CFP: (Re)Production of Urban Space (4/18/03; SAMLA, 11/14/03-11/16/03)

CALL FOR PAPERS

Abstracts are invited for the Marxist Literary Group panel at the South
Atlantic Modern Language Association Convention November 14-16 at the
Atlanta Marriott Marquis.

(Re)Production of Urban Space: Late 20th Century Literature After The City

The spaces of late capitalism appear before us totally built, all signs of
nature's otherness effaced, bulldozed, mined, or marked off as attractions.
Fredric Jameson has argued in this context that what we periodize as
postmodernism appears when the project of modernity is finished and all
pre-capitalist enclaves have been annihilated. Paradoxically, this urban
saturation appears at the same time as both the urban private and public
space seem to disappear. Indeed, in the globalized world of finance capital,
or what Hardt and Negri provocatively describe as "Empire," the forces of
production that are so crucial to the making over of space into this urban
form abandon the City to a ghostly, spectacular existence. As the
ghettoization of the inner city creates a dystopian post-urban form, one in
which we re-imagine the apocalyptic fall of the great modernist city,
unchecked suburbanization heralds a different end of city history, as a
non-nucleated sprawling pseudo-urbanity.

Among the questions raised by these developments are: How are post-urban
spaces (re)produced once the dynamic forces of capitalist production begin
to deterritorialize the site of the city? Do new virtual spaces within or
beyond the city hold the promise of utopia or threaten dystopia? How can we
think the possibility of the "new" when it is already programmed into the
rhythms of construction/destruction of urban forms necessary for the
reproduction of capitalism? What political alternatives remain when the
liberal democratic institutions instantiated in the classic metropolitan
form corrupt? How does literature function as the site of imagining new
post-urban or post-capitalist communities?

Possible topics might include but are not limited to:
-- literary suburbs, literary ghettoes
-- post-urban disciplinarity and images of societies of control
-- utopia and anti-utopia after the city
-- multiculturalism beyond metropolis; racializing post-urban class
segmentations
-- 1st world deindustrialization/3rd world industrialization
-- the city novel and the market
-- bourgeois private space and media prosthetics
-- migration and borderlands
-- dirty realism and cyberpunk
-- the street
-- post-urban space: the writing of labor/the labor of writing
-- intensification of the working day

Please send 250-word abstracts to Aron Pease at apease_at_english.ufl.edu by
April 18.

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Received on Tue Mar 18 2003 - 17:16:08 EST