Call for Papers: Resonance

University of California, Santa Barbara

In a year when the Nobel Committee has invited a critical reexamination of a border between the sonic and the textual by awarding the Nobel Prize in Literature to Bob Dylan, UC-Santa Barbara’s Graduate Center for Literary Research makes a call for papers for its fourth annual interdisciplinary conference: Resonance. Resonance explores configurations of the graphic, phonic, textual and sonic, among and between cultures, literatures, languages, media, musics, and inter(subjects). How can resonance guide our inquiry into the dynamics between texts, stages, performers, artists, spaces, and audiences? How do bodies and materials generate and mediate resonance? How might we engage with resonance “to replace the binaries of structuralist thought with [a discourse] diametrically opposed to a distancing and objectifying form of knowledge”? (Viet Erlmann, Keywords in Sound)

Deliberately broad and interdisciplinary, our call welcomes submissions from across the humanities, including such fields as Art, ChicanX Studies, Classics, Comparative Literature, East Asian Studies, Ecocriticism, English, Ethnic Studies, Feminist Studies, Global Studies, Language and Literature Programs, Media Studies, Musicology, Performance Studies, Religious Studies, and Translation Studies. Let the questions we pose above be more generative than limiting.

Keynoting the May 12th, 2017 conference at UCSB will be Ashon Crawley, whose 2016 book Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility “engages a wide range of critical paradigms from black studies, queer theory, and sounds studies to theology, continental philosophy, and performance studies to theorize the ways in which alternative or ‘otherwise’ models of existence can serve as disruptions against the marginalization of and violence against minoritarian lifeworlds and possibilities for flourishing.”

Interested graduate students should submit a 250-word abstract of a 20 minute presentation and any queries to John Schranck (jschranck@umail.ucsb.edu), Student Coordinator of the Graduate Student for Literary Research, by Friday, April 14th.Non-traditional and experimental presentations likewise welcomed. Advanced undergraduates, professors and postdocotoral scholars also considered.