University of Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
Department of English Studies
March 14-15, 2008.
Of Words, Bodies Politic and Alternative Communities
The strong ties that used to join nation and state during the period between the end of World War II and the 1970s are constantly undermined by the forces of globalization. The nation-state is clearly in crisis and so are most imagined communities that ensue from that relationship (Gerard Delanty). This, however, does not mean that we are living in post-national world. In fact, the predicament of the nation-state is but a symptom of the transformation of both nation and state in a globalizing world. Among the major consequences of this transformation is the simultaneous rise of radical and exclusive nationalisms (in the case of Iraq, for instance) and what Zygmunt Bauman would call the liquidity of human relationships and communities national and otherwise. This conference invites papers, small-scale installations, poems and short stories that rethink community within and beyond the nation. It also responds to the urgent need to reconfigure community at a time when very few alternatives have been proposed to the nation (Hardt and Negris Multitude being the most memorable). We especially welcome papers that would focus their rethinking of community on the way works of art represent the political body/ body politics.
Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
Literature and alternative conceptions of community
The Others/ Monsters of Globalization and their alternatives
Urban space, literature and alternative practices of citizenship
Rethinking body politics
Translation: alternative ways of creating existentially-significant meaning
Multiculturalism
Alternatives to the nation: Literary dystopias and Utopias
Traces of the multitude in the pre-early modern and modern eras
Environmentalist, feminist and Indigenous alternatives
Please send 300-word abstracts to
hajer.ben.gouider.trabelsi@umontreal.ca, by January 20, 2008.
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