First Graduate Students’ Conference
Sponsored by the UCLA Transnational and Transcolonial Studies Multicampus
Research Group (MRG)
April 5, 2002
Los Angeles, California
CALL FOR PAPERS:
“DIASPORA, DESCENT AND DISSENT”
Deadline for submission of abstracts: January 21, 2002
Questions of home, community, allegiance, and identity become more urgent and
contentious in moments of political crisis. In the wake of September 11, these
issues—which have persistently haunted the work of postcolonial and ethnic
studies scholars and artists—have taken central stage in popular culture and
academic debate. We invite submissions of one-page abstracts to discuss these
and related issues in the context of popular culture, literature, visual arts,
and performance. Papers might address, but are not limited to, the following
questions:
How does political crisis transform notions of allegiance and community? How do
the media variously enforce and/or resist hegemonic constructions of national
identity?
How has the role of the dissenting intellectual changed since September 11th?
Has this category taken on new meaning or relevance? What are the consequences
for minority discourse, and for the fields of postcolonialism and
postmodernism?
What are the limits and possibilities of human rights discourse in light of
contemporary debates about cultural imperialism, relativism, and universalist
humanism?
How useful is the concept of ‘identity’ within a transnational context of
shifting affiliations across borders of space and culture? How does an
understanding of identity as both relational and ‘intersectional’ challenge
traditional models of subjectivity and authorship, agency and resistance?
What are the promises and pitfalls of a ‘politics of location’ (e.g.
mobilization on the basis of identity or community affiliation) in an era
marked by the increasingly global trafficking of goods and services, ideas, and
people?
How do contemporary artists and activists conceive of ‘polycentric
multicultural feminism’?
Other possible topics:
Diaspora, displacement, and the ‘subject’ of autobiography
‘Home’ as problem and provocation
Imagined communities: diasporic visual culture
Cosmopolitanism, hybridity, and authenticity
Crafting genealogies: descent, blood ties, ‘passing’, and infidelity to origins
Negotiating ‘looks’ (skin, eye, and ‘I’) vis-a-vis decolonization and
Orientalist aesthetics
Creative contestations of history and stagings of the ‘self’
‘Diva citizenship’: nationalism, sexuality, race, and marginalization
For more information, please see our website: www.humnet.ucla.edu/transnation
Reimbursement will be offered for select travel expenses.
Please submit a one-page abstract for a 20-minute (7-10 page) presentation by
Jan. 21, 2002 either electronically to mrgucla@hotmail.com, or in hard copy to
the following address:
Karina Eileraas, MRG Conference Planning Committee
UCLA Women's Studies Program, 240 Kinsey Hall, Los Angeles, CA 90095
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