postmoderncriticCFP Mash #9
May 25th 2007 04:08
How do individuals and groups deploy these categories in oppositional and definitional ways to intervene in and challenge borders?
> New Directions in Critical Theory: (Re)Locating Borders: Negotiating & Constructing Identities (1/15/07; 3/3/07-3/4/07)
Given the exciting and suggestive variety of critical definitions of regionalism and local color, how do we, how might we, how should we teach American regionalism and local color writing (or those texts that have be typically understood by those labels)?
> Teaching Regionalism and Local Color (1/22/07; ALA, 5/24/07-5/27/07)
What directions of thought, or degrees of evaluative judgment or surety, are right, right now, for the scholar of communications, cultural studies or related social scientific- and humanities-based disciplines?
• How do we deal ethically with our objects of study? Which path is "right" for
social analysts, critics and artists: That of the outside observer or active
participant? That of the objectivity of the scientific method or the subjective
passions of the ideologically-determined?
• How can we define the responsibilities of the contemporary academic or
artistic social critic? Are there tensions between what is “right” and what
these responsibilities might be?
• Should the classroom and lecture hall be politicized spaces? Or, as some
critics argue, should neutrality outweigh political ethos within the walls of
higher learning?
• Is it wrong to be uni-disciplinary in a predominately interdisciplinary
academic / artistic culture? Has the institutionalized interdisciplinary focus
failed to deliver on its promise?
• Can there be a contemporary political economy of communications without
cultural studies? Can there be a contemporary cultural studies without
political economy?
• What ethical questions arise from the commercialization of the academy?
• What is the role of academic ethics or analytic ethos in the debates around
international conflict and peace, especially in the polarized climate of the
"post 9/11" world?
• How do we negotiate the right of multiculturalism with the right of gender
equality, freedom of expression or freedom of religion in a time of widespread
cultural conflict?
• How does what is deemed as "right" get reflected by legislated rights? How do
(or how can) ethics become policy? How do we negotiate between "right" in an
ethical sense and "rights" as they're actually appealed to and invoked to
legitimize political agendas?
• How should we (or should we at all) make evaluative pronouncements of recent
technological advancements? Trends in art? Tastes in pop culture?
• Do emergent methodologies of creative research express an insufficiency with
traditional modes of intellectual / academic practice? What ethical
pronouncements underlie the move away from exclusively written scholarship?
• How, at the beginning of the 21st century, are we to position the previous
half-century’s postmodern project whilst laying the foundations for our own
contributions? Can or should questions of "rightness" even exist at all?
• Is Marxist or critical analysis the last available normative position?
> Intersections 2007 / Ethics and Ethoi of Critical Thought and Practice (grad) (1/12/07; 3/23/07-3/25/07)
How is identity defined? What are some ways to rethink Du Bois’ century-old idea of “double consciousness”? How do we know who we are? Are multiple identities restricted to, in Miller’s words, “people of color”? How are identities expressed? Is the concept of "identity"
outmoded?
> Intersecting Identities Colloquium (12/20/06; 2/15/07-2/16/07)
A) Theoretical Foundations of Coalition. If organizing is no longer forged on the basis of shared identity or “unity,” what serves as the “foundation” for political mobilization? What new forms of coalition, alliance, or issue-based organizing have emerged in the current political, economic, and cultural context? Can these convergences operate only temporarily or can they be more sustained? How can/must/do coalitions negotiate differences along the lines of gender, sexuality, nationality, religion, and class in articulating a shared platform? What productive alliances have been or can be forged between different marginalized groups? What makes these coalitions cohere? How do these projects (re)shape experiences of race and ethnicity?
B) The Multicultural Terrain of Organizing in the United States. With the rise of Asian/Pacific American and Latino/a social movements, how is the concept of “coalition” being rearticulated today? Does the “people of color” construct, expressing the common bonds of non-white groups, still make sense? What new challenges to coalition-building emerge in the context of the variable power relations of nations, economic operations,
and discourse that characterize the contemporary multiracial terrain of US organizing? What strategies can be mobilized to negotiate these differences? What roles are available to whites in multiracial coalitions and in coalitions for racial justice?
C) The Global Context. What challenges and possibilities do new communications and other technologies linking people across the globe offer for multiracial coalitions? How do the ties of nation, state, and culture complicate efforts to organize pan-ethnically? How can models of organizing around race throughout the world, or on behalf of racially identified groups and concerns, usefully inform organizing strategies in the US context, or vice versa? What is at stake and where are we headed?
> "Race and Coalition" Issue, Ethnoscapes: An Interdisciplinary Journal on Race and Ethnicity in the Global Context (2/16/07; journal issue)
How has London been represented in theatre and performance from the middle ages to the present day? What role has the physical fabric of theatres, theatre companies and their associated institutions played in the life of London? How has London's theatrical life figured in theatrical and non-theatrical writing - as something useful and instructive, or as something dangerous and corrupting? Is there a sense in which literary and other texts suggest that London is a site of performance or itself in some way a type of performance? What role have different theatrical traditions (including such 'marginal' ones as clowning, street theatre, pantomime) played in the life of London?
> Literary London 2007: Representations of London in Literature (UK) (2/28/07; 7/19/07-7/20/07)
We still struggle to place the material and discursive aspects of space in a more meaningful dialogue. How are we to put them together methodologically-speaking?
> Spatial Americas (1/22/07; 4/19/07-4/20/07)
What are the political, social and economic implications of such figures of hybridity? To what political uses can (or should) they be put? How does the history of these terms affect their deployment, or shore up their limits? Because these figures point to the intersectionality of analytic categories (class, race, gender) and to the meeting of cultures, languages, and histories, we are particularly interested in cross-disciplinary and intercultural approaches: how do these comparative figures test the boundaries of disciplinary fields and cultural or linguistic formations? Conversely, how do disciplines, languages or fields shape tropes of the in-between, or point to their limitations?
> Figures of the In-Between (grad) (12/31/06; 3/2/07-3/3/07)
Can there be a political community that would not be predicated on the production of identity and alterity? Is it possible to practice an identity politics that would function as a critique of sovereign power while at the same time insisting on sovereignty’s strongly egalitarian and democratic implications? What would it mean to think of such an identity politics as comparative? What understanding of theology is implicit in contemporary concepts of the political? Can theology still be articulated in opposition to secularism? Should secularism perhaps be understood in opposition to nationalism? What could be the benefits of a post-secular perspective?
> Enemies, Strangers, Neighbors, Friends (grad) (12/31/06; CCLS, 3/2/07-3/3/07)
Is translatability a conceptual infrastructure which remains in the face of a new and mathematicized lingua franca? Is it something else? What is at stake politically or ethically in a methodological shift away from translation? If such a shift leads from trans-lation to trans-figuration or trans-position, what are the implications of insisting on the prefix trans-? What could be the benefits of the prefixes inter- or cross-? How can we understand the residual force of the nation or the region in producing and regulating economic/political/cultural relations in the age of globalization?
> Economies of Translation (grad) (12/31/06; 3/2/07-3/3/07)
• Cultural influence in linguistic developments: How does this affect second language acquisition? What are the implications for anglophone, francophone, germanophone, hispanophone, Japanese, lusophone, russophone, and other speakers?
• Can one’s native culture influence his/her acquisition of a second language? How?
• Evolution in theoretical developments: romanticism to realism; modern (surrealism, existentialism, industrialism) to post-modern (post-colonialism; globalization; orientalism; post-industrialism); structuralism to post-structuralism; feminism to post-feminism; How are these theoretical developments defined in a text?
• Author interpretation of societal influences in a text (social, economic, scientific, political, etc)?
• How does one interpret various forms of the visual arts as a text? What is the relationship between literature, culture and other forms of art (architecture, film, painting, sculpture)? Is the adaptation of a literary text, such as a film adaptation, effected by the cultural context in which it is produced?
• How can one better understand gender relations (history vs. herstory) of a time by “reading” a text (that is listening to a musical score, looking at a sculpture, watching a film, reading a novel etc)?
> History as Text-Text as History (12/15/06; 2/23/07-2/24/07)
If outrage comes from "tasting an impotence of which being-named is the sign" (J.M. Coetzee) where can we go in a world where there is no escape from the naming by others?
> Giving and Taking Offence (Portugal) (4/15/07; 6/21/07-6/22/07)
In recent years, historians like Darlene Clark Hine have called for a more nuanced look at African American experiences with migration, highlighting issues such as gender and geography as important focus points. How have African-American writers responded to this call? What new types of concerns or themes emerge in contemporary representations of migration?
> Re-examining Migration (1/10/07; ALA, 5/24/07-5/27/07)
Marxist theory and criticism are saturated by a rhetoric of the historical: historical materialism, history as class conflict, the imperative to historicize. But what is the history of the future in Marxism? That is, how is the category of the future configured in various Marxisms? In what ways could an engagement with futurity, as a semantic, temporal, and material category, lead
beyond the notorious theory/practice impasse? How do we look beyond the material conditions of the present to find material horizons? Answers to such questions can be located in a host of fields spanning the humanities and the social sciences, and they can be informed by a variety of theoretical dimensions: Can one historicize the future? Can dialectics reveal horizons? Can totalized mappings of the present also grasp at the future? Do utopian projects lead the way?
> Moments of Futurity: From Present Conditions to Material(izing) Horizons (1/15/07; 3/29/07-3/31/07)
Many artists, writers and theorists have focused on various aspects of the phenomenon of displacement (exiles, refugees, immigrants, prisoners). Cultural examples range from the politically radical, e.g. Coetzee on internment camps as no-place, to the broadly socio-psychological e.g. Nuri Bilge Ceylan's films. How can we theorize from this a post-nationalist contemporary theory of space (the way Giorgio Agamben - after Foucault - does with the idea of the camp, bio-politics, the exception - Guantanamo, etc.)? How does large scale displacement change our conceptions of urban space (e.g. Mike Davis on third-world macro-cities) or of political power (e.g. Immanuel Wallerstein on the decline of U.S. power)?
> Space and Displacement (Turkey) (2/15/07; 4/21/07-4/22/07)
How does one say the unsayable? Can the realist novel, or any novel, reflect events that defy articulation? How do the silences prompted by such events affect the reading of historical literature? What kind of discursive modes of understanding are prompted by evasion and obscuring? How do the anti-discursive and extra-linguistic ramifications of power shape communicative acts? If silence itself a form of articulation who gets to say what?
> Saying the Unsayable: Examining Discursive Silence in American Literature (grad) (1/5/07; McGill, 3/10/07-3/11/07)
> New Directions in Critical Theory: (Re)Locating Borders: Negotiating & Constructing Identities (1/15/07; 3/3/07-3/4/07)
Given the exciting and suggestive variety of critical definitions of regionalism and local color, how do we, how might we, how should we teach American regionalism and local color writing (or those texts that have be typically understood by those labels)?
> Teaching Regionalism and Local Color (1/22/07; ALA, 5/24/07-5/27/07)
What directions of thought, or degrees of evaluative judgment or surety, are right, right now, for the scholar of communications, cultural studies or related social scientific- and humanities-based disciplines?
• How do we deal ethically with our objects of study? Which path is "right" for
social analysts, critics and artists: That of the outside observer or active
participant? That of the objectivity of the scientific method or the subjective
passions of the ideologically-determined?
• How can we define the responsibilities of the contemporary academic or
artistic social critic? Are there tensions between what is “right” and what
these responsibilities might be?
• Should the classroom and lecture hall be politicized spaces? Or, as some
critics argue, should neutrality outweigh political ethos within the walls of
higher learning?
• Is it wrong to be uni-disciplinary in a predominately interdisciplinary
academic / artistic culture? Has the institutionalized interdisciplinary focus
failed to deliver on its promise?
• Can there be a contemporary political economy of communications without
political economy?
• What ethical questions arise from the commercialization of the academy?
• What is the role of academic ethics or analytic ethos in the debates around
international conflict and peace, especially in the polarized climate of the
"post 9/11" world?
• How do we negotiate the right of multiculturalism with the right of gender
equality, freedom of expression or freedom of religion in a time of widespread
cultural conflict?
• How does what is deemed as "right" get reflected by legislated rights? How do
(or how can) ethics become policy? How do we negotiate between "right" in an
ethical sense and "rights" as they're actually appealed to and invoked to
legitimize political agendas?
• How should we (or should we at all) make evaluative pronouncements of recent
technological advancements? Trends in art? Tastes in pop culture?
• Do emergent methodologies of creative research express an insufficiency with
traditional modes of intellectual / academic practice? What ethical
pronouncements underlie the move away from exclusively written scholarship?
• How, at the beginning of the 21st century, are we to position the previous
half-century’s postmodern project whilst laying the foundations for our own
contributions? Can or should questions of "rightness" even exist at all?
• Is Marxist or critical analysis the last available normative position?
> Intersections 2007 / Ethics and Ethoi of Critical Thought and Practice (grad) (1/12/07; 3/23/07-3/25/07)
How is identity defined? What are some ways to rethink Du Bois’ century-old idea of “double consciousness”? How do we know who we are? Are multiple identities restricted to, in Miller’s words, “people of color”? How are identities expressed? Is the concept of "identity"
outmoded?
> Intersecting Identities Colloquium (12/20/06; 2/15/07-2/16/07)
A) Theoretical Foundations of Coalition. If organizing is no longer forged on the basis of shared identity or “unity,” what serves as the “foundation” for political mobilization? What new forms of coalition, alliance, or issue-based organizing have emerged in the current political, economic, and cultural context? Can these convergences operate only temporarily or can they be more sustained? How can/must/do coalitions negotiate differences along the lines of gender, sexuality, nationality, religion, and class in articulating a shared platform? What productive alliances have been or can be forged between different marginalized groups? What makes these coalitions cohere? How do these projects (re)shape experiences of race and ethnicity?
B) The Multicultural Terrain of Organizing in the United States. With the rise of Asian/Pacific American and Latino/a social movements, how is the concept of “coalition” being rearticulated today? Does the “people of color” construct, expressing the common bonds of non-white groups, still make sense? What new challenges to coalition-building emerge in the context of the variable power relations of nations, economic operations,
and discourse that characterize the contemporary multiracial terrain of US organizing? What strategies can be mobilized to negotiate these differences? What roles are available to whites in multiracial coalitions and in coalitions for racial justice?
C) The Global Context. What challenges and possibilities do new communications and other technologies linking people across the globe offer for multiracial coalitions? How do the ties of nation, state, and culture complicate efforts to organize pan-ethnically? How can models of organizing around race throughout the world, or on behalf of racially identified groups and concerns, usefully inform organizing strategies in the US context, or vice versa? What is at stake and where are we headed?
> "Race and Coalition" Issue, Ethnoscapes: An Interdisciplinary Journal on Race and Ethnicity in the Global Context (2/16/07; journal issue)
How has London been represented in theatre and performance from the middle ages to the present day? What role has the physical fabric of theatres, theatre companies and their associated institutions played in the life of London? How has London's theatrical life figured in theatrical and non-theatrical writing - as something useful and instructive, or as something dangerous and corrupting? Is there a sense in which literary and other texts suggest that London is a site of performance or itself in some way a type of performance? What role have different theatrical traditions (including such 'marginal' ones as clowning, street theatre, pantomime) played in the life of London?
> Literary London 2007: Representations of London in Literature (UK) (2/28/07; 7/19/07-7/20/07)
We still struggle to place the material and discursive aspects of space in a more meaningful dialogue. How are we to put them together methodologically-speaking?
> Spatial Americas (1/22/07; 4/19/07-4/20/07)
What are the political, social and economic implications of such figures of hybridity? To what political uses can (or should) they be put? How does the history of these terms affect their deployment, or shore up their limits? Because these figures point to the intersectionality of analytic categories (class, race, gender) and to the meeting of cultures, languages, and histories, we are particularly interested in cross-disciplinary and intercultural approaches: how do these comparative figures test the boundaries of disciplinary fields and cultural or linguistic formations? Conversely, how do disciplines, languages or fields shape tropes of the in-between, or point to their limitations?
> Figures of the In-Between (grad) (12/31/06; 3/2/07-3/3/07)
Can there be a political community that would not be predicated on the production of identity and alterity? Is it possible to practice an identity politics that would function as a critique of sovereign power while at the same time insisting on sovereignty’s strongly egalitarian and democratic implications? What would it mean to think of such an identity politics as comparative? What understanding of theology is implicit in contemporary concepts of the political? Can theology still be articulated in opposition to secularism? Should secularism perhaps be understood in opposition to nationalism? What could be the benefits of a post-secular perspective?
> Enemies, Strangers, Neighbors, Friends (grad) (12/31/06; CCLS, 3/2/07-3/3/07)
Is translatability a conceptual infrastructure which remains in the face of a new and mathematicized lingua franca? Is it something else? What is at stake politically or ethically in a methodological shift away from translation? If such a shift leads from trans-lation to trans-figuration or trans-position, what are the implications of insisting on the prefix trans-? What could be the benefits of the prefixes inter- or cross-? How can we understand the residual force of the nation or the region in producing and regulating economic/political/cultural relations in the age of globalization?
> Economies of Translation (grad) (12/31/06; 3/2/07-3/3/07)
• Cultural influence in linguistic developments: How does this affect second language acquisition? What are the implications for anglophone, francophone, germanophone, hispanophone, Japanese, lusophone, russophone, and other speakers?
• Can one’s native culture influence his/her acquisition of a second language? How?
• Evolution in theoretical developments: romanticism to realism; modern (surrealism, existentialism, industrialism) to post-modern (post-colonialism; globalization; orientalism; post-industrialism); structuralism to post-structuralism; feminism to post-feminism; How are these theoretical developments defined in a text?
• Author interpretation of societal influences in a text (social, economic, scientific, political, etc)?
• How does one interpret various forms of the visual arts as a text? What is the relationship between literature, culture and other forms of art (architecture, film, painting, sculpture)? Is the adaptation of a literary text, such as a film adaptation, effected by the cultural context in which it is produced?
• How can one better understand gender relations (history vs. herstory) of a time by “reading” a text (that is listening to a musical score, looking at a sculpture, watching a film, reading a novel etc)?
> History as Text-Text as History (12/15/06; 2/23/07-2/24/07)
If outrage comes from "tasting an impotence of which being-named is the sign" (J.M. Coetzee) where can we go in a world where there is no escape from the naming by others?
> Giving and Taking Offence (Portugal) (4/15/07; 6/21/07-6/22/07)
In recent years, historians like Darlene Clark Hine have called for a more nuanced look at African American experiences with migration, highlighting issues such as gender and geography as important focus points. How have African-American writers responded to this call? What new types of concerns or themes emerge in contemporary representations of migration?
> Re-examining Migration (1/10/07; ALA, 5/24/07-5/27/07)
Marxist theory and criticism are saturated by a rhetoric of the historical: historical materialism, history as class conflict, the imperative to historicize. But what is the history of the future in Marxism? That is, how is the category of the future configured in various Marxisms? In what ways could an engagement with futurity, as a semantic, temporal, and material category, lead
beyond the notorious theory/practice impasse? How do we look beyond the material conditions of the present to find material horizons? Answers to such questions can be located in a host of fields spanning the humanities and the social sciences, and they can be informed by a variety of theoretical dimensions: Can one historicize the future? Can dialectics reveal horizons? Can totalized mappings of the present also grasp at the future? Do utopian projects lead the way?
> Moments of Futurity: From Present Conditions to Material(izing) Horizons (1/15/07; 3/29/07-3/31/07)
Many artists, writers and theorists have focused on various aspects of the phenomenon of displacement (exiles, refugees, immigrants, prisoners). Cultural examples range from the politically radical, e.g. Coetzee on internment camps as no-place, to the broadly socio-psychological e.g. Nuri Bilge Ceylan's films. How can we theorize from this a post-nationalist contemporary theory of space (the way Giorgio Agamben - after Foucault - does with the idea of the camp, bio-politics, the exception - Guantanamo, etc.)? How does large scale displacement change our conceptions of urban space (e.g. Mike Davis on third-world macro-cities) or of political power (e.g. Immanuel Wallerstein on the decline of U.S. power)?
> Space and Displacement (Turkey) (2/15/07; 4/21/07-4/22/07)
How does one say the unsayable? Can the realist novel, or any novel, reflect events that defy articulation? How do the silences prompted by such events affect the reading of historical literature? What kind of discursive modes of understanding are prompted by evasion and obscuring? How do the anti-discursive and extra-linguistic ramifications of power shape communicative acts? If silence itself a form of articulation who gets to say what?
> Saying the Unsayable: Examining Discursive Silence in American Literature (grad) (1/5/07; McGill, 3/10/07-3/11/07)
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