Call for Papers: International Conference Shadow Places. Urban Strategies of Dealing with Painful Pasts
Warsaw, 07-10 March 2019
Deadline for applications: 15 September 2018
The term “shadow place” is a neologism that draws attention to memorialization and touristification as social processes. It designates places that are confronted with a publicly known and labelled historical burden, that are informed by them as spaces of memory, and have become tourist attractions as a result. Shadow places are different from “dark” or “evil” places in that their meaning cannot be solely reduced to terrors of the past; the attribute “shadow” implies positive as well as negative interpretations of the past. Accordingly, shadow places define spaces where the tension plays out between affliction and liberation, victimhood and heroism, between the onus and the pleasures of the past. It is the reception of historical burden and its place in the cultural memory of posterity, and not the historical events themselves, that decides on the type and degree of shadow cast on a particular place.
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