Two-Way Tickets: Travel, Home, and War
University of Oxford
6 June 2017
War necessitates travel: soldiers on active duty are ‘mobilised’, and so in a different sense are the people that war has displaced or made homeless. From the peripli of classical antiquity to the Grand Tour, from ethnographic and imperialist expeditions to postcolonial travel, the dialectic of home and abroad, foreign and native, is typically scrutinised through the experience of mobility, and further tested by the question of the return home. Not everybody has a ‘two-way ticket’ when it comes to war, but the industry around war tourism might indicate what war-related travel brings home, and its involvement in the construction of national and group identities.
This interdisciplinary conference asks how the concept of home is reassessed through travel generated by war. It invites debate around the ways travel precipitates or disrupts the construction of identity, against the backdrop of war. How do travelogues and literary fiction, fine art and film, museums and battlegrounds stage the encounter between home and the unheimlich? The conference welcomes papers from across all periods and fields, which might include literary studies, art history, film, gender, history, anthropology, psychology and media studies.
Topics might include:
Proposals, which should include a title, 300 word abstract, and short biography, for a 20-minute paper, should be emailed to twowayticketconf@gmail.com by the new, extended deadline of 8 May 2017. The conference will be held on 20 June 2017.