Our Congresses
13th Fenix Congress
Special Issue: “The Return to Ithaca. European Exile Imaginaries”
The 13th Fenix Congress special issue will explore the imaginaries of return from exile in 20th-century European intellectual and artistic production. Taking Homer’s Ithaca as a foundational metaphor for the longing to recover the lost homeland, this issue will analyze how exiled writers and artists represented the possibility—or impossibility—of return.
Scope
The special issue will examine exile movements caused by armed conflicts, ethnic persecutions, and totalitarian regimes throughout 20th-century Europe, including among others the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), the Second World War (1939-1945), the Franco-Algerian War (1954-1962), or the Yugoslav Wars (1991-2001).
We welcome contributions that:
- Analyze representations of return in exile literature, cinema, visual arts, architecture, photography, or other artistic expressions
- Explore the spatial imagination of exiles and the reconstruction of homeland from the diaspora
- Examine the intersections between different artistic disciplines in expressing exile experience
- Investigate how the exile imaginary connects to contemporary refugee and migration realities
Approach
The special issue will adopt a transdisciplinary perspective, bringing together history, art history, literature, and cultural studies. We encourage proposals that examine specific case studies of European intellectuals and artists in exile, focusing on how they imagined, prepared for, or represented their return—whether real, mental, or impossible.
We invite scholars from diverse fields to contribute to this dialogue on exile, belonging, and the enduring human desire to return home and to send your proposals to Fenix.network.research@gmail.com by 01.12.2024. The congress will be celebrated: 03.12.2024-05.12.2024. More details follow via the Fenix Network.