Call for Applications: Dartmouth Humanities Institute, 01/01

THE NEAR IN BLOOD, THE NEARER BLOODY:
Inter-Ethnic Civil War/ Cultural Genocide/ Cultural Resistance

Humanities Institute
Dartmouth College
March 25 -May 31, 2002

The twentieth century--by some accounts the bloodiest century in the history of the human race--is generally imagined in terms of its major wars that pitted nations and groups of nations against one another. Yet by the century's final decade, the face of war had changed. Rather than peace, what accompanied the end of the Cold War was a dramatic number of inter-ethnic or inter-religious conflicts that originated in a virulent strain of intolerance for difference, itself often triggered by economic and/or environmental factors.

The Carnegie Commission's December, 1997 report _Preventing Deadly Conflict_, counted thirty-eight such wars in the decade of the 1990's. In the newly mediated world in which such conflicts were taking place, references to the Holocaust, and the word "genocide," were being woven into proliferating narratives of national identity, setting Armenians against Azeris, Palestinians against Israelis, Somalis against Amhari, Tamils against Sinhalese, Hutus against Tutsis, Northern Irish loyalists against their nationalist neighbors, and Serbs, Muslims and Croats against one another. In an exclusion that finds the external "other" within the same shared borders, and therefore recasts its citizen-neighbors as aliens to the historic culture- community, rests the specter of an especially vicious kind of war.

Unlike the earlier wars of the century, these are conspicuously non-ideological. Instead, they both create and are created from a nationalist imaginary in which "ethnicity"--itself a most complex identity category--functions as defining rationale for the assertion of a selfness in which language, culture, and religion become somehow validated only by their performance through violence. Moreover, in a post-Gulf-War-world, these wars have become enactments framed by and for the expectations of a CNN audience. Through television, Western Europe and the United States have thus become daily consumers and voyeurs of the violent performances on the stages of the collapsing states of sub- Saharan African and partners in a denied complicity that is acted out through the United Nations and/or NATO's largely ineffective interventions.

In the Serb shelling of the National Library of Bosnia-Herzegovina in Sarajevo, which began on August 25, 1992, over a million books, more than 300,000 manuscripts, and centuries of historical records went up in flames. The destruction of the National Library was one component in a systematic campaign of cultural eradication that included the targeting of all Turkish built edifices and Muslim grave-markers. It characterized a war that was as much about effacing the material signs of a people's historical existence as it was about killing the inheritors themselves. Within no more than six months, almost all palpable evidence of over 500 years of intercultural and interreligious life in Bosnia was gone. Here were the extreme circumstances of a conflict that was not about culture, but with culture.

The Institute, "The Near in Blood, the Nearer Bloody," proposes to examine this new kind of war within a dialogue that is not committed to a particular explanation, theme, or theoretical approach. Instead the topic will be viewed as a series of problematics, and the Institute experience will be directed primarily towards discovering and critically describing shared phenomena or points of difference for which no single description may exist.

The topic that we will study is the attack on culture; to what extent such wars have been fueled by perceptions of cultural difference, how the eradication of culture has featured as a major weapon, and how different groups under attack have attempted to reinforce their threatened cultural norms through the implementation of various methods of cultural resistance. By intention, religion has not been isolated into a separate category but subsumed within the larger framework of "culture."The focus on geographies may vary widely: Afghanistan , Algeria, Chechniya, Congo, Chiapas, East Timor, Northern Ireland , the former Yugoslavia. El Salvador , Mozambique, Nicaragua, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Zaire.

Among the issues the Institute wishes to examine are: "Ethnic" War and the Modern Conscience; the Landscape of War; War Zone Photography and Documentary Film; the Power of a National Mythology; Writers under Repression; The Performativity of Ethnic Conflict; War, Gender and Rape; Strategies of Resistance; Cultural Memory and Strategies of Reconciliation, Privatizing War & Peace, War Tourism; War/Web.

FELLOWS
The Institute will include 12 residential Fellows: eight from Dartmouth and four external. Four of the Dartmouth fellows will receive a course relief and four will receive a $1000 research allowance. A lecture series with visiting writers, artists and scholars will be associated with the Institute. Senior and junior faculty, artists and writers, are eligible to apply. Residential Fellows from outside Dartmouth will receive a stipend of $5,000, office space, library and computer access, and assistance in finding housing. Fellows will be expected to contribute to an edited collection that will emerge from the work of the Institute. The Humanities Institute directors will be Lynda Boose, Professor of English and Annabelle Winograd, Visiting Professor of Theatre.

FORMAT
The 2002 Humanities Institute will be held during the Dartmouth Spring Term. Fellows are expected to reside at Dartmouth during this period and to participate in all seminar meetings. Institute Fellows will meet for three hour sessions on Tuesday and Thursday of each week, and will be expected to attend a Wednesday evening guest lecture as well as film/video screenings. The Tuesday session will be devoted to the presentation of Fellows' projects and the first half of the Thursday meeting to the work of the weekly guest lecturer. The Institute's goals include the publication of a book that will include contributions from all Fellows.

APPLICATIONS
Applications must be postmarked no later than January 30, 2001. There are no application forms. Please send two copies of your academic resumÈ together with a statement of 1,000-2,000 words explaining why you wish to participate in the Institute, outlining your current research interests related to the topic of the Institute, and including a description of the project you would pursue during your participation in the Institute. Please also send two copies of a sample of your scholarly work related to the Institute topic. External applicants should insure that two letters of recommendation are submitted directly by the referees. All materials should be sent to:

Humanities Institute
c/o Sandra Gregg
Dartmouth College
6201 Wentworth Hall
Room 114
Hanover, NH 03755-3526

For further information, please contact
Sandra Gregg,
Assistant Dean of the Faculty, by email
sandra.gregg@dartmouth.edu
or phone (603) 646-3756.

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