Statelessness Conference

Just back from a rich encounter in all senses of the word. The “Statelessness Conference”  was organized in Barcelona by Jay Winter, the great historian of W.W.I, and Kolleen Guy (Duke U.), a down-to-earth historian of food (and most accomplished host) at the Duke Kunshun University temporary abode in the IES Abroad center.

The Barcelona meeting was the first chapter of a conference that will resume in Melbourne on 15-16 December.

The participants, including academics (among others, Robert Bickers [Bistol University], Rana Mitter ([Oxford University], a poet [Peter Balakian], a visual artist [Mary Behrens], have engaged in a deep conversation about what statelessness meant in wartime and postwar China.

This project aims to tell the story of statelessness in Asia and the Pacific during the Second World War. Building on Hannah Arendt’s classic account of the plight of the stateless, it draws attention in different case studies to the voice of the stateless in the collective effort they made to narrate their own lives. They occupied a third space between being outcasts and being free men and women. Comparisons among different stateless communities in Asia and the Pacific show the different paths out of statelessness during and after the Second World War.

Barcelona was already in Christmas mode!