ERC Project "JudgingHistories"

With an Eastern Gaze:
World War II in an Age of Globalization

International Conference
November 22-24, 2015

Beit Maiersdorf Faculty Club, room 502
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Mount Scopus Campus

What does it mean to write a history of World War II in the age of globalization? Can one bring histories and memories associated with the war in continental Europe together with the experiences in East Asia or North Africa? Meeting the challenge of composing such an
encompassing history of World War II, the conference brings two essentially important aspects into focus: first, topographically to interrelate the two theaters of war – the European continental and the Asian-Pacific domain. Second, to scrutinize and probe into the memories of war and the discourses that emerged in retrospect.

The first endeavor will allow exploring the range and scope of the war’s global character, while highlighting differences and frictions in alliances – i.e. reconsidering the history of events. The second inquiry will open up questions of judgment concerning the character of violence, death, and suffering executed and sustained, evoking morally permeated discourses of comparison, analogy, and meaning. While the Holocaust emerges at the center of European continental moral and historical understanding and judgment, signifying a rupture in civilization, an epistemological crisis in understanding, so to speak, the exigent question arises as to whether Western categories of historical comprehension may claim universal validity.

Topographically, the conference will privilege queries of entanglement and paradoxical constellations which have been less attended to in the European master narratives of WWII. Considering a “peripheral” perspective for the history of events as especially insightful, the Japanese intrusion into Manchuria in 1931 will serve as a point of departure, culminating in the Japanese-Soviet border war in summer 1939 and its European repercussions, arriving eventually at the division of the war’s two theaters: the European-continental and Asian-Pacific. Proceeding from the “rape” of China, the fall of Fortress Singapore in 1942 will allow focusing on British India as a conflicting political environment where Allied war efforts and anti-colonial struggle mesh in a paradigmatic constellation. That will open a window onto insightful continuities leading from the war to the post-war era of decolonization. From India the gaze will range on to the Middle East and North Africa, where the British imperial strategy will require special concern – entangling exertions in the struggle against the Axis Powers and the imperial-colonial presence in the region. Special consideration will be given to the battle of El-Alamein, the fate of Jewish-Palestine and the perceptions of Arab public opinion in real time as well as in retrospect.

Epistemologically, the conference intends to focus on questions of historical comprehension and moral judgment. Core issues are iconic events which have inscribed themselves into universal memory as well as into particular memorial cultures, mostly of a contested character. Embarking from the Jewish Holocaust as a foundational event in European and Western perception as ultimate evil, other events claim an iconic meaning of suffering and disaster. This relates to the Japanese “art of war” in East Asia, especially in China, the calamitous famine in Bengal, caused by natural circumstances and the blunder of British colonial policy. Furthermore, the French case during and after the war, could add to complete the reappraisal of WWII and its aftermath in the colonial and postcolonial environment.