Call for papers: Graduate student conference, McGill U., Montreal

[Baktygul Aliev]

Call for Papers
 First Interdisciplinary Languages, Literatures
& Cultures Graduate Conference
McGill University, Montréal, Canada
April 20-22, 2012
 
Europe's Dis/integration
Place, Belonging and Identity across and beyond Europe
 
Keynote Speaker:
Jeroen Dewulf, University of California - Berkeley
 
McGill’s First Interdisciplinary Languages,Literatures, and Cultures
Graduate Student Conferenceseeks to
question and discuss the making of a pan-European identity as well as to
reflect on the impact of Europeanism in the world. In discussing these
questions, the conference will also yield a forum for examining the proliferation of homeland narratives across
and beyond Europe, and for exploring issues uniting or dividing continental,
national, and regional loyalties. 
 
Pivotal historical events
and experiences, such as colonization, exile, deportation, and the influx of
foreign workers both from within and beyond European borders have given rise to
an array of discourses on belonging, identity, and the topography of nation in
the past century. In recent decades, socio-political and integration-focused
events, such as German unification, increasing mobility, and the breakdown of
borders as a result of the European Union’s expansion, have given rise to
optimism about a strong and united Europe. Yet, post-colonial discourses, along
with recent waves of nationalism and xenophobia across and beyond EU borders,
suggestthat nations
and subjects who either defend or condemn the notions of Europeanism and
pan-European identity still persist. Debating the fate of a dis/integrating
Europe seems all the more crucial today, not only for the individual but also
for the collective identity, as the debate follows in the
wake of an expanding EU whose monetary union is currently threatened by a
looming economic – and identity – crisis.
 
This conference will question
and critically debate the limitations and possibilities of homeland and
national identity within the past and/or present European context. What are the
functions of historical and contemporary discourses on nation andhomeland as
being linked to a place where one belongs? How does the nationalistic discourse
on nations and homelands apply to the context of an ambitiously growing
European Union? What is at stake, economically,
politically, and culturally when investing in the normative changes implied by a pan-European
identity?
 
We encourage
comparative, transnational, and interdisciplinary approaches to the theme Europe’s Dis/integration from scholars
working in any field of the humanities. Possible topics include, but are not
limited to:
 
•         Portrayals
of Europe in film, literature and the arts
•          National, regional and
transnational narratives on Europe
•          Clashes of identity:
Gender, class, nation
•          Transatlantic
dis/integration: Colonial and postcolonial perspectives on Europe and the
Americas in the literary, cinematic and artistic tradition
•          Islam in Europe
•          Pan-European policy
and its impact on economy, culture and identity
•          Europe's East-West / North-South
divides 
•         “From the outside”:
Non-European perspectives on Europe and Europeans in literature, film and the
arts
•          Literary, historical
or filmic representations of migration and integration
•          Europe's
legacy: Multi-linguism, multi-culturalism and plural identities across and
beyond Europe
•          From myth to reality:
Europa’s Greek tragedy
 
 
Please submit all materials to michel.mallet at mail.mcgill.ca by
no later than January 5, 2012.
 
Abstracts for
20-minute presentations (in English) should be no more than 300 words. Submissions should not bear the author’s
name. Please include the following information as a separate attachment: name, title of paper, department and
university affiliation, phone number and e-mail address. Notification of
acceptance will be sent to participants by late January 2012. The conference
organizers will do their best to assist in securing accommodations for
conference participants, and there will also be the option of staying with
McGill graduate students. Further details will be provided at the time of
acceptance.

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