The Department of French and Fransophone Studies at Northwestern University has a call for papers for the international graduate student symposium in the literary and visual arts on May 1st and 2nd, 2014. This conference seeks to investigate this transnational moment, providing theoretical elements for different approaches to literature, film, and the visual arts. Papers will be accepted in either English or French. Deadline is December 20.
The symposium's keynote speaker will be Françoise Lionnet (Professor of French and Comparative Literature, University of California, Los Angeles)
The prospect of the "transnational turn" that has been proclaimed in much recent scholarship across the humanities presents an opportunity to trouble the artistic and critical frames that have shaped (post)modern aesthetics, particularly those of the nation-state. This development comes on the heels of the creation of positions dedicated to arts and literatures beyond traditional nation-based fields in the humanities departments of American universities. As a result, new objects of study emerge, such as works which engage with borderlands and crossroads, or groupings of authors who share the use of formerly "national" languages. Similarly, artistic practices have elicited and reflected such changes.
This conference seeks to investigate this transnational moment, providing theoretical elements for different approaches to literature, film, and the visual arts. What makes the transnational? Is this transnationalism an artistic practice, an academic methodology, or a political strategy? Is it an ideal model or a mode of resistance? Is it a "third way" between diversity and difference, between identity and essentialism? What is a "transnational move" in artistic production or academic criticism and how might its implied relationship to other categories (national, international, multinational, supranational) be problematized? How do transnational theories rethink the intersections of aesthetics and politics? How do new media and internet culture relate to (trans)national spaces? How does transnationalism overlap with the concept of creolization?
Suggested topics for exploration include, but are not limited to:
1.transnational subjectivities (migrants, students, outsiders, border agents, cosmopolitans)
2. imaginary geographies and political territories
3. community / communitarian: a "rise in communitarianism"?
4. languages between the local, national, and global
5. transnational creation and reception: mobile artists and audiences, in diaspora and exile
This event is co-sponsored by the French & Italian department, Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities and the French Interdisciplinary Group.
