The 53rd Annual Comparative World Literature Conference: Borders, Place, and Translations

Dates: April 25th-26th, 2018

Location: Anatol Center, California State University, Long Beach

From Starbucks’ retail-branding as a “third place” between home and work to Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, the places of our lives are simultaneously locations and conceptions. To be in a place is to do the representational work of defining that space’s affective and pragmatic borders.

That work might be personal, such as Proust’s cork-lined room, or literary, such as Homer’s portrayal of the Mediterranean. Or it might be political: the American borders, the boundaries of the EU, and contested areas such as Kashmir. Often, of the representational work of defining a place is the work of defining the other through translations both linguistic and cultural.

The Department of Comparative World Literature and Classics at California State University Long Beach invites 250-word proposals for 15-20 minute individual presentations or one-hour panel discussions with up to 4 speakers on the topic of borders, place, and translation, broadly conceived. Possible topics may include, but are not limited to:

--Political places such as the border, the city, the region, and the nation
--Personal places in literature, film, and other media
--Speculative and conceptual places such as haunted houses, mazes, and fictionalized landscapes
--Digital spaces, social media, and the borders of selective community discourse
--The concept of borders and their relationship to diaspora studies and identity studies
--The locus classicus, or the “places” of literary texts
--The relationship of language translation to place
--The concept of translation beyond the linguistic

Please submit proposals to cwl.csulb@gmail.com by February 2, 2018.