Concourse: CFP: "Witnessing / Becoming" - University of Toronto, Centre for #Comparative #Literature’s #Annual #Conference, March 22-23, 2024

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Monday, October 30, 2023

CFP: "Witnessing / Becoming" - University of Toronto, Centre for #Comparative #Literature’s #Annual #Conference, March 22-23, 2024

 “‘I bear witness’—that means: ‘I affirm (rightly or wrongly, but in all good faith, sincerely) that that was or is present to me, in space and time (thus, sense-perceptible), and although you do not have access to it, not the same access, you, my addressees, you have to believe me, because I engage myself to tell you the truth, I am already engaged in it, I tell you that I am telling you the truth. Believe me. You have to believe me.'” – Jacques Derrida (“Poetics and Politics of Witnessing” 76)


Witnessing is more than seeing, more than recounting testimony. A witness to an event is its participant, whether central or peripheral. In its continuity, the act of witnessing carries us past the immediate crisis of an event, into a post-event life. Processes of witnessing have manifested as fluid, ongoing testimonies, conveyed through various mediums such as novels, memoirs, autobiographies, reports, and films, among others. One could argue that at the core of these testimonies lies what Nadine Gordimer describes in “Literary Witness in A World of Terror: The Inward Testimony” (2009) as “the duality of inwardness and the outside world” (Gordimer 68), the dual exploration of one’s inner self and the external world, the quest to reconcile oneself with the uncertainties inherent in evolving events and the imperative to conceive new meanings of self-identity.


We invite papers that consider how testimony has been represented not only as a form of documented eyewitness literature, but also as a process that entails transformations, and encounters that elicit new forms of becoming. By conjugating witnessing with becoming, we invite you to move past the eventuality of crisis, to understand language as irrevocably tied to the process of bearing witness, remaking itself continuously against the possible threat of erasure, “as if it were being invented at every step, and if it were burning immediately” (Jacques Derrida The Post Card 11). Differing subjectivities, selves, and life stories emerge in different environments. How might the act of bearing witness to uncodified subjective experiences and marginalized social realities challenge narratives of dominant power structures?


To return to the temporal disconnect between the witnessed event and the performance of testimony, becoming can take a similar form. To become is to recognize the same temporal disconnect, to look backwards at what once was, yet no longer remains. Becoming might be a reading of the past, enacted in tandem with the witness’ attempt to reconstruct it, which remains eternally out of reach. How do these two forms interact with one another? How else might they intertwine?
As an interdisciplinary conference, we encourage submissions from a variety of fields, such as literature, philosophy, history, ethnography, anthropology, media studies, disability studies, sociology, art history, religious studies, and gender studies. We welcome papers related (but not limited) to the following topics:

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  • Testimonial Literature
  • Ethics of Bearing Witness
  • Living & Writing
  • Socio-political events in literature
  • Performativity
  • Transnationality & the Diaspora
  • Queerness & Alterity
  • Black Studies
  • Indigeneity & Decolonial thought
  • Planetary Subjectivity vs. Capitalist Globalism
  • Language & Translation
  • Temporality & the Self

Those who wish to participate in the conference should submit an abstract of no more than 250 words, along with a short bio. Abstracts must be sent, as attachments, to utorontocomplitconference@gmail.com before December 1, 2023. Emails should include the author’s name, institutional affiliation, and contact information. Presentations should not exceed 20 minutes.

Contact Information

Zichuan Gan, co-organizer 

PhD student 

Centre for Comparative Literature, University of Toronto

z.gan@mail.utoronto.ca

 

Contact Email
utorontocomplitconference@gmail.com