Call for Papers: Panel for ACLA - The Substance of African and Middle Eastern
Literatures
(8/1/03; American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) 04 at Univ. of
Michigan “Global Ethnic Networks”)
>From the scramble for Africa to the latest proposal for war, Africa and the
Middle East have been seen from the outside as spaces of endless natural wealth
and raw resources. Diamonds, oil, gold, and even water (to name a few) have
held coveted spaces in the imaginations of European and American prospectors,
employers, patrons and corporations, and have impacted national and regional
mappings and networks. Although there has been much work on the histories of
exploration, there has been less sustained thought as to how the resources are
viewed from within, and as to how “cultural wealth” reflects and intersects
with the reality and mythology of African and Middle Eastern substances. Panel
organizer seeks papers that creatively engage the intersections between the
natural resources of Africa and the Middle East and the literature of the
regions. Approaches may be eclectic and comparative, and may take an aesthetic,
historical, textual, anthropological, geographical, or other perspective.
Areas of exploration may include:
-88 Examination of the way resources (“substances”) are represented in
literature, film, performance
-88 Explorations of how contemporary material networks intersect with
ethnic networks
-88 Representations of those who work with the resources (at any stage and
in any role) as reflected in literature and film
-88 Resources and modernity and development
-88 Resources and indigenous environmental discourses
-88 Examination of the representations of resources in oral literatures or
other “traditional” texts and performances
-88 Historical approaches to the ways natural resources emerge in discourse
-88 Examination of generic forms emerging as responses to conflict over
natural resources
-88 Examination of funding sources, corporations and how profit serves (or
doesn’t) the arts of the regions
-88 New emergent subjectivities in response to the discovery and engagement
with resources
500 word abstracts to Rebecca at rlorins@mail.utexas.edu (attachments or in-
email accepted) by August 1, 2003.
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