Graft and Transplant: Identities in Question (Premier numéro de Skepsi)

Graft and Transplant: Identities in Question

The editorial board of Skepsi is pleased to invite contributions for the inaugural issue of the Interdisciplinary Online Journal of European Thought and Theory in Humanities and Social Sciences, based in the University of Kent, to be released in Autumn 2008.

The practices of grafting and transplanting, understood both literally and metaphorically, raise a series of questions with regard to the concept of identity: the unity of the subject; becoming; the Other; the in-between. Grafts and transplants set up a relationship between a donor and a receiver, be they human beings, texts, literary genres, images, languages, concepts, cultures, genders or historical periods. It involves the transposition of a part of something into something else. How might these different entities be said – or made – to co-exist? In what sense might the existence of such aggregates involve (or indeed require) a form of grafting and transplanting? Is their co-existence the result of an act of intrusion and violence or a mark of hospitality?

Our aim is to explore the process of becoming-other or (re-)building an identity which the graft and transplant entail – to consider the switches, relays and connectivities at work in a wide variety of literary, artistic, philosophical, cultural and linguistic assemblages.

We invite proposals for articles which interpret the topic as widely as possible. The following list, which is neither prescriptive nor exhaustive, may serve as inspiration:

- Otherness and transculturality

- Ethics of transplants

- Subject, unity and self-identity

- Inter-textual processes, uses of quotations

- Transplanted and translated text

- Effects of transplants: rejection and acceptance

- Hybridism in texts, films and works of art; textual/visual interactions

- Gender studies

Contributions – including an article (3000/5000 words, written in academic English), an abstract proposal (approximately 300 words, with a short list of keywords) and a C.V. (with your name, institution, stage of study and email address) – should be sent to Skepsi editorial board via e-mail (skepsi.secl@googlemail.com), as Microsoft Word attached documents. Skepsi uses a version of the MHRA referencing style. Please refer to the MHRA online guide.

The deadline for all applications is 12 sept. 2008. Please note that a postgraduate conference was held on the same topic in May 2008 at the University of Kent. A selection of its papers will be published in the inaugural issue of Skepsi.

http://www.kent.ac.uk/secl/journals/skepsi