Call For Papers
Please submit individual abstracts for
the listed panels below to the contact information provided with
each individual panel. Because of the extended deadline
for panel proposals, the new deadline for individual abstracts is
October 8, 2003.
Who Is a Woman? Who Wants to Be One? - New
10/02/03
“One is not born, but becomes a woman,”;
declared Simone de Beauvoir in 1949. Clearly, in The Second Sex,
this is not a particularly cheering prospect. And in fact, for many
women, even today, it is more a calamity than a cause for celebration.
Our panel seeks to explore various notions of womanhood and reactions
to them, celebratory and otherwise.
In the last sixty years or so, our understanding of
the process of becoming a woman and the production which it results
has changed considerably. Furthermore, feminist movements sparked
in part by de Beauvoirs philosophizing have changed the world in
which discussions of femininity and the female take place. Feminist
theory has shown that the meaning of womanhood is culturally inflected
in ways de Beauvoir didn’t address. Feminist theorists from
a range of perspectives have clearly demonstrated that, not only
is gender a social construct, it is constructed and performed quite
differently in different times and communities. Thus, the very meaning
of womanhood is dependent on ethnic, historical, and social contexts.
Our goal in this panel is to explore literary representations of
these different constructions of femaleness and femininity, especially
as they intersect with other types of identity constructions (race,
ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, religious affiliation). In
this exploration of comparative constructs of femaleness and femininity,
we would also like to examine resistance to and acceptance of these
cultural norms -- and creative alternatives to them too.
* Male appropriations or imitations of femaleness
* Female or feminine languages
* Female bodies
* Comparative bildungsroman
* Lesbian and bisexual models of womanhood
* Producing and consuming femininity
* Motherhood, maternity, and family roles
* Women and myth
* Women, power, and femininity
* Beauty
Monika Giacoppe
Ramapo College of New Jersey
giacoppe@ramapo.edu
Comparative World Literature/AIS
505 Ramapo Valley Rd
Mahwah, NJ 07430
Co/chair:
Paula Straile-Costa
Ramapo College of New Jersey, Unknown
Global networks after de Landa’s A Thousand
Years of Non-Linear History and Negri’s Empire
Taking its point of departure from two texts-- de
Landa's A Thousand Years of Non-Linear History, and Hardt and Negri's
Empire--proposals should address any of these texts in the context
of contemporary issues of globalization. Specific proposals addressing
the ways in which these texts transform the concept of networks
in a comparative and/or global context are especially welcome.
Please send abstracts to both Phillip Armstrong, armstrong.202@osu.edu
and Gene Holland, holland.l@osu.edu.
Phillip Armstrong and Gene Holland
Ohio Statue University
armstrong.202@osu.edu & holland.l@osu.edu
Department of Comparative Studies
Ohio State University
308 Dulles Hall
230 West 17th Avenue
Columbus, OH 43210
"Perverse" Desires and Trans/national
Politics
What is currently called the era of the postmodern
is marked by redistributions of intensities, strange connections,
but also radical cuts and separations. Flows of capital, goods,
information, and people are closely linked to the traumatic experiences
of war, exile, poverty, dictatorship, terrorism, ecological crises.
How are such constellations connected to forms of
"perverse" desires and their representation across different
media, to queernesses (from gay/lesbian to sado-masochism, to cybersex...),
to pleasures that challenge notions of normativity?
- Can such queernesses still offer points of resistance within,
but also beyond a reigning discourse when the normative represents
itself joyfully as an "anything-goes"?
- Is the political potential of such sexual intensities just a myth
that aids their commodification?
- Are "perverse" desires corporeal constellations that
are marked more deeply by postmodern politics than others or/and
embody them more effectively?
Between commodification, pleasure, and pain, what
are the possibilities of such "queer" desires and practices
to embody, perform, re-enact, use, and criticize inter/cultural
political formations? Across different cultures and disciplines,
through theory-informed approaches, this panel seeks to explore
strategies of connecting "perverse" desire to trans/national
politics.
Please send your abstracts and queries to:
Andrea Bachner, Or: Itziar Rodriguez de Rivera
Dept. of Comparative Literature Hispanic & Italian Studies
Harvard University Dept. of Languages, Literature & Cultures
Boylston Hall G-02 University of Albany
Cambridge, MA 02138 1400 Washington Avenue
bachner@fas.harvard.edu Albany, NY 12222
ir8153@albany.edu
"The Translatress in her Person Speaks:"
Women Translators and the Art of Cultural Mediation.
This session will attempt to explore various aspects
of women writers' involvement in the linguistic/cultural mediation
of the past five hundred years. Often labeled as a secondary/derivative
activity, translation nonetheless offered women access to the world
of letters, giving them an opportunity to contribute to the intellectual
life of their times. As a matter of fact, translations often helped
to start literary careers (Mary Wollstonecraft's translations of
Jacques Necker and Christian Salzmann, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's
translation of Aeschylus and George Eliot's translation of David
Friedrich Strauss are just a few examples). Participants may choose
to focus on the following writers: Mary Sidney, Margaret Tyler,
Aphra Behn, Mary Wollstonecraft, Helen Maria Williams, Charlotte
Smith, Germaine de Stael, Elizabeth Barrett-Browning, Caroline Schlegel-Schelling,
Dorothea Veit-Schlegel, Henriette Herz, Karolina Pavlova, George
Eliot, Margaret Fuller, Eleanor Marx-Aveling, Constance Garnett,
Willa Muir, Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter, Helene Cixous, Luce Irigaray,
Gayatri Spivak, Barbara Godard, Suzanne Jill-Levine. Abstracts on
cultural/identity mediation by these and other women writers/translators
are also welcome.
Anna Barker
University of Iowa
anna-barker@uiowa.edu
Asian Languages and Literatures
526 Park Road
Iowa City, IA 52246
Translationality
Ilan Stavans recently noted that “modernity…is
not lived through nationality but through translationality,”
commenting on the essential, though often unacknowledged, role of
translation in today’s world. The seminar I propose seeks
to explore the relationship between translation and cultural life
in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Specifically,
how does translation figure within what is called “globalization”?
How might a heightened awareness of translation and the role it
plays in literature and other aspects of cultural life—law,
politics, economics, information technology, ‘the media,’
etc.—help us revise and refine our thinking about the increasingly
interwoven quality of our cultures? How might theoretical insights
into translation complement/contradict social science theories of
globalization? How might such insights deepen our understanding
of contemporary writing and of teaching in the humanities?
Sandra Bermann
Princeton University
sandralb@Princeton.edu
Comparative Literature
107 East Pyne Building
Princeton University
Princeton, NJ 08544
Cosmopolitan Writing
How do writers imagine global stories? This panel
seeks to examine how cosmopolitanism can be represented, asking
how literature attempts to forge imagined communities across social
and political borders. What are the possibilities and the limitations
of works that aspire toward diverse cosmopolitan ideals? How might
novels, poems, plays, films, and other forms of art challenge or
reshape current scholarly understandings of cosmopolitanism?
Shameem Black
Stanford University
ssb@stanford.edu
5 Roberts Road, Apt. 1
Cambridge, MA 02138
Places, Memories, Citations
The seminar explores the idea of the “network”
in the context of premodern literary and artistic practice. One
point of departure is the text—verbal or visual; in manuscript
or in print; as composed by an author or as re-composed by readers
and beholders. Texts are themselves classically pictured as networks
of meaning and association, weaving multiple threads to form a single
tissue. But texts are also characterized by their connections with
(and conflicted responses to) other texts through the play of topoi
and reminiscences, echoes and allusions, citations and revisions.
So in addition to examining texts as independent networks of meaning,
the seminar explores their location in wider, intertextual systems
of community and communication—traditions, filiations, disciplines,
schools.
While the “ethnic” and “global”
seem less pertinent, the seminar welcomes notions of ethnos, the
related theme of ethos, and the worlds that ethnoi inhabit as distinct
yet interdependent ethical communities. The seminar accordingly
addresses as broad a spectrum of premodern cultural perspectives
as possible. Themes might include:
¨ technologies of storage, retrieval, and citation:
footnotes, libraries, compilations, anthologies, encyclopedias,
rhetorical arts of memory, arts of “amnesty” or forgetting
¨ coding and format: scroll vs. codex, print vs. manuscript,
alphabetic vs. non-alphabetic scribal systems (syllabaries, logography,
ideograms, rebus writing, hieroglyphics)
¨ the theory and practice of history and historiography in classical
antiquity, Western humanism, the Near Eastern cultures of the Book,
premodern China and Japan
¨ “world literature” before its invention in Goethe,
Hegel, and August Schlegel
¨ iconographies and philologies: symbolic codes and the techniques
required to construct, reconstruct, or deconstruct them
¨ ideas, images, and their associations (mental, topical, traditional,
or conventional)
¨ acts of vision and revision: versions, editions, commentaries,
abridgements, epitomes, palimpsests; but also protests, critiques,
polemics, parodies, satires
¨ texts, contexts, pretexts, intertexts, and paratexts
Please send proposals (250-word abstract and current
curriculum vitae) by regular post or by e-mail attachment to:
Christopher Braider
University of Colorado, Boulder
Dept. of French & Italian
238 UCB
Boulder, CO 80309-0238
braider@colorado.edu
Herbert Marks
Indiana University
Dept. of Comparative Literature
Ballantine Hall 914
Bloomington, IN 47405-7103
marks@indiana.edu
Borders and Marginalities in the Americas
This seminar explores themes in comparative studies
of the Americas. The papers address the topic of borders and marginalities
from a number of different methodological approaches, but in their
broader argumentation complement one another.
Rodriguez explores contemporary Chicana/o detective fiction as an
example of an emergent cultural formation coincident with a shift
in post-nationalist identities. Ontiveros also addresses Mexican-American
themes in the exploration of the 1943 Zoot Suit Riots as a formative
story for the Chicano movement in the United States. This relationship
between ethnicity and event is analyzed vis a vis events in other
cultural contexts such as Ghandian nationalism and Armenian-American
identity. Cabanas looks at the complex relationship between violence
and globalization and the representation of this relationship in
contemporary fiction by Mexican and Colombian writers. Chevalier
also addresses violence in her examination of the "global"
anti-lynching campaign resulting from Ida B. Wells's trans-Atlantic
travels in the late 19th century. Byron links the 19th and 20th
centuries in her analysis of hybrid texts that seek to represent
individual and collective identities in time of war and revolution,
in particular the U. S. invasion of Mexico and the Mexican Revolution
of 1910.
The theoretical questions explored in these papers
fit well with one another and with the theme for the conference.
Other points of convergence include:
* geographic: the Mexican-American border as fluid space, "America"
as political site of violence
* politics of resistance: cross-cultural comparison of this in different
generic forms: detective fiction, historical novel, memoir, visual
culture,
* identity: relationship between identity and event (the Zoot Suit
Riots, the Mexican American War, Mexican Revolution), economic,
political, social, and moral conflict (neoliberalism, globalization,
imperialism; lynching, the drug war, struggle for land)
* hybridity, cross media; comparative Americas; identity politics;
visual and verbal culture; community formation, diaspora; violence,
rupture; politics of resistance
Kristine Byron
Michigan State University
byronk@msu.edu
Department of Spanish and Portuguese
Michigan State University
329 Old Horticulture Building
East Lansing, MI 48824-1112
Convergence and Conflict In the Ottoman Empire
The demographical topography of the Ottoman Empire expanded once
the Empire stretched its borders deep into the Balkan Peninsula
in the West and the Arabian Peninsula in the East. The coexistence
of polyethnic and multi-religious groups (Jews, Christians and Muslims)
within the Empire gave rise to both (religious) conflict and (cultural,
artistic) diversity at the same time. This panel explores the convergence
and conflict of the ethnicities in Ottoman Empire. We are inviting
papers on
* Conflict and harmony within different religious
groups
* Travel writings
* Sovereignty/ administration
* Millet system
* Art and architecture
* Cuisine
* Intermarriage
Proposals for papers should be sent in electronic
form, giving a title and an abstract of 100-250 words in length.
Iclal Cetin
SUNY, University of Buffalo
icetin@acsu.buffalo.edu
638 Clemens Hall
State University of New York
Buffalo, NY 14260
Global Dandyism
This panel will explore dandyism as a daring form
of border-crossing: between genders, between nations, between life
and art, between the mass media and high culture. Ever since its
first appearance in the unsettled Europe of the Romantic period,
the concept of the dandy has always traveled across national borders,
connecting diverse performers of dissident masculinity into an international-and,
more recently, global-network. After first emerging in early 19th-century
Britain, the ideal of "dandyism" was soon adopted by the
French Aesthetes and Decadents, and then re-imported back to Britain
by the Irish Oscar Wilde, who decisively turned the dandy persona
into an expression of a new "homosexual" identity. Our
panel seeks to explore both this international formation of 19th-century
European dandyism and the more recent transformations of dandyism
in the Americas, in non-Western cultures, and among ethnic minority
Europeans (such as the Black British artist Yinka Shonibare, who
recently covered London with posters of his 1998 self-portrait series
"Diary of a Victorian Dandy"). For our discussion of "Global
Dandyism," we especially seek papers which show how the persona
of the dandy has been adapted for the performance of ethnic identities,
or, alternately, papers which show how dandyism has been used to
perform a cosmopolitan identity that seeks an alternative to racial,
national, and ethnic categories. Other pertinent questions include:
What happens to ethnic identity when dandies express their ethnicity
through stylized, overtly artificial performance? Does the "aristocratic"
European origin of dandyism make it an elitist and/or Eurocentric
phenomenon? Or can the new global dandyism subvert dominant categories
of class and race as well as gender? Can there be a female dandyism?
Is post-Wilde male dandyism always identified with same-sex erotic
preference? And, above all, how can we better explore these questions
by comparing the various versions and projects of dandyism across
centuries and in different national and trans-national cultures?
Sarah Rose Cole Matthew Smith
Columbia University Boston University
src20@columbia.edu mwsmith@bu.edu
7 Murdock Street
Cambridge, MA 02139
Islam in Postcolonial Cross-Sections: Myth
or Reality
This panel invites papers exploring Islam as a postcolonial
space and/or Islam within a postcolonial space in interaction with
other cultural, political, social or economic forms. Analyses on
Islam's ability or inability to participate in what Appiah terms
"space-clearing gesture" and the occurrence of this theme
in literary works of any genre or country are especially invited.
Papers are encouraged to highlight reasons and possible conclusions
for Islam's ability to participate in creating a postcolonial space
based on these interactions.
Minimum 400 word abstracts should be sent by post
or e-mail attachments to shirin.e.edwin@vanderbilt.edu or Shirin
Edwin, Department of French and Italian, Station B, Box 6312, Nashville,
TN 37235.
Shirin Edwin
Vanderbilt University
shirin.e.edwin@vanderbilt.edu
Department of French and Italian
Station B, Box 6312
Nashville, TN 37235
Geo-philosophy: Transversals and Passages
via Deleuze and Guattari
Across the widely divergent fields that comprise the
Humanities today, a central point of convergence is a renewed interest
in the global constructions of historical, cultural, and political
systems of representation. As earlier approaches to geo-politics
have become out-paced by a rapid process of globalization, scholars
and theorists have begun to explore alternative models of conceptual
construction that address the status of global networks, e.g., Deleuze-Guattari's
proposal of "geo-philosophy," Deleuze's analysis of Foucault
as "a new cartographer," the turn to universalism in Badiou
or to theology in Derrida and Zizek. We invite considerations (by
no means limited to the names cited) of the ways that "geo-philosophy,"
broadly-conceived, addresses the global context of cultural and
political phenomena.
Co-organizers: A. Gelley, Eleanor Kaufman, Univ. of
Virginia, Gregg Lambert, Syracuse University
Alexander Gelley
University of California, Irvine
agelley@uci.edu
Department of Comparative Literature
University of California, Irvine
Irvine, CA 92697
American Ethnicities and Literatures in a
Global Context
The aim of this panel is to examine how and whether
diaspora, postcolonial or transnational theoretical models can be
used to discuss texts written by or featuring ethnic American writers/characters
in a comparative context. I invite submissions of papers which question
and probe concepts of "Americanness" and "ethnicity"
while also proposing fruitful ways in which to read ethnic American
texts globally.
Proposals are invited for twenty-minute presentations
on ethnic American literature and/or characters in a global context.
Below are suggestions for topics the papers might address. Other
themes or ideas are welcome.
· American ethnic texts that situate themselves
within a larger diasporic or transnational community
· The role of "American" characters
in non-U.S. literature
· Novels and/or travel books featuring ethnic
American travelers in other countries
· The influence of ethnic American writers
or texts on European, African or Latin American writers
· Translations of or appropriations of ethnic
American texts by non-U. S. writers
· American ethnic texts
· Ethnic memoirs/autobiographies
· Gender and sexual orientation as markers
of American ethnicity
Please send 250 word abstracts to Vivian Nun Halloran
at vhallora@indiana.edu
Vivian Halloran
Indiana University, Bloomington
vhallora@indiana.edu
914 Ballantine Hall
1020 East Kirkwood Avenue
Bloomington, IN 47405
The Theory and Practice of Critique
This seminar welcomes theoretical contributions that
help further the current debate about what it means to engage in
critical theory and critical practice in an interdisciplinary field.
What are some of the enabling principles underlying critical work?
What challenges, possibilities or limitations await the practitioner
of critical work? Perspectives from a variety of schools of thought
are welcome (e.g., cultural theory, Marxist theory, Critical Theory,
psychoanalysis).
Send a one-page abstract by e-mail *only* to Prof.
Hanssen at bhanssen@uga.edu
Beatrice Hanssen
University of Georgia
bachner@fas.harvard.edu
Department of German
University of Georgia
Joseph E Brown Hall
Athens, GA 30602-6797
Transnational Exchange in Early-Modern Drama
This seminar will explore various forms of international
exchange, commerce, and "translation" in early-modern
drama. Actual border crossings of acting troupes, dramatists, playscripts,
and scenarios will be of concern, as well as old world productions
of theater in the new world. We'll consider early-modern drama as,
on the one hand, an international system of flexible but recognizable
"theatergrams" and, at the same time, a site of contentious
intercultural encounter. We will, then, also explore dramatic texts
that represent exile, migration, and diaspora, and the figure of
the ethnic outsider.
Robert Henke
Washington University
rhenke@artsci.wustl.edu
Comparative Literature
South Ridgley Hall 116 - Box 1107
Washington University
One Brookings Drive
St. Louis, MO 63130
Pastiche as Cultural Memory
The genre of pastiche, for centuries the "other"
of high art, is being rewritten in the context of the radical hybridity
that is the mark of contemporary culture. Artistic practices contest
the negative sense traditionally associated with "pastiche"
and redefine its hybrid status of "neither original nor copy"
-- to serve a critical agenda. Although Fredric James rightly stated
in 1983 that pastiche is "one of the most significant features
or practices in postmodernism today," he wrongly dismissed
it as "a dead language."
By looking at pastiche structuration in contemporary
visual arts, film, some hybrid texts, my paper focuses on the emancipatory
potential of the best postmodern pastiches. In their heterogeneous
conjunction, forging horizons past and present, they activate and
motivate our cultural memory.
Ingeborg Hoestery
Indiana University, Bloomington
hoestere@Indiana.edu
63 Magnolia Ave, #2
Cambridge, MA 02138
New Perspectives on Comedy
Global networks of exchange – cultural, artistic,
critical – are affecting the nature of comic prose and performance
in ways that theory had yet to address. Historically, once the ethical
bases of comedy in Antiquity modulated into social emphases after
the Renaissance, the (often unstated) premise of comedy as a social
form persisted through the 20thC. Because the social premise is
still unexamined, even amid the perceived breakdown of the social
under post-nation pressures of global amalgamations, this seminar
will explore new approaches to such comic staples as ethnic stereotypes
and national comic traditions while stressing the global emergence
of transnational forms, modes, and techniques, as well as critical
perspectives. Our purpose is not simply to point to, say, Japanese
animation techniques in U.S. sit-com formats or to the use of comic
blogs in French fiction, but to explore the significance of such
geotextual transformations for the theory of comedy – ultimately
for the question of how Western theoretical premises can (if they
can) incorporate ancient non-Western comic modes and/or contemporary
electronic media and material.
Papers may range from monographic studies of single writers, playwrights,
cartoonists, cinematographers and single, erstwhile national comic
traditions, to larger issues of comic theory East and West. Papers
on the theory of comedy, and papers on non-Western comic modes and
their advent in Europe and the Americas, are particularly welcome.
Send 200-word abstract to hokenson@fau.edu, with a copy to janhoken@aol.com,
and please use as subject head: ACLA Comedy.
Jan Walsh Hokenson
Florida Atlantic University
hokenson@fau.edu and janhoken@aol.com
Department of Languages & Linguistics
Florida Atlantic University
777 Glades Road
Boca Raton, FL 33431 USA
Remembrance of Places Past: Departures, Migrations,
and Returns
How does one return to the past, when this past also
entails a return to the lost home(land)?
This panel aims at opening a space to address how
the migrant/refugee self returns to the past, how this return is
performed through different narratives which at times could be nostalgic,
at times a cultural identification practice for both the reader
and the narrator, which genres mediate in conveying the past, in
dialogue with collective memory, and finally, what kind of a texture
this adds to the cultural identity.
Asli Igsiz Lily Chiu
University of Michigan University of Michigan
zigsiz@umich.edu lchiu@umich.edu
Romance Languages and Literatures Comparative Literature
4108 Modern Languages Building 2015 Tisch Hall
812 East Washington 435 South State
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1275 Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1003
(Not) All We Do is Talk, Talk: Communication,
(Post)coloniality and Transnational Feminist Consciousness
"Identities and positionalities are articulations
of embedded experiences and social relations that a given spatiality
entails."
Saraswati Raju
Analyzing nineteenth century narratives by European
women about their third-world sisters reveals one of the complexities
of modernity: "the white woman's other burden" (Kumari
Jayawardena). The effort to form international solidarities, embedded
in imperialist discourses, drew upon orientalist tropes of representation
that often mirrored particular anxieties that Euro-American women
felt about their own positions at home-in the nation (see Barbara
Ramusack, Inderpal Grewal, for example). Recent scholarship in this
area emphasizes locating these stories as part of a decentered and
global history and to articulate polycentric models of knowledge
in order to create a "practice that involves forms of alliance,
subversion and complicity within which asymmetries and inequalities
can be critiqued" (Inderpal and Grewal, "Postcolonial
Studies and Transnational Feminist Practices"). Part of this
process involves studying the structures of knowledge that informed
colonialist discourses which continued to represent women as "lack"
in the national imaginary, thus impeding the building of transnational
collectivities. Historicizing difference through these narratives
allows us to study how constructions of the Self and the Other subject
us to specific ethnic formations that continue to haunt the construction
of the national citizen well past the nineteenth century and into
the twenty-first. Our proposed seminar is interested in pursuing
these issues in terms of how representations of woman and womanhood
were treated both in the East and in the West, spanning both the
modern and postmodern epochs. We seek presentations that examine
interconnections and network exchanges between western and eastern
women. In particular, we ask interested panelists to consider the
following:
* What kinds of cultural and linguistic models did western women
utilize as they talked about their more downtrodden sisters "over
there"? How did these models rely upon androcentric and orientalist
tropes embedded within imperial discourse in order to construct
the absolute Other?
* How have vocabularies of earlier models of communication instantiated
particular notions of the Other in order to maintain political,
cultural, and social hegemonies?
* In what ways did the rhetoric of "talking about" Other
women foreclose possibilities for forming collectivities across
national borders? What do we, at this point in our multicultural
realities, learn from this silent moment in global history?
* How might historicizing models of communication help us to envision
a present that anatomizes a colonial historiography of difference?
We encourage interdisciplinary presentations that address some of
our concerns. Some possible areas include:
* Museum studies
* Travel narratives
* Performing Identity
* Cinematic history (Colonial and Postcolonial)
* Postcolonial and Transnational Feminisms
* Colonial and Postcolonial Visual Culture
* Women Missionaries
* Women's networks and cyberculture
Please send 1 page proposals to Priya Jha at priya.jha@murraystate.edu
or to Courtney Wennerstrom at cwenners@Indiana.edu
Priya Jha Courtney Wennerstrom
Murray State University Indiana University – Bloomington
Priya.jha@murraystate.edu cwenners@Indiana.edu
Department of English and Philosophy
Faculty Hall 7C
Murray State University
Murray, KY 42071
Finitude, or the Limits of the Left
If it were possible to reduce the conflicting tensions
that define the theoretical left today, it might well come down
to one central question: how to understand the figure of limits,
or finitude. The recent surge of interest in a Deleuzian theory
of immanence (found with significant variations in a number of contemporary
thinkers, among them Badiou, Hardt and Negri) eschews an emphasis
on the limit as an emancipatory figure in favor of an ideal of a
constantly shifting plenitude. The other side of the spectrum, ranging
from deconstruction to subalternity, stresses the importance of
the figure of the limit for a thinking of emancipation. The objective
of this seminar is to see how a conversation between these two sides
can be broached. International approaches are of course especially
welcome, e.g., Nancy, Badiou, Derrida, Hardt, Negri, Laclau, Arditi,
Richard, Butler, Moreiras, Spivak. Or themes such as the multitude,
the nation, globalization and imperialism, media, the internet,
etc.
Adriana Johnson Kate Jenckes
University of California, Irvine Rice University
adrianaj@benfranklin.hnet.uci.edu kjenckes@rice.edu
University of California, Irvine Rice University
English and Comparative Literature Department of Hispanic Studies,
MS 34
Irvine, CA 92697 P.O. Box 1892
Houston, TX 77251
Speaking the Americas: Ethnic Realities, New
Worlds
When the last U.S. census was taken in 2000, it contained
a category never before seen in this country, creating a national,
public space for the existence of those of multiracial heritage.
In legitimating the fact of multiraciality, the new category represented
an important recognition for multiple cultural identity--taking
it out of the silence often imposed by America’s (U.S.) difficult
ethnic history and making it a part of authorized public discourse.
Such public recognition, however, also opened the door to the way
in which multiple cultural reality in the U.S. may be implicated
in a more complex understanding, one that recognizes what it means
to consider the ways in which multiple cultural and ethnic reality
is filtered through the history of the Americas and the development
of the New World. The increasing globalization of today’s
world and its consequent changing demographics have made multiple
ethnic, racial and cultural reality a commonplace of everyday life
in many national contexts. Yet although public recognition of this
fact in the U.S. and elsewhere may help to create a more just and
open society, the failure to examine the deeper cultural significance
of such multiple reality may also help to camouflage deep-seated
attitudes toward race, national identity, and ethnic culture which
have long served to uphold notions of ethnic identity that celebrate
notions of its purity and singularity while imposing artificial
divisions between peoples of disparate ethnic groups, and placing
a wall of silence around those with multiple cultural and racial
affiliations.
Papers are invited which use the context of the Americas
and the New World to consider multiple ethnic and cultural reality
from an interdisciplinary, transnational, transhistorical perspective.
Possible themes include:
· U.S. American ethnic texts, or other ethnic
texts of the Americas that concern themselves specifically with
the conflict between diasporic cultural reality and the pressure
to assume a singular ethnic cultural identity
· U.S. American ethnic texts or other ethnic
texts of the Americas that discuss the problem of multiracial heritage
· Comparisons between ethnic literatures of
the Americas
· The role of the history of discovery and
exploration in ethnic texts of the Americas
· Problems of gender, class, and/or sexuality
in ethnic texts of the Americas
· Issues of language, authority, power and/or
voice in ethnic texts of the Americas
Please send 250-word abstracts to Cyraina Johnson-Roullier
at johnson.64@nd.edu
Cyraina Johnson-Roullier
University of Notre Dame
Department of English
352 O’Shaughnessy Hall
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
Johnson.64@nd.edu
Voices from the Periphery: Arabic Literature
between the Ages of Imperialism and Globalism.
The 2004 Arabic Literature Seminar will be held at
the annual convention of the American Comparative Literature Association--Ann
Arbor, Michigan 15-18 April 2004. The topic of the Seminar is "Voices
from the Periphery: Arabic Literature between the Ages of Imperialism
and Globalism." The Seminar will attempt to approach this topic
from a broad theoretical basis and/or through the critical consideration
of particular texts. Proposals might address, but are not limited
to, the following:
- Localism vis-à-vis globalism
- Globalism as Neo-colonialism
- Globalism, identity, and representation
- Hybridities, hybrid genres
- Constructs and Deconstructions
- Topographies of gender and sexuality
- Translating cultures
- Experimental writing
- Nationalisms, colonialities and postcolonialities
- Diasporas, exilic narratives
- Cosmopolitanisms
- Testimonials, memoirs, biographies
- Influence studies
- The Mass media, literature, and globalism
- New media, digital media, cyber culture
- Cinematics/film studies
- Literature and war/the literature of war
- Prison literature
The seminar will be conducted in English in its entirety.
Please address enquiries and submit abstracts (accompanied
by brief bio-info) to:
Hussein.Kadhim@Dartmouth.Edu.
Please also see: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~kadhim/als.html
Hussein Kadhim
Dartmouth College
Hussein.Kadhim@Dartmouth.Edu
Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Languages and Literatures
6191 Bartlett Hall
Dartmouth College
Hanover, NH 03755
Displacing desire – globally
Journeys of desire exist throughout literature - Gilgamesh
went on a vain search for Immortality; Odysseus sought his own homecoming;
Basho recounted moments on the narrow road to the deep north. While
these three examples differ in their conceptions of time and immediacy,
they portray what Freud termed the death drive, a repetitious cycling
of acts in a search for the final return. It is true that Eastern
modes of thinking, such as Buddhism and Hinduism, affirm this cycle
as the means of enlightenment. But the journey of desire's metonymic
displacement continues nonetheless to the point of extinction.
This panel is looking for explanations of 'desire'
as it pertains to the self in specifically literary texts, the self
in space, time, and geography, or the self in theory. This panel
is particularly interested in abstracts (with either an Eastern
or Western focus) that pertain to notions of desire as displacement
whether physical, spiritual, emotional, sexual, literary, psychological,
or philosophical.
Kristi Krumnow
University of South Carolina
kkrumnow@aol.com
Welsh Humanities Building 405
Program in Comparative Literature
University of South Carolina
Columbia, SC 29208
Critical Translation Studies: New Crossings
We propose a 3-day seminar that will apply the theme
of this year’s conference, “Global Ethnic Networks—Old
and New,” to the emerging field we call Critical Translation
Studies. Critical Translation Studies combines recent interest in
the theory of translation and postcolonial interrogations of global
power and universalism, with philological investments in details
of rhetorical practice, to hone the critical tools available for
analyzing the terms of translational/ transnational exchange. Our
diverse experiences working with materials both inside and outside
modern, European archives have made it mandatory that we map the
conceptual terrain of this field in terms of multiple, equally viable
epistemological centers, in such a way that encourages innovation,
self-reflection, and a fine-tuned rigor. The papers in this seminar
in particular aim to highlight the insights and expertise non-literary
disciplines may bring to bear on the enterprise of translation,
working within broadly-conceived categories of technology, music,
and environment. Of interest are the ways familiar paths (ideological,
economic, cultural) in our inherited global networks may be crossed
to reveal new cuts in our thinking.
Each day of the seminar will feature four fifteen-minute
papers that are to serve as a starting point for an open and ongoing
discussion on the methods and aims of Critical Translation Studies
and its relation to Comparative Literature as a discipline. We ask:
Are there more illuminating ways of delineating the materiality
of our discipline? How may we think of the objects of our inquiry
other than in terms of words and texts? Are there more sophisticated
tools available for calibrating the temporal and historical spaces
these materials occupy? How do we participate in the circulation
of these resources—through tropes of exchange, renewal, ownership?
We have deliberately left ample time for discussion and expect presenters
to participate in all three days of the seminar. Every effort will
be made to include presenters from a variety of specializations
and stages in their careers. We also extend a special invitation
to scholars with an interest in this field to contribute actively
to the discussion regardless of whether or not they are scheduled
to present.
Days’ Topics:
I. Technology and Materiality
II. Music/metrics
III. Landscapes of power
Christi Merrill
University of Michigan
3070 Frieze
105 South State St.
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1285
merrillc@umich.edu
The Substance of African and Middle Eastern
Literatures
From the scramble for Africa to the latest proposal
for war, Africa and the Middle East have been seen from the outside
as spaces of endless natural wealth and raw resources. Diamonds,
oil, gold, and even water (to name a few) have held coveted spaces
in the imaginations of European and American prospectors, employers,
patrons and corporations, and have impacted national and regional
mappings and networks. Although there has been much work on the
histories of exploration, there has been less sustained thought
as to how the resources are viewed from within, and as to how “cultural
wealth” reflects and intersects with the reality and mythology
of African and Middle Eastern substances. Panel organizer seeks
papers that creatively engage the intersections between the natural
resources of Africa and the Middle East and the literature of the
regions. Approaches may be eclectic and comparative, and may take
an aesthetic, historical, textual, anthropological, geographical,
or other perspective.
Areas of exploration may include:
- Examination of the way resources (“substances”) are
represented in literature, film, performance
- Explorations of how contemporary material networks intersect with
ethnic networks
- Representations of those who work with the resources (at any stage
and in any role) as reflected in literature and film
- Resources and modernity and development
- Resources and indigenous environmental discourses
- Examination of the representations of resources in oral literatures
or other “traditional” texts and performances
- Historical approaches to the ways natural resources emerge in
discourse
- Examination of generic forms emerging as responses to conflict
over natural resources
- Examination of funding sources, corporations and how profit serves
(or doesn’t) the arts of the regions
- New emergent subjectivities in response to the discovery and engagement
with resources
500 word abstracts to Rebecca at rlorins@mail.utexas.edu
(attachments or in-email accepted)
Rebecca Lorins
University of Texas in Austin
rlorins@mail.utexas.edu
700 Hearn St Apt #215
Austin, TX 78703-4504-65 USA
Crossing the Pre-Modern and the Post-Modern:
Challenges to Global Ethnic Networks
This seminar invites papers that navigate a crossing
between pre- (or early) modern works of literature and post-modern
theories of subjectivity in order to deepen and/or to challenge
the terms constitutive of "global ethnic networks." Until
relatively recently (the past few hundred years), the words "global"
and "ethnic" were predominantly descriptive terms, the
former designating spherical shape (with all its divine symbolism)
and the latter, from its Greek root, referring to a "nation"
(but particularly to any non-Judeo-Christian people). In contemporary
usage, "ethnic" and "global" retain these basic
definitions. However, these words now function within complex networks
that are grounded in modern, Cartesian notions of subjectivity,
a term which also had very different connotations in the classical,
medieval and even the early modern world. In the latter half of
the 20th century, certain philosophers and literary scholars began
to criticize ideologies of subjectivity (including ethnicity and
globalism). In the "premodern" and the "postmodern"
periods, there exist historical and theoretical challenges to the
conceptions of "ethnic" and "global" that have
come to dominate much discourse in literary studies and the world
at large. This seminar will pursue the following general questions:
Were there such networks (in practice if not by definition) in historically
and culturally distant times? How can they be compared to more modern
networks? Conversely, does the conceptual lack of "globalism"
and "ethnicity" in earlier periods raise questions about
the modern terminology? Is it anachronistic to apply these terms
to historically and culturally distant periods?
Papers must be grounded in at least one pre- or early
modern literary text (roughly antiquity through the Renaissance).
Proposals should offer a clear definition of terms and provide a
careful theoretical framework by which to navigate the crossing.
One-page proposals (300 words), electronically or by snail mail.
Brenda Machosky
Stanford University
machosky@Stanford.edu
Introduction to the Humanities
Building 250-251J
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-2020
Violence and Ethics
This panel invites papers that interrogate the relationship
between violence and ethics. Philosopher Alain Badiou suggests that
contemporary concepts of "ethics" may embody or constitute
a kind of epistemic violence that is inseparable from its political
implementations. In a cultural climate that opposes ethical practice
to institutional violence, and in a political climate in which 'ethics'
are wielded to justify the perpetration of violence, this interrelation
of violence and ethics demands close and careful scrutiny. To what
extent do ethical agendas - political, philosophical, critical,
and social - presuppose a violent context? Does ethics' investment
in the presence of violence render ethics complicit in violence's
perpetration? What role does political expediency play in the marriage
between ethics and violence? Can this marriage be dissolved? Should
it?
Approaches may include, but are not limited to:
Aristotle at Auschwitz: Classical conceptions of ethics
in contemporary violent contexts;
Good bodies and bad: Ethics and the human figure throughout
the ages;
Ethics and the body politic: race, nation, class;
No Graven Images: the ethics of representing - and
of not representing - violence;
Hurts so good: Ethics, violence, and sexual pleasure;
A Light Unto the Nations: Ethics and hegemony;
Please send 500-word proposal to Naomi Mandel at mandel@uri.edu
or by snail mail to:
Naomi Mandel
University of Rhode Island
mandel@uri.edu
Department of English
Independence Hall
60 Upper College Road
Kingston, RI 02881
Global Terrorism and Cultural Representation
This seminar will investigate various ramifications
of the ethnic and global aspects of terrorism, including: the relationship
of terrorism to violence, politics, and the state and to cultural
production, including the connection between writing and violence
and "the writer as terrorist's victim, rival, or double"
(M. Scanlan). The philosophical underpinnings and psychological
space of terror, ranging from Benjamin's theory of history as a
state of siege to Camus' belief that revolt is an essential dimension
of humankind and Kristeva's postulate that only the confrontation
of "an obstacle, prohibition, authority, or law . . . allows
us to realize ourselves as autonomous and free." Topics may
include: cinematic adaptations; the paradigm of the good terrorist;
rebellion vs. revolution; individual vs. group vs. state terror;
creation and revolution; terrorism as fictional construct; "the
Essential Terrorist" (Said); political terrorism and the media;
anarchy and culture; terrorism on stage/as performance.
Send 250-word abstracts to Elaine Martin (University
of Alabama) at
emartin@bama.ua.edu.
Elaine Martin
University of Alabama
emartin@bama.ua.edu
Box 870262
Tuscaloosa, AL 35487 USA
Demanding Satisfaction: The Last Men in the
New Imperium
Friedrich Nietzsche's idea of the last men has exerted
a powerful hold upon the imaginations of thinkers across the political
spectrum, from those aligned with the political Right, such as Carl
Schmitt, Leo Strauss, and Allan Bloom, to Marxists such as Alexandre
Kojeve and Slavoj Zizek. Is Zarathustra's nightmare of a fully satisfied
and pacified (and therefore bestial) multitude best understood as
a damning indictment of consumer capitalism and liberal democracy?
Or does it crystallize the skepticism that universal plenty and
a life of ease have inevitably dehumanizing effects, and thereby
constitute a powerful refutation of institutionalized communism?
Is the ultimate goal of the new imperial order and economic globalization
the pacification of potentially explosive populations into "last
men," so that they may be exploited by, but also profit from,
the world system of liberal capitalism? To what extent is such a
transformation "racialized," whether through the dominance
of Hollywood film or images advertising the delights offered by
capitalist prosperity? Where might one locate sources of resistance
to the pressures of such homogenization, both within and beyond
the politics of ethnic identity and the militarism of radical Islam?
The panel will address such topics as:
* Narrative Speculations. How do literature and film
explore post-historical societies and dramatize the contradictions
that persist in them?
* Struggles for Recognition. Is the so-called clash
of civilizations between radical Islam and the US imperium a Hegelian
conflict between Masters and Slaves? What are the meanings of mastery
and slavery in the present context of the "war on terror"?
* Global Mafias. Is it possible to understand the
US imperium in terms of the redemptive narratives of post-history
elaborated by Kojeve and popularized by Fukuyama? Or is the model
of the homogeneous and universal world state giving way to the proliferation
of global mafias underneath the preeminence of corporate elites?
* Free to be a Borg? Does ethnic identity constitute
a kind of agalma, a psychic "hidden treasure" among "nonwhite"
peoples in an age of increasing cultural homogenization? To what
extent can the fear of assimilation among immigrants be understood
as anxiety over their offspring becoming "last men," cut
off from tradition and familial obligations?
* Prozac and Pornography. How are techniques of pacification
increasing the possibility of a world of satisfied individuals,
for example, the spread of anti-depressants and the ubiquity of
web pornography?
* Up from Decadence? How might we draw upon the works
of thinkers considered conservative or reactionary, such as Carl
Schmitt, Leo Strauss, Oswald Spengler, Ernst Junger, and Georges
Sorel to critique the new imperialism?
Peter Paik
University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee
pypaik@uwm.edu
French, Italian, Comparative Literature
Box 413
University of Wisconsin
Milwaukee, WI 53201
Ancient Atomism and Modernity
The aim of this panel is to explore the reception
of the ancient atomistic traditions (Leucippus and Democritus, Epicurus
and Lucretius) in the modern era, with a special focus on the period
from Kant to the present. Areas to be discussed will include the
relationships between ancients and moderns and the state of theory
then and now in a few domains: social theory, subjectivity, aesthetics,
and mechanical reproduction. One-page abstracts should be sent to
the co-organizers.
James I. Porter Eric Downing
University of Michigan University of North Carolina
jport@umich.edu edowning@email.unc.edu
Department of Classical Studies
2160 Angell Hall
435 South State St.
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1003
Word and Image in Latin America
The interactions between verbal and visual representations have
been one of the most productive fields of cultural output in Latin
America.
In the context of the current interest in cross-disciplinary
approaches to literary studies, the panel welcomes papers that explore
the relations between word and image in this region of the Americas.
Presentations may address traditional ekphrastic strategies and
new regimens of representation, as well as historical perspectives,
links between aesthetics and politics, and methodological explorations
between arts and media.
Preference will be given to analysis of works from
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but submissions that address
colonial art and letters will also be considered.
Please submit paper proposals to Dan Russek at dlrussek@midway.uchicago.edu
Dan Russek
University of Chicago
dlrussek@midway.uchicago.edu
Department of Comparative Literature
University of Chicago
Wieboldt Hall
1050 E. 59th Street
Chicago, IL 60637
Sacred Tropes: The Hebrew Bible, New Testament,
and Qur'an as Literary Works
The Hebrew Bible, New Testament, and Qur'an continue
to configure our subjectivity and, by extension, our evolving cultures.
Bruce Feiler's best-selling book, *Abraham: A Journey to the Heart
of Three Faiths* is only one example of an exploding popular culture
interest in the three sacred texts reflecting a continuing search
to keep the works relevant to a broader audience and to serve as
a reminder of the similarities among the traditions. Recent panels
on this topic suggest that, in addition to popular culture appeal,
strong and enthusiast academic interest exists in exploring these
sacred texts by enlisting current literary practices which often
deny the boundaries of academic disciplines. While examining the
influence of the sacred texts and traditions on other literary works
is undeniably important, this panel focuses on the sacred texts
themselves as works of literature that invite examination from a
comparatist perspective. The application of twenty-first century
theoretical approaches to these sacred texts promises to foster
their resonance with contemporary problems and promise. This panel
invites the use of polymorphus discourses to examine these works
and unearth fresh readings. Suggested literary approaches include,
but are not limited to, Philosophical, Ethical, Aesthetic, Literary,
Cultural, Sociological, and Psychological readings.
Roberta Sabbath
University of Las Vegas (UNLV)
sabbathr@yahoo.com
2550 Hayesville Ave
Henderson, NV 98052
An Archaeology of America’s Classical
Origins
This workshop will be arranged into three sessions taking place
over a three-day period. Session I, “Investigating the Influence
of Classical Cultural Imperatives on American Thought and Behavior,”
will explore what effect(s) reclamation of our classical origins
has upon such cultural imperatives as understanding of the so-called
American Way—God, Mother, and Country (largely derived from
Vergil’s treatment of pietas [devotion to the Gods, to family
and friends and to patria or country] in the Aeneid); our use, during
the eighteenth century of the pastoral elegy (twenty or so have
been located by Early American authors written between c1720 and
1784, not one of which does obeisance to Milton) as an American
genre for preservation of the past; and our grasp and application
of Roman republicanism vis-à-vis United States’ republicanism.
Regarding this last cultural imperative, for example, Paul Rahe
has in Republics Ancient and Modern, substantially investigated
how Greek democratic ideals impact contemporary society; but his
centering upon an Augustinian analysis of Roman virtue as “praise
of glory” obfuscates the arguably much more important role
of Vergilian pietas, both on Rome and on the origins of the American
republic. So much more needs to be done.
The second session, “How Classical Literary Allusions Focus
Attention on Vital Aspects of American Thought and Behavior,”
centers on such queries as “Why was George Washington called
Cincinnatus?” “Why does Melville make Billy Budd the
son of Venus?” “How does knowing that Vergil’s
Aeneid was a more likely source for much of Hawthorne’s notion
of Hell (Tartarus) than was Dante’s Inferno alter our interpretation
of this American author’s works (especially a short story
like “My Kinsman, Major Molineaux” or even The Marble
Faun)?”
The third session will focus upon “How Study of Our Classical
Origins Intersects with the Globalization Debates?” In this
final session of the workshop, we will interrogate how recovery
of America’s classical origins can potentially bring about
positive intercultural bridges of communication among U.S. citizens
and our global neighbors from Europe and South America. For example,
learning that we share not just Adamic but classical origins should
enable Americans to gain, or perhaps reclaim basic cultural contiguities
which may encourage episodes of trans-Atlantic rapprochement. While
we may indeed still recognize significant points of American exceptionalism,
we may as well discover ourselves not to be so radically “other”
as we too often appear to think ourselves; hence constructive intercultural
exchange may become more emphatically fostered. As well reclamation
of our secular origins (the mythos of Aeneas or classicism is certainly
more secular while the Adamic mythos resides more clearly in the
spiritual/religious realm) can serve as a check on what too often
can be perceived as a characteristically American religious fanaticism.
The observations offered in this proposal are meant only to suggest
and/or to provoke thought. They are assuredly not intended to limit
possible responses. The proposer welcomes a wide diversity of approaches
to the topics presented.
John Shields
Illinois State University
JohnShieldsISU@aol.com & jcshiel@ilstu.edu
Department of English
Stevenson Hall
Campus Box 4240
Normal, IL 61790-4240
Thinking Globally, Teaching Locally: Comparative
Literature on the Regional Campus
This panel will explore the challenges experienced
by comparatists teaching international languages and/or literatures
at regional, state, or community colleges and universities. At such
institutions, a local student body often arrives on campus as an
already cohesive culture that is more than usually resistant to
the universalizing values of academia. Tensions between students'
local culture and the goals and values of a transplanted faculty
may be played out in a number of culturally resonant oppositions
that vary the theme of the ethnic vs. the global. These might include,
but are not limited to, domestic vs. foreign; provincial vs. cosmopolitan;
rural vs. urban; "street" vs. elite; religious vs. secular;
fundamentalist vs. postmodernist; patriotic vs. "anti-American";
etc. This panel calls on professors of international languages and/or
literatures who have found themselves at the crux of such oppositions
to draw upon their experiences traversing the boundaries of local
and global difference in their pedagogy as well as their scholarship.
In what ways are teachers and scholars of comparative literature
uniquely positioned to address such ethnic/global confrontations
in the classroom? How might comparatist theories and methods be
applied to the practice of teaching international cultures in local
settings? Or, conversely, what can we theorize from our pedagogical
adaptations to such settings?
Karen R. Smith
Clarion University of Pennsylvania
kasmith@clarion.edu
Department of English
840 Wood Street
Clarion, PA 16214
Memory and the City
What is the relationship between memory, individually
or collectively inscribed, and ever-changing urban populations and
landscapes? How does memory affect the organization of cities, and
vice versa? Cities, as some have argued, resist theorization. To
what extent do they also resist memorialization? How does memory,
evoked and erased, come to play in discourses of urban decay and
renewal? How can one begin to map or trace urban networks of memory
across neighborhoods and/or ethnic groups?
Deborah Starr
Cornell University
das86@cornell.edu
Department of Near Eastern Studies
Cornell University
409 White Hall
Ithaca, NY 14853
States of Exposure
Exposure can be defined as a condition of passivity
before an uncontrollable alterity. We propose its treatment as a
key concept through which to rethink the logic of the subject, be
it the political subject, the witness to the event, the embodied
subject, the affective subject. It may also be viewed as a concept
that defines perhaps more than any other the event to which art
is above all dedicated and which it tries to bring about. Figures
and topics of investigation include: exposure to light, the encounter
with the stranger, shame, nudity, shock, the nomadic/exilic subject,
the unsheltered, woundedness. Interdisciplinary work in literature,
philosophy, psychoanalysis, film, and the visual arts is encouraged.
Emily Sun Eyal Peretz
Colgate University Harvard University
esun@mail.colgate.edu peretz@fas.harvard.edu
Department of English
13 Oak Drive
Hamilton, NY 13346
Metamorphosis: Cultural Imaginations of the
Hybrid
From Ovid to Apuleius, Dante, Goethe, Nietzsche, and
Kafka, metamorphosis has been a significant motif for a cultural
and poetic imagination invested in exploring the limits of the human
or the limits of narrative representation. Recounting manifold transformations
of the human into the natural or the divine, narratives of metamorphosis
try to articulate emergence or evolution as a time of transition
or a hybrid merging of animal body and human consciousness. Metamorphoses
seem to have occupied the cultural imagination particularly in times
of crisis, and mythological, philosophical, literary, and scientific
inquiries have drawn on the concept of metamorphosis to explore
transitions triggered by the clash of highly adapted systems with
radically altered environments. Within the cultural imagination
of metamorphosis, the hybrid is not only a recurring motif, it also
affected theories of development, transition, and evolution and
informed the cross-fertilization of literature and science from
1800 to the present.
Please send abstracts to Theisen@jhu.edu.
Bianca Theisen
Johns Hopkins University
theisen@jhu.edu
Department of German, Gilman 246
Baltimore, MD 21218
(Post)-Coloniality on the East and South-East
Margins of Europe
This panel plans to continue conversations started
in San Marcos on
"(Post)-Coloniality and Under-Examined Empires." Last
year, the panel focused on the legacy left in the cultures and literatures
of the Balkans, Mitteleuropa, and Eurasia by the Austro-Hungarian,
Russian, and Ottoman Empires; this year proposals are invited that
directly connect (post)-colonial issues to the present age of globalization.
Again, the panel welcomes proposals that (re)-work concepts from
(post)-colonial theories, including Orientalism, to shed light on
the diverse geographical space of East and South-East Europe.
Possible issues to examine in the proposals/presentations
include (but are not limited to) the following:
1. How do cultural and literary "texts"
from East and South-East Europe respond to recent efforts to build
"new" empires? Are the "new" empires ignored,
feared, or celebrated? How does East and South-East Europe narrate
its own role(s) in the formation of "new" empires?
2. How do "texts" explain the sometimes
vociferous nationalism in the Balkans, Mitteleuropa, and Eurasia
in relation to old empires and especially to new ones? Do ethnic
identifications aid or detract in empire formation? Do "texts"
envision a future without nationalism in these geographical areas?
3. How do "texts" represent the introduction
of mass market consumerism in the Balkans, Mitteleuropa and Eurasia?
How do mass market issues relate to issues relevant for old and
new empires? How can these geographical spaces survive the introduction
of mass markets and rampant consumerism?
4. How do exilic communities from the Balkans, Mitteleuropa,
and Eurasia contribute to conversations about old and new empires
that operate in East and South-East Europe? Do exiles offer new
insights, travel different paths, or merely repeat the old hegemonic
patterns?
Email 250-300 word proposals with basic contact information
to
Vlatka Velcic at vvelcic@csulb.edu.
Vlatka Velcic
California State University
vvelcic@csulb.edu
College of Liberal Arts
Comparative Literature
California State University, Long Beach
Long Beach, CA 90815
Cross-Cultural and Gendered Collecting
Presentations are invited for panels on collecting
as a site of trans-cultural exchange and dialogue in the age of
imperialism/colonialism.
From the beginnings of imperialist expansion to the
present, Western people have collected objects from Non-Western
locales, the traffic in objects becoming a process of (unequal)
negotiation between Western and Non-Western cultures. We start from
the practice of collecting as rooted in material culture but wish
to extend the notion of collecting to include the appropriation
of other people in a colonialist context
as well as the appropriation of others' intangible cultural property
through translation, adaptation, and the borrowing of techniques,
styles, and ideas. To underline the relationship between material
culture and colonialist exchange, each day of the seminar a cabinet
will be installed in the seminar room that displays items relating
to the day's topics.
We are thinking of the following topics, but we would
be open to others as well:
Western collecting of Non-Western art. Collecting
of objects as a simulation of the colonialist encounter: the cabinet,
the ethnological museum, the colonial exposition.
Collecting as a means of transforming the meaning
of the Other: Orientalism, fetishism, nostalgia, imperialist/colonialist
desire.
Collecting, the writer and the artist. The artist
or writer who collects Non-Western art (Van Gogh, Edmond de Goncourt).
Japonisme, Chinoiserie. Relationships between the collection of
objects and the appropriation, in literature and art, of images,
ideas, techniques, and styles of Non-Western traditions.
Gender and collecting. Female American collectors
of Native American art (Millicent Rogers, Georgia O'Keeffe). Collecting/appropriating
the colonized Other through colonialist desire. Collected objects
as sexual currency in colonialism. Female collecting and the amassing
of cultural value. The effect of the national appropriation of foreign
objects on social, economic, and religious hierarchies in regard
to
gender.
We are planning to put together a volume of papers
from the seminar for publication.
Please send 500-word abstracts and a brief c.v. by
email to all of the seminar leaders:
Helen Fazio rajdasa@aol.com
Julie Rajan julie_rajan71@yahoo.com
Janet Walker jwalk@rci.rutgers.edu
Please include your street address and phone number.
Janet Walker, Julie Rajan, Helen Fazio
Rutgers University
Respectively: jwalk@rci.rutgers.edu, julie_rajan71@yahoo.com, rajdasa@aol.com
205 Ruth Adams Building
131 George St.
New Brunswick, NJ
08901-1414
Global Chinese Network and Transnational Cinema
As one of the oldest and most populated civilizations
wide spreading in the world, Chinese societies and the diasporas
serve as a fascinating site for scholars to study ethnicity in relation
to globalism. Due to historical reasons, the global Chinese network
stretches in multiple forms: nation-states (Mainland China, Taiwan),
post-colonial city-state (Hong Kong), ethnic majority/minority (Singapore,
Indonesia), and immigrant diasporic communities (Asian-Americans,
etc.). Within the network, the ethnic bonding coexists with regional
tensions and sub-cultural diversities. The interactions with other
cultural systems, accelerating in the age of globalization today,
bring even more complex dimensions to the network. This panel seeks
to understand the dynamics of Chinese ethnic connection in relation
to globalization through Chinese transnational cinemas. Combining
ethnic allegiances with transnational industrial collaboration,
a number of Chinese language films not only frequent!
ed international film festivals but also won the hearts of audience
worldwide in the last two decades. These films reflected and also
generated changes on the front of global Chinese networks. The panel
welcomes film analysis from different regions of the ethnic network,
in different angles (the film text, the film production and reception,
the auteur, the actors, etc.), and with diverse theoretic frames.
Ultimately, by centering on transnational Chinese cinemas, the panel
aims to contribute to the general understanding of ethnic networks
in the age of globalization.
Please send 200-word abstracts to Li Yang at lucyyang@mail.utexas.edu
Chair:
Elizabeth Richmond-Garza
University of Texas at Austin
e.m.Richmond-garza@mail.utexas.edu
Organizer/Panelist:
Li Yang
University of Texas at Austin
lucyyang@mail.utexas.edu
1300 S. Pleasant Valley Rd. #244
Austin, TX 78741
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