CALL FOR PAPERS: Watersheds: Poetics and Politics of the Danube River

Sun Nov 17 15:36:26 UTC 2013

*CALL FOR PAPERS:*

*Watersheds: Poetics and Politics of the Danube River*

Marijeta Bozovic and Matthew Miller, editors

The collected volume *Watersheds: Poetics and Politics of the Danube
River*brings together scholars from diverse disciplinary approaches
and across
regional fields of study. The Danube, Europe’s second largest river,
directly connects ten countries; its watershed covers four more. Yet the
river, like much of the region it traverses, has attracted surprisingly
little scholarly attention, and what exists too often privileges single
disciplinary or national perspectives. We instead see the river as both
boundary and border, fluidly connecting multiple nations, and cultural and
economic spaces, through legal and illegal flow. It intersects
civilizations and nature, physical and imaginary spaces and invites an
array of critical approaches.

As both a real geographic feature and a guiding metaphor, the Danube river
brings together the scholarship of a number of leading and rising scholars
across fields and disciplinary divisions. Our book attempts to synthesize a
number of regional studies, methodologies and modes into a collective work
of truly interdisciplinary research; at the same time, humanities
disciplines and the powerful interpretative strategies they offer serve as
our primary anchor. The concepts we use to both metaphorize and actualize
the Danube form the linkage between these discussions and vital issues in
natural and social science disciplines. We hope that this collaboration and
the lasting exchanges it will cultivate can serve as a promising model for
genuine, creative, and inspiring interdisciplinary academic work.

1.     In an age of tenuous unification, we actively seek to culturally
remap Europe by means of the river and river imaginary, thus rectifying
Europe’s frequent and erroneous omission from conversations about global
engagement and innovative explorations of world culture. The Danube river
has been claimed successfully only by one empire: Austria-Hungary, the
(spectral) multicultural state par excellence. Today, the complicated
cultural imaginaries entrained by the river help us to call into question
paradigms of nation and nationality in areas fraught by aggressive
discourses on identity, language, the link between people and place, and
blood purity. When examined together, the multiethnic, multilingual, and
historically intertwined relations of the Danube populations present an
opportunity to explore this broadly conceived site as an instantiation of
the global present.

2.     Our book will critically examine the discourse of Central Europe to
undermine autochthonic conceptions of culture. It will challenge the
imagined divide between the democratic and Western-leaning “center” and
“foreign” Bolshevik ideology coming from the Russian East or the Balkan
South. The Danube is haunted by historical tragedy and memories of
genocide; by the legacies of Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Soviet empires;
and by cultural (mis)appropriations of classical antiquity. We will explore
the cultural and economic flows moving downriver and upstream, as well as
the mapping of cultural capital through spatial and temporal metaphors:
cities such as Vienna, Budapest, and Belgrade serve as regional centers,
while margins appear culturally “belated.”

3.     Finally, it is the metaphorical and real power of the Danube as
artery, lifeline, and locus for circulation and communication that we hope
to exploit intellectually and critically as we search for a way to flow
between fields and methodologies: from Germanic to Slavic, from the
interventions of experimental art to environmental studies of changing
physical spaces littered with actual and figurative historical debris. To
facilitate cross-disciplinary communication, many of our authors embrace
broadly conceived bridge concepts relevant to multiple methodologies, such
as “pollution” and “circulation.”

We invite submissions from scholars of literature, cinema, music,
architecture and other culture, historians, anthropologists, sociologists,
geographers, and others interested in exploring the Danube and its peoples.
To complement the work already gathered, we particularly encourage
submissions pertaining to the German, Slovakian, Bulgarian, Romanian,
Ukrainian river and to its delta.

*Submissions due by March 1, 2014.*

Please send your work to marijeta.bozovic at yale.edu and mdmiller1 at colgate.edu

Co-editor Marijeta Bozovic is Assistant Professor of Slavic Languages and
Literatures at Yale University. She is the author of the forthcoming *From
Onegin to Ada: Nabokov’s Canon and Transnational Literature* (Northwestern
University Press), and co-editor of the collected volume *Nabokov Upside
Down* (with Brian Boyd; forthcoming with McGill-Queens University Press). More
recent articles and her second book project turn to post-Soviet and
post-Yugoslav literature and culture: specifically, to contemporary
re-engagement with aesthetic and political avant-gardes.

Co-editor Matthew Miller is Assistant Professor of German at Colgate
University. His specialties comprise 20th-21st century German literature
and film, 18th-21st century German theater, and critical and aesthetic
theory from Kant through Adorno. Interests include Danubian studies;
modernity, modernism, and the avant-gardes; the political and cultural
history of East Germany; transnational cultures in the New Europe; and
futurity studies. His book project *Mauer, Migration, Maps: The German Epic
in the Cold War *focuses on works by Peter Weiss, Uwe Johnson, and
Alexander Kluge.

*Watersheds: Poetics and Politics of the Danube River* builds on the
results of a Central New York Mellon Humanities Corridor working group
(“Legacies of the Second World”) and a uniquely interdisciplinary
conference (“Black and Blue Danube Symposium”) held at Colgate University
in Spring 2013.

--------------------------------------------
Marijeta Bozovic
Assistant Professor
Slavic Languages and Literatures
Yale University
marijeta.bozovic at yale.edu <mbozovic at coglate.edu>
m. 917-887-5197
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