CFP: Walls (2021/2)
The motif of the wall evokes negative associations through its connotations of separation, confinement, isolation, and segregation. The building of walls, and their tearing down, assume the proportions of symbolic events, always fraught with special significance in the history of any given community, and hence recorded in literature and visual arts with great excitement. The continuing life of a society divided in two by a wall also belongs to a cultural phenomenon conscientiously studied by anthropologists and sociologists. The scientific and artistic tension concentrated around the motif of walls (their building and tearing down, and the way they accompany the setting-out of the rules of a socio-political order) usually has a documentary character, which explains the reportage-like tone of most of artistic renderings of such events. However, when we examine closely the verbal accounts, photographic coverage, and the various forms used to record of a historically crucial moment, it turns out that elements of staging, artistic calculation and fabulation are always involved. Here we want to inquire into the ways in which narratives about walls being built and walls being torn down are shaped; the decisive role played by the media; how the memory of such crucial moments is fabricated; how an individual copes with these events; and how areas of conflict are depicted.
Another area of interest in this project has to do with how communities confined within walls during states of emergency, separated from neighbouring communities, organise their lives. The Great Wall of China, the Berlin Wall and the security wall in Israel supply the best-known examples, and we can refer to them when trying to approach this kind arrangement of social existence.
Also of interest – alongside the historical, political and social – are metaphorical and figurative meanings of walls. As a trope of separation, set in contrast to bridges, walls attract the attention of many artists and writers. Open to examination are various representations of the trope in contemporary literature and art. Such investigations may be acquiring special urgency due to the fact that recent years have seen intensive efforts (in both the symbolic and literal sense) to build walls in various countries and cities. Such efforts indicate class differences as they isolate the poor from the rich; they put in place new divisions and – perhaps – decide about who is to live and who is to die.
The deadline for the submission of proposals with abstracts is 20.12.2020.
Send your text to the email address of the editorial board of the journal:
slaskiestudiapolonistyczne@us.edu.pl
