Our project
Mapping Creativity in Captivity during WWII is charting the rich cultural production produced by Italian POWs in Australia, the USA, UK, Africa, India and Japan between 1940 and 1947, through a programme of research, international collaborations and community engagement. It will provide a comparative study of Italian POW experiences in diverse geographical spaces to deepen our comprehension of wartime history, the connections between migration and the wartime experience, the transnational role of creativity during wartime and of the dynamic transcultural interactions between individuals and communities under restrictive lives. This sheds light on the social consequences of diaspora, dislocation and detention and will prove valuable in a time of increasing global mobility and refugee crises.
Our aims
- Determine the ongoing impact of POW cultural heritage in the everyday reality and identity of the post-war rural and regional communities in Australia and in other countries.
- Provide a comparative study of the Italian POW experiences and cultural production in diverse countries.
- Redefine these creative acts in confinement as vectors of affective relationships between prisoners, captors, civilians, and prisoners’ relatives in multilingual and multicultural contexts.
- Enrich existing narratives of POW history by including Italian POW cultural outputs held in private and public repositories around Australia and the world.
Methodology
This project will collectively refer to a number of different categories of detainees, but with a focus on Italian military prisoners of war (POWs) as regulated by the Geneva convention. In order to avoid oversimplifications that risk bringing disparate experiences within a single narrative, we place the POW group in dialogue with other detained groups, including Italian civilian “enemy alien” residents and Italian civilian nationals outside of Italy.
Our work is divided into four interlinked stages:
- Data collection
- Investigating Cultural Production
- Analysis
- Dissemination
DARCI, our digital atlas, through geo-cultural maps, aims to show how connections constitute networks, overlapping lines or flows of influence that can indicate developments with broader significance thus inscribing cultural production in a range of contemporary contexts. Our approach enables us to go beyond a historically, spatially and disciplinary bounded history of Italian POWs and their cultural production as marginal by reconceptualising creativity in captivity as enduring multiple transnational and transcultural narratives emerging from mobility and the multifarious and dynamic relationships between people, objects and places.