CFP: The Queer Space of the Postcolonial

Northeastern Modern Language Association (NEMLA) Convention, 2006
Philadelphia, PA
March 2- March 5, 2006
Convention Information: http://www.nemla.org
(Panelists must be members of NEMLA)

This panel proposes to explore the ways in which the postcolonial nation and
subject are seen through literature to inhabit what Judith Halberstam, in "In
a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives," terms "queer
space." If we do, indeed, "detach queerness from sexual identity," we can
begin to imagine those spaces which function in non-normative time patterns
and across spaces which escape conventional definition. The "postcolonial"
may be seen as such a space: the very emphasis on lands which have been
subjected to imperialistic rule constructs a necessary binary of Us/Other,
where the weight of history is deemed to define the present and the future, as
well as the bodies and individualities of those who inhabit this space. In
addition, the sheer vastness of the space which is named "postcolonial" defies
any form of geographic normalcy: in the intervening twenty years of
postcolonial theory, the term has come to cover virtually the entire globe,
with the exclusion of the United States, England, and Western Europe, and the
rendering of the "postcolonial" as queer allows for ways in which literatures
can be seen to be revealing narratives which must necessarily work against the
concepts of space and time which have been defined by the normative values of
the West.

E-mail 250-300 word abstracts by September 15, 2005 to Rebecca Romanow at
rromanow_at_mail.uri.edu.

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Received on Wed Jun 15 2005 - 17:26:30 EDT