Call for Papers on #Edward #Said’s legacy in the context of current events-Edited Volume; MLA 2025 conference special session

Twenty years after his death and fifty years after the publication of Orientalism, Edward Said, the best-known Palestinian American public intellectual, seems more relevant and more controversial than ever before. As the middle-east is torn apart by the most horrific violence since the creation of Israel, Said has already been blamed for providing academic cover to Hamas’s murderous actions. Said, these critics say, was a rabid anti-Western, anti-Semitic, Arab extremist who legitimized the use of violence by terrorists calling themselves freedom fighters. But others have recalled the intellectual clarity and moral urgency Said brought to the Palestine question. Those who respect Said see him as a cosmopolitan, liberal, secular humanist who consistently critiqued colonialism, whether Western or Israeli. Both sides, however, acknowledge that something remarkable is happening in the West, particularly the United States: for the first time, a generational divide has opened up between the elders who stand steadfastly by Israel and the youth who are speaking up for Palestinians. This generational battle is being fought on elite college campuses where student protests against unconditional US aid for Israel’s war on Gaza have put college presidents in the crosshairs and upended careers. Articulated in a Saidian language of anti-colonialism and Orientalism, this youth protest is more aligned with the political position of the non-West/global South than the older West/global North which views the conflict largely in terms of its own troubled history of anti-Semitism and the holocaust. What should we make of Edward Said and his legacy at this global conjuncture? How have Said’s intellectual preoccupations and political commitments shaped today’s divided discourse about the middle-east? What is the long-term impact of Said’s literary preoccupations and cultural interventions within and beyond academia?

We invite original scholarly papers for a proposed edited volume that explores the legacy of Edward Said in the wake of the current Israel-Palestine war.

While we would like to include a wide range of topics and perspectives in the edited, the following areas will be of particular interest:Said, democracy, and decolonization in the context of (de)globalization, the rise of China, great power competition

Said, zionism, and the politics of Palestine today

Said’s influence on public opinion in America/the West/other regions about the Middle East

Said’s cosmopolitanism/secularism/humanism/liberalism: scope, relevance, limits

“Orientalism” today

Said’s influence on literary and cultural studies as practiced today

Please send abstracts of 300 words, a 100-word bio, and five keywords by March 15, 2024 to

revathi.krishnaswamy@sjsu.edu

or noelle.brada-williams@sjsu.edu

Let us also know if you’d like your abstract to be considered for inclusion in a proposed special session at the 2025 annual Modern Language Association conference scheduled for 9-12 Jan in New Orleans.

Full articles of 5000-8000 words should be submitted by November 30th, 2024.

revathi.krishnaswamy@sjsu.edu

CFP: Voicing Otherness Reconfiguring #Australia’s #Postcoloniality-17th ESSE Conference 2024

 

17th ESSE Conference 2024 Lausanne  26-30 August 2024

(please note, only members of one of the European Association for English Studies or similar can present papers at the Conference, so you should consider applying for one before sending a proposal)

Recent debates in so-called Commonwealth nations have raised issues about the representation of others and the way in which an Other is o;en defined through a distorted vision stemming from the sustaining of imperial/nationalistic practices that may been even more significant in the late 20th and the 21st Centuries at a global level. The place of Europe in former colonies is still paramount with the binary centre/margin, locating the non-European Other in a liminal space and, in fact, conveying a nostalgia for an imperial past.

 The post-reconciliation stage in Australia and the Uluru statement from the heart (2017) have paved the way for the current political debates around “A Voice to Parliament” meant to enshrine an

Indigenous voice in the Australian constitution and thus bring all Australians together and encourage them to move forward as a nation.

Several critics in various fields of the academia (Ashcroft; Appadurai; C Bhabha; Mbembe…) have sought to explore the perception of otherness in order to question the various discourses that seek to reappraise the role of the nation, reconfigure the space of the nation or the agency of Other. Australian fiction often shows how the cultural encounter between individuals under the flagship “multicultural nation” is even more complex, considering the sustaining of practices inherited from Europe and of a discourse that maintains the “non- European” in a liminal space.

In his book, Postcolonial Melancholia (2005) Gilroy argues that the need for the homogenized nation often surfaces as an attempt to dismiss a postcolonial situation deemed desperate. Gilroy focuses on the mechanisms that trigger the return of nationalisms (in their various forms) and induce a postcolonial chaos. 

Taking on Gilroy’s analysis of ethnicity and identity issues and Ghassan Hage's work on multiculturalism and his idea that Australia’s multiculturalism is a “cosmopolitan multiculturalism”, that it thus prevents inclusion for the sake of less visible forms of exclusion, we encourage papers that analyze the various forms of marginalization that occur in the “postcolonial moment” and to what extent such a ”moment” may encourage writers to search for new alternatives: alternative ways of living and of relating to the earth, alternative ways of approaching and experiencing otherness, also alternative literary discourses of the Other – which may point out to tensions between the postmodern and the postcolonial.

Bourdieu’s notion of “habitus” may be useful for the understanding of discourses that articulate physical space, social space, and spiritual space. The issue at stake will be to determine to what extent a reconstruction of landscapes, a rewriting of myths and stories can or cannot trace the contours of a post-colonial cultural dilemma.

In following these ideas, we encourage papers in the field of Australian literatures that address the displacement of individuals and the many forms of wanderings that that occur within the space of the nation and global environments. Thus, it might be noteworthy to determine the extent by which the act of wandering may trace the contours of various forms of enrooting and may create a diaspora of

forms. How such a diaspora may question, affect, or simply relocate the postcolonial in an “alter moment”.

Please send your proposals to both:

Pr Salhia Ben-Messahel, University of Toulon (France)

salhia.benmessahel@unjiv-tln.fr

Pr Marilena Parlati, University of Padova (Italy)

marilena.parlati@unipd.it