postmoderncriticCFP Mash #1
May 11th 2007 11:50
Introduction to the Text:
What I've done here is strip each interesting-looking CFP sent to me of it's non-questions, and placed them one after another with the titles separating (so that if you like one stream of questions you can trace it back and offer your services). Enjoy!
- Epiphanie
Is the Area Studies term obsolete? Is it possible that many contemporary writers in India have more in common with their postcolonial peers in Kenya, South Africa or England than with those in Pakistan, Bangladesh or Sri Lanka? Do postcolonial writers imagine "South Asia" as a viable construct with the same degree of intellectual focus and creative energy as applied to particular national contexts? One could argue that the value of the term "South Asia" seems to be closely tied to diasporic writing and the recent spurt in such cultural artifacts as movies that have achieved success around the world in recent years. To what extent might "South Asian culture" be a product of diasporic consciousness?
* Imagining South Asia (3/31/07; journal issue)
How have the literatures of South Asia dealt with various issues of social justice that political activists and social reformers (both during and after the period of colonial rule) have been known to engage with? How do South Asian aesthetic practices engage with questions of the just, and the morally justifiable, whether it be in terms of affirming or contesting existing regimes of truth and reason? As a region of historically altering hegemonies and various kinds of coexisting pluralities (linguistic, religious, ethnic, etc.) how have South Asians sought to bring the just and the beautiful in accord? What sorts of ideologies of progress and change, or of anxious return to indigenous tradition, have fostered what kinds of narratives of affect in literature primarily but also in cinema, theatre and other popular forms?
* Social Justice in South Asian Cultural Practices (7/15/07; SALA, 12/26/07-12/27/07)
Ethnic Studies-Is it postcolonial?
* Division on Ethnic Studies in Language and Literature
Call for Papers 2007 MLA
In what ways has leisure participated in shaping knowledge?
* Leisure and the Making of Knowledge in 18th-century Europe (Germany) (3/16/07; 10/31/07-11/2/07)
In what ways does male beauty inform, shape, define and redefine our definition of masculinity itself? What does the concept of male beauty do to gender?
* Male Beauty (4/15/07; collection)
[The following is not composed of questions but I thought it had plenty to contribute anyway.]
"The Accident is not an exception or a sickness of our apolitical regimes; nor it is a correctable defect of our civilization: it is the natural consequence of our science, our politics, and our morality."
-- Octavio Paz, Conjunctions and Disjunctions.
Our lives are filled with accidents, from the mundanity of spilled milk and a slip of the tongue, to large-scale, mediated and mediatized accidents; here we sit, glued to the screens, as increasing numbers of unruly cyclones smash into tropical coasts, as Black-Hawk helicopters fall out of Iraqi and Afghani skies, as friendly-fire death reports issue from the war-zones of the Middle-East, as narcotized teenagers suicide on the side-effects of their over-prescribed anti-depressants. Representations of the accident span the highs and lows of culture; there is a popular culture of the accident and the disaster -¬ remember when The Coast was Toast!? -¬ and an avant-garde culture of chance and aleatoric production. There is a discourse and an aesthetic of the accident, a mode of concerned and shocked reportage and a standard plot-line by which to invite the accident in, to excite, abreact and entertain. Accidents are events, and they produce events, they are constituted within spectacular milieux.
Accidents are generally understood to happen by chance. They are seen as the mark of a failure to maintain control of an environment, or as the unexpected outcome of "natural" environmental occurrences. But perhaps accidents can be seen in another way, as productive, in the sense that seemingly incongruous things and events coincide or collide and together create possibilities and release potentials. Or maybe, as Octavio Paz suggests, they're not accidents at all! In a world that is increasingly reliant on technological means of knowing and doing, accidents come thick and fast, and the accidentality of the accident is brought soundly into question.
* Transformations Issue 14 (3/13/07; online journal issue)
The Department of English at the University of Ottawa is holding a symposium to discuss the past, present, and future of 'the postmodern' in Canadian writing and criticism. In using the term 'postmodern' today, twenty years after the publication of Linda Hutcheon's The Canadian Postmodern, are we referring to a phase of Canadian literary production that is now past, and whose history can begin to be written? To what extent-if at all-does the term 'postmodern' remain useful for an understanding of contemporary Canadian cultural production? Historically, how has the term (and its various cognates and permutations) been used to theorize the field of Canadian literature and/or particular texts? To what degree has 'the postmodern' and its associated forms and tropes ('ex-centricity', 'historiographic metafiction', parody, irony, self-reflexivity, pastiche, 'textualism', etc.) co-opted and/or suppressed alternative ways of understanding the works that have fallen under its rubric? What is at stake in the recuperation of some of these alternatives? If, following Fredric
Jameson, the postmodern may be understood to designate, not a set of discursive tropes or literary styles, but the dominant cultural logic of multinational capitalism in a borderless global market, to what extent have 'Canadian' and 'postmodern' always been fundamentally at odds? In other words, does the postmodern entail the erosion of 'the national' as a category for thinking about 'our' literature 'here', and do 'we' care?
* CFP: Reading the Postmodern (Canadian Literature) (8/31/07; 5/9/08-5/11/08)
Of what critical importance is Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy to our ability to think ecologically or to address environmental catastrophe effectively? What do Deleuze and Guattari mean when they write that "philosophy . . . turns its back against itself so as to summon forth a new earth, a new people"? How does philosophy foresee a time when the
earth "passes into the pure plane of immanence of a Being-thought, of a Nature-thought"? Does "Nature-thought" enter philosophy only when philosophy thinks geographically, that is, in terms of geography's real (versus history's transcendental) territoriality? How do the emerging concepts as "geophilosophy," and Guattari's "three ecologies," mesh with such long-evolving Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts as "rhizome," "becoming," "territory," "haecceity," "plane of immanence," "chaos," "nomadology," etc? Does this mιlange of concepts create an "Ecology-thought," thought that might itself be regarded as adaptive, as creative evolution immanent to (an earth-based) philosophy?
Moreover, if philosophy must escape the exhausted national and historical traditions of French and German philosophy and become refreshingly earth-based, it will have to call on art, or transform itself artistically. How, then, does recent nature writing of an expressly
"bioregional" nature (as opposed to a national literature) help philosophy to "summon forth a new earth"?
On a more pragmatic note, what environmental ethics might we derive from Deleuze and Guattari's ecophilosophy? E.g.: How might the concept of "becoming-animal" effectively challenge the idea of animal rights? How might the concept of deterritorialization effectively
challenge the idea of wilderness conservation and/or land reclamation? How might the concept of nomadology effectively mobilize and advance aboriginal land-claim strategy? What, if any, critical case studies of environmental disaster and recovery have put Deleuze and Guattari's eco-thinking to use, and how?
* Rhizomes 15: Deleuze and Guattari's Ecophilosophy (9/15/07; journal issue)
How does this communal ownership influence the study of texts? Is there a privileged hierarchy in this community, in which the initial creator has primacy or authority? Can (or should) this privilege be eroded? How does the definition of text shift as a result? In our era
of interactivity, can a book or an idea or a society, fictional or not, ever conclude? How is the manner in which we build and experience fictional worlds changing the non-fictional world?
* Creative Communities: The Interactive Actualization of Utopian Worlds (4/10/07; Society for Utopian Studies, 10/4/07-10/7/07)
In his book Containment Culture, Alan Nadel explores the relationship of American postmodernism and the pervasive cultural force of Cold War containment narratives. While the trope of containment continues to proliferate in contemporary culture, this panel seeks to explore containment in all of its various historical epochs and cultural manifestations. Some
topics to consider:
Imprisonment (kidnapping, detainment, camps, etc.)
Social Institutions (schools, hospitals, monasteries, etc.)
Identity categories (race, gender, sexual orientation, etc.)
Bodies (corpses, books, the body, etc.)
Virtual containers (firewalls, social networks such as MySpace, etc.)
Genres (categories, forms,etc.)
Death (cemeteries, morgues, urns, sequestration of living and dying, etc.)
Sites of Preservation (museums, memorials, etc.)
Artistic Frames (the picturesque, film, book binding, genres, etc.)
Waste (nuclear fall out, sewage, etc.)
Diseases (contagions, viruses, etc.)
Law (policies, mail, national borders etc.)
Spatial containers (consumer spaces, geographic spaces, ghettos, etc.)
* Cultural Containers / Containment Culture (grad) (4/15/07; SAMLA, 11/9/07-11/11/07)
How do Germans writing around 1800 represent the experience of constructed space? How is the perception of architecture related to travel? What aesthetic aspirations do Goethe and his contemporaries associate with idealized buildings? How does Goethe help construct a
history of architectural styles? What is the relationship between Classicist aesthetics and German architectural histories written in the nineteenth century?
* Poetics of Architecture (3/15/07; MLA '07)
What are the languages of globalization? How new are they? How do they supplement or replace existing discourses of Marxism, post-colonialism, or postmodernism?
* Poetics of Globalisation (UK) (3/26/07; 5/2/07)
> If you'd like to follow up on any of the CFPs from which these questions have been extracted, please do search for them on the web.
What I've done here is strip each interesting-looking CFP sent to me of it's non-questions, and placed them one after another with the titles separating (so that if you like one stream of questions you can trace it back and offer your services). Enjoy!
- EpiphanieIs the Area Studies term obsolete? Is it possible that many contemporary writers in India have more in common with their postcolonial peers in Kenya, South Africa or England than with those in Pakistan, Bangladesh or Sri Lanka? Do postcolonial writers imagine "South Asia" as a viable construct with the same degree of intellectual focus and creative energy as applied to particular national contexts? One could argue that the value of the term "South Asia" seems to be closely tied to diasporic writing and the recent spurt in such cultural artifacts as movies that have achieved success around the world in recent years. To what extent might "South Asian culture" be a product of diasporic consciousness?
* Imagining South Asia (3/31/07; journal issue)
How have the literatures of South Asia dealt with various issues of social justice that political activists and social reformers (both during and after the period of colonial rule) have been known to engage with? How do South Asian aesthetic practices engage with questions of the just, and the morally justifiable, whether it be in terms of affirming or contesting existing regimes of truth and reason? As a region of historically altering hegemonies and various kinds of coexisting pluralities (linguistic, religious, ethnic, etc.) how have South Asians sought to bring the just and the beautiful in accord? What sorts of ideologies of progress and change, or of anxious return to indigenous tradition, have fostered what kinds of narratives of affect in literature primarily but also in cinema, theatre and other popular forms?
* Social Justice in South Asian Cultural Practices (7/15/07; SALA, 12/26/07-12/27/07)
Ethnic Studies-Is it postcolonial?
* Division on Ethnic Studies in Language and Literature
Call for Papers 2007 MLA
In what ways has leisure participated in shaping knowledge?
* Leisure and the Making of Knowledge in 18th-century Europe (Germany) (3/16/07; 10/31/07-11/2/07)
In what ways does male beauty inform, shape, define and redefine our definition of masculinity itself? What does the concept of male beauty do to gender?
* Male Beauty (4/15/07; collection)
[The following is not composed of questions but I thought it had plenty to contribute anyway.]
"The Accident is not an exception or a sickness of our apolitical regimes; nor it is a correctable defect of our civilization: it is the natural consequence of our science, our politics, and our morality."
-- Octavio Paz, Conjunctions and Disjunctions.
Our lives are filled with accidents, from the mundanity of spilled milk and a slip of the tongue, to large-scale, mediated and mediatized accidents; here we sit, glued to the screens, as increasing numbers of unruly cyclones smash into tropical coasts, as Black-Hawk helicopters fall out of Iraqi and Afghani skies, as friendly-fire death reports issue from the war-zones of the Middle-East, as narcotized teenagers suicide on the side-effects of their over-prescribed anti-depressants. Representations of the accident span the highs and lows of culture; there is a popular culture of the accident and the disaster -¬ remember when The Coast was Toast!? -¬ and an avant-garde culture of chance and aleatoric production. There is a discourse and an aesthetic of the accident, a mode of concerned and shocked reportage and a standard plot-line by which to invite the accident in, to excite, abreact and entertain. Accidents are events, and they produce events, they are constituted within spectacular milieux.
Accidents are generally understood to happen by chance. They are seen as the mark of a failure to maintain control of an environment, or as the unexpected outcome of "natural" environmental occurrences. But perhaps accidents can be seen in another way, as productive, in the sense that seemingly incongruous things and events coincide or collide and together create possibilities and release potentials. Or maybe, as Octavio Paz suggests, they're not accidents at all! In a world that is increasingly reliant on technological means of knowing and doing, accidents come thick and fast, and the accidentality of the accident is brought soundly into question.
* Transformations Issue 14 (3/13/07; online journal issue)
The Department of English at the University of Ottawa is holding a symposium to discuss the past, present, and future of 'the postmodern' in Canadian writing and criticism. In using the term 'postmodern' today, twenty years after the publication of Linda Hutcheon's The Canadian Postmodern, are we referring to a phase of Canadian literary production that is now past, and whose history can begin to be written? To what extent-if at all-does the term 'postmodern' remain useful for an understanding of contemporary Canadian cultural production? Historically, how has the term (and its various cognates and permutations) been used to theorize the field of Canadian literature and/or particular texts? To what degree has 'the postmodern' and its associated forms and tropes ('ex-centricity', 'historiographic metafiction', parody, irony, self-reflexivity, pastiche, 'textualism', etc.) co-opted and/or suppressed alternative ways of understanding the works that have fallen under its rubric? What is at stake in the recuperation of some of these alternatives? If, following Fredric
Jameson, the postmodern may be understood to designate, not a set of discursive tropes or literary styles, but the dominant cultural logic of multinational capitalism in a borderless global market, to what extent have 'Canadian' and 'postmodern' always been fundamentally at odds? In other words, does the postmodern entail the erosion of 'the national' as a category for thinking about 'our' literature 'here', and do 'we' care?
* CFP: Reading the Postmodern (Canadian Literature) (8/31/07; 5/9/08-5/11/08)
Of what critical importance is Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy to our ability to think ecologically or to address environmental catastrophe effectively? What do Deleuze and Guattari mean when they write that "philosophy . . . turns its back against itself so as to summon forth a new earth, a new people"? How does philosophy foresee a time when the
earth "passes into the pure plane of immanence of a Being-thought, of a Nature-thought"? Does "Nature-thought" enter philosophy only when philosophy thinks geographically, that is, in terms of geography's real (versus history's transcendental) territoriality? How do the emerging concepts as "geophilosophy," and Guattari's "three ecologies," mesh with such long-evolving Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts as "rhizome," "becoming," "territory," "haecceity," "plane of immanence," "chaos," "nomadology," etc? Does this mιlange of concepts create an "Ecology-thought," thought that might itself be regarded as adaptive, as creative evolution immanent to (an earth-based) philosophy?
Moreover, if philosophy must escape the exhausted national and historical traditions of French and German philosophy and become refreshingly earth-based, it will have to call on art, or transform itself artistically. How, then, does recent nature writing of an expressly
"bioregional" nature (as opposed to a national literature) help philosophy to "summon forth a new earth"?
On a more pragmatic note, what environmental ethics might we derive from Deleuze and Guattari's ecophilosophy? E.g.: How might the concept of "becoming-animal" effectively challenge the idea of animal rights? How might the concept of deterritorialization effectively
challenge the idea of wilderness conservation and/or land reclamation? How might the concept of nomadology effectively mobilize and advance aboriginal land-claim strategy? What, if any, critical case studies of environmental disaster and recovery have put Deleuze and Guattari's eco-thinking to use, and how?
* Rhizomes 15: Deleuze and Guattari's Ecophilosophy (9/15/07; journal issue)
How does this communal ownership influence the study of texts? Is there a privileged hierarchy in this community, in which the initial creator has primacy or authority? Can (or should) this privilege be eroded? How does the definition of text shift as a result? In our era
of interactivity, can a book or an idea or a society, fictional or not, ever conclude? How is the manner in which we build and experience fictional worlds changing the non-fictional world?
* Creative Communities: The Interactive Actualization of Utopian Worlds (4/10/07; Society for Utopian Studies, 10/4/07-10/7/07)
In his book Containment Culture, Alan Nadel explores the relationship of American postmodernism and the pervasive cultural force of Cold War containment narratives. While the trope of containment continues to proliferate in contemporary culture, this panel seeks to explore containment in all of its various historical epochs and cultural manifestations. Some
topics to consider:
Imprisonment (kidnapping, detainment, camps, etc.)
Social Institutions (schools, hospitals, monasteries, etc.)
Identity categories (race, gender, sexual orientation, etc.)
Bodies (corpses, books, the body, etc.)
Virtual containers (firewalls, social networks such as MySpace, etc.)
Genres (categories, forms,etc.)
Death (cemeteries, morgues, urns, sequestration of living and dying, etc.)
Sites of Preservation (museums, memorials, etc.)
Artistic Frames (the picturesque, film, book binding, genres, etc.)
Waste (nuclear fall out, sewage, etc.)
Diseases (contagions, viruses, etc.)
Law (policies, mail, national borders etc.)
Spatial containers (consumer spaces, geographic spaces, ghettos, etc.)
* Cultural Containers / Containment Culture (grad) (4/15/07; SAMLA, 11/9/07-11/11/07)
How do Germans writing around 1800 represent the experience of constructed space? How is the perception of architecture related to travel? What aesthetic aspirations do Goethe and his contemporaries associate with idealized buildings? How does Goethe help construct a
history of architectural styles? What is the relationship between Classicist aesthetics and German architectural histories written in the nineteenth century?
* Poetics of Architecture (3/15/07; MLA '07)
What are the languages of globalization? How new are they? How do they supplement or replace existing discourses of Marxism, post-colonialism, or postmodernism?
* Poetics of Globalisation (UK) (3/26/07; 5/2/07)
> If you'd like to follow up on any of the CFPs from which these questions have been extracted, please do search for them on the web.
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