postcolonial

The deadline for abstracts for the Twelfth Annual Massachusetts Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies Graduate Conference has been extended to Thursday, September 10:

Massachusetts Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies Graduate Conference

The Massachusetts Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst will host its twelfth annual graduate student conference on Saturday, October 10, 2015. We are delighted to welcome Anne Lake Prescott of Barnard College as our keynote speaker.

Ever since the emergence of the modern marketplace for cultural goods, literary texts and art works have, on occasion, defied the expectations of its readers and audience, affronted their moral ethos, or flaunted a disregard for their sensibilities and norms. The potential power of art to disrupt the perceptions of its audience was foregrounded in the critical discourse of the modernists and the historical avant-garde and this possibility continues to animate critical debates, particularly those organized around some understanding of autonomy. With the all but complete commodification of every artistic and literary practice, it is more urgent than ever to pose the question whether we can still presume autonomy.

Below, please find a cfp for a panel to be held at the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) Annual Meeting in Pittsburgh, PA, March 31 - April 3, 2016.

"Making Sense(s) in the Eighteenth Century"

Feminist Singularities

Co-organizers: Jacquelyn Ardam, UCLA; Ronjaunee Chatterjee, CalArts

2015 marked the 30-year anniversary of the publication of Donna Haraway's "A Cyborg Manifesto," whose radical questioning of the divisions between human and machine, matter and meaning, and gendered and "postgendered" existence continues to animate our social reality. Recent discussions in the field of new materialism, which grapple with questions of embodiment and materiality, have opened up new avenues for theorizing femininity outside of conventional frameworks.

The term we still use to designate someone's attachment to a particular language, her potentially flawless competence, or the very "place" for her thoughts to emerge in coherent form, is "mother tongue". We take it to be a natural condition of language acquisition, equally valid for every individual speaker, and thus forget that it is a mere metaphorical reference to the "first" language, spoken by what is referred to, with an even more misleading metaphor, a "native" speaker. Throughout history, the use and connotations of the expression "mother tongue" have undergone several changes. In the Middle Ages and Early Modern period, the Latin "lingua materna" referred to the vernaculars in opposition to the learned Latin.