CFP: [Postcolonial] CFP - ACLA 2009 Seminar: "Intertechnical Bodies" (11/3/08; Harvard U, 3/26/09-3/29/09)

full name / name of organization: 
Theodora Danylevich
contact email: 

ACLA 2009 Annual Meeting: “Global Languages, Local Cultures”
March 26-29, 2009
Harvard University
Cambridge, MA

Seminar: Intertechnical Bodies

Co-chairs: Theodora Danylevich, Megan McCabe, Jed Brubaker

This seminar considers how the term "local culture" relates to concepts of
embodied subjectivity. We argue that the embodied subject is a
manifestation, distillation, or representation of local culture, and
subsequently ask: To what extent do global communications and global
technologies constitute a threat not only to "local cultures" but also to
individual (human) bodies? How can we re-theorize global technologies in a
way that recognizes their conduciveness to authorship, creativity, and the
expression of productive differences, rather than their purported tendency
to mistranslate, subsume or otherwise violate local cultures? The concept
of the intertechnical body thus emerges to guide our inquiry toward a
co-constitutive and co-representative relationship between the global
language of technology and the local culture of the embodied subject.

This seminar invites both a literal and a broad interpretation of the term
"technology," following Heidegger and Foucault with respect to discourse
and philosophical heuristics (i.e., “Global Languages,” “World Literature”
can be said to be a “technology”).

Questions that participants are encouraged to consider for this panel are:

-How do global technologies afford us to rethink local culture?
-What are some strategies for recuperating the "autonomous self" of
Enlightenment humanism that can be called intertechnical strategies for
authoring the local self?
-What are some textual or other cultural performances of an intertechnical
body?
-What are some cultural or subjective repercussions of the concept of an
intertechnical body?
-What happens to gender with an intertechnical body?
-Global authorships due to local readings and local authorships due to
global readings.
- The phenomenology of the subject's internalization of global
discourse/technology/authorship.
-Technologies of authorship of the self.
-The role of creativity in the intertechnical body.

***Important: 250-word proposals must be submitted through the ACLA2009 web
site website BY NOVEMBER 3, 2008: http://www.acla.org/submit/. Simply
choose the seminar “Intertehnical Bodies” from the drop-down menu when
submitting your proposal.

***If you have any questions about the seminar, please feel free to contact
Theodora Danylevich at td87 [at] georgetown [dot] edu.

The American Comparative Literature Association's 2009 annual meeting will
be held in Cambridge, MA, at Harvard University, from March 26-9, 2009.
ACLA provides a unique forum for the productive collaboration of scholars:
Seminar participants meet for two hours/day for consecutive days (1-3,
depending on the number of participants) to discuss their work. You can
learn more about ACLA and the 2009 meeting here: http://www.acla.org/acla2009/.

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Received on Wed Oct 15 2008 - 21:51:02 EDT

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