Witnessing War: Session One

A half-day workshop in conjunction with Jay Winter's 2012 Humanitas Visiting Professorship in War Studies at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH).

Mr Paul Cornish : Exhibiting War. A New First World War Gallery for the Imperial War Museum.
Senior Curator and Historian, Imperial War Museum, London

Dr Dacia Viejo-Rose : Cultural and Symbolic Violence: The case of Spain, 1936-2006
British Academy Post-doctoral Fellow, Macdonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge

Dr Khadija Carroll La: If you fight the dragon long, the dragon you become: Comments on Monuments in the Balkan
Newton Fellow, Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge

Building on Professor Jay Winter’s series of lectures on Writing War, Figuring War, and Filming War, as well as a concluding symposium on Imagining War in the 20th Century and After, this workshop will provide an opportunity to further explore the general topic of 'imagining war' by linking it with some of the concerns of the Between Civilisation and Militarisation Faculty Research Group, particularly the murky and manipulable imagined line between 'civil' and 'military' spheres of action and influence. We will focus on the interrelations among the following conceptual triad: conflict + culture + witnessing. In this triad, ‘culture’ will be understood to encompass forms of creative expression and exhibition, as well as definitions of the term that stem from anthropology and political science, in particular the idea of ‘cultural violence’. Questions about practices of ‘witnessing’ and offering ‘testimony’ will be applied not only to the arts, social sciences and humanities as intellectual institutions, but also to the roles and responsibilities that various actors in conflict situations might perform, from military soldiers and museum archivists, to civilians living in war torn spaces, and even to the spaces themselves. Some of the questions raised during the workshop include: What kinds of politics of memory and recognition emerge from war? How do artistic expressions and exhibitions serve various actors in war situations in presenting testimonies of experiences? How have artists been drawn to war themes from ‘outside’ as witnesses to ‘internal’ conflicts? How do artistic and historical memorials offer more and less satisfying testimony to the destruction and loss occasioned by war?