In November 2018 the final centenaries of the First World War will take place. 2019 will witness the centenary of the Paris Peace Conference and of the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. But, as many have pointed out, the “Wilsonian Moment” (Manela 2007) was short-lived outside of Europe. For India, the “interwar” was heralded by the Rowlatt disturbances and the massacre at Amritsar, while the Japanese quickly found that the internationalism of the League of Nations was inherently racialized (Zachman 2017). These un-pickings of the hopes and claims of the interwar have extended to disciplinary histories which have explored the racial geographies upon which disciplines like International Relations (and geography) were based (Vitalis 2015).
In this session we invite geographical interpretations of the interwar years as a way of shaping the way we centenarize and continue to think about the post-1919 world. While welcoming papers on the monumental events of 1919, we encourage reflections on the economic, political, cultural, historical and social geographies of the broader interwar period. We are especially keen to establish dialogues regarding the spatialities and temporalities of different nations, regions, cities and places as they negotiated the opportunities and dangers of the interwar. Paper topics might include:
• Memorialising ‘failed’ projects
• Universalism and race in the interwar
• The theory and practice of Wilsonian internationalism
• Commemorations of the interwar, including contrasts of European and non-European commemorations (or their absence)
• Beyond Geneva: alternative geographies of interwar internationalism
• Anticolonial and neo-colonial geographies
• Feminist historical geographies (regional, national, international)
• Interwar cartographies
• (Re)writing disciplinary histories and geographies
• Transcending the inter/national binary: geographies of regionalism, intercolonialism, neoimperialism
Ben Thorpe, Mike Heffernan and Stephen Legg, University of Nottingham, UK
Please send abstracts of up to 250 words and a brief bio by October 15, 2018 to benjamin.thorpe@nottingham.ac.uk