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Please find the abstract here. 

Directed by Friederike Pannewick

Poetry and martyrs – who gave birth to whom, and which of these phenomena was born first? Could it be that they create each other? Would an act of martyrdom exist without its symbolic production, without its public praise and homage in literature? These questions lead us to the role that literary representation plays in the creation of martyrs. Perhaps it plays a double role: it represents historical and mythical cases of martyrdom by reproducing, metaphorically elevating, or deconstructing them, and creates, simultaneously, new literary figures and paradigms of martyrdom that may be staged in reality.

Since the attacks of September 11th 2001, publications and conferences on politically-motivated violence and religious conceptions of suicide and mass murder have undergone a sudden boom. Given the fact that Mohammad Atta and his comrades are regarded as martyrs by their sympathizers, the associations between the concepts of martyrdom, self-killing and mass murder have been studied by the international scientific society from several perspectives.

Our colloquium will approach the question of martyrdom and/in modernity (which will include many more perspectives than those paraded on September 11) not from the perspective of the political sciences or religious studies, but within the frame of Literary Anthropology. The aim is to investigate the role that literary representation plays in the imagination, actualisation, realisation or critical deconstruction of martyrdom in different modern literatures from around the world. Martyrdom has been regarded not only as a religious concept – represented in and by different religions under specific conditions – but also as a cultural phenomenon with socio-political implications. The literary representation of martyrdom could provide us with more insight and a better understanding of this phenomenon’s human experiences and deeper dimensions than other areas of cultural studies. In this field, imagination and emotion, discourse and image work together to influence and direct our perception and action.

Poetry has represented martyrs in a wide spectrum of sensibility – from praise, homage and as an example of virtue, to censure, sermonizing, and the condemnation of infidels and oppressors. The essential features of this kind of literature usually prove to be polemic and agonistic. This is often a literature of Holy War that shows how the adoration of believers is sometimes nurtured and encouraged, sometimes driven, or even coerced towards the imitation or emulation of the religious ideal.

The notion of belonging to a victimized and humiliated community is also very important. It might be interesting to examine and compare the solidarity of remembered victimhood, the dimensions of the sacredness of suffering, and the capacity of suffering in Christian, Jewish, and Islamic contexts. To this end, the differentiation between Passion and martyrdom and the analysis of how concepts of remembrance are transmitted to a collective memory in modernity might raise important characteristics of this phenomenon.

Since martyrdom is one of the pivotal components of Holy War, the double-edged constellation of secularity and martyrdom will be an engaging and rather problematic aspect for our colloquium: to what extent can the fact that para-religious concepts of martyrdom have gained increasing importance in modern secular and political or military contexts be regarded as a reconfiguration of the religious? Do we have to deal with a secularisation of religious concepts or, rather, with the opposite, a reorientation towards religious conceptions of the world? The same question is pertinent to the literary representation of martyrdom: are the categories in which martyrdom is represented religious or political, and is a differentiation between these possible at all?

The institutional context of the literature on martyrdom is especially important, as such literature is always produced about social groups that claim martyrdom as their own experience. Thus, it serves as the reason for and result of political and religious conflicts. The literature of martyrdom can be both propagandistic and manipulative, even if it seems to stray from direct effectiveness.

Highly motivated volunteers who are ready to risk their lives for the sake of an idea, a nation or a religious belief, and who are regarded as martyrs by their community – or who consider themselves as victims or martyrs due to certain circumstances or a certain weltanschauung – can be found in various cultures, settings, and throughout history.

Martyrdom is represented in many literatures around the world. It might be interesting to ask if, to what extent, and how this phenomenon may be part of the global exchange of cultural capital that leads to syncretisms and hybridisations of narrative topoi. Aspects of cultural mobility may thus serve as major points of reference for the comparative analysis and interpretation of the different notions of martyrdom and their textual representations. These intercultural associations and their intertextual dimensions may be discussed, as well as a modern literary and theatrical deconstruction of ideologically-motivated martyrdom.

We would like to gather researchers in the field of literary and cultural studies for three days in Berlin, in order to talk about the way concepts of martyrdom are represented, staged, praised or critically deconstructed in different world literatures. This colloquium is part of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin-based Working Group Modernity and Islam's project 'Cultural Mobility in Near Eastern Literatures’ which is trying to pave the way towards a conception of Near Eastern Literary Studies as an integral part of international Comparative Studies. The aim is to ask the same question to different literatures from around the world; the underlying concept of world literature does not imply the notion of a canon of exemplary works, but rather a decentralized and global exchange of literatures and cultures.

During the colloquium we plan to discuss topics of martyrdom and/in modernity such as:

- Martyrdom and Memoria
- The Fascination of Suffering and Sacrificial Acts in Literature and Performance
- Deconstructions of Martyrdom

In co-operation with the House of World Culture’s project In Transit Elyas Khoury’s and Rabih Mroué’s performance ‘Three Posters’ will be shown and discussed with the authors. “Missionaries, Martyrdom, and Narrative” is the title of a public lecture, Ussama Makdisi will give at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.

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