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Spaces and Places  Toward a Geo-critical Study of Language, Literature, Culture and Politics

Spaces and Places Toward a Geo-critical Study of Language, Literature, Culture and Politics

Publié le par Matthieu Vernet (Source : Asma Hichri)

Université de Tunis El Manar

Institut Supérieur des Sciences Humaines de Tunis

Department of English

 

 

Call for Papers

 

Spaces and Places

 Toward a Geo-critical Study of Language, Literature, Culture and Politics

In Memory of Stuart Hall

8- 10 April 2015

 

The great obsession of the nineteenth century was, as we know, history: with its themes of development and of suspension, of crisis, and cycle… The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space… of simultaneity… of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at a moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein.

Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces”

The dialectics of time and space is inherent in the distinction between the notions of space and place. Literally, space denotes “a continuous area which is unoccupied as well as the dimensions of height, depth and width within which all things exist and move.” Space might also refer to an interval of time. Place, however, refers to a particular position or point in space, a location (OED). “Place is a calm centre of established values” (Tuan 54). Conversely, space is “actuated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it,” as it “occurs as the effect produced by the operations that orient it, situate it, temporalize it. In short, space is a practiced place” (de Certeau 117).

In an era of postmodern incredulity towards metanarratives (Lyotard xxi), scepticism has been directed towards place as yet another grand narrative. Starting from the 1980s, and more particularly with the writings of Michel de Certeau, Michel Foucault, and Henri Lefebvre, topography and geography began to establish themselves as new paradigms of cultural and literary studies, providing new insights into notions of place, space and territory. With the emergence of novel critical and theoretical landscapes, such as postmodernism, postpostmodernism, colonialism and postcolonialism, critics have given primacy to the concept of space. New literary and cultural cartographies are valuing fluid, multiperspectivist and open-ended ways of approaching the complex net of spatial relations where space is no longer seen as “a stable or inert category but rather as complex, heterogeneous practice” (Tally 134).

Rather than being predefined by external forces, space synchronically bears its own social, historical, political and even textual and intertextual practices, which in turn destabilise and deterritorialise the “established values” that confine it within the realm of a particular place. Signalling the “spatial turn” of the century, the geocritical notion of space, along with such related concepts as mapping, border, spatiality, routes, contact zones, deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation, have provided new and fresh avenues for literary criticism and cultural studies. Spatial practices, spatial semantics, or geocriticism, indeed reveal that “all writing partakes in a form of cartography, since even the most realistic map does not truly depict the space, but, like literature, figures it forth in a complex skein of imaginary relations” (Tally 134).

The purpose of this conference is to rethink the dialectics of place and space. We are soliciting theoretical and critical contributions in the fields of culture, history, politics, literature and linguistics. Potential contributors are invited to submit papers on topics including (but by no means limited to):

-          Theorising space and place

-          Surveillance, enclosures and the panoptic structures and spaces of contemporary life

-          Space and postmodern anxieties (nomadism, diaspora and exile)

-          Language and the semiotics of space and place.

-          Gendered spaces: domestic and public spheres

-          Geographies and archaeologies of space: Orientalism and Occidentalism

-          Ethnic spaces: border crossing and contact zones.

-          Space and place in colonial/postcolonial contexts.

-          Real and imagined maps: cartographies of place and literary cartographies.

-          “Imaginary Homelands”/ “Imagined Communities”

-          Space and social mobility.

-          Home, nation and spaces of belonging

-          Geopolitics and political geography: space, state, and political power.

-          Boundaries, borders and “geographies of exclusion”.

-          Mapping the past: (re)presenting the landscapes of history.

-          Geo-criticism: mapping new spaces in literary and cultural studies.

-          From geography to geo-criticism: toward a Deleuzian geo-philosophy.

 

We are interested in receiving abstracts for twenty-minute papers. English is the language of the conference, but papers in Arabic and French will also be accepted.

Deadline for abstracts: December 15, 2014

Notification of abstract acceptance: January 5, 2015

Abstracts should be 250-300 words long and include affiliation and a short biography.

Your contacts for the conference are: samiramechri@yahoo.com, hichriasma@yahoo.fr

 

 

 

 

  • Responsable :
    Samira Mechri
  • Adresse :
    Insitut Superieur des Sciences Humaines de Tunis