Kategorie: Aktuelles

Two Panel Call For Papers at the Irish Association for American Studies/British Association of American Studies Conference at Queen’s University, Belfast, 7-9 April 2016

Scholarship on the Mexican-American border has dominated the field of border studies for the past forty years, from the publication of Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera in 1987 to the present. Yet the forty-ninth parallel remains an under-examined yet critical divide, separating Indigenous tribes and cultivating distinct colonial and neo-colonial histories in both Canada and the United States. Richard Ford’s most recent novel, Canada, examines the complex relationship of America to its northern neighbour, focusing on how one young white boy remakes his identity once he has crossed the 49th parallel, albeit with relative ease. While the novel portrays the Prairies and later Central Canada, looking specifically at the Windsor-Detroit border, Ford offers a distinctly American vision of Canada. Using the theme of border-crossings and revolutions (and recalling that during the American Revolution, many British Loyalists fled northward to what was to become British North America), the organizers are interested in papers that consider the relevance of the Canada-US border from an American Studies perspective.

Topics may include but are not limited to:

• border security and surveillance
• innovative approaches to border theory and the concept of hemispheric studies   (typically dominated by the United States)
• American exceptionalism and the border
• space/place and the 49th parallel
• que(e)rying the border
• borders and regions
• revolutionary borders
• Indigenzing the border
• border claims after the human rights revolution
• trauma, testimony, and geopolitical reconciliation
• cultural memory and the revolutionary moment
• how the revolutionary spirit is maintained
• mobilizing (counter)revolutionary affects across borders

Please send abstract (250 words maximum) and a brief (2-3 sentence) scholarly biography by September 15th, 2015 to Jennifer Andrews and Richard Cole.

Conference and Call for Papers:
Third Bremen Conference on Language and Literature in Colonial and Postcolonial Contexts:
„Postcolonial Knowledges“
University of Bremen, March 15-18, 2016

Organizers: Prof. Dr. Kerstin Knopf, Prof. Dr. Eeva Sippola

This interdisciplinary conference brings together scholars of different academic backgrounds to explore how knowledge systems, cultures, languages, and literary traditions have been affected by colonial and postcolonial conditions that are increasingly marked by contradictions, cultural heterogeneity, and transcultural processes. We are interested in the ways in which colonial and postcolonial constellations have been reflected, shaped, and negotiated by communication, symbolic practice, and knowledge practices.

We will look critically at ongoing knowledge production and Eurocentric ‘intellectual dominance’ (Emeagwali 2003) in knowledge centers and discourses around the world. We aim to crystallize decolonial strategies to challenge neocolonial tendencies in institutions of knowledge production and to probe the possibilities of integrating postcolonial knowledges into present knowledge discourses. Many collaborations and attempts to interlink Eurocentric and non-Eurocentric knowledge systems are already taking place, and scholars around the globe are producing alternative postcolonial visions of reality and the world that are embedded in non-European lives, ontologies, and philosophies (e.g. Armstrong 2009; Atleo 2009, 2011; Dogbe 2006; Garcés V 2012; Moctar Ba 2013).

To address these issues, this conference focuses on themes related to the marginalization and displacement of local knowledge systems and the endangerment of languages as well as on epistemological and language ideologies in colonial and postcolonial settings.

We welcome contributions from linguistics, cultural studies, literature and film studies, anthropology, history, political science, sociology, and other disciplines.

Further information on the Conference and the Call for Papers can be found here.