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Call for Papers Theme: Cultures of Violence Type: Postgraduate Conference Institution: Queen's Postcolonial Research Forum, Queen's University Belfast Location: Belfast, Northern Ireland (United Kingdom) Date: 23.–24.9.2011 Deadline: 1.4.2011 __________________________________________________ It is now fifty years since the publication of the seminal treatise Les Damnés de la terre/The Wretched of the Earth (1961), in which Frantz Fanon showed how colonialism initiated a vicious cycle of escalating violence between colonizer and colonized. Fanon’s text, seen by many as a rallying cry for Third World revolution and as a eulogy to anti-colonial struggle, in fact ranges broadly across history, psychiatry and language, areas of particular interest for this conference. The violence and trauma of colonial, postcolonial and neocolonial history have required Postcolonial Studies to actively engage with both dominant and marginalized knowledge sets, so as to ‘re-member’, understand and move beyond a (sub)consciously repressed and fragmented colonial history. In what ways does engaging with and remembering violence help us make sense of the lived present? And is violence, as a product of our colonial past, an (un)avoidable presence in the world of both today and tomorrow? When such violence manifests itself in text, to what extent does it inform, or is it informed by, our understanding of the (post)colonial encounter? By addressing such urgent and complex issues, this conference aims to foster discussion and debate around these questions and others, examining how violence is experienced and represented not only as an act of physical force, but also as a violation of what is generally considered to be the ‘natural order’ – be that of people, landscape, or text. The conference is organized with the support of Queen’s Postcolonial Research Forum, and aims to draw speakers from a broad range of disciplines. The Forum invites papers from postgraduate students working in the fields of literature, history, law, politics and cultural studies among others. Our aim is to bring together a wide variety of scholarly interest and methodological approaches. Individual papers should be no longer than 20 minutes, and submissions should be in the form of an abstract (250-300 words) sent as an email attachment in Word to Ríona Kelly and Tanya Campbell at <[email protected]>. The deadline for all submissions is 1st April 2011. Topics may include (but are not limited to): - Cultures of conflict - Genocide - Trauma - Slavery - Sexual Violence - Environmental Aesthetics - Human/non-human dichotomy - Environmental Degradation - Globalization and Neo-Colonization - Revolution - Space, Place and Race in Colonial and Postcolonial Contexts - The Oppressed and the Oppressor - Memory and Forgetting - Marxist Approaches - Textual violence - 'The Pitfalls of National Consciousness' Keynote Speakers: Charles Forsdick (James Barrow Professor of French, University of Liverpool) Robert Marzec (Associate Professor in the English Department at Perdue University, IN, and Associate Editor of Modern Fiction Studies) Contact: Queen's Postcolonial Research Forum School of Languages, Literatures and Performing Arts Queen's University Belfast 10 University Square Belfast, BT7 1NN United Kingdom Email: [email protected] Web: http://www.qub.ac.uk/schools/SchoolofLanguagesLiteraturesandPerformingArts/QueensPostcolonialResearchForum/ __________________________________________________ InterPhil List Administration: http://interphil.polylog.org Intercultural Philosophy Calendar: http://cal.polylog.org __________________________________________________
