CFP: Unthinking Generations: Kinship and Comparison (grad) (12/31/06; 3/2/07-3/3/07)

full name / name of organization: 
och2101_at_columbia.edu
contact email: 

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: Unthinking Generations: Kinship and Comparison (panel moderated
by Marianne Hirsch)

Sigrid Weigel argues that generation is a hybrid concept that moves
between different academic fields and discourses, and invites
comparative inquiry. She theorizes generation as a process or
movement less of evolutionary than of cultural, historical, and
narrative patterning: a generation is shaped by commonalities of
experience as well as by temporal, geographic, and cultural
differences. In Antigone's Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death,
Judith Butler asks what will be the legacy of Oedipus for those who
are formed in family situations "where positions are hardly clear,
where the place of the father is dispersed, where the place of the
mother is multiply occupied or displaced, where the symbolic in its
stasis no longer holds?" For this panel, we invite papers that
contribute to our understanding of comparative studies by asking,
for example, what is the role of genealogy and family narrative in
the study of cultural memory? What is the role of the family
metaphor in political theory? If the comparative can be rethought
(after Weigel and Butler) as a generational or familial concept, in
what way would it invite us to reconsider the notion of
disciplinarity? Taking into account that the word generation also
means the process of generating, contributions could also propose
to think through comparativism as an emergent (dominant? residual?)
mode of inquiry today.

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 - 17:56:22 EST