The deadline for registrations of abstracts for the Call for Papers 'Feminisms and Marxisms', in the framework of the 2012 London HM conference, has been extended to Friday 1 June 2012.
This will be a final deadline, so please do submit your proposed paper or panel in time at:
http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/conferences
Tradition and the Italian Resistance
A panel at Historical Materialism's Ninth Annual Conference, London, 8-11 November
Il solo vero amico che abbiamo al fianco adesso
e' sempre quello stesso che fu con noi in montagna,
ed il nemico attuale e' sempre e ancora eguale
a quel che combattemmo sui nostri monti e in Spagna
(Fausto Amodei, Per i morti di Reggio Emilia, 1961)
Deep into the seventh decade of the post-war period, the legacy of the Italian Resistance continues to represent an important battleground in Italian public life. As the summer 2011 fight over keeping the 25th April national holiday showed, the traditions of the anti-fascist struggle still have deep emotional and political meaning for the left. Yet this tradition is also rather contradictory in character, both a lasting symbol of the left's past glory and a national myth for the postwar Republic and its parties.
In the proposed panel we will explore the tensions between the lived experience of the Resistance period and its traditions and mythology in postwar Italy. Moreover, the panel will seek to use the Resistance experience to examine the importance of traditions in interconnecting the high points of the Italian left: from the lessons the 1970s extra-parliamentary left drew from 1943-45 to the Resistance generation's own narratives of the biennio rosso, the fight against the rise of Mussolini and the Spanish Civil War.
We welcome paper proposals (between 200 and 300 words), in English or Italian, in the following areas:
- Narratives of the Resistance and the instrumentalisation of historical memory
- A 'long Resistance'? The struggles of the 1920s and 1930s and the Resistance
- The PCI that emerged from Fascism and its pre-1926 traditions
- The national mythology of the Resistance and the 'patriotic' traditions of the PCI
- Working-class and women's experience of war, occupation and rebellion 1940-45 outside and beyond 'the Resistance'
- Left critiques of anti-fascism as ideology and anti-fascism in practice
- Pavone's Una guerra civile: a national, civil and class war?
- Regional, class, and gender differentiations within the Resistance and 'forgotten' Resistance forces
- Doppiezza: revolutionary aspirations during the Resistance and in the immediate post-war period
- The assimilation of the Resistance experience by 1960s-70s extra-parliamentary forces and the left today
Paper proposals should be submitted by registering at
http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/conferences BEFORE 1 June 2012 and sent, together with a short CV, to David Broder at
d.broder@lse.ac.uk
The expected presenting time will be around 20-25 minutes per speaker, depending on the exact number of papers. The official language of the Historical Materialism Conference is English.