Call for Panelists - ACLA, April 2013 - Dissident Writing, Literature, and Global Media

[Josephine von Zitzewitz]

Dear colleagues,

you are invited to submit paper proposals for the seminar 'Dissident
Writing, Literature, and Global Media'  at the ACLA Meeting in Toronto in
April 2013.

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This seminar aims to accommodate papers that look at a variety of instances
of dissident writing, acknowledging the problematic nature of terms like
“dissidence” and “human rights.”  Both concepts have roots in a
universalizing European vision, as John M. Headley pointed out (*The
Europeanization of the World*).  Both are also associated for contemporary
readers primarily with resistance to Communist States in Eastern and
Central Europe.  As Samuel Moyn made clear recently (*Human Rights in
History*), critical traction can be gained by making explicit the utopian
or global pretensions of human rights and the discourses of dissidence that
appealed to it.  We should acknowledge the sometimes awkward fit of such a
frame for particular, local cases.  Jonathan Bolton (*Worlds of Dissent*)
observed that dissidents in Central Europe were “writing people,” whose
audience was, crucially, abroad.

What qualifies a person to be a “dissident,” and what constitutes
“dissident writing” in European and other contexts?  Does this framework
remain relevant for our understanding of events in China and the Arab
world, for example? How does new media, and social networks in particular,
change what we envision to be the global context of citizen activism?  And
what is the role of literature within the framework of “dissident
writing”?  Should literary texts by “dissidents” be afforded special
attention, as the East European dissidents of the 1960s-1980s would have
argued, or be treated like any other form of cultural activism?  What is
the relationship between art, including literature, and citizen activism?
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If you'd like to propose a paper (abstract of 250 words) please visit
http://www.acla.org/acla2013/propose-a-paper-or-seminar/ and click on the
'Propose a Paper' link.

The deadline for paper proposals is 1 November.




The description of the ACLA meeting structure can be found here:
http://www.acla.org/annualmeetingguidelines.html

The conference theme and call for papers is here:
http://www.acla.org/acla2013/

Information about the membership and registration requirements and travel
grants are here:
http://www.acla.org/acla2013/conference-faq/


I'm looking forward to your proposals!


Josephine (Josie) von Zitzewitz
Research Fellow in Russian

University of Oxford
New College
OX1 3BN
UK

josephine.vonzitzewitz at new.ox.ac.uk

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