In Poetics of Dislocation, Meena Alexander recalls her childhood migration as an experience of “unselving.” The ocean that makes her an immigrant also dissolves inherited identities. Yet this loss, for Alexander, is generative: a crucible of poetic vision, where the self, fluid as tidewater, reshapes itself from poem to poem, contouring itself to each new shore that it meets. 

Alexander’s poetics draws on a philosophical lineage that views the self not as given, but as continually made and unmade. Psychoanalysis sees identity as fluid, shaped through misrecognition; Foucault, as a product of power and knowledge; and Deleuze, as desiring production. Feminist and Queer Theory argues that bodies are gendered through social sedimentation, not innate markers. Black Studies emphasizes how certain bodies are materially and discursively produced as flesh, conscripted into (porno)tropes of fetish and fungibility. Asian American Studies, in turn, insists on the hybridity and heterogeneity of the immigrant subject, far exceeding the containment of “model minority” stereotypes.

However, across these traditions, theorists have variously figured the liquefaction of selfhood not just as an imposed violence, but also as a mode of resistance. From Tiqqun’s “desubjectification” to Leo Bersani’s “self-shattering,” Judith Butler’s “unbecoming” to Homi Bhabha’s “mimicry,” and Anne Anlin Cheng’s “immersion” and David Eng and Shinhee Han’s “racial dissociation” to Timothy Campbell and Grant Farred’s “dispossession,” unselving has appeared as a gesture of refusal and a precipitous opening to transformative alterity.

But can selfhood be surrendered so easily? Who has the privilege to shatter the self, and on what terms? Might the performance of selective dispossession reinscribe colonial fantasies of racialized primitivity—a recuperative orientalism in which the Other becomes a fungible site for lost futurities? Does unselving risk collapsing into identity tourism, ventriloquy, or appropriation? As Natasha Tinsley asks, might queer theory’s embrace of fluidity betray a colorblindness to the violent history of racialized plasticity? And if selfhood is a necessary fiction, is unselving not a prescription of psychosis? To return to Stuart Hall’s enduring provocation—“Who needs identity?”—might it be that only the most privileged can afford to disavow it?

At a moment when racialized, gendered, ethnic, and sexual identities are under assault globally, these questions regarding identitarian capture resurface with new urgency. We invite proposals that grapple with the political possibilities and perils of retaining or relinquishing selfhood. How might we imagine alternative forms of subjectivity that neither reify identity nor abandon it to hierarchized dissolution? What poetic, theoretical, or political practices trace the line between dispossession and survival, between imposed fungibility and agentic plasticity?

To submit a proposal (approximately 220 words / 1500 characters) along with a brief bio, please use the ACLA submission portal at the following link:
https://www.acla.org/seminar/313fc2f4-d410-4469-bbff-f6cf164bcbe0

We welcome proposals from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds—including psychoanalysis, postcolonial studies, poetics, translation studies, feminist, gender, and sexuality studies, Asian American studies, Black studies, Latinx studies, Global South studies, and critical caste studies—and especially encourage work engaging diverse objects of study, whether literary, cinematic, musical, performative, or otherwise.

The last date for submission is Thursday, October 2, 2025 [EST].

Please note that submissions sent via email will not be accepted.

For any questions or clarifications, feel free to contact Suchismito Khatua (smito@stanford.edu) or Jenny Andrine Madsen Evang (j.a.m.evang@uu.nl).