CFP: Worlds, Texts, Critics (South Africa) (4/1/07; 7/8/07-7/11/07)

full name / name of organization: 
Tredoux, Francois
contact email: 

Association of University English Teachers of South
Africa/SAACLALS/SAVAL CONFERENCE 2007.
 
8 - 11 July 2007
 
UNIVERSITY OF KWAZULU-NATAL, HOWARD COLLEGE, DURBAN
 
WORLDS, TEXTS, CRITICS

      In a combined spirit of homage and debate, the 2007 conference
takes its theme from the title of a collection of essays by the late
Edward Said. While no critical consensus on Said's views is presupposed,
participants are invited to speculate on the "worldliness" of texts as
both deliberate aesthetic elaborations and as material ensembles which
are at once enabled and constrained by complicated informing contexts.
We invite papers which explore these webs of 'worldliness'.
      As Said himself might have observed, it is apt to address such
affiliations in Durban, South Africa's pre-eminent port city. Named
after the colonial governor Benjamin D`Urban, this east coast city
entered European history with da Gama, slowly developed as an ivory
trading post, and saw settlers uneasily tolerated by indigenous people
and their monarchs, Shaka among them. Later, the city was integrated
into British imperial economies through the immigrant Indian labour and
industry associated with sugarcane. In terms of literary history,
writers linked to the city include Ghandi, Fernando Pessoa, B.W.
Vilikazi, Rider Haggard, Roy Campbell, Mazizi Kunene, William Plomer,
Daphne Rooke, and Douglas Livingstone. The actual and imaginative routes
from Durban to various centres, margins, and interiors are many, and as
a once-colonial maritime city which fronts the Indian Ocean, Durban is
an appropriate location from which scholars might reconceptualise the
prevailing emphasis on the "Black Atlantic" as a dominant zone of
economic-cultural exchange.
 
Deadline for submission of abstracts is 1 April 2007.
 
Website: http://academic.sun.ac.za/english/AUETSA2007/

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Received on Fri Dec 15 2006 - 20:17:39 EST