Workshop: "Women Writers and the Construction of National Identities in the Long 19th Century: Comparative Perspectives"

Workshop organised by Nikol Dziub in collaboration with Anna Hodel and F. Benjamin Schenk

Situated at the crossroads of women’s studies and imperial studies, this highly innovative and ambitious scientific event aims to answer the following guiding questions: is not women’s subordination to men inherent in the patriarchal conception of the social body made even more suffocating when empires peripheralise ethnic groups, forcing women to fight both for their own rights and for the rights of their nation and culture? And, beyond the history of women’s rights, should women who have contributed to the progress of democracy and the cultural emancipation of their countries not be brought out of the shadows? To answer these questions, we will start from the long 19th century, considered as the age of the invention of national identities, and we will see how this movement of intertwining of discourses for national self-determination and struggles for the moral and cultural sovereignty of women continues in the 20th century. This will also be an opportunity to discuss the relevance of the periodicity of this division into centuries. 

And precisely, this workshop will be all the more innovative as it will include a strong methodological dimension aimed at leading, beyond case studies, to reproducible results. In particular, we will ask ourselves what concepts we need to study the history and posterity of the struggle for gendered and cultural self-determination in non-national (i.e. trans- or sub-national/trans-imperial and multilingual) cultural spaces. We will discuss in particular the very relevance of the concept of identity, which we will put in competition with the concept of self-determination, the women whose works and speeches we will study being often less focused on the definition of an essentialist identity (national and/or feminine) than on a free construction of self enlightened by the comparative knowledge of a European culture in the broad sense. 

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