13th FENIX CONGRESS

The 13th Fenix Congress special issue, El retorno a Ítaca. Imaginarios exílicos europeos, is published in Cuadernos de Historia contemporánea (vol. 47, Núm 2, 2025). This special issue  explores 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.

The special issue examines 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).

The special issue adopts 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.

The contributions included in this Fenix Special Issue 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, and examine the intersections between different artistic disciplines in expressing exile experiences.