Panel for Figures of Comparison in the Humanities and the Social
Sciences, the second annual graduate student conference of The
Center for Comparative Literature and Society (CCLS)

Date/Place: March 2nd-3rd, 2007/ Columbia University, New York

CFP: Figures of the In-Between (panel moderated by Stathis
Gourgouris)

Various tropes of hybridity (Bhabha)—metissage (Lionnet), mestizaje
(Anzaldua), creolite (Bernabe, Confiant, Chamoiseau), or
antillanite (Glissant), for example—have featured prominently in
the scholarship and aesthetic practices of the last thirty years to
figure modes of cultural mixing. Others—trans- or cross-sexuality,
the androgyne, and forms of sexual indeterminacy—have been used
critically in gender, feminist, and queer studies. This panel
proposes to examine figures or tropes of the in-between that
simultaneously call for a comparative (interdisciplinary,
cross-cultural, multilingual, etc.) approach, and figure the
comparative itself. What are the political, social and economic
implications of such figures of hybridity? To what political uses
can (or should) they be put? How does the history of these terms
affect their deployment, or shore up their limits? Because these
figures point to the intersectionality of analytic categories
(class, race, gender) and to the meeting of cultures, languages,
and histories, we are particularly interested in cross-disciplinary
and intercultural approaches: how do these comparative figures test
the boundaries of disciplinary fields and cultural or linguistic
formations? Conversely, how do disciplines, languages or fields
shape tropes of the in-between, or point to their limitations?

The conference will be introduced by the director of CCLS, Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak. All panels will be moderated by Columbia
University faculty members. The conference will close with a
roundtable discussion in which the panel moderators will present
their concluding thoughts and open the discussion to the public.
You can visit the following website for more information on the
conference:
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/ccls/lists/rce/ance.html
or
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/ccls/events/main/intro/index.html

Please send a 300-500 word abstract to the following e-mail address
no later than December 31st, 2006:
figures_of_comparison_at_columbia.edu.
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Received on Tue Nov 28 2006 - 17:56:01 EST