F[R]ICTION

    Conference date: April 26, 2024 | Abstracts due: January 10, 2024 (*extended deadline*)

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Amber Jamilla Musser, Professor of English (CUNY Graduate Center)

In Anna Tsing’s ethnography Friction (2005), Tsing offers “friction” as a metaphor for thinking about global connection: “A wheel turns because of its encounter with the road; spinning in the air it goes nowhere. Rubbing two sticks together produces heat and light; one stick alone is just a stick. As a metaphorical image, friction reminds us that heterogenous and unequal encounters can lead to new arrangements of culture and power.”

Friction, defined by the OED as the “action of chafing or rubbing,” is not always benign. Our contemporary moment bears witness to devastating frictions such as the atrocities of international conflict and the erosion our environment due to anthropogenic forces. Friction, as a material and abstract force, can be a source of pain, violence, and suffering. Yet, under some circumstances, might friction also be a site of relationality and world-making? Amber Jamilla Musser’s Sensual Excess (2018) invites us to think about “the pleasures of friction” in relation to black lesbian feminism, suggesting that “the surface … offers a space to think toward brown jouissance and its alternate choreography of pleasures, relationality, and self-making.” Marquis Bey’s critique of gender politics in Cistem Failure (2022) similarly explores the relational possibilities of friction. Offering a theory of “coalition” or “non-sanctioned coming-togethers,” Bey argues, “Coalition’s nonexclusivity means that we cast no one out, that no one is disposable, that in the rubbing and generative friction in the work is the always present possibility of one being changed, radically, by the rubbing and friction.”

How do we work with and against the concept of friction in fiction? How is friction narratively and formally represented in literature? In what ways do our social identities rub against our readings? How do we encounter the text as a material object? How do we shape texts? How do texts shape us? How does friction wear us down? What kinds of imaginative possibilities might friction enable?

The Graduate English Association at the University of Toronto invites conference papers that consider friction in fiction and other literatures. We welcome submissions across disciplines. Approaches may include but are not limited to:

• Aesthetics
• Affect theory
• Archives, research, and pedagogy
• Creative practices
• Critical race theory
• Drama, drag, and performance
• Disability studies
• Ecocriticism and environmental humanities
• Embodiment and the senses
• Gender and sexuality
• Health humanities
• Indigenous studies
• (Post)colonial theory
• Phenomenology
• Queer theory
• Surface reading/close reading

F[r]iction will be held in-person at the University of Toronto. Please submit abstracts of 250-300 words and a brief bio of 50 words to uoftenglish.gradconference.com by January 10, 2024 (extended deadline). More information can be found at our website: https://www.gea-conference.com/.