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Rethinking Literature and Violence

Rethinking Literature and Violence

Publié le par Julien Desrochers

Call for papers/Appel à contribution:

Globage Linkages: Rethinking Literature and Violence

Thursday March 24th, 2005
Université de Montréal
Département d'études anglaises

Guest lecturer: Rinaldo Walcott
Canada Research Chair in Social Justice and Cultural Studies - OISE / UToronto

Globalization, as Okanagan writer Jeannette Armstrong describes it, has become a "dirty buzzword." While for some it signifies an unprecedented degree of cultural homogenization and Americanization, and for others it implies an unequal relationship of power between the global North and South - in the wake of globalization, all are witness, both, to extreme forms of violence, and to new ways of representing and resisting these.

This conference, then, raises questions, first, about the discursive status of the term "globalization" and the cultural and social violence that is intrinsic to the political and economic operations of globalization. Second, the conference examines the relationship between literature and globalization. For if, as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri argue, globalization designates "multiple processes," and is neither "unified" nor "univocal," then, how can literature as well as other forms of cultural practice partake in "reorganizing [these processes] and re-directing them toward new ends" (Empire xv)? How can the various rhetorical configurations of globalization, as they construct both the social and creative imagination, be read as symbolic, textual, or political acts of violence (or resistance)? How can cultural and literary forms of representation work (in practice) productively toward a critical theory of global violence? How do literary and cultural constructs of globalization re-plot dominant narratives of race and gender?

This conference will pay particular attention, not only to the ways in which literary, non-literary, and cinematographic practices engage with and are engaged by dominant (and other, contestatory) narratives of globalization, but also to how these are circulated, translated and adapted. We would like to ask under what conditions literary and cultural practices can "re-direct," or/and "re-enforce" the violent effects of globalizing tendencies. What is the relationship, and where are the links between literature, violence, and globalization?

Thus, we invite proposals (200 - 300 word) to the following or related topics:



  • Globalization as a discursive and epistemological issue

  • The relationship between globalization and literary production

  • The relationship between violence and literary production

  • Literature, Film, and Global Violence

  • Adaptation, Translation, and the representation of global space

  • Globalization, race and gender

  • Global violence, war, the making of "disposable people" and their representation in film and literature

  • Literature and Anti-globalization resistance

  • Cultural constructions of narratives of globalization

Please send your proposals, in English or in French, to richard.cassidy@umontreal.ca or violent_fictions@yahoo.ca. Papers may also be given in French.

Proposals should reach us no later than January 15th, 2005.