Romanticizing Difference: Identities in Transformation after World War I
Résumé
This special issue explores the theme of essentialist discourses about languages, human collectivities, and human diversity during the interwar years, outside of explicitly racist or antisemitic perspectives. It grew out of a conference that Cécile Mathieu and I organized at the Université de Picardie Jules Verne in October 2013. Our original inspiration came from the discovery of thematic overlap in our research on the 1920s in our two quite disparate fields of history and linguistics. In particular, we were both struck by the contrast between contemporary associations of essentialized representations of human collectivities and practices of oppression, discrimination, and genocide, and the prevalence of these kinds of discourses across the political and ideological spectrums in the pre–World War II era.