You are warmly invited to attend Ex Oriente Lux: Emigré Culture in Interwar France, a two-day conference taking place at Queen Mary University of London, 1-2 September 2023.
The event is fully hybrid. No registration is needed to join either in person in London or via Zoom.
In case you are interested in attending the conference virtually, you can do so using these two links:
Day 1: https://qmul-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/81909945846?pwd=aFBBVys3QlVwQWxHTWlDRjk3ejJGQT09
Day 2: https://qmul-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/84389066810?pwd=UnJWTlFzYzFYb28rVzdLbi9vSnhPdz09
If joining in person, both days of the conference will be held at the Maths Lecture Theatre, School of Mathematical Sciences, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Campus, Mile End Road, London E1 4NS.
In the 1920-30s, France was a transnational laboratory of ideas, with Paris hailed as the capital of modernity. However, new intellectual and artistic trends were often imported by immigrants, many of them from Central and Eastern Europe. After Berlin declined as a diasporic capital in the early 1930s, thousands of Eastern Europeans settled in Paris. The influx of innovative currents of thought (Marxism; phenomenology; existential thought) and artistic avant-gardes (Dadaism; Futurism; Surrealism) from Central and Eastern Europe radically shifted cultural life in France between the wars. The significance of Paris as the capital of Russians who fled the Revolution and Civil War is relatively well-explored. However, scholarship on the migration and forceful displacement of Eastern Europeans has gained new urgency following Russia’s war on Ukraine. With this international conference, we want to give a voice to émigrés who have remained so far in the marginalised space beyond all canons, excluded from both the history of French and Soviet letters.
Many of the émigré networks, journals and institutions of interwar Paris are still relatively little explored, especially when it comes to the contemporary relevance of women or non-Russophone authors in exile. So-called “Russian Montparnasse” was in fact the home of other émigrés from Central and Eastern Europe, many of them Jewish. This diasporic “archipelago” was by no means unified, especially concerning aesthetics and political affiliation. Hosted at Queen Mary’s School of Languages, Linguistics and Film, our International Conference has a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary scope. Our event is of interest to graduate students and scholars in comparative literature, art history, Eastern European, Central Asian and Caucasian studies, cultural studies, geography, philosophy, Jewish studies, modern history, French studies, migration studies, among other disciplines.
This conference is supported by the London Arts and Humanities Partnership (LAHP), Queen Mary University of London and the British Association of Slavonic and East European Studies (BASEES).