University of Arizona Graduate Literature Conference: Imagining the End(s)

Conference Dates: March 6-8, 2026, Tucson, AZ, USA

“It is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism” (Mark Fisher)

“But the plot too has its own history” (Wynter 101)

What is it we have in mind when we imagine the end of the world or the end of capitalism? 

Is it the temporal–the closing, conclusion, finale, the end of capitalism’s historical epoch?

Is it the spatial–the enclosure, edge, boundary, limit between persons, places, or things, the end of capitalism’s spread or reach?

Is it the social–the goal, the organizer of the means (of production and reproduction), the intended outcome of purposeful social action, the ends for which either the world or capitalism is a means, or the world or capitalism as an end-in-itself?

Sylvia Wynter reformulates these socio-spatio-temporal concerns in her theoretical work on the Caribbean plantation and the postcolonial novel. Rather than solely identifying sites external to racial capitalism (which would signal an end of capitalism, with means for different ends than those of capitalism, working towards the end of capitalism), she illuminates the site of the plot, the land within the New World plantation given to enslaved Black communities to offset the planters’ costs of labor reproduction. From this (spatially and temporally) internal site, though it was dominated, precarious, and liable to foreclosure and destruction, transplanted cultural practices and traditional folk values were cultivated and improvised, offering a fugitive site of resistance. The plot moves the (spatial) end of capitalism to a site within capitalism. The plot, with “its own history,” introduces a temporality other than the “end of the world”/“end of capitalism” binary. The plot, a site of traditional, use-oriented values, offers other ends to production, to the metabolism of Nature, to human labor. 

For Wynter, the garden plot finds an analogy in the novel plot, where the imperialist form of capital-H History and the bourgeois form of the novel are transformed, improvised, and subverted in the postcolonial novel, retelling history and subjectivity from within these forms, seizing upon specific affordances and oversights of History and the novel as a mode of representative and narrative resistance.

In this conference, we hope to explore the end(s) of the world(s), the end(s) of capitalism(s), and the various plots, or sites of resistance, within the dominating, pervasive, seemingly endless mode of production, reproduction, and destruction. We welcome papers on any period and place, from any theoretical perspective, and from any moment in the social-spatial-temporal trialectic. We hope to explore such questions as:

• Will capitalism, racism, patriarchy, heterosexism, ableism, speciesism, ever end? 

• Is there any place where these reach their end? 

• Will these ever achieve their ends–of abundance, of liberal self-actualization, of perfectly disciplined, organized, rationalized productivity, of the annihilation of space, time, difference, the not-me?

• What ends do literary and other cultural texts serve? 

• How do they begin and end, and what beginnings and endings do they suggest? 

• Where do they identify or declare ends, socio-spatial demarcations or limits, or how do they transgress these, crossing back and forth between endpoints and end lines? 

• Where do they shift the sites of resistance from without to within? 

• How are objects, spaces, cultural expressions produced by capitalism, racism, heterosexism, ableism, speciesism, appropriated for different ends?

To be considered for this conference, please submit a 250-300 word proposal to uagradlitconference@gmail.com, along with a 100 word author bio. The deadline for proposals is December 1, 2025.

As part of the exploration of the socio-spatio-temporal dynamics of inside, outside, beginning, end, and as a response to the continued denigration and disinvestment of the academy (as practice and institution), this conference will attempt to play with conventional forms and norms of staging scholarly, literary, theoretical work, experimenting with conventions such as speaker-audience distance and relative elevation, the capaciousness of the presentation room, indoor/outdoor, public/private property settings, among others. Within your proposal, you are invited (though not required) to submit a written or drawn description, at your chosen level of detail, of a staging you would be interested in presenting within. Please also use this description submission as a means to make us aware of any accommodations you would need as a presenter or audience member. While we can’t promise to honor all proposed stagings, seeing trends in preferences and ideas will help us shape the conference’s stagings to the desires of our fellow scholars, who we will share our space, time, and society with.