The C2DH of the University of Luxembourg and the Centre national de littérature (CNL) are organising the French/English [online] conference ‘Journées d’étude – “Déposséder – déposséd锑 on Monday, 5 and Tuesday, 6 July 2021.
How to join
The conference will take place in a mix of French and English and will be held online (Webex)
About the conference
Whether experienced personally or recounted through fiction, whether due to the application of the law or to the opportunism of some, the dispossession of certain categories of the population for the benefit of others manifested itself in many ways in Europe between 1933 and 1945. The Jewish population was particularly targeted by the exclusion measures that caused them to lose their property, their identity and even their existence by evicting them from economic life, public space and the social body in a mechanism that often only prepared them for deportation and death.
These processes, whose central stage is often the modification of the legal framework and its application by the various components of society, have repercussions right down to the intimate level, creating a feeling of exclusion that is echoed in the arts. The loss of what constitutes one’s identity, one’s home, one’s daily life, is thus expressed in painting, as in the paintings of Felix Nussbaum or Jean Fautrier, as well as in literature, with for example Max Jacob, Paul Palgen, Marcel Thiry.
The aim of these ‘Journées d’étude’ will be to explore the different facets of this dispossession, particularly but not exclusively in Luxembourg, France and Belgium, by first looking at the structural mechanisms and their material manifestations, then at their individual consequences and the way they are expressed, particularly in the arts.
The conference is supported by the FNR’s RESCOM programme