To mark the 100th anniversary of the end of the Great War in November 1918, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and Flinders University, Australia, invite speakers for an international conference to be held in Singapore from 5-7 December 2018.
By the end of the Great War the British Empire had expanded its reach across more territory and was in control of more people than ever before in its history. Not only had it consolidated its pre-existing empire but it had expanded it at the expense of the defeated nations. The implications and reverberations of this transformation can still be felt today. This conference, following on from that in 2014, focusses specifically on an examination of the social and cultural reactions within the old and new colonial societies at the end of the first global conflict and in the inter-war period.
In keeping with the themes of the 2014 conference, the organisers are especially interested in papers which allow a decentralisation of socio-cultural and socio-economic analysis away from the more predictable metropolitan perspective (and away from the monolithic notion of empire) to focus instead on contrasts and complementarities of ideology throughout the geographical and ethnic extremes of both the ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ empire. From Singapore to Australia, Cyprus to Ireland, India to Jamaica, Ghana to Mesopotamia, and around the rest of the British imperial world, further complexities and interlocking themes will be addressed, for example: how different strata and subsets of imperial society shaped and were shaped by the experience of total war; and how disparate societies and cultures – in all their manifestations – shaped and were shaped by the war and its aftermath.
The conference will be of particular interest to those actively researching imperial and colonial history; the British imperial experiences of the end of the Great War and its aftermath, including its remembering and forgetting; and the relationships between war, society and culture. More specifically the organisers are interested in papers dealing with themes ranging from colonial responses, loyalties and disloyalties, gender roles, class and race relations, migration and displacement, collective identities and memorialisation and memory; as well as art history, especially music, theatre, film and photography, as well as the perspectives of artists.
Final program now available: Program Singapore II 7 Nov
Empire, Armistice and Aftermath 