2011 CFP: Transnational Literatures

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American: “Pan-American Immigration Narratives”

British and Anglophone: “Creativity and Imagination at the Fin De Siècle (1870-1910)”; “Neomedievalism”; “New Old Stories: Reinventing African Narratives in Black British Fiction”; “Transnational Ireland: The Celtic Tiger and Beyond”

Comparative Languages: “Unreliability as a Narrative Trope in Postcolonial Literature”

Cultural Studies and Film: “Concepts of Identity in Post-colonial African Culture”; “New Media and the Asian Diaspora”; “Reading the Postcolonial Other in Contemporary Film”; “Reshaping the Italian American Identity”

German: “Hybrid Identities: Second Generation Immigrants (Austria, Germany, Switzerland)”; “Images of Eastern Europe in Recent German Literature and Film”; “‘Nationalism-with-a-big-N’ in German Historical Fiction of the Long 19th-Century”; “Rafik Schami - The Poet and Storyteller”; “Transnational Genres in 18th Century German Literature”; “Writing Surveillance: Transcultural Perspectives”

Italian: “Charting the Circulation of Italian Culture, 1660-1800”; “Is There an Italian-American Novel?”; “Italian and Anglo-American Literature: A Dialogue through Translation”

Spanish/Portuguese: “Displaced Communities”; “Giving Testimony to Transnational Migrations: Gender and Witnessing in Hispanic”; “The Intellectual as a Public Figure in 20th Century Latin America”; “Issues on Ecology in Latin American Literature and Culture”; “Publics, Markets and the Early Fashioning of a Picaresque Genre”; “Reflections on Lusophone Literatures and Cultures”

Theory and Literary Criticism: “Questioning Hybridity-Discourse: Colonial Métissage, Postcolonialism, and Globa”

Women’s and Gender Studies: “Death, Dying and Dislocation: Transnational Grief Literature”; “Global Feminist Science/Speculative Fictions Advance Social Change”; “Representations of Gendered Transnational Identity in Contemporary Literature”

World Literatures (non-European Languages): “Contemporary Fiction from the Middle East”; “Growing Up in China: the Coming of Age in Chinese Literature”

The Art of Villainy: Machiavelli and the Creation of the Fictional Villain
This panel will explore Machiavelli’s impact on villains from the early modern period to today, from Iago and Milton’s Satan to Lex Luthor, Voldemort and Tony Soprano. Machiavelli may have inspired these writers, but how have their own cultural backgrounds and historical contexts shaped their depiction of his ideas? This panel hopes to gain a better understanding of how our view of Machiavelli and our view of villainy have changed over the years. Please submit 250-300 word abstracts (MSWord) to Jackie Cameron at jackiec159@hotmail.com.
Bohemiens, Tsiganes, Gitanos, Roma: Representing the Margins
This panel seeks to assess the representation of the Roma in European literature, film or music from the middle ages to the present. The central issue to be addressed is the problem of representing a culture in light of the culture’s resistance to representation. Please email 250-500 word abstracts to Thomas Kealy, Colby-Sawyer College, tkealy@colby-sawyer.edu.
Canada and the African Diasporic Literary Imaginary
This panel invites scholars to investigate the presence of Canada in an African Diasporic literary imaginary, focusing on writers who examine black subjects and subjectivities within Canadian landscapes (both urban and rural), but also attending to representations of African Canadians and the idea of Canada in literature from across the diaspora. Please send 300-500 word abstracts and brief biographical statements to Kristin Moriah at kmoriah@gc.cuny.edu.
Censored Literature (Roundtable)
Teaching literature censored by governments or self-censored means engaging with social. religious, political and sexual taboos dialectically related to the courage of writers. This panel will explore pedagogical methods appropriate for this topic, with the objective of exploring the secrets of other cultures and discovering our own biases. These methods could include close textual analysis, role-playing, blogging and mock trials. Please send proposals to Julia Keefer, jk12@nyu.edu.
Central European Authors
This panel seeks to analyze whether or not writers from Central European nations have been allowed to have a national literary identity. Papers that discuss minority literature, transnational literature, or textual politics would be ideal, although papers on individual Central European authors such as Franz Kafka, Milan Kundera, Bohumil Hrabal and Robert Musil would also be considered. Abstracts can be submitted to emhall47@gmail.com
Complicated Space: Reading the Transnational Text (Roundtable)
This roundtable attempts to define transnational as a literary term, using diverse examples of transnational literary texts from across the world. Contributors are invited to propose specific readings of the literary meanings and opportunities associated with the transnational in particular places across the globe. We hope to foster a lively dialogue which extends awareness of the range of human experience and cultural identities represented in transnational texts. Send submissions to Elaine Savory, New School University, savorye@newschool.edu.
Contemporary Nordic Literature
This panel seeks papers on developments in Nordic Literature over the last 20 years, including works by authors, film directors and playwrights from Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, Finland, as well as the Faroe Islands and Greenland. Topics might address national identity, cultural sovereignty and integration into the European Union, or focus on individuals such as Stieg Larrson, Peter Høeg, Lars Von Trier, Aki Kaurismäki, Signa Sørensen and others. Please send 300-500 word abstracts and brief bios to Jeff Johnson. johnsonj@brevardcc.edu.
Global Magical Realisms and Speculative Fiction
Recent global fiction has pushed the boundaries of realism and magical realism with a variety of fantastic and speculative devices. This panel is interested in expanding the range of cultural interpretations across the spectrum of magical realism and speculative fiction. Why is it important to distinguish among terms such as fantasy, myth, spirituality, and magic? In what ways do cultural and literary traditions shape the writers’ imagination? Please submit 250-500 word abstract to Anita Duneer at aduneer@ric.edu.
Globalization and the Americas: Challenging Categories of Literary Production
Patrick Chamoiseau’s notion of the Territory Créolité connects the Americas and the Atlantic world through an examination of the creoleness of the Caribbean. Our conversation will begin with this notion as an example of engaging the local as an act of resistance. Those texts that demonstrate both an awareness of local cosmologies and an informed sense of place and connectedness across categories of language, culture, and our sense of being in the world are of particular interest. (please submit paper proposals to: rio@buffalo.edu)
Intersections of language and culture: Sprachgemisch, métissage & code-switching
Using more than one language in a given text has a long tradition, from medieval religious spectacles to present-day pop culture, from “The Name of the Rose” to contemporary bilingual novels and plays. The panel invites contributions that focus on the significance of language change in spoken and written texts (novels, poetry, song lyrics, theater etc.) and examine the function of code-switching in the context of intersections of language and culture. Send proposals of 250 words, CV, and academic affiliation to Susanne Even (evens@indiana.edu).
Journeys of the Bicultural Self: Narrative Geographies from the Middle East (Roundtable)
This roundtable seeks scholars who want to discuss the works of Middle Eastern authors from Turkey, Israel, Algeria, Iran, Egypt and other regions who write in English in order to generate new insights about the journeys of the bicultural self within a geographic narrative. What kinds of narratives emerge? Is there a transcendence of Eurocentric negations? Is the author historically located in his/her culture? Please send 300-500 word abstracts and brief biographical statements (via email) to Dr. Nilgun Anadolu-Okur nilgun.okur@gmail.com
The Legacy of Scandinavian Drama
Board-Sponsored. This session invites abstracts on the influence of Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg, while welcoming examinations of work by other Scandinavian playwrights. Send brief abstracts and cv to Barbara Mabee, Oakland University, mabee@oakland.edu with ‘Scandinavian Drama’ in subject line.
Memory of Borders, Borders of Memory: Life Writing at a Distance
This panel invites papers on “Life Writing at a Distance,” broadly defining both life writing and “distance” as spatial/geographical or temporal remove: Topobiography; eco-biography; heroic memoirs; missionary and spiritual autobiography; letters and epistolary life narratives; life narrative of/in place; biography, memoir and autobiography in exile; expatriate memoirs; life narratives in travel and tourism; ethnoautobiography; migrant memoir and testimony. Please submit to Mary Goodwin, National Taiwan Normal University, profgood@hotmail.com.
Modernism, Modernity, and Politics: Face-off or Interface?
This panel will engage the relationship between literary modernism, literary modernity, and politics in fiction from a transnational perspective. Is there a face-off with politics/politicized art in Anglo-American modernist fiction or an interface elided by critics? Does a hiatus exist between British and US modernists in this regard? How do non-western modern writers in colonial contexts negotiate western literary modernism and the politicized fictional discourses that mark modernity? Please send 250 word abstracts to smukherj@fas.harvard.edu
Music Contingencies in Narrated Americas.
When we talk about literature and music, are we also thinking about the social and political arena? This panel seeks papers on the intersection between music and narrative works considering how aesthetic experiences informed other discourses. The focus will be on Latin America but comparative submissions with the US are welcomed. Please, submit your 250-500 word abstract (Spanish, Portuguese or English) and a brief biographical statement to Enea Zaramella, ezaramel@princeton.edu.
Narrated Objects: Literature and Material Culture in the Americas
This panel will address the relationship between literature and materiality in the Latin American cultural production of the 19th and 20th centuries. The topics of the panel include, but are not limited to: subject/object relationship; commodity fetishism; materiality and visuality; forms, surfaces, and their boundaries; the text as an object; thing theory. Please send 300-500 word abstracts and brief biographical statements (English or Spanish) to Laura Gandolfi, Princeton University <gandolfi@princeton.edu>
‘Only the Difficult Stimulates’: The Interplay of Opacities in Caribbean Lit
Taking its conceptual point of departure from an aphorism by Cuban poet José Lezama Lima, this panel proposes to explore some recent theoretical/creative directions in Caribbean literature that radically challenge and unsettle easy assimilation and consumption by the metropole by insisting on their opacity (which Edouard Glissant has claimed as a right of all peoples). Please send all paper abstracts to Christopher Winks, Department of Comparative Literature, Queens College/CUNY, christopher.winks@qc.cuny.edu.
Post/Colonial Nostalgia in South Asian Literature
The panel examines how South Asian authors, residing in the Indian subcontinent and / or in the diaspora, writing in the late 19th-21st century in Anglophone or regional languages, grappled with the post/colonial legacy of past empires, and how they made sense of present-day dilemmas in light of those legacies. How did early authors, writing in the late 19th-early 20th century, envision their colonial pasts, and did their nostalgia differ from the nostalgia articulated by subsequent authors? Send proposals to Suha Kudsieh (kudsieh@gmail.com)
Theorizing Mobility in Transnational Literature
Increased movement of populations, information, and capital in the era of globalization has produced an emphasis in literary studies on the migrant, the cosmopolitan, and the exile, but little focus on practices of mobility. This panel will address treatments of mobility in transnational literature. Topics include, but are not limited to, migration, border crossing, cosmopolitanism, planetarity, and wanderlust. Please send 250-500 word abstracts to Penny Vlagopoulos, pigi.vlagopoulos@tamiu.edu, and Nicole Rizzuto, nicole.rizzuto@okstate.edu.
Traditional and Modern Medicine in Caribbean Literature
This panel will address the representation of healing and medical practices in Caribbean literature, both in the region and diasporas. Texts may include fiction, poetry, drama, memoir and autobiography, and may be written in English, French, Spanish, Dutch or any of the Creole languages of the Caribbean. Please send submission to Elaine Savory, New School University, savorye@newschool.edu.
What is ‘World Literature’?
In recent years, questions have been raised about ‘world literature.’ Yet, what is meant by the term is still in the making. This is an exploration into literary study that challenges problems posed by translation,linguistic imperialism and nationalism at the same time it attempts to map literary contact across the globe. Deepika Marya <deepikamarya@aol.com>
World Literature/Global Empathy
This panel invites papers that seek to understand the ways in which imaginative literature, in Jeremy Rifkin’s words, “allows empathic consciousness to grow and develop.” If literature is a vehicle for extending empathy and expanding human consciousness, how does reading literature from around the globe contribute to a “biosphere consciousness” (Rifkin), the belief that “each human being has responsibilities to every other” (Appiah)? Papers from a variety of perspectives are welcome. Benjamin Carson benjamin.carson@gmail.com
Zero World Literature: The Writing of the Outside
This panel envisions the possibility of a “zero-world” literature, i.e. one that extends beyond historical, political, and even cultural matrices. Thus, we pursue a de-territorialized imagination which constructs the experience of the radical elsewhere (exile, estrangement, border-hopping). Theorizing a zero-world literature will necessitate a captivating affective universe of dislocation, forgetting, transformation and outsider consciousness. Please submit a 200-300 word abstract to Jason Mohaghegh at jbm36@columbia.edu for consideration.