Workshop: Call for Papers
African and South Asian Histories of the Holocaust
26-28 February 2025
Trinity College, Cambridge University
in partnership with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Deadline for Abstracts: 27 September 2024
Notification: 15 October 2024
This workshop will explore the intersections between African, South Asian, and Jewish experiences of and encounters with the Holocaust, both during the Second World War and in subsequent decades. How have African and South Asian historians, communities, and intellectuals deployed and reimagined histories of the Holocaust? How have states invoked and reworked histories of the Holocaust to animate political power and cultural production? To what extent did the Nazi genocide and its legacies shape critical discourses and events in African and South Asian history in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? What were the encounters between Jewish refugees from Europe and local populations, governments, and colonial authorities?
Although a growing body of scholarship has begun to examine the impact of the Holocaust in the ‘Global South’, there has been little contact between scholars of Holocaust Studies and scholars of Africa or South Asia; in addition, much scholarship remains limited to national case studies. The aim of the workshop is thus to create an opportunity for leading and emerging scholars to come together for more sustained dialogue across geographic as well as historiographical boundaries.
To this end, we are soliciting proposals in the following four areas:
● Historiography and historical imagination: African or South Asian history writing and the work of African and South Asian historical thinkers who created varied ways of explaining the rise of Nazi political power and the necessity of African and Asian interventions to end European state violence against its own communities.
● Histories of refugees and exile: The interconnected histories of dislocation, settlement and exile among Jewish, African, and South Asian communities.
● Political power and cultural production: How African and South Asian states, social organisers and dissidents have incorporated Holocaust memory into the everyday work of political mobilisation, nationalist projects and cultural production.
● Religious and social change: The ways in which Jewish experiences, histories, and identities were borrowed and rescripted by Africans and South Asians in the aftermath of the Holocaust, and how Jewish communities borrowed South Asian and African cultural and historical registers.
Please send your 300-word abstract and 50-word bio to both jonathon.earle@centre.edu and shirli.gilbert@ucl.ac.uk by 27 September 2024. Notifications will be sent no later than 15 October. The workshop will begin with a reception on Wednesday evening (26 February 2025) and will conclude on Friday afternoon (28 February).
Thanks to the generosity of the Martin Rees Conference Series Fund and the College Council of Trinity College, all presenters' meals and workshop fees will be covered. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum will partially subsidise travel to and accommodation in Cambridge. If you require travel and accommodation subsidies, please indicate on your proposal your full costs as well as any support you may have from other sources, so that we can distribute funding as fairly as possible.
Professor Jonathon Earle, Centre College and Trinity College, jonathon.earle@centre.edu
Professor Shirli Gilbert, University College London, shirli.gilbert@ucl.ac.uk