Kategorie: Call for Papers

Centre for Comparative Literature, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON (Canada), March 3 – 4, 2017

From Hugh MacLennan’s Two Solitudes (1945) to La revue acadienne’s ironic suggestions of Chiac as a tool to „prendre ces deux solitudes-là pis en faire une seule solitude“ („Le Chiac est la solution“), the image of Canada as a country of two peoples or communities – English and French (or, more specifically, English and Québécois) – has become a commonplace. Recent scholarship has questioned the applicability of this image, as „the old epics of identity“ (Simon 2006, 8) are increasingly unable to represent the current multicultural and polyglot reality of Montreal and Toronto, historically the Francophone and Anglophone literary centres of Canada. In fact, Catherine Leclerc (2010) has argued, the two languages interact, „cohabit“ much of contemporary Canadian literature and occasionally blend to the extent that the very notion of a „primary“ language for a given text begins to blur. As the model of „Two [geographically specific] Solitudes“ begins to crumble, an equally dreary tension emerges, this time between the image of Canada as an officially bilingual-bicultural state and the more progessive ideal of Canada as a „varied, rich cultural mosaic“ („Canada’s Enthnocultural Portrait: The Changing Mosaic“). One could read this as a step towards greater diversity, and away from nationalism tout court, or simply as a reiteration of the Canadian n ational narrative, now a fortress rendered even more impenetrable by virute of its seemingly open gates and attractive welcome mat.

E.D. Blodgett’s article „Canadian Literature Is Comparative Literature“ (1988) notes that while Canada is home to a diverse range of literature – English and French, but also other, less grequently studied settler literatures (German, Icelandic, Ukranian, Gaelic et al.), as well as a wide range of Indigenous literatures – there are few scholars who „compare the Canadian literatures,“ and that most of these focus on only one point of comparison, namely „the relationship between the anglophone and francophone literatures of Canada, Comparative Canadian Literautre in the official sense“ (905). In light of the 150th anniversary of Canadian Confederation, the organizing committee invites contributions exploring Canada – or Canadas – in all the term’s varied meanings.

A few questions to consider:

• How might we bridge the gap between the „Two Solitudes“ of Canadian literature? In what ways does translation between the two official languages, as well as other languages, contribute (or not) to bridging this gap and other cultural and linguistic gaps in Canada?
• How can the language of multiculturalism/interculturalism/hybridity inform Canadian scholarship? What critiques or complications of this frame emerge in Canadian contexts?
• How do diasporic or minority literatures fit into the broader field of „Canadian literature“? How does the presence of these other traditions (Indigenous, Black, queer, immigrant, et al.) complicate our understanding of „Canada“ and „Canadian literature“?
• How do settler and immigrant literatures in Canada relate to their parent literary traditions (e.g. Chinese Canadian literature to Chinese literature(s) in Asia)?
• What is the significance of environmental themes, ecological criticism, and the notion of landscape in Canadian literature(s)? How does „nature“ fit into these questions of language? How do these literatures figure the interplay between „nature“ and „indigeneity“?
• What is the place of other solitudes – literatures that do not fit (or do not fit easily) into the paradigm of „anglophone“ and „francophone“ literatures? What is there to be said of the East and West geopolitical divide, a reframing of Canadian solitudes?
• How might we centre Indigenous experiences and consider Canada as Kanata? What is the relationship between Indigenous literatures and communities and the culture(s) of settler colonialism in Canada? How do Indigenous literatures work with/against, inside/outside of „Canada“? The organizing committee especially welcomes submissions discussing works in Indigenous languages.
• Where and how do Canadian ltierary and cultural productions fit in an international context?
• How has Canadian critical and theoretical writing been received or applied, and how might it be applied, beyond Canada? The organizers welcome sumbissions working with Canadian theoretical work in classical, medieval, or early modern contexts.

Artistic sumbissions that explore these themes and discuss or problematise these or related questions are also welcomed.

The organizers invite joint proposals for panels/roundtables as well as proposals for individual talks. They also encourage proposals for alternative and creative presentations that include a description of length and format. Proposals should be a maximum of 150 words (this limit is for the purposes of funding applications for the conference) and may be accompanied by a longer description of around 250 words. Individual talks sould be approximalety 20 minutes in duration and altogether, panels/roundtables should not exceed 90 minutes. If you are participating in a roundtable, please be prepared to speak for no more than 10 minutes in order to facilitate discussion. The organizers also request that you include a biographical statement of no more than 50 words. Please submit your abstract by 11:59pm on October 14, 2016.

For submission, please visit the conference’s website.

Annual Meeting of the Canadian Historical Association, May 29 – 31, 2017, Ryerson University, Toronto, ON/Canada

The 150th anniversary of Confederation provides an opportunity to revisit the nation-building negotiations and agreements that shaped the Dominion of Canada, but more fundamentally it should cause us to reflect upon and reconsider the collective and the individual Canadian experience across time and place. “From Far and Wide: The Next 150” – the theme for Congress 2017 – not only recognizes the sesquicentennial moment, the theme’s first part issues a call to consider the diversity of experience, both nationally and internationally, while its second challenges us to consider where Canada and Canadian society is headed in the future. With this in mind, “From Far and Wide: The Next 150” can be adapted to historical purposes, encouraging us to explore the following broad issues:

From Far and Wide: National anniversaries often focus on a shared national experience, but what of the diverse Canadian experiences across the vast geographic expanse of Canada before, during, and after Confederation? What of the indigenous experiences, and how might we better recognize and include them in our understanding of Canadian society? What of experiences shaped by gender and sexual identity? How have they furthered and broadened our understanding of what it means to be Canadian? What of the immigrant experiences? How have those “from far and wide” challenged and augmented Canadian society and national identity? What is the place of counter-narratives within the national experience, such as those raised by protests, separation movements, or the recent Truth and Reconciliation Commission? What of the international sphere? How has Canada, and how have Canadians, exerted influence in “far and wide” locations across the globe? How have issues surrounding national naissance and development – belonging, citizenship, identity – been framed and contested beyond our borders?

The Next 150: What new insights can historians bring to the vision upon which the Dominion of Canada was founded? What new assessments can we provide about Canada’s territorial expansion to fulfill the vision of “From Sea to Sea”? What future did Canadians foresee for the nation in “the next 150” at the time of Confederation and at subsequent anniversary commemorations? How might we assess the merits of such forecasts? How have Canadians commemorated previous anniversaries of Confederation? And, at these celebratory moments, how did Canadians reflect on the nation’s present and its past? What roles have historians played in shaping the commemorative experience and the idea of the nation in general? What role should they play? How have other nations or peoples elsewhere in the Commonwealth or beyond crafted their commemorative experiences? How do these compare to the Canadian variants?

The Programme Committee for the Annual Meeting of the Canadian Historical Association invites proposals in English and in French from scholars working in any discipline, in any field, and in any era that address the conference theme. We also welcome proposals that do not specifically address the theme.

The Programme Committee invites individual paper and roundtable submissions, but strongly encourages the organization of panels aimed at generating engaging debate, submitted in one of the following two formats:

1. A panel submission of three papers for which the Programme Committee will appoint a commentator. For these panels, papers must be submitted to the commentator in advance of the conference in order that the commentator may provide substantive remarks as a part of the panel session.
2. A panel submission of four papers, for which the Programme Committee will appoint a facilitator.

Please submit a proposal of no more than 250 words and a one-page CV to this email address.

Deadline: Monday, October 17, 2016

Please note:
– The Programme Committee will accept only one paper proposal per individual.
– Presenters must be members of the Canadian Historical Association and must be able to attend the conference to present their paper in person.

Hosted by the Chair in Mennonite Studies and the Journal of Mennonite Studies, October 2017 (exact dates TBA)

This international, interdisciplinary conference will focus on personal narratives in the context of Mennonite writing in Canada, the United States, Russia and around the world. Participants are encouraged to explore the historical and literary significance of personal narratives – including biography, autobiography, diary and memoir – in relation to the conference’s theme of „place and displacement“.

In particular, the conference focuses on texts arising from: 1) dislocation resulting from war-driven and violent forced migration; 2) dislocation from familiar local space resulting from social and cultural upheaval in peacetime. Other ideas regarding dislocation are welcomed.

Questions to be considered:

• How have writers of Mennonite descent recorded their experiences of war and forced migration, or, alternatively, of resisting the assimilatory pressures of modern society?
• How have they imaginatively grappled with their local community’s place in „the world“?
• What role have personal narratives played in connecting, sustaining, or challenging Mennonite communities and institutions?
• What future spaces are opened by attending more closely to personal narratives within the context of Mennonite writing?

Please submit a 100 word proposal, complete with a short CV to either Royden Loewen or Robert Zacharias by November 1, 2016.

Workshop, May 22-25, 2017, various Oklahoma locations, USA

The organizers solicit papers for a National-Science-Foundation-funded, interdisciplinary workshop that explores the environmental history of the North American Great Plains from western Texas to southern Canada. Qualified papers from the workshop will be included in a volume edited by Kathleen A. Brosnan (University of Oklahoma) and Brian Frehner (University of Missouri, Kansas City) and published by the University of Oklahoma Press.

The organizers seek papers that collectively contribute to a redefinition of the region and its environmental history by exploring how technological adaptations, rather than disasters such as the Dust Bowl, have shaped the history of this environment and the people who inhabited it. Submissions should ideally move beyond decline and exploitation as defining ecological narratives of the region and examine the Great Plains by emphasizing one or more of the interrelated themes of water, grasses, animals, and energy. Moreover, technological adaptations can be defined in the broadest sense. Proposals that emphasize the longstanding role of native people in shaping environments throughout the regions are particularly encouraged.

Travel and lodging expenses, as well as most meals, will be provided for workshop participants. The workshop will take place at various Oklahoma locations from May 22 – 25, 2017. In addition to the papers sessions, the workshop tentatively included introductions to archival and museum resources at the University of Oklahoma in Norman; travel to Stillwater to observe grasslands management strategies such as prescribed burning; a visit to the Osage Tribal Museum in Pawhuska; and travel to the Tallgrass Prairie Preserver to witness the effects of patch burning and to see bison ini their native habitat.

The selected participants will join a group of scholars who have already committed to this project including Clint Carroll, Michael Lansing, Mark Palmer, Jonatahn Peyton, Molly P. Rozum, Natale „Nat“ Zappia, and Maria Nieves Zedeño.

Penultimate drafts of the papers will be due one month in advance of the workshop. The organizers also plan to podcast the workshop live to high school students and will ask participants to share, in advance of the workshop, sample primary documents for a website for those students.

Please submit a 300 – 500-word paper proposal no later than September 30, 2016 to Kathleen Brosnan and Brian Frehner.

International conference, 15 – 17 June 2017, Senate House, University of London, London/UK

Papers are invited for a major international, interdisciplinary conference to be held at Senate House, London, in collaboration with ENCAP (Cardiff University) and the University of Westminster. Coinciding with and celebrating the 150th anniversary of Canadian Confederation, this conference will focus on the strong culture of artistic exchange, influence, and dialogue between Canada and Britain, with a particular but not exclusive emphasis on the decades after World War II.

The immediate post-war decades saw both countries look to the arts and cultural institutions as a means to address and redress contemporary post-war realities. Central to the concerns of the moment was the increasing emergence of the United States as a dominant cultural as well as political power. In 1951, the Massey Commission gave formal voice in Canada to a growing instinct, amongst both artists and politicians, simultaneously to recognize a national tradition of cultural excellence and to encourage its development and perpetuation through national institutions. This moment complemented a similar post-war engagement with social and cultural renewal in Britain that was in many respects formalized through the establishment of the Arts Council of Great Britain. It was further developed in the founding of such cultural institutions as the Royal Opera, Sadler’s Wells Ballet, the Design Council and later the National Theatre, and in the diversity and expansion of television and film.

While these various initiatives were often instigated by a strong national if not nationalist instinct, they were also informed by an established dynamic of social, political, and cultural dialogue. In the years before the war, that dynamic had been marked primarily by the prominent, indisputably anglophile voices of such influential Canadians in Britain as Beverly Baxter and Lord Beaverbrook. In English-speaking Canada, an established recognition of Britain as a dominant, if not originating, influence on definitions of cultural excellence continued to predominate. In the years following the war, however, that dynamic was to change, and an increased movement of artists, intellectuals, and artistic policy-makers between the two countries saw the reciprocal development of an emphatically modern, confident, and progressive definition of contemporary cultural activity.

This conference aims to expose and explore the breadth of this exchange of social and cultural ideals, artistic talent, intellectual traditions, and aesthetic formulations. The organizers invite papers from a variety of critical and disciplinary perspectives – and particularly encourage contributions from scholars and practitioners working in theatre, history, literature, politics, music, film and television, cultural studies, desgin, and visual art.

Some indicative post-war cultural figures and areas of influence:

• Henry Moore and the Art Gallery of Ontario
• John Gierson at the Naitonal Film Board
• Leonard Brockington and the CBC
• Sydney Newman, Alvin Rakoff and British and Canadian television drama
• Tyrone Guthrie, Barry Morse, Tanya Moiseiwitch, Alec Guinness, Maggie Smith, John Neville, Christopher Newton, Robin Phillips, Brian Bedford, Christopher Plummer, Donald Sutherland, and others: developments in staging, acting, repertoire, and theatre-design at the Stratford Festival, the Shaw Festival, the Old Vic, the Chichester Festival Theatre, the National Theatre
• Powys Thomas at the CBC, the Stratford Festival, and the National Theatre School of Canada
• Celia France, Gweneth Lloyd, and national ballet
• Robertson Davies as novelist, actor, cultural critic in Britain and Canada, at the Stratford Festival; at the UNiversity of Toronto’s Massey College
• Yousuf Karsh and the iconography of the mid-twentieth century
• Intellectual exchange and influence: Northrop Frye, Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, John Kenneth Galbraith
• Elizabeth Smart and the London literary scene
• Ronald Bryden and theatre criticism in London
• Benjamin Britten and Michael Tippett: Canadian tours and compositions
• Glenn ould as musical interpreter, recording artist, celebrity personality, documentarian
• Mordecai Richler, the cultural scene in London, and the dramatization of Anglophone Quebec
• Mazo de la Roche and Lucy Maud Montgomery: literare influence and adaptations
• Ben Wicks as cartoonist, journalist, and post-war memoirist

Other areas of exploration include (but are certainly not limited to):

• Quebec and ‚French Canada‘ in the British artistic scene
• The cultural presence and infulence of the Governor General
• Publishers and publishing networks
• Newspapers, media magnates, and editorialists from Beaverbrook to Black
• Universities and the ‚modernisation‘ of higher education
• Popular culture and popular music
• Cultural policy-making
• Traditions of humour and satire
• ‚Distinct cultures‘ within a larger nation
• Constructions of indigeneity and native culture
• National culture as anti-Americanism
• Definitions of diversity, audience, and national identity
• Architecture and urban development
• More recent and contemporary exchanges in literature, art, politics, theatre, film, design, television, and the media

Proposal (max. 250 words) for papers of 20 minutes can be sent to the organizers Irene Morra (Cardiff University) and Hohn Wyver (University of Westminster) by 1 November 2016.