Proposals for 20-minute papers should be submitted online by October 15 through the ACLA website:

The ACLA conference is organized into seminars consisting of eight or twelve papers, and meeting on two or three days of the conference. Presenters are required to become ACLA members after acceptance of their papers.

"The Empire of Eurocentrism: Legacies and Challenges"

Organizer: Nicoletta Pireddu, Georgetown University
Email: pireddun@georgetown.edu

The connection between eurocentrism and imperialism (literal and metaphorical) is obvious. Dealing with the European tradition inevitably implies coming to terms with its self centeredness, its strategies of self-legitimation, and its power over otherness. This seminar explores past and present forms of literary, linguistic, cultural, and political resistance to Europes imperialism produced inside and outside of Europe. Yet, it also addresses the risk of what could be defined as a kind of reversed imperialism: the tendency to dismiss Europe in bulk as eurocentric.

We welcome papers engaging with the following issues (but not exclusively): How and why did/do European and non-European authors challenge eurocentrism? If, as Chakrabarty claims, the non-European world needs to provincialize Europe by demystifying the cliches it borrowed from European thought, can Europe be provincialized from within? Is the emerging New Europe a real aftermath of its Old imperialist counterpart, and how do contemporary writers address this question? Can this New Europe legitimately be analyzed with the tools of postcolonial theory, as various European intellectuals are doing? How can we rethink the role of Europe, of its literatures and cultures, in academia and specifically in comparative studies, without reducing them to agents or targets of disciplinary imperialism?