cfp.english.upenn.edu

‘A Self-Conscious Voice’ - an Exploration of Expatriation and Literature
A post-graduate conference at the University of Bristol on May 11th, 2011

Website: http://www.bris.ac.uk/english/events/selfconsciousvoice/
Poster: https://www.bris.ac.uk/english/events/selfconsciousvoice/poster-scv.pdf

'You're an expatriate. You've lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cafés.’
–Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises.

Plenary Speaker Dr. Lindsey Moore

Expatriates have long been known to form communities within communities, which are neither fully a part of their past homeland or present host country. Within these environments writers and artists have often emerged, seeking to express the unique cultural atmosphere created by this form of collective exile.
This conference looks to explore expatriate literatures and their dislocations from the Medieval Period onwards in literatures in English. Possible topics might include but are not limited to:

Expatriate narratives of identity
Home and community in expatriate literature
Exile, the expatriate, and the nation (state)
Expatriate geographies
The pilgrim as religious expatriate
Assimilation and the expatriate
Expatriate literature and form
Immigrant or Émigré?
The expatriate and Post-colonial theory

Proposals for 20 minute papers should be sent as an email attachment in .doc or .pdf format to

expatlitconference@gmail.com

and must include a double spaced, 250-word abstract plus a cover sheet with your name, university (if app.), contact information, and a brief biographical paragraph about your academic interests and achievements.
All proposals will be blind-vetted. The deadline for receipt is April 1st 2011.
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Speaker - Dr Lindsey Moore

Dr Lindsey Moore's first book, Arab, Muslim, Woman: Voice and Vision in Postcolonial Literature and Film (Routledge, 2008) is an interdisciplinary examination of a wide range of Arab women's postcolonial fiction, autobiography, film and other visual media. She continues to work on Arab women's writing and visual media, and on postcolonial women's writing more broadly. She recently edited a symposium on 'Glocal Diasporas' for the Journal of Commonwealth Literature (2010) and is editing a special issue of Postcolonial Text (forthcoming, 2011/12) entitled 'Glocal Imaginaries'. She has also written on expatriate American writer Paul Bowles. She is currently writing an article on representations of Islamism in selected contemporary Arab fiction and developing a new comparative book-length project on postcolonial women's writing in a 'glocal' frame.

Dr Moore is the Principal Investigator of the AHRC-funded project 'Islamism in Arab Fiction and Film, 1947 to the Present' (with Dr Arthur Bradley and Dr Abir Hamdar), Feb. 2009 - Feb. 2010. For further information go to: http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/projects/islamism/index.htm)

She is on the steering group of the Centre for Transcultural Writing and Research and a co-organiser of Trans-Scriptions, a series that brings together creative writers, publishers and academics to discuss interfaces between 'Writing, Culture and Location'.