cfp.english.upenn.edu

This is a call for papers for the annual American Comparative Literature Conference which will be held in Toronto, Canada, April 4 - 7, 2013. The abstracts need to be submitted on the ACLA website: < http://www.acla.org/acla2013/> by November 15, 2012.

Seminar Title: Postcolonial and Global Routes/Roots of Affect
Co-Organizers: Monika Mehta & Praseeda Gopinath

This seminar seeks to expand the work in affect studies by examining how location(s) drive, obstruct, transform, and facilitate affect from empire to contemporary globalization. In doing so, we wish to place affect studies in conversation with postcolonial and global studies. We are specifically interested in tracking affective responses to film and literature. How do postcolonial and global films or literary works generate anger, love, sympathy or sorrow? What roles do form(s) and context(s) play in the production of these affective responses? Though affect and its circuits can be carefully contextualized, they always exceed and spill over from their immediate local, regional, and “national” sites. We are interested in precisely the cross-hatching of the local and global circuits of affect, in the causes and effects of travelling affect. Does affect shift as it travels? What are the effects of affective circuits that originate within a specific context and are absorbed in another? What are the coordinates that shape the scale of affect? Does the location of an affective event determine its global/regional scale? How might caste, class, ethnicity, race, gender, and sexuality structure affect? We welcome papers which would examine the interaction, conflict, mutation, and appropriation occurring between local and global circuits in both historical and contemporary global contexts.

Possible topics might include but are not limited to:
Technology and the Circulation of Affect
Transnational Fandom
Film Exhibition and Affect
Literary Reception in Global Contexts
Prizes (e.g. Oscars, Man Booker) and the Production of Affect
Film and Literary Festivals as Affective Events
Form(s) of Affect
Genre and Affect