Conferences
After Comparatism
The 18th Annual Graduate Conference in Comparative Literature
March 31st-April 1st 2023
In 2003, distinguished novelist and scholar Sylvia Wynter posited that “the struggle of our new millennium will be one between the ongoing imperative of securing the well-being of our present ethnoclass (i.e., Western bourgeois) conception of the human… and that of securing the well-being… of the human species itself/ourselves.” In other words, the conception of the Human has privileged only a particular range of individual experiences, often linked to whiteness, masculinity, and ciss-ness. Wynter’s insight invites us to imagine how different ontological modes could be held in comparison to one another.
- How might we challenge modes of being “Human” without revalorizing the category itself that binds, restricts, and subjugates?
- In what ways can we hold ourselves accountable to a truly multidisciplinary liberatory project?
- What can we learn from those for whom the space of otherness is ever present?
- How can we use this moment to reframe our understanding of temporality and spatiality?
- How might we envision or hold onto glimpses of an alternative being, away from deceptive constructions of citizenship or sovereignty?
Addressing these questions requires a methodology that is relational, interdisciplinary, and intertextual: a methodology that is constantly questioning and evolving is critical to any comparative study, whether done within or outside of the academy. As the sociopolitical landscape continues to respond to centuries of institutional and state-sanctioned oppression, it has become increasingly indispensable for comparative research to be legible across linguistic, national, geographic, and disciplinary boundaries. While comparative literature has traditionally embraced interdisciplinary and transnational approaches, at times the field has institutionally failed to recognize the work done by those who are forced to reckon with the ontological issue of being “Human” as Wynter describes it, not only out of theoretical interest, but as a precondition of their very existence.
With this urgency in mind, how can we approach comparatism while accounting for the ways our subjects and topics are discursively inextricable from how they came into being? If comparatism inherently entails working across varying theoretical, methodological, and material borders, how do we take the next step to question those ontological factors that always determine or foreclose their legibility? If we understand that disciplines are embedded in empire, how might we question our own participation in an epistemological imperial legacy that differentiates knowledge into predetermined exclusionary categories and canons?
Boldly questioning what comes after comparitism, we invite papers and presentations that theorize across literary, visual, and auditory mediums to participate in the Graduate Organization for Comparative Literature Students (GRACLS) 18th annual Spring 2023 graduate conference March 31st-April 1st. We invite proposals for 15-minute presentations that include formats such as orally presented research papers, showing videos, live performances or any other multidisciplinary form that imagines the conference theme.
Grateful to the fundamental framework Wynter lays out and to Black anticolonial scholarship at large, we prioritize works that seek to destabilize the coloniality of being through fostering ways of knowing differently. Topics may include, but need not be limited to, the following areas of scholarship:
Anticolonial/ Decolonial Discourse
Black Queer Worldmaking
Performance Studies
The Trans and Queer Transnational
Disability and Race
Regimes of the Human
Black Caribbean Scholarship
Ethnicity, Race, and Indigenous Studies
Visual Culture and Iconography
Affect Studies
Popular Culture
Globalization
Space, Place, Temporalities
Psychoanalysis
Racial Justice, Abolition, and Decolonization
Ecology and Race
Black Political Thought
Digital Media and Activism
Migration/Displacement and Diaspora
Keynote Speaker: Dr. Paul Joseph López Oro