CALL FOR PAPERS

[ibironke at msu.edu]

Michigan State University's  2001 Modern Literature Conference.
GLOBALICITIES
A Conference on Issues Related to Globalization
Sponsored by the Program in Comparative Literature

Date: October 18-20, 2001
Location: Michigan State University

Confirmed Keynote Speakers:
-GAYATRI SPIVAK, Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities, Columbia
University
-MICHAEL HARDT, Associate Professsor of Literature and Romance Studies, Duke
University
-MAHMOOD MAMDANI, Herbert Lehman Professor of Government, Director, Institute
of 	African Studies, Columbia University
-SASKIA SASSEN, Professor of Sociology, The University of Chicago


A number of recent, important works make clear that the present moment's
metaphor for the economic, political, social, and cultural interrelationships
between nations  is "globalization," a concept that has come to replace
earlier formulas of "modernization" and "civilization." This conference,
"Globalicities," will focus on the limitations and implications of
theoretically determining these relations.

We are interested in reflections on the anthropological, sociological,
economic, legal, linguistic, and aesthetical ways in which the "global" has
been thought and actualized during the last 500 years. We particularly are
soliciting serious investigations of the rhetorics and practices of recent
theories of the global, postcolonial, and international. We hope that our
neologism, "globalicities," stands in relation to commonsense notions of the
global in the same way that temporalities and historicities stand in relation
to conventional time and history.

In other words, our invitation is to treat the concept of the "globe" not as
something given, but rather as something which is politically fashioned
posterior to our always endless relations.

Possible areas or topics include, but are not limited to:
*Theories of Narrative and the global
*Rethinking travel, exile, migration, diaspora
*Mestizo logics; or, hybrid theory "all the way down"
*"Development," "modernization" and "civilization" and the fate of dependency
theory
*Race and gender in globalization theory
*Post-structuralism and the critique of late-capitalism
*Markets, profits, and violent conflicts
*State violence, armed resistance, and limits of international law
 *The return of the state in global theory
*The rhetorics of geography, space, and place theory
*Questioning post-Marxism's turn to "culture"
*Subalternities and Solidarities
*Markets, products and the construction of taste
*Queering the sphere
* Genetics, biotechnology and the globe

Abstractions for individual papers should be no more than 500 words long;
abstracts for panels are limited to a total of 1000 words. DEADLINE for
Proposals: March 31, 2001

Please send abstracts and one-page vita for each proposed panelist to:
Professor Kenneth Harrow
Director, Program in Comparative Literature
Morrill Hall
Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI 48824
fax 517 353 3755
e-mail harrow at msu.edu

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As in past years, a selection of conference papers will be published by the
Centennial Review, which in 2001 enters its 45th year of publication and
interdisciplinary scholarship.
The Program in Comparative Literature has hosted the Modern Literature
Conference for many years. Recently the program has developed a special
emphasis in African and the African diaspora studies, and the program serves
as a complement to interdiscipinary Ph.D. programs in Michigan State
University's College of Arts and Letters, including the Literatures of the
Americas and Postcolonial Studies, founded in 1998, and the Ph.D. program in
Africa and the African-American Diaspora, which will be launched in Fall 2001.

--
Olabode Ibironke
Comparative Literatures Progarm
318 Linton Hall
Michigan State University,
East Lansing, MI 48824