postcolonial

Through the creation of a bounded space, territory, as Stuart Elden points out, 'is already a violent act of exclusion and inclusion; maintaining it as such requires constant vigilance and the mobilization of threat, and challenging it necessarily entails a transgression' (Elden, Terror and Terrorism xxx). This organisation and maintaining of territorial limits as an enterprise fraught with violence is clearly apparent in the postcolonial world, the boundaries of which, ever since European imperial expansion began and right through to decolonisation and the present era, have been drawn and redrawn with little or no consideration for the cultural and historical affinities among the inhabitants of those places.

World Cinema and Television in French

September 9-10, 2016 ∙ University of Cincinnati, USA

Sponsored by Contemporary French Civilization, The University of Cincinnati & The University of Rhode Island

Confirmed Keynote Speaker: Bill Marshall (University of Stirling)

Confirmed Roundtable Participants: Joseph Mai (Clemson University), Mireille Rosello (University of Amsterdam), Sylvie Durmelat (Georgetown University), Thibaut Schilt (College of the Holy Cross)

In her recent study, The Forms of the Affects (2014), Eugenie Brinkema announces, "We may well be at the beginning of what will eventually be called the twenty-first century 'return to form' in the humanities" (39). Brinkema marks MLQ's special issue, "Reading for Form" (2000), which was later published as a collection of essays under the same name (2006), both edited by Susan J. Wolfson and Marshall Brown, as the beginning of this return to form. Meredith Martin's The Rise and Fall of Meter: Poetry and English National Culture, 1860-1930 (2012) and Derek Attridge's Moving Words: Forms of English Poetry (2013), to name only two of the many recent publications that address form, seem to support Brinkema's claim.

"The visionary starts with a clean sheet of paper, and reimagines the world." — Malcolm Gladwell

"It's a very salutary thing to realize that the rather dull universe in which most of us spend most of our time is not the only universe there is." — Aldous Huxley

Philosophers, poets, and artists in every era have revisioned and reimagined the world in ways that have inspired historical transformations. Visionary texts – whether they reach proleptically into an imagined future, analeptically reconsider the past, or urgently re-envision the present – have offered us alternative possibilities of understanding who and where we are.

The Centre for British Literary and Cultural Studies at Hacettepe University is pleased to announce its second graduate conference which this time will be held on an international ground, "Innovative Representations of 'Utopias' in Studies in English". We welcome academic proposals produced in English on British Literature/Culture, Commonwealth Literature/Culture, Irish Literature/Culture and American Literature/Culture from MA and PhD students enrolled in graduate programmes all over the world.