CALL FOR PAPERS

   

An onslaught of contemporary crises clamors for our attention: climate change, neo-fascist violence, surveillance states, refugee crises, financial precarity, anxiety at epidemic levels. But ours is not the first generation to be characterized by ‘crisis.’ The historian Randolph Starn, for instance, argues that crisis is a “working framework for historical investigation.” The term is both flexible and fallible and, in its usage, it nevertheless reveals a history. How can the concept of crisis provide access to history and memory? In what ways can it provide hope and vision for the future? Walter Benjamin’s dialectical reading of history illuminates these crises precisely as “moments of danger” that fan the sparks of memory against a backdrop of homogenous time and open new channels for collective thinking. 

 

The 15th Annual Comparative Literature Graduate Student Conference at the University of California, Irvine interrogates the response-ability of intellectual, cultural, and artistic inquiry into contemporary crises. We invite paper submissions from graduate students and independent scholars across disciplines who are interested in conceptualizing this contemporary moment as well as creative submissions of all media/performance types to present at our pre-conference creative reception. Experimental approaches to both academic papers and creative work are welcome.  

 

Some broad questions that inform our thinking include: What tools—rhetorical, representational, pedagogical, and methodological—could generate cultural strategies to write our precarious time? In the face of crisis, what obfuscates our memory of the past or our vision for the future? When images of occluded histories and memories flash up, how are we to seize hold of them in cultural and aesthetic production and activate a politics of imagining across times? For whom is “danger” threatening and to whom is “memory” dedicated? How does the transient and urgent temporality of the “moment of danger” condition ways of building communities and articulating resistance? Despite sentiments of anxiety and uncertainty, how do social groups within and without academia retain creativity, humor, and intimacy? Situated as we are in the theoretical and experiential impasse of our time, this conference invites presenters to explore the poetics and vibrancies of life within and beyond this “moment of danger.”

 

Possible topics include but are not limited to:

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• History and memory writing

• Representation of crisis across mediascapes

• Speculative fiction

• Anthropocene and posthuman studies

• Human, nature, machine interactions

• Performance studies

• Religious crisis and secularization

• Politics of memory/hope/imagining

• Critique of political economy

• Humor and play

• Translation studies

• Temporality

• Neofascism and rightwing retrenchment 

• Insurgent politics

• Hauntology

• Fake news

• Anxiety, disorder and mental illness

• Constellation, (un)worlding and (un)relationality

• Affect theory

 

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Submission Details

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We welcome submissions from Masters and PhD students at all stages of their graduate careers, as well as independent scholars and creatives. Submissions should be sent by December 20th, 2019 to momentofdanger@gmail.com. Abstracts should not exceed 300 words, and creative submissions should include a representative sample OR concise description of your work, depending on what is most applicable to your medium of choice. Please include your name, affiliation (if any), and key scholarly interests. Conference activities will begin the evening of Thursday, February 20th, 2020 and end the evening of February 21st, 2020. Events will be held on the UC Irvine campus.