CFP: Contingent Communities

[Aaron Gerow]

$B!H(BContingent Communities$B!I(B (2010)

The Annual Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature Conference at  
University of Minnesota

Dates: 10/15/10-10/17/10



Keynote Speakers: Rey Chow and Peter Hitchcock



As many have argued, globalization puts into question the connection  
between fixed territories and communal identifications. How, then, are  
we to conceive of community differently? This conference takes as its  
starting point the insufficiency of traditional identifications of  
class, gender, race, and nation for navigating the complexities of  
contemporary life. It addresses the persistence of practices of  
thinking and living beyond notions of essential identity and fixed  
boundaries that nonetheless insist on the necessity of  
$B!H(Bcommunity$B!I(B as an idea by which to understand  
contemporary modes of association. Our conference seeks to combine the  
recent theoretical conversations interested in excavating and  
rethinking the philosophical and political tradition of community  
under conditions of late-capitalism and globalization, and the focus  
of literary theory and cultural studies on contemporary practices of  
global association (planetary literature and film, networks of  
migration, non-essentialist theories of race, class, sex/gender,  
interdisciplinarity, etc.). In other words, we are interested in work  
that raises the possibility of thinking the fact of non-essential and  
global linkages under the sign of community.



We seek papers that move across and between different disciplines,  
addressing the following questions, as well as related concerns:

In what ways do film, literature, and other aesthetic media act as  
globalizing forces, generating experiences of commonality that exceed  
the imaginary space of the nation-state? Or how do such media re- 
engender the nation in a displaced form? What are the effects of new  
mass communication and network technologies on emerging forms of  
community? How does one speak of migrant or refugee communities, the  
very existence of which challenges the nexus between nation and state?  
How does the figure of $B!H(Bthe camp$B!I(B operate in a world of  
transnational migrations and globalized networks? What forms of  
political organization are adequate to transnational modes of  
affiliation? What is the role of class in the practices of communities  
under late capitalism and how does this category function in relation  
other forms of identification which today are referred to with the  
term $B!H(Bidentity politics$B!I(B? How does the crisis of  
community change the way that we think about comparativity or  
interdisciplinarity, especially in relation to area studies? How does  
the imagination of community intersect with visions of utopia? What is  
the role of so-called immaterial labor in postmodernity, and in what  
ways do such concepts speak to the question of subalternity? How are  
we to think community in a supposedly post-communist world?



Possible paper topics include:

-       Transnational modes of affiliation.

-       Literature, film, and other aesthetic media generating  
experiences of commonality beyond or traversing the nation-state.

-       Emerging forms of collective life and mass communication and  
digital. connectivity. Technological conditions of community.

-       The displacement and persistence of the nation-state.

-       Utopia and other imaginary            communities.

-       Subalternity.

-       Refugee and Migrant communities.

-       Hostile Communities, clandestine networks.

-       The discourse of the commons/the common.

-       The relationship between the human and the animal in the  
formation of   community.

-       So-called $B!H(Bidentity politics$B!I(B and alternative  
ways of practicing race, gender/sex, class, culture, religion.



Please submit your abstract of no more than 250 words to UMCSCLconference at gmail.com 
  by 06/31/10. Include your name, e-mail address, brief bio (including  
school affiliation, position, and research interests), and any audio- 
visual requirements. Papers should be in English and no more than 20  
minutes in length. We are also interested in panel submissions, which  
should consist of at least three participants and which should include  
the above information about each participant and a tentative title  
indicating the theme.
  
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