Panel Proposal for
“Writing the Self – Modes of Self-Portrayal in the Cultural Text”
The Annual Conference of the English Department
University of Bucharest, Romania
5-7 June 2008

We seek paper proposals for a panel entitled “Ethnic American Life Writing: Engaging Cultures, Communities, and Individuals” as part of the 10th annual conference of the English Department at the University of Bucharest, Romania (5-7 June 2008).

As the contemporary world is going global, ethnicity is becoming a fluid category, whose definitions are increasingly connected to individual rather than group histories. Hence it is becoming more and more appropriate to discuss the changes and challenges that occur in the interaction between identity narratives and the autobiography genre, which in itself is being reshaped by these processes of redefinition. We seek to explore these topics in areas such as Native American, African American, Central and Eastern European and Asian American life narratives.
Special points of interest might be: connections between personal histories and group histories; interactions between gender and ethnic identities; techniques of resistance writing in life narratives; modes of autobiographical writing; history writing and life writing in the struggle for decolonization; cultural mediation in life narratives; mapping the mixedblood self in life writing; ways of dealing with post-slavery trauma, memory and its impact on contemporary selfhood; diasporic identities, American ethnicity and the American Dream.

Please send 200-word proposals and brief CV by March 1, 2008 to:
Ruxandra Radulescu: and Maria Sabina Draga Alexandru:
University of Bucharest
Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures
Department of English
Str. Pitar Mos 7-13, 010451
Romania