Archival Travels / Traveling Archives
We are inviting paper proposals for the 2010 Annual American Comparative Literature Association Meeting (New Orleans, April 1-4).
Archival Travels / Traveling Archives
* Seminar Organizers: Anne Kingsley, Northeastern U; Aparna Mujumdar, Northeastern U
This seminar focuses on the relation between the archive and travel as represented or imagined in contemporary texts. The archive, defined by many contemporary critics by its etymological root as a "house of record," suggests that we might explore its geography, the space and place in which the narratives of history and empire are recovered, named, classified, catalogued, measured, valued, processed and produced. The archive is an active site — traveled to and explored — exemplifying what Ann Stoler has recently coined as "ethnography in the archive." Her use of the term ethnography and the examination of the anthropology of archival practice encourage the connection between archival practice and travel writing in which epistemological systems and classifications of culture, race, gender, and nationality are recorded, examined, mapped and produced. We are interested in these archival mappings as they are explored through contemporary literature, theory, film, and art. More so, we are especially interested in those papers that explore the challenges that emerging discussions of travel, migration, diaspora, creolization and cosmopolitanism pose to archival production, imagination, theory and practice.
Topics might include, but are certainly not limited to:
* Geography of the Archive
* Mapping the Archive
* Archive as Installation/Exhibition
* Gender, Identity and Place in the Archive
* Global Literatures/Global Archives
* Traveling Narrators and the Archive
* Traveler as Archivalist
* Archival travels
* Archive and Empire
* Postcolonial Archives
* Writing Back to the Archive
Proposals must be submitted through ACLA link:
Deadline: November 13, 2009
When submitting a proposal, make sure to select the seminar "Archival Travels/ Traveling Archives" from the drop down list