CFP: Expressionism and Colonialism

Focusing on the nexus between literary Expressionism and German and European colonialism, the conference provides an opportunity to explore some of the following questions: 

• How do Expressionist writings represent, construct, imagine, or respond to colonialism? 
• In what ways have expressionist Exoticism, Primitivism, Africanism and Orientalism been framed by colonialist ideas and practice?  
• What form does the engagement with colonialism take in Expressionist literature – poems, fiction and drama, or larger literary projects such as anthologies and journal issues – and other writings, such as essays, manifestoes, travelogues, autobiographies, translations, letters and diaries? 
• To what extent are the imagined societies, cultural geographies and figurative tropes in expressionist writing shaped by or subverting colonial fantasies? 
• What can Germanists and Comparatists learn from the reception of expressionist literature in formerly colonised countries, and what lessons might the research community have to learn from non-European colleagues? 
• To what extent does Expressionism’s nexus with colonialism warrant a revision of the received understanding of the movement’s transnational and universalist tendencies? 
• Might addressing the nexus require or lead to new methodological approaches to Expressionist writing?
  
   

This conference invites papers on these and other pertinent questions of 20 minutes' length. It works with a broad understanding of Expressionism as a literary movement from around 1910-1925 with some early and late outliers. Authors may, for example, include Hugo Ball, Johannes R. Becher, Gottfried Benn, Alfred Döblin, Kasimir Edschmid, Carl Einstein, Claire und Yvan Goll, Georg Heym, Richard Huelsenbeck, Hans Henny Jahnn, Franz Kafka, Georg Kaiser, Else Lasker-Schüler, Robert Müller, René Schickele, Ernst Toller, Armin T. Wegner, Friedrich Wolf or Paul Zech, but also writers or texts on the margins of Expressionism. 

The in-person conference takes place at the Institute of Languages, Cultures and Societies, School of Advanced Study, Senate House, University of London, on Thursday, 25 and Friday, 26 September 2025. 

Abstracts of 250-300 words in length in German or English should be sent to both Andreas Kramer ([email protected]) and Frank Krause ([email protected]) by 31 January 2025.

This conference is organised in association with the Centre for Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London

Image: From Irma Stern (1894–1966), Fruit Seller in Zanzibar (photo by Munfarid1via Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 4.0)