CFP: The Hybrid Eighteenth Century (3/31/03; MLA '03)

The Hybrid Eighteenth Century

This panel is sponsored by ASECS.

Description:

Long cut loose from its biological origins, the term hybridity has
become one of the dominant theoretical concepts in the humanities. From
the history of science and linguistics to gender studies and
post-colonialism, from Mikhail Bakhtin to Donna Haraway and Homi Bhabha,
the term has crossed and defined various fields and practitioners.
Fueled in part by an accelerating globalization, hybridity has become
symptomatic of our need to account for the complexities and
unpredictable mixtures that mark life under postmodern capitalism.

This need is reshaping eighteenth-century studies. It is questioning
established narratives of modernization with their reliance on
differentiation and purification as central mechanisms that move us from
traditional to modern society. The distinctions generated by this
movement—between private and public, separate male and female spheres,
state and society, human imagination and material causality, different
kinds of knowledge—are ripe for reinvestigation.

This panel seeks to foster such examinations by bringing hybridity into
the eighteenth century. It wants to ask whether our current fascination
with this concept could help us discover alternative paths toward
modernity and enable different accounts of the link between eighteenth-
and twenty-first-century realities. How does the construction of race
and ethnicity in eighteenth-century Britain respond to the challenges of
the hybrid? How do we account for cultural forms that reject the
legitimizing appeal of purification and embrace fragmentation and
contamination instead? What might the hybrid do for the history of
sexuality? What for the question of interdisciplinarity itself? Are
there alternative stories to be told about early empiricism and its
alleged production of a split between isolated fact and detached
observer?

Contributors from all fields and disciplines are invited to submit
proposals. Please send a 1-2 page abstract and a brief CV by March 31 to
Wolfram Schmidgen, preferably by email: wschmidg_at_artsci.wustl.edu.

Wolfram Schmidgen
Department of English
Campus Box 1122
One Brookings Drive
Washington University
St. Louis, MO 63130-4899

(314) 935 4401

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Received on Sun Mar 09 2003 - 17:48:44 EST