Author: modernistudies

CFP: In/Security

Special issue of English Language Notes, Fall/Winter 2016 (Vol. 54, No. 2)

This issue of ELN takes for its focus the topic of security and its necessary correlate, insecurity. As Itty Abraham notes, the term “security” is a “traveling signifier” that has “attached itself to every scale of human activity, from the individual to the international, even to outer space; from comestible (food security), natural (environmental security), financial (security/securities), and territorial (homeland security) to virtual (cyber security); to forms of community, from Social Security to collective security, which is the principle behind the United Nations.” Such proliferation, however, signifies not so much the incoherence of the term, but rather, the radical inflation of insecurities—whether material, real, imagined, or manufactured—that seem to beleaguer us. A special issue on this topic is an opportunity not only to analyze both the interconnections and contradictions between the forms and technologies of in/securities that have structured—and that continue to structure—our political climate, but also to think about the aesthetic, cultural, and institutional modes through which such concerns have been experienced and addressed at different historical and geopolitical junctures.

Giorgio Agamben points out that “[s]ecurity as the leading principle of state politics dates back to the birth of the modern state”; the imperatives of national security raise a series of questions regarding the scope of state power and action; the identification and manufacturing of domestic and foreign threats against the state (viewed as sources of “insecurity”); and the negotiation of geopolitical relations between states. But the work of thinkers like Michel Foucault and Achille Mbembe reminds us, in addition, to enquire into “the generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the material destruction of human bodies and populations” that lie at the heart of security’s imperatives (Mbembe). Their concepts of bio- and necropolitics invite attention to the ways in which particular technologies and instruments of security act on collective populations and individual bodies, managing danger, risk, and insecurity in the service of governmentality, as well as to the forms of solidarity and/or resistance these engender in consequence. Indeed, important theorizations of vulnerability and precarity (including Sara Ahmed’s The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Judith Butler’s Precarious Life, and Bryan Turner’s Vulnerability and Human Rights) foreground the political possibilities that can inhere in shared experiences of corporeal and affective insecurity. And recent discourses of human rights—encapsulated in the United Nations Commission on Human Security’s call for a “shift [in attention] from the security of the state to the security of the people”—ask if the politics of security can be reconfigured in less coercive, or more ideologically nuanced, terms.

For the Fall/Winter 2016 issue of ELN, we invite scholars from across the range of humanities (inter)disciplines, and grounded in any historical or geocultural context, to propose contributions that enquire into the forms by which, conditions under which, and discourses through which in/security has been experienced and known. We welcome single- and -collaboratively authored essays of no longer than twenty-five manuscript pages, as well as creative works and review essays on relevant books. Questions that contributors might consider in formulating their offerings include:

• What are the historical referents of in/security (national, human, economic, etc.), and (how) have these changed over time? What accounts for shifts in the objects of what we might today call in/security? To what extent, likewise, does the vocabulary of in/security resonate transhistorically?

• What are the epistemologies that have underpinned our apprehensions of in/security? And what are the histories of the apparatuses or technologies—in Foucault’s terms—that have been deployed in the name of security? How have different “societies of security” been constructed or envisioned?
• How is in/security differentially distributed across populations, geographical regions, and within the world system? How do the categories of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability organize such distributions, and how does in/security function as a technology of differentiation and/or identity formation?
• What forms of political resistance of activism might cohere around the idea or experience of in/security?
• Fredric Jameson has observed that “it seems easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism.” If feelings of insecurity seem to saturate everyday life in the twenty-first century, what do we not feel insecure about, and with what consequences? Are there forms of in/security that we have forgotten or no longer feel it necessary to feel?
• What sorts of literary, aesthetic, cultural, or institutional forms have been deployed to capture and represent in/security? If genre is, as Lauren Berlant describes it, “an aesthetic structure of affective expectation,” might in/security itself be described as a kind of genre?

We also welcome shorter position papers of between eight to ten pages for two topical clusters: 1) “Labour, Precarity, and the University”; and 2) “Environment, Protest, and the (Post)colonial Condition.” We envision each as an opportunity to focus attention on the material in/securities that condition intellectual work today, particularly in wealthy settler nation-states like Canada and the United States (where ELN currently “lives”).

For Cluster 1, on “Labour, Precarity, and the University,” we invite papers that consider how contemporary processes of neoliberalism and advanced capitalism have restructured institutions of higher learning in relation to the production of in/security. On one hand, the university today has witnessed acute erosions to job security and increased dependencies on precariat labour through the casualization of its workforce; on the other, it is also a site in which the construction of “safe spaces” for students, faculty, and employees—a discourse historically mobilized by minority groups and, more recently, redeployed in calls for civility or trigger warnings—has been (unevenly) pursued. We welcome reflections on, but not limited to, the following questions: who feels—or is made—safe or unsafe in the university, and how do these experiences of in/security intersect with histories of discrimination? How have universities been shaped by the broader socio-political environments of in/security in which they exist? What kinds of new critical or pedagogic practices might be envisioned as responses to such environments? What conjunctural alliances and solidarities have been—or might be—formed across different classes of precariat labour as conditions of employment in the university continue to be transformed?

Entitled “In/security on the Ground: Environment, Protest, and the (Post)colonial Condition,” Cluster 2 takes as its starting point Jameson’s observation that “it seems easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism.” In fact, however, engagement with the former often includes capitalism, understood in its articulation with racist, nationalist, and imperialist systems of governance, among its objects of critique. For this cluster, we welcome papers that address local, translocal, and/or macro experiences of environmental insecurity in relation to the requirements of, and movements against, racial capitalism, colonialism, and nation-state securitization. In what ways do environmental degradation and activism arise out of, reflect, make visible, activate, and/or contest racial capitalism, nationalism, and colonialism as projects that have severely limited who (or what) can access as well as what counts as a livable life?

Prospective authors should submit a 300–500 word proposal, clearly indicating the nature of the proposed contribution and accompanied by a brief biographical note and 2-page CV, to the editors by September 1 2015. Selected authors will be invited to prepare articles by March 1 2016, with publication contingent on an external peer-review process.

More information about ELN can be found at http://english.colorado.edu/englishlanguagenotes. Currently published online at EBSCO, ELN will be soon entering into a publishing agreement with Duke University Press Journals and with Project Muse as its hosting venue. Please direct queries and proposals to the special issue editors Nadine Attewell (attewen@mcmaster.ca) and Janice Ho (janice.ho@colorado.edu). Include “In/Security” in your subject line.

Museum Engagements in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Literatures

The Society for Novel Studies (SNS) invites proposals for fifteen-minute papers to be given at its biennial conference held at the University of Pittsburgh, May 13-14, 2016.  The conference theme is “The Novel in or against World Literature,” and many of the panels highlight topics central to modernist studies.  The CFP and information on the conference can be found here: http://novel.trinity.duke.edu/news/2015/07/08/sns-2016-call-for-papers

Touching the Body in Pieces: Affective Ecologies of the Modern Body (NeMLA- March 2016, Hartford, CT)

From artist Hans Bellmer’s distorted dolls, to Rupert Brooke’s “dust” in a “corner of a foreign field,” to Virginia Woolf’s “orts, scraps, and fragments,” bodies – textual, phenomenological, cultural, political, and physical – seem to fall to pieces in modernism. How can we conceptualize the modern body in light of its affective and ecological surrounds?

Broadly, this panel seeks to examine these ecologies of bodies and their surrounds in modernism. Specifically, we endeavor to explore textual bodies and their composition (or decomposition) in ways that help us understand the ecological placement of the body as it engages with modernism’s historical and physical environments. What is the relation of modern bodies to both “hard” and “soft” surrounds? How is the natural body “queered” by the natural world or other surroundings? Does the queer intervene in these conceptions of dualistic bodies, as Judith Butler argues? How is the wounded body – which seems to negotiate both the hard and soft by opening permeable bodily and subjective bounds – represented in or through landscapes of war, or in relationships with nature and landscape? What is embodiment, or what are the boundaries of the body and its hard surrounds if the body itself is an affective environment or ecology of its own? How does modernity’s affective shift register or occlude a relationship between subject the “outside”? How is the body and/or its emotions disseminated, or dismantled? Related elements to consider could include WWI, WWII, “publicity,” cities and urbanity, T.S. Eliot’s cool impersonality, nation or politics, robotic or prosthetic bodies; and in parallel, the domestic, rurality, sentimentality, the homefront, sympathy or suffrage.

We welcome all approaches to the question of the modern body’s conceptualization or re-/de-conceptualization, including those that cross disciplinary bounds.

Go to http://www.cfplist.com//nemla/Home/S/15703 to submit a 200-300 word abstract by September 30, 2015. Email molly_hall@my.uri.edu or kara_watts@my.uri.edu with any questions.

Two Panel Call For Papers at the 2016 Irish Association for American Studies/British Association of American Studies Conference at Queen’s University, Belfast (7-9 April 2016)

Border Crossings and Revolutions

Scholarship on the Mexican-American border has dominated the field of border studies for the past forty years, from the publication of Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera in 1987 to the present. Yet the forty-ninth parallel remains an under-examined yet critical divide, separating Indigenous tribes and cultivating distinct colonial and neo-colonial histories in both Canada and the United States. Richard Ford’s most recent novel, Canada, examines the complex relationship of America to its northern neighbour, focusing on how one young white boy remakes his identity once he has crossed the 49th parallel, albeit with relative ease. While the novel portrays the Prairies and later Central Canada, looking specifically at the Windsor-Detroit border, Ford offers a distinctly American vision of Canada. Using the theme of border-crossings and revolutions (and recalling that during the American Revolution, many British Loyalists fled northward to what was to become British North America), we are interested in papers that consider the relevance of the Canada-US border from an American Studies perspective.