Graft and transplant: identities in question

Graft and Transplant: Identities in Question

The University of Kent and the School of European Culture and Languages are pleased to invite contributions for an Interdisciplinary Postgraduate Conference to be held on Saturday 24^th May 2008

CALL FOR PAPERS

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 twenty-minute papers (in English) which interpret the conference theme 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

Abstract proposals (approximately 300 words) should be forwarded to the conference organising committee at seclconference08@gmail.com as a Microsoft Word attached document that includes your name, institution and email address. You should also indicate on your proposal any audiovisual requirements you may have.

The deadline for all applications is Saturday 7^th March 2008. Further details regarding the conference program and registration will be circulated at a later date.

www.kent.ac.uk/secl/