CFP: Cultures Across Borders: Negotiating the Global and the Local
3rd Annual Comparative Literature Graduate Conference
Coordinates of Comparison 2009
“CULTURES ACROSS BORDERS:
NEGOTIATING THE GLOBAL AND THE LOCAL”
Comparative Literature Program
University of Alberta
13-14 March 2009
In the words of Fredric Jameson, globalization, a concept with no “privileged context,” “falls outside the established academic disciplines” (xi), thus necessarily calling for an interdisciplinary perspective and methodology and questioning the limits of traditional disciplinary areas. How does Comparative Literature respond to and participate in the discourse on and of globalization? We invite you to explore globalization – a complex political rhetoric, a leading social force, and a growing cultural practice – as a space of tension and a site of resistance and to investigate its evolving theoretical paradigms and specific practices: forms and channels of cultural exchange and communication, local and global audiences, borders – material and virtual, homogeneity and diversity, local and global subjectivities, transculturality and transnationality.
We invite papers for “Cultures Across Borders: Negotiating the Global and the Local.” Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
- Comparative Literature and the role of comparatists in an age of globalization
- Local and global histories
- The national, the supranational, and the global
- Globalization as a site of resistance
- New readings of gender and sexuality
- Local and global femininities and masculinities
- Translation and adaptation in the global context
- Popular literature and culture in an age of globalization
- Virtual communities and local cultures
- Literature, the arts, and the global media
- Diaspora and multiculturalism in Canadian literature
- Inter-American literatures: the dialogue among the literary representations in the Americas
- Indigenous literatures and cultures in Canada, the Americas, and in the global context
Proposals for complete panels are welcome.
Please submit 250-300 word abstracts to Iryna Tsobrova (tsobrova@ualberta.ca) before January 15, 2009.
Works Cited:
Jameson, Fredric. “Preface.” The Cultures of Globalization. Eds. Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi. Durham and London: Duke UP, 1998. xi-xvii.
