Entangled Literatures and Cultures:Systems of Relations, Intersections, Reciprocity (Tallinn, Estonia)

Conference
Entangled Literatures and Cultures:
Systems of Relations, Intersections, Reciprocity

Under and Tuglas Literature Centre of the Estonian Academy of Sciences, Tallinn, Estonia
25−26 May 2017

The study of cultures inevitably involves comparison and influence, for every culture has developed in a process of exchange with other cultures. Despite this widely acknowledged circumstance, the enquiry into cultures has long suffered from “methodological nationalism” (Ulrich Beck) ‒ a view that posits nations as the only natural units for the comparative study of cultures. The cultures of the Baltic region present a case in point. The Baltics have been an intense battlefield of various political and economic forces and have been part of a number of different states for almost a millennium. The literary culture of the region began to take shape in the context of the local German rule starting from the beginning of the 13th century onward and was up to the end of the 19th century largely multilingual (involving Latin, German, Swedish, Estonian, Latvian, and Russian). The national movements of the 19th century split the multilayered literary field into separate fields centred on national languages. In the 20th century, the national literatures of the region developed in lively interaction with various European literatures as well as, after World War II, under the restrictive regulations of Soviet ideology. At the same time, however, the study of national literatures of the Baltics completely erased the entangled history of literary culture from the respective canons.
    In recent decades, an interest in cultural transfer has been invigorating research into conceptual models that would do justice to the crisscross patterns of culture. The study of cultural transfer offers a welcome alternative to the nation-centered exploration of cultural influence and exchange by acknowledging métissage (cultural intermingling, or mixed identity) as an essential feature in the development of national cultures. This phenomenon has proved to be crucial in rethinking the question of cultural influence in so far as it draws attention to the processes of re-appropriation and re-writing of transferred cultural models and hence to the originality of the “copy” in a receiving socio-historical configuration. 
    However, the study of cultural transfer still fails to do justice to the entangled nature of cultures: on the one hand, to the general system of relations between different (national) cultural fields (Gisèle Sapiro), and, on the other, to the reciprocity of unequal exchange in the multiethnic and multicultural contexts which have a common, or partly overlapping, cultural heritage.
    The conference invites its participants to develop a conceptual framework for studying literatures and cultures as entangled by exploring various cultural contexts where cultural entanglements have been an essential feature, but which cannot be productively studied by means of, for example, postcolonial approaches. Some questions which may prove relevant in this regard are:
‒ What are the advantages of approaching cultures as entangled in relation to comparativism and the study of cultural transfer? 
‒ What are the previously overshadowed phenomena that can be illuminated by this approach? 
‒ How to do justice to the reciprocity of cultural exchange? 
‒ How to study the unequal exchange between cultures that may result from unequal political and economic legacies but does not neatly overlap with it? 
    The conference will explore these questions by focusing on the literary cultures of different regions of the world understood in the broadest of terms. Contributions that examine entanglements in history, theatre, visual and other fields of culture are welcome. 

Keynote speakers:
Kevin F. M. Platt (University of Pennsylvania)
Gisèle Sapiro (EHESS – School for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences, CNRS − The National Center for Scientific Research)

Paper proposals are due by 1 December 2016. Please send your proposal (max 300 words) to Maarja Kalmet at utkk@utkk.ee.

Organisers
The conference is organized within the framework of the institutional research project “Entangled Literatures: Discursive History of Literary Culture in Estonia” (IUT, 2014–2019, project leader: Research Professor Jaan Undusk)