update: Globalicities Conference

[ibironke at msu.edu]

CALL FOR PAPERS

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 the neologism, "globalicities", stands in
relation to commonsense notions of the global in the same way that
temporalities and historicities stand in relation to conventional notions of
time and history.

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