CFP: Session at EAUH: Urban History (Helsinki, 24-27 Aug 16)

European Association for Urban History (EAUH), 13th International
Conference, Helsinki, Finland, August 24 – 27, 2016
Deadline: Oct 31, 2015
CFP for Panel at EAUH ’16:
Satire and the City: Representations of Cities and Urban Life in the
Comical Press (18th – 20th centuries)
The recent attack on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo tragically
brought the satirical press and its agency to the forefront of the
political debate. Comical newspapers have long played an important role
in commenting and testing cultural and socio-political practices.
Caricature and satirical print culture date back to the Enlightenment,
however, it was in the nineteenth century when it became an urban
phenomenon and an object of mass consumption due to the advances in
reproduction techniques. Across European and Western cities the comical
press became a dominant form of popular culture and was, ultimately, an
antecedent to twentieth-century forms of entertainment and
socio-political critique like comics and cartoons.
While scholarship has focused on print culture’s relation to social
satire and class, or the stylistics of caricature, the relation between
comical journals and the city have received less attention. As examined
in the volume Rire en Ville, rire de la ville (Histoire Urbaine, no.
31, 2011) humor sheds light on how urban identities and modernization
were negotiated in everyday life. Thus, we propose a more nuanced look
at the subject of satire and the city through its most far-reaching,
popular, and metropolitan vehicle: the comical press. Not only were
comical periodicals an essentially urban phenomenon on account of their
methods of distribution and places of production, but also in what
relates to its central subject matter, the vicissitudes of urban life.
This session will explore how the caricatures reproduced in the comical
press articulated ideas of urbanity, place and lived experience, and
changing socio-spatial relations in modern cities throughout the
eighteen to the twentieth centuries. The purpose of this session is to
examine the satirical press and its ability to comment, shape and test
cultural boundaries, social conventions and power relations. We welcome
interdisciplinary approaches that explore images of street scenes and
city dwellers; the presence of women in public space; issues of class,
urban leisure and consumption; the critique of urban projects; everyday
practices like strolling and window-shopping or other significant
themes of urban reality. Papers may also look at representations of
place and the articulation of cultural memory through humor, such as
the reworking of urban archetypes and customs or the treatment of
places of memory that were bound to urban identity. We welcome both
specific and comparative studies that establish connections between
cities and the visual tropes used to express concerns regarding urban
life.
Session organizers: Paulo Jorge Fernandes, Universidade Nova de Lisboa,
Portugal; Vanesa Rodríguez-Galindo, UNED, Madrid
Deadline paper proposals: October 31, 2015
Notification of paper acceptance: December 15, 2015
Abstracts of paper proposals should not exceed 300 words. To submit a
paper proposal, registration in the conference management system is
required: https://www.conftool.pro/eauh2016/. The authors of the
accepted paper proposals will be invited to submit the full text (max.
5000 words) to the conference management system by August 15, 2016.
Paper proposals and full texts can only by submitted online, via the
EAUH2016 website: https://eauh2016.net/programme/call-for-papers/