“Alter-geographies” conference flyer

“Alter-geographies” call for papers

UCLA Department of Comparative Literature 2014 Annual Graduate Conference

“Alter-geographies”

Friday and Saturday, February 21 and 22, 2014

Royce Hall 306

Poet Mahmoud Darwish observed that “the geographical part of History is stronger than the historical part of geography.” We ignore space at our peril. The 2014 UCLA Comparative Literature Graduate Conference seeks to critically engage a wide range of regional and literary interests, traditions, and disciplinary methods both classical and modern, around the theme of geography.

To speak generally, the universal struggle over space—its resources, people and capital—has made the last three centuries of colonialism, slavery, and capitalism intelligible as a world history. Alter-geographies seeks to explore both old and contemporary notions of space, decolonization, and resistance that try to newly account for, question, or destabilize hegemonic epistemologies of global economic structures and political formations. How can narrative, literature, film, and other media provide critical imaginaries of past, present, and future geographies—economic, political, and cultural? How do technologies of global capitalism effect the production of knowledge and its cultural practices?

We invite graduate students to submit abstracts between 250 and 350 words that engage with these and related issues from a broad range of approaches and theoretical lines of inquiry, through literary analysis, political theory, critical theory and philosophy, area studies, theatre and performance studies, anthropology, geography, history, and others. Papers may address, but are by no means limited to, the following themes:

-practices of cartography; imperialism; geographic imaginaries both dominative and subaltern;

-travel narratives, translation studies, borders and transmissions (of cultures, ideologies, civic institutions, violence, etc)

-world-systems, south-south relations, national and pan-ethnic movements, Marxism, internationalism, Third Worldism, etc;

-emergent geographies and cultures of contemporary surveillance networks, cloud technologies, and archival media and practices

– uprisings and global transformations of state and capital, from Brazil to Greece, Turkey and Spain,  indigenous resistance campaigns to the global Occupy movements, and other locales

– Arab insurrections and its literatures; mapping identities and geographic imaginaries of revolution, minorities, violence, and sovereignty

-the institutional currency of national and world literatures, multiculturalism, and postcolonial studies as fields of study and knowledge

-the place of culture, aesthetics, and the humanities within ontologies of local and global geographies; the role of humanism in the age of perpetual war and the neoliberal university.

please send all submissions to: ucla.complit.conf@gmail.com by January 1, 2014