Call for Papers
AMSN2: Transnational Modernisms
Australian Modernist Studies Network Conference
Hosted by the University of Sydney
15-16 December 2014
Confirmed Keynote Speakers:
Professor Paul Giles (University of Sydney)
Professor Ira Nadel (University of British Columbia)
Professor Sue Thomas (La Trobe University)
The ‘Transnational turn’ in literary studies has been the focus of intense debate and sustained reflection in recent years, as have critical re-evaluations of Modernism’s transnational scope. Scholarly interventions by Paul Giles (Transnationalism in Practice), Wai Chee Dimock (Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time), Jahan Ramanzani (A Transnational Poetics), and Paul Jay (Global Matters: The Transnational Turn in Literary Studies), among many others, establish the viability of transnationality as a disciplinary focus. Transnational Modernismsaims to provoke fresh thinking about the particular resonances between Transnationalism and Modernism, including the ongoing critical review of Modernism’s traditional Transatlantic focus.
This broader awareness of the sites where Modernism was practiced and transnational connections were initiated (or resisted) prompts a range of compelling questions, including:
- How might uneven flows of cultural capital between centres of Modernist practice and erstwhile peripheries be understood, accounting for the varieties of geographic and temporal displacement?
- Must a global Modernism be co-synchronous, or did it evolve in different phases in different locales and under different socio-economic conditions?
- What is to be made of the increasingly intensive scholarly attention given to East Asian Modernism(s) in Western scholarship, and how might this inflect more long-standing work in Asian literary, art historical and musicological studies?
- How might an Asian-Pacific Modernism be conceived, and how might this intersect with regional scholarship in literature, visual arts, music, and dance?
- How might, for example, Caribbean, South Asian, Brazilian, Latin American, Nigerian or Arab Modernisms be comprised, and reckoned with respect to hegemonic literary and cultural history?
This two-day conference will seek to address these and other notions of Transnational Modernisms. Proposals are invited for 20 minute papers or panels of three papers examining any relevant aspect of the conference theme across literature, the visual and plastic arts, music, theatre, and related genres. Proposals from postgraduate students are especially encouraged.
Please send abstracts of 300 words and a brief biographical note to mark.byron@sydney.edu.au by 31 August. Notification will be forthcoming by 15 September.
Registration and other information will be available soon at the AMSN website, at http://amsn.org.au/
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