cfp.english.upenn.edu

“Afterlives”: June 4, 2010

Keynote Speakers
Mark Seltzer (Evan Frankel Professor of Literature, UCLA)
Saree Makdisi (Professor of English and Comparative Literature, UCLA)

The term "afterlives" has become increasingly predominant in recent literary criticism. But what is meant by afterlives? How do its ghostly connotations distinguish it from older critical models of influence, and how can we understand its proximity to haunting as divergent from previous theorizations of spectrality? How do afterlives function within and between texts?

This conference is interested in exploring the multiple meanings of afterlives, from its genealogical underpinnings to its political and theoretical ramifications. Papers may address any aspect of afterlives including, but not limited to, the following:

-Haunted genres: ghost stories, fairy tales, the gothic
-Genealogy, ancestry, racial identity
-Architecture/Urbanism: rehabbed & re-purposed space
-Afterlives of capitalism & economic systems
-Biology, genetics, biopolitics
-War, trauma, flashbacks
-Afterlives of Empire: citizenship & postcolonial subjectivity
-Spectral citizenship & imagined communities
-The body & its echoes: raced, queered, & transgendered bodies
-Organ transplantation & affective resurrection
-Periodicity, historicization
-Film and photography: indexicality & death
-The afterlives of living authors/dead characters
-The resurrection of the "dead author"
-Psychoanalysis & the Unconscious
-Philosophies of radical change versus continuity
-Archivization

Abstracts for 20-minute papers and panel proposals are due by Monday, 22 March 2010. Please paste the abstract (200-300 words) or panel proposal into the body of an e-mail message and submit to southland.ucla@gmail.com. Panels should consist of three papers and may include a respondent. Be sure to include your name(s), contact information, department(s), and institution(s). The conference will be on 4 June 2010 at the University of California Los Angeles. More information will soon be available at http://www.english.ucla.edu/events/southland.