Funded International Conference on Re-thinking Nationalism, Sectarianism,& Ethno-Religious Mobilisation in the Middle East, 26-28 January 2018, University of Oxford.

Concept Note:

Nation-states in the Middle East are facing profound challenges. Borders and boundaries are coming under pressure, being (re)made and mobilised owing to a confluence of internal and external factors including war, mass migration, geopolitical competition and domestic struggles. On the one hand, these regional challenges relate to the dynamics of nation-building. Struggles over the questions that were posed in the nation-building era, including the relation between religion and politics, the nature of citizenship and the management of diversity have continued to impact contemporary conflicts. These have gained further salience in the wake of events such as the Iraqi invasion and the Arab uprisings since 2011. On the other hand, new strategies and technologies utilized by diverse actors, social movements, ethnic entrepreneurs and state elites are producing novel forms of mobilization and politics.

At the centennial of the end of WWI, and as the region appears to be at a new crossroads, this conference intends to reflect on nature of borders and boundaries, to be explored from both historical and contemporary lenses with an aim to draw comparative lessons and identify the dynamics of continuity and areas of change. Focusing therefore on the questions of why, how and in what ways borders and boundaries have and are being (re)constructed and their implications for the management of diversity, the conference invites submissions from different disciplines such as history (late nineteenth century to present), sociology, IR, politics and gender studies among others, alongside interdisciplinary and comparative perspectives.

Focus Session: Religion and Sectarianism in the Islamic World

This special session will explore the role of religious actors, institutions and discourses in making modern sectarianism. Well-meaning critiques of the ‘primordial religious conflict’ diagnosis often swing all the way to equally easy conclusion that sectarianism is essentially ‘about politics, not religion’. What is left uncharted in the rush to define sectarianism as a ‘political’ rather than ‘religious’ phenomenon? Specifically, what Islamic or other religious concepts, practices, institutions or social dynamics could shed light on communal boundary-making, mobilisation or conflict?

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• New theoretical thinking on ethno-religious borders and boundary making, including processes of minoritisation and majoritisation, and the role of religion in ethnic mobilisation and conflict.
• The role of intellectuals such as religious leaders, ulama, historians, thinkers, writers, and artists in constructing new sectarian/national identities.
• Colonialism and its influences on the nature of borders and boundary making.
• Challenges to the nation-state framework and management of diversity in an environment of transforming boundaries and borders.
• The dynamics of sectarianism and sectarianisation.
• Interventions and influences of transnational political or religious networks, mass migration and diaspora movements on ethno-religious mobilisation.
• Impact of new technologies and media.
• Official or unofficial representations of ethnic/religious identities as inclusive or exclusive, or of society as deeply divided.
• Theoretical reflections on the utility of ‘religion’ as a comparative category in studying sectarianism. 

Submission Guidelines:

Proposals should be sent to mideastconf@pmb.ox.ac.uk, including:

1. Paper title and a 300-word abstract.
2. CV including a list of relevant publications.
3. Please indicate whether you would like to be considered for travel/accommodation funds.

Proposals must be submitted by 15 September 2017. Accepted participants will be asked to send complete papers (c.2000 words) by 1 January 2018. Participants will be invited to submit papers for publication as part of an edited collection following a peer-review process.

Travel and Accommodation:

Some funding is available for accommodation and travel expenses. We request that participants apply to their home institutions first, and, if this is not possible, we will seek to provide a partial re-imbursement subject to availability of funds. Those participating will be informed of how much we can reimburse before they make a final commitment to attend.

Conveners:

The conveners of the conference are Dr. Alex Henley (alex.henley@theology.ox.ac.uk), Dr. Ceren Lord (ceren.lord@area.ox.ac.uk) and Dr. Hiroko Miyokawa (hiroko.miyokawa@area.ox.ac.uk).

This conference is funded jointly by the Sasakawa Peace Foundation and Pembroke College, Oxford.

Contact Email: 

mideastconf@pmb.ox.ac.uk

URL: 

http://www.mes.ox.ac.uk/call-papers-re-thinking-nationalism-sectarianism-and-ethno-religious-mobilisation-middle-east-fo...

International Conference on Politics & Letters The Function of Criticism at the Present Time- in India- 23 – 24 January 2018 -Department of English, Utkal University, Bhubaneswar, Odisha, India

Call For Abstracts:

In a follow-up on its successful international conference on “De-centring English Studies: Studying Literature in the Global South”, held in January 2017 (keynoted by Prof. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, New York University), the P.G. Department of English, Utkal University has decided to announce its second international conference, in which the focus will be on the discourse of criticism as it exists in its dialectical relationship with literary and visual culture. The dates of the conference are 23-24 January 2018. The concept note is as follows:

Concept Note:

A great many conferences and symposia are held on literature, on the various contemporary extensions in which literary and visual culture exist today, namely Comparative Literature, World Literature, Minority Literature, Digital Humanities and so on. There are, however, very few conferences in which the crucial mediating role of criticism is explored and debated, despite the significant reversal in the literature-criticism relationship in the later decades of the last century. Jonathan Culler alerted us to this reversal in a pithy formulation when he said: “Earlier the history of criticism was a part of the history of literature, but now it is the history of criticism which provides the framework for reading and understanding literature.”

The shift that Culler has described has no doubt given criticism a certain undeniable pre-eminence in literary culture. In the academic setting, however, and especially in the Indian context, this shift seems to have led to a ‘critical supermarket’ (Fredric Jameson) of styles, an eclecticism of approaches to literature. The pre-eminence of literature and the self-evidence of literary value are still unchallenged. The globalization of culture, under the influence of neoliberal economic policies, has become another name for the commodification of culture. This coupled with the largely uncritical, chauvinistic and anti-rational climate we are living in, not just in India but in the ‘developed’ part of the world, makes it obligatory for us  to pose afresh the question about ‘the function of criticism at the present time. ’

While this expression echoes Matthew Arnold, the function in question is a hermeneutic one, voiced with considerable urgency by Oscar Wilde at the turn of the last century. Wilde said that the highest critical function was ‘to reveal in the Work of Art what the author had not put there.’ This sort of criticism is hermeneutics at its best and involves reading the text against its grain. Hermeneutics is the need of the hour.  And in this context it is important to recall another figure from the later decades of the twentieth century, Pierre Macherey, who, though not much talked about now, made the best possible case for a political hermeneutics with his statement: ‘the task of criticism is to know the work as it cannot know itself.’

The conference, building on this case for a demystifying hermeneutics – Macherey’s project was to demystify literature, will explore the ways in which the critique of literary and cultural artefacts and discourses reveals/constitutes something that the authors or the instigators did not consciously put there. This kind of hermeneutic act that results in the production of an interpretation is intimately connected to the context in which it is produced. Drawing on literary, cultural and visual corpuses from around the world, but with a particular focus on India, this conference will seek to reveal the ‘not-said’ of texts, the secret principle which ties ‘symbolic acts’ to the racial, sexual, political and economic unconscious.

Themes 

Within the overall framework of the secular and political function of the critical act, the conference will engage with and explore the following issues:

1. The politics of literary representation 
2. Literary study as an exercise in ‘radical semiotics’ or the tracing of ‘politics’ in the ‘letter’ of the text 
3. Translation as an act of interpretation and (re)writing 
4. Revisiting the aesthetics and politics debates in Europe in the 1930s 
5. Revisiting the Marxism and Scrutiny debate in England in the 1930s 
6. The realist canon of Indian literature as radical intervention 
7. Literary radicalism in India in the 1940s 
8. The role of criticism when confronted with an explicitly political discourse (feminist, dalit, minority texts etc.) 
9. The ‘universals’ of radical criticism and the ‘particulars’ of place or locality 
10. Class, gender, race and sexuality: commonalities or forces pulling in different directions? 
11. ‘Universalism’ versus ‘nationalism’ and/or ‘nativism’ 
12. History and politics: the ‘untranscendable horizon’ of all literature? 
13. The politics of modernist or exilic literature or the memoir 
14. The politics of postmodernism 
15. Political readings of culture (postcolonialism, Marxism, feminism etc.)

The conference invites papers exploring one or more of the issues listed above in relation to literary, cultural and cinematic texts of the last two hundred years. Critical and metacritical readings of critics, seminal critical concepts and texts from the West as well as from India will be on the agenda. Papers seeking to engage with Indian aesthetics from a political standpoint are welcome.

Important Dates

• Last Date for Submitting Abstracts: 20 September 2017
• Communication of Acceptance: 05 October 2017
• Submission of Registration Form and Payment of Registration fee: 20 November 2017
• Submission of Completed Paper: 20 December 2017
• Dates of the Conference: 23 and 24 January 2018

Call for Papers – Guidelines

• Registration is compulsory for participation and presentation of the papers.
• Participants are requested to send their original and unpublished papers, strictly following the MLA Style Book-7^th Edition for preparing their papers.
• Only selected papers are eligible for presentation and publication.
• In case of the co-authored papers, both authors have to register and at least one of them should be present in the conference.
• Participants have to make their own arrangements for their travel, stay and board.
• The abstracts written in 250-300 words with a paper title in the prescribed format (format-for-abstract) should reach the following email ID-iccenglish.utkal@gmail.com
• Each participant will have 15 minutes presentation time.
• The word limit for the completed paper is 2500-3000.

Registration Fee

• Paper Presenters (India) : INR 1700/-
• Foreign Participants/Paper Presenters : USD 100
• For Utkal University Scholars: INR 1000/-
• Students of the Department : INR 200/-

Keynote Speaker:

Dr. Robert Clark

Former Professor of English and American Literature

University of East Anglia, U.K.

Proposed Title of Talk: “Jane Austen and the Transformation of Capital”

Plenary Speakers:

Dr. Ellen Handler Spitz

Prof. Harish Trivedi

Prof. Paul St-Pierre

Dr. Mauricio D Aguilera Linde

Venue/Contact

PG Department of English

Utkal University, Vani Vihar-751004

Phone No- 0674- 2567542

Conference Director:

Prof. Himansu S Mohapatra

heironymo@gmail.com

Cell phone- +91 9437404431

For more details: 

https://politicsandlettersconference.wordpress.com/