ethnicity and national identity

CFP: Edited Collection on Latino Fatherhood in Literature, Film, Television, and Art

International Conference Literature (&), (In)tangible Heritage

FCSH, NOVA University (Lisbon, Portugal)

11-12 October 2018

Throughout 2018, we are celebrating diverse cultural heritage across Europe. The aim of the European Year of Cultural Heritage is to encourage more people to discover and engage with Europe’s cultural heritage, and to reinforce a sense of belonging to a common European space. The slogan for the year is: “Our heritage: where the past meets the future”.

In her still influential Fantasy and Mimesis: Responses to Reality in Western Literature (1984), Kathryn Hume defines the literary fantastic as any departure from consensus reality, believing that it holds an equally significant position in literary history as mimesis. Rather than being a recent and sometimes academically marginalized genre, fantasy, for Hume, is integral to almost all literature.

Call for submissions to a collection which critically examines programs that prominently feature children in international (i.e. non-American) television. Programs may include those targeted to children, or those programs targeted to adults but contain child characters. We invite submissions on programs from Canada, the UK, Continental Europe, Australasia, Africa, Asia, Central and South America, and the Middle East. These essays will explore how international television has been a significant conduit for the public consumption of changing ideas about children and childhood, and will connect relevant events, attitudes, or anxieties within their respective countries of origin to an analysis of children or childhood in international programs.

The concept of ‘identity’ has of late acquired much resonance inside and outside academia. Identity has become in today’s globalized world more fundamental than ever before to the endeavor of addressing theoretical and political issues relating to ‘nationality,’ ‘nation (-state) borders,’  ‘history,’ ‘ethnicity,’ and other, perhaps more urgent, issues of ethnic conflicts, immigration, and refugees. The complexity of each of these entities and the interplay of most of them point, together, to the insufficiencies apparent in those ‘fixed’ understandings of the concept of identity. Fixed, or essentialized, views of identity put emphasis on roots, continuity, tradition, and timelessness... .