Call For Paper: Subcultures of Exile
International Yearbook of the Society for Exile Studies, 2027
Edited by Burcu Dogramaci, Anna Sophia Messner, Helene Roth
The term subculture was introduced by the American sociologist Milton Gordon in the mid-1940s ‘as a concept […] composed of a combination of factorable social situations such as class status, ethnic background, regional and rural or urban residence, and religious affiliation, but forming in their combination a functioning unity which has an integrated impact on the participating individual’. (Gordon 1947). In this context, the term refers to a subculture or counterculture within a specific social or ethnic group, with its own norms and values, that emerges in a cultural sphere and/or a society (Brasch 2024). At the same time, subculture also highlights the contradictory nature of the underground, as the term has also been used pejoratively in external descriptions since the 1920s as, for example, in reference to politically left-wing and youth movements (Schwendter 1971). Aware of the different meanings of subculture, this book aims to examine the creative potential and associated creative practices in Vilém Flusser’s sense as well as the intermedial and interdisciplinary alliances of subcultures in exile (Flusser 1984).
Gordon’s concept of subculture emerged shortly after the flight and migration in the 1930s and 1940s in response to dictatorial oppression and war. Many of those fleeing Nazi persecution, for example, had to settle into a new life in their places of refuge. They often faced great difficulty in pursuing their professions; they frequently had to build new networks, create alternative spaces and spheres of activity outside established structures and institutions, and experiment with unconventional artistic practices and techniques. While in exile in Paris, the physician Charlotte Wolff, who had fled Berlin, took up palm reading and published her 1936 book Studies in Hand Reading, featuring handprints of Surrealist artists and writers. While in exile in New York, the exiled dancer Valeska Gert opened her Beggar Bar, a makeshift basement cabaret where the staff performed. The Villa Air-Bel in the French port city of Marseille served as a hideout and transit hub for artists persecuted by the Nazi regime. While there, they reflected on the time spent waiting to continue their journeys to their places of exile through shared artistic and creative activities, using the limited resources available.
Based on these observations and examples, the 2027 Yearbook of Exile Studies will, for the first time, explore the concepts of subculture (as counterculture) and exile in conjunction. Juliane Rebentisch characterises subcultures as ‘secret histories that […] rarely and discontinuously—namely due to the nature and exclusionary rules of the institutions responsible for avant-garde historiography (e.g., art history)—become “historically significant” in the official sense’ (Rebentisch 2006). Experiences of exile, which are constituted by discontinuities, invisibility and ruptures, also share characteristics with subcultures. The ‘secret histories’ identified by Rebentisch open new possibilities for perceiving the intersections between subculture and the underground. Examples include the Swing Boys or Swing Girls, who became politicised in Nazi Germany through their love of American swing music and dance, leading them to be submitted to surveillance. While not every subcultural practice has the potential for resistance, some such (artistic) practices and political resistance emerge together in situations of exile. The artistic and literary leaflets with which Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore opposed the German occupiers during their exile on Jersey are but one example.
The 2027 Yearbook will feature historical and contemporary case studies that explore subculture and exile from diverse and interdisciplinary perspectives, alongside explicitly theoretical contributions. In addition to the 1930s and 1940s, we are also interested in case studies from the more recent past and present. For example, since the 1970s, exiles and migrants have used graffiti to gain visibility in marginalised social spaces. Through tagging, graffiti artists inscribe themselves onto public spaces as a form of self-empowerment. Groups such as the 36 Boys — youths of Turkish and Kurdish descent in the Kreuzberg district in Berlin — gave rise to hybrid subcultures that developed their own rules and codes.
The following topics are of particular interest:
– Subculture as a creative, aesthetic and resistant practice in exile and in migrant societies (culture, art, queerness, gender, feminism, politics, etc.)
– Visibility, counterculture and resistance in relation to established, mainstream media and spaces
– Places, spaces, networks and contact zones of subcultures in exile / in migrant societies
– Transnational and transcultural processes within subcultures, such as creativity, mobility, appropriations, rejections, reflections on cultural difference and engagements with the foreign and the Other
– Various terms and concepts — such as scene, movement, subculture, mainstream, underground, counterculture, counter-spaces, resistance, mobility, migration, network, and contact zone— to be contextualised with exile.
Please submit abstracts (approx. 300 words) and a brief CV as a single PDF file by 15 July 2026 to Dr. Helene Roth (helene.roth@lmu.de).
Selection will take place at the end of July.
The full papers (approx. 30,000 characters) must be submitted by 1 December 2026.