Michel Foucault once remarked that "I believe that the anxiety of our era has to do fundamentally with space, no doubt a great deal more than with time." Indeed, there is a strong sense in which space has become one of the most privileged loci of economic, social, and cultural production in the age of globalization. Though many contemporary thinkers have addressed this postmodern "spatial turn," Fredric Jameson's theoretical discourse is remarkable for its insistence on space as a cultural dominant in the world today. From his theorization of "cognitive mapping" and his critique of the "prison-house" of (post)structuralist epistemology, to his intervention into the architectonics of postmodern culture, to his cartography of utopia, his oeuvre can be understood as a series of sustained attempts to map diverse spatial phenomena and tendencies under late capitalism.

This panel aims to cast new light on Jameson's work as a kind of global positioning system or a spatial mode of thinking that seeks to locate, map, and contest the spatial/spatializing logic of late capitalism and its contemporary cultural formations. We welcome any proposals that address the importance of space qua history in Jameson's theoretical discourse. We are particularly interested in papers that address the following topics:

1) Jameson's symptomatic readings of contemporary spatial forms, including, most notably, the city, architecture, cyberpunk, video art, and film

2) Jameson's spatial dialectic in comparison with spatial dimensions in other thinkers (e.g. Lacan's Imaginary/Symbolic/Real, Derrida's deconstruction, Deleuze's deterritorialization, Lefebvre's social space, Bhabha's interstitial space)

3) Jameson's cartographic imagination and its relevance for theorizing transnational networks of globalization that are increasingly facilitated and underpinned by cybernetics and digital technology

If you are interested in participating in the seminar, please submit your paper proposal (Max. 250 words) and short bio (50 words) by midnight, November 15, 2012 (Pacific Standard Time) on the following website:
http://acla.org/submit/index.php

Please feel free to contact me at koonyong.kim@gmail.com should you have any questions about this seminar.