14th Annual Comparative Literature Conference at USC

 

Go here to visit the Transatlantics 2012 - 14th Annual Comparative Literature Conference full website.

In celebration of the University of South Carolina's new PhD in Spanish, with a special focus on Transatlantic Studies, we are pleased to announce the 14th Annual University of South Carolina Comparative Literature Conference:

Cultural and Linguistic Intersections of the Transatlantic 
To be held from March 22nd-24th, 2012

Analyzing and understanding the historical and cultural processes unique to the transatlantic sphere requires a comparative perspective. To that end, transatlantic studies examine the circulation of goods, ideas and people across the Atlantic, while simultaneously probing the implications of these processes for the nations involved. In keeping with this simultaneous focus on transnational and national coordinates, this colloquium solicits papers with a transatlantic perspective on both the formation and the diasporic nature of Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian cultures. So as to further account for the centrality of African cultural contexts in transatlantic processes, papers dealing with French and Anglophone cultures are also welcome. Our common goal will be to examine how circum-Atlantic and cis-Atlantic processes frame the constitution of transnational and national identities, cultural production, discursive formations and ideas about language. As we aspire to delimit and define historical and cultural processes unique to the Atlantic, the colloquium will encompass both the Colonial period and the past two centuries of nationhood.

Topics of particular interest include but are not limited to:

• Discourses and practices of subordination, domination and discrimination (i.e. colonial period, neocolonial dynamics)
• Transnational discourses on violence and human rights in film and literature/ cultural production
• Transatlantic historical and cultural processes in film and visual culture 
• Postcolonial and Subaltern Studies Approaches to the Transatlantic
• Performance Studies
• Spaces and places linked to transatlantic processes
• Genealogies and trajectories of Hispanism / Transfers of ideas and cultural forms across the Atlantic
• Immigration, exile, diaspora, and transoceanic identities
• Local, national and imperial languages in situations of contact and conflict (past, present and future)
• Spanish as a world language – sociolinguistic and cultural perspectives
• Language policy, multilingualism and multiculturalism in the Spanish, Portuguese, French and English-speaking world (past, present and future).

Abstracts for twenty minute papers should be sent to TransatlanticSC2012@gmail.com by October 15th, 2011.

Abstracts should be 250 words long. Panel proposals of 750 words are due by the same date. Panels should include three papers and a respondent.