Republic of Tunisia

Ministry of Higher Education

University of Kairouan

Faculty of Arts & Humanities

English Department

Call for Papers

FLIGHT

International Multi-Disciplinary Conference

April, 23, 24, 25, 2018

The English Department at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities in Kairouan announces a multi-disciplinary international conference on “Flight”.

The notion of flight is associated with movements of bodies, thoughts, desires, fancies, journeys from one place, state or condition to another, seeking sites of hope, settlement, escape, respite, safety, security, appropriation. And more. 

Flight often suggests an initial state of discontent, stagnation, danger or defeat. On the one hand, the thought of flight is inspired by certain feelings of despair and vacuity in closed, claustrophobic, even embattled circles. As a mode of endurance, perdurance or survival, the subject of flight may escape from reality to illusion, or from one reality to another, through contemplation, aesthetic creation, drinking wine or consuming drugs, to avoid existential malaise, with aims as diverse as purgation or redemption.  At odds with thwarted motion or vitality, flight opens towards life as a nomad, as an exile, as a refugee, alienated, by choice or coercion, from the natural ground.

On the other hand, flight has positive connotations associated with freedom, liberation and survival. It is inscribed in the will to take wing andundertake adventures in utopian experimentsto realize dreams. Indeed, flight is a crossing in which subjective forms, singular, collective, composite, hybrid, construct appropriate alternatives, finally comporting with forms of well-being or well-becoming; or in which these forms surpass themselves in ways they cannot yet know.

There are strong drives which urge the individual to fly—to be, to see, to feel, to experience at a larger scale -seeking a better or perfect destination to break upwith the chains of repression, frustration and dominance. Paradoxically (or not), flight often aims to come to ground via divergent trajectories of violent actions and illegal practices to change a political regime or abort the spread of a particular ideology. As a concept then, flight constitutes a clustering or intersecting of vectors whose forces, directions, and even names, would seem to negate one another:  anarchy and unionization, security and terrorism, nomadismand encampment, ‘on the lam’ or ‘holed up’. In the postmodern political thought, escape or the line of flight is a radical movement that aims to either escape or confront despotism or totalitarianism. In fact, vectors of flight may converge in drawing the schemes for revolution, aspiring to the establishment of new plateaus for free and democratic discursive practices.  Often these plateaus establish themselves in literature, on the stage or screen, in the dance club, or across the ‘black mirrors’ that accompany our most banal flights.

The English Department invites abstracts on the broad issues of FILGHToutlined above. The conference will take place on 23, 24, 25 April, 2018 at the Conference Room, Faculty of Kairouan. Please send 250-word abstracts by February 15, 2018 to:

flightkairouan2018@gmail.com

Acceptance of papers will be sent out by February 25, 2018.

The topics might be related, but not limited, to the following issues:

• Aestheticpractices and productions as means of escape from…
• Myth as a space of flight
• Flight from reality to illusion
• Flight as a mode of endurance
• The nature of the modern and postmodern flight (the anxieties of flight, inter/intra-subjective flights)
• Migration and displacement
• Imagination between escape and its creative potential (the gothic and romantic constructions of ‘flight’)
• Nomadic flight
• Spiritual versus carnal / sensual flights
• Mass media and advertisement: representation of flight
• Multiculturalism and globalization: the flight from/to ethnic cultural specificities
• The Discourse of deviation, evasion, mitigation as styles of flight.
• Law and criminality and imprisonment
• Aerial vision and surveillance
• Avian-Human mutations
• Religious flights:  Hejira, mysticism, etc.

Head of English Department

Dr. Adel Bahroun

Peer-reviewed articles will be published.