ACLA conference

Dear colleagues,

The organizers of the ACLA conference have extended their deadline for abstract submission to December 3, 2007.

As a result, you still have a few days to submit a proposal to our seminar: Negotiating Cultural Identity through
Representation of Violence?

We are planning to have a follow-up publication.
Please forward the following call for papers to anyone who might be interested.

Sincerely,

Pascale Perraudin and Annine Schneider

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Call for papers for the ACLA (Long Beach, California, on
April 24-27, 2008)
Deadline to submit proposals: December 3, 2007
Where to submit: directly to http://www.acla.org/acla2008.
Format: seminar (see description below)
Project: We are planning to have a follow-up publication of
this seminar.



Negotiating Cultural Identity through Representation of Violence?

As Homi Bhabha reminds us in his introduction of Location of
Culture, the identity of culture, far from being unitary or
simply dualist, needs to be examined to allow for the
possibility of cultural difference and the subsequent
ambivalence of cultural authority. In this panel, we would
like to ask how/whether representation of violence
contributes to the questioning of cultural authority. Does
it help reposition a group's identity in relation to its
past/present? If so, how? Does writing make experiences of
violence "legible"? Are oppressed groups in particular
need of legible accounts of their experience? If history
tells us that the experiences of the powerful groups are
heard more easily, does the same follow when it comes to
experiences of violence? How does a group's identity
(whether national, minority or sexual) come to be
represented through, and even dependent on, experiences of
violence, either as perpetrators or as victims? What happens
to representations and to notions of identity when the
perpetrators become victims, or when the victims turn into
perpetrators? How does individually experienced violence
come to be conflated with community memories of violence,
and thus part of the larger community identity?
How much is being the object of violence perceived as the
"natural" expected state of the oppressed? How can
literature counteract this perception, to reinstate the
extraordinary nature of experienced violence? Similarly, if
violence is something lived primarily by the oppressed, how
can people perceived as privileged have their experiences of
violence recognized?

Format of seminar:
This panel will meet on two or three consecutive days
(depending on the number of papers), and presenters are
strongly encouraged to plan to attend all sessions of the
panel. This is a unique conference format that allows a
small group of researchers (normally 8-12 people) to pursue
a particular topic in depth within the context of a larger
conference.

For more information on the conference and to submit paper
proposals, please visit the official conference website at
http://www.acla.org/acla2008.

For questions about the panel, please contact the seminar
organizers:
Pascale Perraudin, Saint Louis University (schneider@sabanciuniv.edu)