The second half of the nineteenth century witnessed the emergence of a modern city culture within a globalised economy, built on industrial mass production, an early consumer society, and colonial expansion. Both modernism and colonialism led to the creation of otherness. Non-industrial, pre-modern or exotic societies, and furthermore the racial, moral or female other were not just conceived in reaction to the emergence of modernism, but were also interiorised. Otherness, for example, surfaced in the modern world’s own pre-modern past as well as in the unconscious of the modern self, where the remains of the primitive lurked, as both a threat and a source of creativity and primeval meaning. These ambiguities at the very core of modernism continuously reconfigured the relationship between the public and private dimensions of the self, between domesticity and sociability. They equally affected the self-image and the (re)construction of the history of the modern nation states.
- 15-16 October 2020
- Keynote speaker: Patrick McGuinness (St Anne’s College, Oxford, UK)
- Location: Emile Verhaerenmuseum – Kasteel d’Ursel, Hingene, Belgium
- Registration Fee: Normal registration is 30 euro/day. Students pay 15 euro/day
Scientific committee: Dominique Bauer (KU Leuven), Jason Hartford (University of Dundee), Laurence Brogniez (Université Libre de Bruxelles), Claire Moran (Queen’s University Belfast), Marjan Sterckx (Universiteit Gent), in conjunction with the Emile Verhaeren Museum at Sint-Amands (Rik Hemmerijckx)
Organising committee: Dominique Bauer (KU Leuven), Laurence Brogniez (Université Libre de Bruxelles), Marjan Sterckx (Universiteit Gent).