • Different trajectories and modes of Romani mobilities from 1945 to the present
  • Movement as a mode of escaping oppressive and asymmetric conditions
  • Intersectional studies of mobilities addressing gendered, classed, raced/ethnicised differentiations and other intertwined dimensions of social domination
  • Connections between mobilities and forms of violence (physical, symbolic, everyday, structural)
  • Romani migration during the period of socialist high-modernist policies – strategies deployed to attain upward social mobilities; forced displacements and resettlement schemes
  • Mobility between oppressive policies of racial containment and dispersal, on the one hand, and resistance and resilience of various Romani individuals and groups, on the other
  • Romani civil and political rights movements and their relation to physical and social mobility
  • Continuities and discontinuities of migrations; historicizing the present moment and connecting past trajectories of migration and mobilities to current developments
  • Methodological issues in exploring “histories of the present” of Romani migrations and mobilities
  • Attempts at conceptualisation/critical revision of migration and mobility beyond the concept of “nomadism” and traditional “statist” tropes; examination of various modes of being beyond relying on the assumption of “Roma/Gypsy proneness to movement”

The conference will include a panel highlighting research based on the archival holdings of the International Tracing Service (ITS). The ITS collections include more than 35 million multi-page Holocaust-era documents relating to the fates of more than 17 million people who were subject to incarceration, forced labor, and displacement during and after World War II. The ITS is located and accessible for research in Bad Arolsen, Germany, as well as in digital copy at seven other locations around the world, including the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. The Archive included significant holdings on Romani victims and survivors, as well as documentation of Romani interactions with refugee resettlement agencies and compensation schemes. Proposals that feature ITS-based research are particularly welcome. As additional conference program a public session will be organized during which experts working on the ITS collections will introduce the research tools available to the interested public and assist Romani participants and visitors in searching for the documentation on their ancestors.

PROGRAMME
16 September 2019

14:30 Opening of the conference
Helena Sadílková (Charles University) & Jan Grill (University of Valle): Introducing Trajectories of Romani Mobilities

15:00-17:00 Panel I
Displacement, Survival, and Migration in the Aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust: Romani Trajectories in the Arolsen Archives

Elizabeth Anthony, Visiting Scholar Programs, Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum
Using the Records of the International Tracing Service Digital Archive for Scholarly Research on Roma Victims of the Nazis

Ari Joskowicz,  Vanderbilt University and 2013-14 Diane and Howard Wohl Fellow (USHMM)
Romani Refugees between National and International Migration Regimes (1945-1960)

Chair: Jo-Ellyn Decker, Holocaust Survivor and Victims Research Center, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum
Discussant: Kateřina Čapková, Institute for Contemporary History, Czech Academy of Sciences

17 September 2019

9:30-11:00 Panel II
Manipulation of „Gypsy Nomadism“ in Post-War Europe

Huub van Baar, Institute of Political Science, Justus-Liebig University Giessen, Amsterdam Centre for Globalisation Studies, University of Amsterdam
The Ambiguous Politics of Protection in Post-War Europe: Irregularizing Citizenship of Roma through Mobile Governmentalities

Stefánia Toma – László Fosztó, Romanian Institute for Research on National Minorities in Cluj-Napoca
The mobility of the Roma as Resource and/or Obstacle for Social Integration in Romania

Filip Pospíšil, City University of New York, Anthropology Department of John Jay College of Criminal Justice
Nomads from the Neighboring Village – The Intrastate Mobility of the Unwanted

Chair: Yasar Abu Ghosh, Department of Anthropology, Faculty of Humanities Charles University
Discussant: Ari Joskowicz

11:00-11:30 Coffee break

11:30-13:00 Panel III
Negotiating Intrastate Policies During Socialism

Ana Chiritoiu, Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, Central European University
‘Capable’, ‘Free’, and ‘Universal’: The Circulation of Roma Between Idioms of Resistance and Difference. A Case-Study from Southern Romania

Markéta Hajská, Seminar for Romani Studies, Department for Central European Studies, Faculty of Arts, Charles University
The Assimilation Policies of 1950s Czechoslovakia Towards Itinerant Groups as Viewed by Romani Witnesses: The Case of Žatec and Louny

Jan Ort, Seminar for Romani Studies, Department for Central European Studies, Faculty of Arts, Charles University
The Policy of “Controlled Dispersal” of the Roma in the 1960s in the Former Czechoslovakia. A Case Study of Humenné District

Chair: Helena Sadílková
Discussant: László Fosztó

13:00-14:00 Lunch

14:00-15:30 Panel IV
Challenging Borders and Closed Concepts

Licia Porcedda, École des hautes études en sciences sociales
The Trajectory of Croatian Roma in 1940s and 1950s Italy. Citizenship, Social Control and Inclusion Through the History of Rosa Raidich

Sabrina Steindl-Kopf – Sanda Üllen, Institute of Modern and Contemporary History at the Austrian Academy of Sciences
Intersections of Participatory Action and Migration Biographies of Romani Migrants in Vienna

Dušan Slačka, Museum of Romani Culture
Effects of Political and Administrational Situation on Territorial Movement and Life of the Roma in Moravian-Slovak Borderlands – Example of Districts of Hodonín and Senica till 1970s

Chair: Ilsen About, National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris
Discussant: Eszter Varsa, Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies, Regensburg

15:30-16:00 Coffee break

16:00-17:30 Discussion/Forum
Interrogating Analytical Categories: On Pitfalls and Hopefulness in the Emerging Research Field (‘Mobilities’, ‘Migrations’, ‘Trajectories’ and Beyond)

Introductory remarks by: Jan Grill (University of Valle), Yasar Abu Ghosh (Charles University), Helena Sadílková, (Charles University), Martin Fotta, Goethe University, Frankfurt
Chair: Krista Hegburg, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum

18 September 2019

9:30-11:30 Panel V
Beyond the Binary of Nomadism and Settlement

Kamila Fiałkowska – Michał P. Garapich – Elżbieta Mirga-Wójtowicz, Centre of Migration Research, University of Warsaw
Migration Regimes, Kinship and Ethnic Boundaries Impact on Migration Strategies and Practices: Case Study of Roma Migrants from Poland to the UK

Judit Durst (University College London) – Zsanna Nyírő (Corvinus University of Budapest)
Interrupted Continuity: The Role of Kinship in Migration among (Trans)nationally Mobile Roma Factory Workers from Rural Hungary at the Global Assembly Line

Daniel Škobla (Slovak Academy of Sciences – Institute of Ethnology and Social Anhtropology) – Mario Rodriguéz Polo (Palacký University in Olomouc – Department of Sociology, Andragogy and Cultural Anthropology)
Escaping Ethnic Traps. Cyclical Migration from Slovakia to Austria as a Way to Escape Poverty and Oppression

Chair: Jan Grill
Discussant: Huub van Baar

Emigrating Animals and Migratory Humans: Belonging, Prosperity and Security in More-Than-Human World

Workshop

Venue:  CAS, “Lower Hall” (Na Florenci 3, Prague 1)
Date: 10-11 September 2019
Organizers: Institute of Ethnology and Institute of Sociology, Czech Academy of Sciences and CEFRES, with the support of the program “Strategy AV21”
Language: English

Check the program of the workshop here.
Argumentary

In 2018, Polish authorities announced a plan to build one of Europe’s longest fences to protect the country’s Eastern border from unwanted migrants and a highly contagious disease they might be carrying. At the first glance, the plan is reminiscent of president Trump’s design for a wall along the US Mexican border, or the already built Hungarian fence at the Serbian and Croatian borders. However, there is an important difference: the disease that Polish and other European authorities fear is African Swine Fever (ASF), and the unwanted migrants are not humans but wild boars from Russia, Belarus and Ukraine. The Polish plan has since been dropped, yet similar fences, such as one between Denmark and Germany, are already being built. It seems that the “Trojan boar”, the feared virus carrier, is contributing toward the resurrection of the old-new borders just as human refugees have, eroding the Schengen space of free movement. This account of foreign boars, biosecurity, and border walls is just one example of the interesting parallels between human and nonhuman animal movement and how the state organises in response.

Noting the unfolding conceptual exchange between mobility studies and animal studies, the objective of this workshop is to further the dialogue and bring together scholars of human migration and non-human animal migration. At the intersection of these two fields of study we expect a range of engaging questions to emerge. Migration often involves the destabilisation of established orders of belonging and the triggering of processes of othering and protectionism. What are the potential empirical and analytical synergies between studying the movement of people and that of non-human animals across geophysical, symbolic and biopolitical borders? In many contexts, human migrants are derogatively described with the use of animal metaphors (e.g. as cockroaches) while animals, often equally derogatively, are described with the human qualifiers (e.g. as invaders). What should we make out of those analogies? Can we still speak about the flow of  “metaphors” between accounts of human and non-human migration if we refuse to see the two as belonging to ontologically disparate domains (one exclusively human, the other exclusively non-human)?

We invite participants to share empirical research on, and conceptualizations of, migration in relationally complex multispecies world. Focusing on ongoing, historical and anticipated movements of humans and non- human animals we wish to explore the changing meaning and analytical utility of such concepts as belonging, precarity, (bio)security, prosperity, invasiveness, climate refugees, ecosystem, native, nation or state.

You can download the abstracts here.

Critical Suicide Studies International Network Meeting

International Network Meeting

Venue: Institute of Ethnology of the CAS (5th Floor), Na Florenci 3, 110 00 Prague 1
Date: 26-27 June 2019
Organizers: Institute of Ethnology of the Czech Academy of Sciences and CEFRES
Language: English

Argumentary

As part of its ongoing commitment to growing the emerging field of critical suicide studies, an international network of scholars will come together for two days in Prague to address the following goals:

1.      Identify ongoing opportunities for collaborative grant-writing, research and writing projects.

2.      Develop a regular conference schedule to build on the success of three international conferences to date (Prague, Canterbury, Perth). The next conference is planned for Vancouver in June 2020.

3.      Articulate a set of guiding ethics to serve as a touchstone for our scholarly, practice and pedagogical engagements.

4.      Continue to mobilize critique for productive ends by identifying opportunities to re-think what it means to do suicide prevention.

5.      Expand the field to include scholars, practitioners and those with lived experience from around the world.

For further information: https://criticalsuicidology.net/.

CEFRES Review of Books – June 2019

The new edition of CEFRES Review of Books will take place on Tuesday 25 June at 5 pm at CEFRES library.
Join us for a discussion around the latest publications in humanities and social sciences from France.

This informal meeting gathers CEFRES team, the library readers, and professionals from libraries and publishing. The aim of our Review of Books is to make better known the publishing landscape in humanities and social sciences. Each book is presented in no more than 10 minutes, so to stress its originality and stakes.

So far, the following presentations are announced:

  • Diane AFOUMADO : Indésirables (Calmann-Lévy, 2018), par Florence Vychytil Baudoux
  • Franz FANON : Oeuvres. N° 2 (La Découverte, 2018), par Thomas C. Mercier
  • Marc JOLY : La révolution sociologique (La Découverte, 2017) par Jan Maršálek
  • Claudia MOATTI : Res Publica. Histoire romaine de la chose publique (Fayard, 2018), par Hana Fořtová
  • Gérard NOIRIEL : Une histoire populaire de la France, De la guerre de Cent ans à nos jours (AGONE, 2018) par Michel Perottino

 

Revisiting the 1989 event in Central Europe: social margins, writing practices, new archives

International Conference

Venue: Scientific Center of the Polish Academy of Sciences (74, rue Lauriston, Paris), Sorbonne University (17, rue de la Sorbonne, “Salle des actes”, Paris)
Date: 7-8 June 2019.
Organizers: Science Centre of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Paris, Centre of Polish civilisation (Sorbonne University), CEFRES,  Centre of French Civilisation and Francophone Studies in Warsaw
Language: English

This conference is the first in a cycle of conference entitled “1989-2019: Beyond the Anniversary, questionning 1989“, held in Paris, Warsaw and Prague.

You can check the detailed program here.

Argumentary

What is known about 1989, this chain of major events that have shaken up the map of Europe and the world? The collapse of communist regimes has been extensively studied and commented on. The human and social sciences have long focused on the 1989 enigma, which saw the un-anticipated collapse of the European part of the Soviet bloc in just a few months. However, the work on 1989 quickly led to other research agendas, proposing to study the current transformations in Central and Eastern Europe. Because contrary to what the large number of stories about 1989 may suggest, there are few empirical studies on this object and for good reasons. Because of its historical situation as the final moment of the communist period and as the inaugural moment of the “democratic transition”, 1989 was finally little addressed as such and for itself. Retrospective analyses of the reasons for the fall of the communist bloc and prospective studies on the democratization of Eastern European societies quickly marginalized the event as an object of investigation, in favor of more interpretation-oriented writings. More recently, it is more a questioning around the memory controversies on 1989 that has caught the attention of researchers. This conference therefore proposes a return to the event itself. Going back to the field, diving in the past, mobilizing new sources, without of course sacrificing the analysis to pure facts. This is the perspective adopted which consists in questioning the event through its social margins, actors who have until now remained in the shadows (for example workers or women), through writing and cultural practices and by engaging in a debate on the archives of 1989, raising new or too long ignored questions. Several leads seem to be possible:

  • 1989 and social margins : What did 1989 mean for the Eastern European working classes, rural communities, people living in urban areas far from the heart of events, women, young people or the regime’s elites? Crossing the political event and the social worlds offers an original perspective on the dynamics of the collapse and makes it possible to rethink the relationships between the “revolutionary process” and social classes, which are known to be central to Marxist theory.
  • Writing and cultural practices : How was 1989 figured, documented and co-constructed, both during and after, through various writing practices (diaries, actors’ memoirs, underground press, samizdats, correspondence) and artistic genres such as literature, theatre, happening, painting or documentary? What traces does it leave in the visual memory of the event? What exactly is described, from what point of view?
  • New archives : Which archives were constituted on 1989 and on the period preceding the event? Are the archives on 1989 part of the archives of communism? Did 1989 produce its own archivists? Who are they and how can these archives be used? How can we interpret the development of oral history in the East and the multiplication of real “banks of testimonies”, which are emerging as new archives of communism and post-communism?

It is therefore about revisiting 1989 by consciously taking a fragmented look on the series of political events that have transformed Central and Eastern Europe. Hence the use of new and heterodox sources: oral history with ordinary citizens, self-writing, memoirs written by former members of the opposition or communist parties, posters, literary and artistic materials, etc., which have been the subject of so few publications since then.

Scientific direction of the Cycle of conferences
  • Maciej Forycki, Scientific Centre in Paris of the Polish Academy of Science
  • Jérôme Heurtaux, CEFRES–French Research Centre in Humanities and Social Sciences
  • Nicolas Maslowski, Centre for French Studies (CCFEF), University of Warsaw
  • Paweł Rodak, Centre of Polish Civilisation, Sorbonne University