Convenors: Ivan Stacy, Cornelia Wächter
5 – 6 June 2023
Technical University Dresden
Venue: Deutsches Hygiene-Museum (Seminarraum 9.2.)
Zoom (Meeting Passcode: 1CsFD7^$)
4 June 2023
19:30 Symposium warming at Ristorante Da Franco
(Weberplatz 3, 01217 Dresden; rooftop of Guesthouse ‘Am Weberplatz’)
5 June 2023
09:00–09:15 Symposium opening and welcome remarks
09:15–10:30 *Keynote speech: Kim Johnson (former Director of the Carnival Institute of Trinidad and Tobago)
‘Resistance is Futile’
11:00–12:30 Panel 1: Writing and Reading Complicity
Stephanie Bird (University College London)
‘Who are you? Complicity and the second person in Yishai Sarid‘s The Memory Monster (2017) and Tsitsi Dangarembga‘s This Mournable Body (2018)’
Jerrine Tan (City University of Hong Kong)
‘Prosopopoeia, Silence, and Complicity in the Global Afterlives of Lolita: Chang-Rae Lee‘s A Gesture Life and Ruth Ozeki‘s A Tale for the Time Being’
Lena Seauve (Free University of Berlin)
‘Complicity and the Emotionalization of the Reader in Fictional Texts about the Military Dictatorship in Chile and Argentina’
14:00–15:30 Panel 2: Systemic Complicities and Structures of Power
*Ali Ahmadi (Geneva Centre for Security Policy)
‘Complicity and Economic Sanctions’
Bryant Scott (Texas A&M, Qatar)
‘Beneficiaries, the World-System, and Distant Suffering: Thinking through Complicity with Mohsin Hamid‘s The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Nuruddin Farah‘s Crossbones’
Judith Neder (Technical University of Dresden)
‘The Necessity of Violence‘ –Complicity with and Resistance against Empire in Rebecca Kuang’s Babel’
15:30-17:00 Panel 3: Colonialism and its Legacies
Jarula Wegner (Zhejiang University)
‘Implicated in Imperial Intimacies: Questions of Power in the Reparations Movement’
*Jeremy Ekberg (Fort Hayes State University)
‘History Commodified: Complicity, Colonialism and Simulacra in the Novels of V.S. Naipaul and Julian Barnes’
*Mary Grace D. Arcigal (FEU Institute of Technology)
‘The Reproduction of Norms as a Disguised Form of Resilience and the Complicity in the Present: Revisiting the Impacts of Typhoon Yolanda in the Phillipines through Selected Poems and Photographs in Agam’
17:00 – 17:15 Day 1 closing remarks
19:30 Conference dinner at Dresden 1900, Dresden Old Town
6 June 2023
09:00 – 10:15 Keynote speech: Cathal Ó Gabhann (former humanitarian aid worker)
‘Complicity with the Taliban: how should aid agencies respond to increasing restrictions on women’s rights in Afghanistan?’
10:45–12:15 Panel 4: Chinese Contexts Ronald Torrance (Sino-British College, University of Shanghai for Science and Technology)
‘Complicity and Compromise: A Case Study of Three Contemporary Chinese Writers’
Emma Zhang (Hong Kong Baptist University)
‘Grassroots Complicity in Silencing Dissent: The Wuhan Diary Controversy’
*Li Yuanyuan (Beijing Normal University)
‘Envy and Complicity: The Green-eyed Monster in the Cultural Revolution, Slavery, and Post-Holocaust Era’
13:45–15:15 Panel 5: Japanese contexts
Motoko Sugano (Tsurumi University)
‘Hesitation and Hindsight: The Japanese TV Adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World’
Mohor Chakraborty (South Calcutta Girls’ College)
‘War, Women and War Crime: Tracing Complicity and Seeking Humanitarian Redress’
*Ngoi Hui Chien (University of Malaya)
‘Complicity and Hibakusha Victimhood: The Representation of the (In)secure Self in Jackie Copleton’s A Dictionary of Mutual Understanding’
15:45 – 17:15 Panel 6: Dictatorship and Totalitarianism
Will Norman (University of Kent)
‘Sartre, Arendt and the Organization of Guilt’
Jonathan Lahey Dronsfield (Czech Academy of Sciences)
‘Inner Freedom: The Complicity of Dissent with its Repression’
Juliane Prade-Weiss (LMU Munich)
‘Memory, Politics and Complicity in Eastern Europe’
17:15 – 18:00 Closing Discussion
19:30 Conference dinner at Planwirtschaft, Dresden New Town