Call for Papers "Forging the Local and the Global" Interdisciplinary Conference University of Stellenbosch Stellenbosch (South Africa) 9-12 July 2006
Starting with the assumption that identity and sense of place are matters of forging and of forgery, the conference seeks to examine literary and other modes of cultural production as forms of flow and exchange in the arena of global apartheid. The conference implicates the discursive practices that articulate unequal relations and disjunctive temporalities between different localities, and alludes to the practices of translating across cultures. In particular, it seeks to conceptualise the role of literature and the visual arts in tracing and mapping the cartographies, movements and fault lines of past imperialisms and of contemporary empire with its new forms of sovereignty. The conference invokes location, this place and elsewhere, and movement, journeys from one location to another, from homeland to foreign land. It raises issues of identity and of agency, and gestures towards the body as locus of inscriptions that are both culturally specific and, increasingly, transcultural. We hope that the focus areas - global apartheid, human and textual traffic, travel records, literary canonization - will assist us in understanding our interlinked histories, as well as our imagined presents and futures. The conference theme reflects the location of Stellenbosch University near the southern tip of Africa, within sight of Table Mountain, at the point of intersecting trade routes between east and west. Papers are invited on the following topics: - Global Apartheid, Perpetual War: Bodies and Biopolitics - Migrations of Texts: Sites of Production and Reception - Crossing Borders in Literature and Visual Arts - The Challenges of Translation, Transculturalism, Tricontinentalism - Travel-Writing, Trade-Routes and Slave-Routes - International Reading Publics and the Creation of a South African Canon Panels: Proposals for panels, seminars and workshops will be welcome. Keynote speakers: There will be five keynote speakers from several countries. Their names will be made public as soon as their participation has been confirmed. Confirmed keynote speakers: * F. Abiola Irele * Achille Mbembe * Bharati Mukherjee Abstracts of 300 words (including institutional affiliation and contact information) by 28 February 2006. Contact: Local/Global Conference Organizing Committee c/o English Department Stellenbosch University Private Bag X1 Matieland, 7602 South Africa fax: +27 (21) 8083827 email: [email protected] web: http://www.sun.ac.za/english/localglobal2006 _________________________________ InterPhil List Administration: http://interphil.polylog.org/ Intercultural Philosophy Calendar: http://agd.polylog.org/cal/
