Cultural exchange in WWI
‘Cultural exchange in a time of global conflict: Colonials, Neutrals and Belligerents during the First World War (CEGC)’: a 3-year HERA-funded Collaborative Research Project led by Dr Santanu Das, Department of English, with partners from Belgium, Germany, Poland and the Netherlands.
As the First World War centenary approaches, a new research project which will be launched at the Arts & Humanities Festival later this week will take a fresh look at this defining conflict of the 20th century.
How did the First World War create new spaces for as well as put new pressures on encounters between peoples and cultures from belligerent, colonised and politically neutral countries and what were the lasting consequences (in terms of social, cultural and literary memory) for Europe? How did exchanges occur across linguistic, national, religious, ethnic and social barriers? What is the significance of such memories for the various ethnic communities within Europe today? Led by Dr Santanu Das, Department of English, this research project which has attracted one million Euros of funding from the Humanities in European Research Area (HERA) brings together a cross-disciplinary and multilingual team of researchers – Professor Geert Buelens (Utrecht University), Dr Heike Liebau (Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin) and Professor Hubert van den Berg (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland) – and seven cultural institutions from across Europe, including the Imperial War Museum, London, In Flanders Field, Ypres and the Museum for European Culture, Berlin.
‘We aim to reconceptualise the First World War from the conventional military model of the clash of civilisations to a watershed moment in the history of cultural encounters and contact and uncover a whole new world’ observes Project Leader Dr Santanu Das who is also completing a monograph titled India, Empire and the First World War: Objects, Images and Words for Cambridge University Press. Between 1914 and 1918, on French soil alone – in its trenches, fields, farms and factories – there were over one million Asian (Indian, Pakistani, Nepalese, Chinese, Vietnamese) and African (Senegalese, Moroccan, Algerian, Tunisian) men, in addition to soldiers from Australia, New Zealand and Canada. How did they respond to Europe and how were they perceived? Simultaneously, a different kind of ‘cultural encounter’ was being engineered within Europe: the belligerent states were each trying to win over the neutral nations by funding cultural institutions and trying to influence artists, writers and opinion makers such as Georg Brandes from Denmark and Albert Verwey from the Netherlands. What is the relation between the direct encounters (in battlefields, billers, hospitals, Prisoner Of War camps) and these state-sponsored, ideologically motivated, indirect encounters?
The project will investigate these issues through a range of material – archival documents, testimonies, newspapers, literature, films, photographs, paintings and sound-recordings. The findings will be disseminated through workshops, conferences, public lectures, publications as well as an exhibition. The project seeks to make memories of the war more international and multi-racial during its centennial commemoration.