IMC 2024: Sessions

In moments of acute crisis, individuals, whether historical or fictional, are often left with one singular option: flight. This raises significant questions about how flight is portrayed in historical documents and narrative texts, and how this representation is related to the status of the social actors who produce and receive these texts. Flight and exile, at least for certain social classes, appear to hold productive potential that extends beyond mere desperation, often serving as a deliberate and calculated strategy for resolving the initial crisis. This session brings together contributions from history and literary studies to employ comparative perspectives in seeking to elucidate the complex relationship between crisis and flight across diverse historical contexts. The papers’ analyses will draw from historical documents, narrative texts, and, notably, the artefacts they depict. Moreover, they will explore the intricacies of network formation, both as a precondition and a consequence of flight and exile as a response to crisis.