postcolonial

While the research of our invited keynotes and plenary speakers mostly gravitates around the issues of labour and precarities, decolonizing knowledge and the refugee “crisis” in the Mediterranean, the conference is open to all topics relevant to Cultural Studies. Suggested topics, drawing on the work of our invited keynote, plenary and spotlight speakers, and on more general themes in Cultural Studies research, include:

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• (Anti-)consumption and everyday life

• Adaptation cultures

• Borders and mobilities

• Critical and cultural theory

This creative panel seeks to examine how artist-scholars can combine their scholarship and their creative skills to articulate various forms of marginalization. I intend to solicit creative works that lie at the intersection of the textual and the pictorial, which push the boundaries of scholarly inquiry by incorporating the artistic, in an effort to make research more accessible to people outside the academe. As a comic scholar and artist, I firmly believe in the versatility of its hybrid form and its ability to solicit deeply affective responses (which cannot be achieved by purely empirical data).

This roundtable endeavors to assess the influence of Donald Trump’s presidency on literature in the US and around the world. Three avenues of inquiry will be featured. First, how has the Trump presidency influenced literature in the US since 2016? Second, are there commonalities between writing in the US and writing internationally owing to the Trump presidency? Finally, focusing on non-US writing, are there perspectives or themes in global literature that are not at all present in US writing that have occurred in the wake of Trump’s presidency?

One of the strengths of comparative literature is that by definition it offers a pluralistic perspective on concrete world events.

“The Middle Ages” are created and maintained by those who imagine them today, lending urgency to the project of narrating a global medieval that resists the field’s racist and nationalist myths. Given a need for new imaginaries:

This proposal invites scholars to address the connection between Socialist Realism(s) and world literatures within and beyond the Soviet Union and the Cold War. As I. Anisimov stated in 1959 that, in the period following the October Revolution, the leading talents of world literature came to the side of the Socialist Revolution, since Socialist literatures associated with the new reality were rapidly developing not only in the Socialist world, but also in the capitalist world, where the best part of literature has joined battle to change reality. However, in the past decades the Socialist side of World Literature has not gotten the proper attention in World Literature studies.