Biologism and Identity ACLA Seminar [UPDATE] - DEADLINE OCTOBER 15

full name / name of organization: 
Jenny Heijun Wills/University of Winnipeg; David Palumbo-Liu/Stanford University
contact email: 

This seminar will take place at the American Comparative Literature Association conference in Seattle, March 26-29, 2015.

Since the 1970s theorizing identity has held to one basic belief: identities are not inherent, they are constructed. But recent scientific and technological innovations, along with a general fatigue in constantly rehearsing the "identities are constructed" mantra, compel us to rethink that basic belief and see how it might be deserving of radical rethinking, or at least radical modification. More and more we find people searching for biological kinship and ancestry from around the world, embarking on "roots trips" to their (or their ancestors') countries of origin, and "culture camps" that offer young people (such as transracial adoptees) the opportunity to "connect with their lost cultural origins." There is an anti-constructivist, personal nostalgia sweeping the country (a nostalgia for something one has yet to experience—one's bare roots) as well as a fascination with the global applications of genetic analysis (for instance, with the Human Genome Project), that are represented in a variety of genres, media, and perspectives. What we are witnessing here is a return to thinking about essence, identity, and more specifically, the biological aspects of our far pasts as an important and missing index. Our seminar will move beyond the sentimental, however, to see the theoretical and political consequences of such an inversion of the essentialist-constructivist dyad. We invite papers that explore such consequences for textual and cultural representations of globality, migration, genocide, Indigeneity, settler colonialism, postcolonialism, gender and sexuality, trans* subjectivities, transnational and transracial adoption, kinship, race, and ethnicity.

Please submit 250-word abstracts via the ACLA website: http://acla.org/biologism-and-identity-0