In November, the EGSA symposium call for panels applying to our Failed Fixities theme was released, and many of our colleagues delivered with wonderfully generative and thought-provoking panel ideas. As a result, we have six panels this year, calling for a jam-packed and thought-filled conference on February 15. But now, we need you to submit your abstracts in response to these wonderful panels. Papers can be anything you have written and presented before; we just want to hear from across the department to see what our colleagues are working on! You can of course feel free to write something new for the symposium, but do not feel as if you have to. If you are not sure that your paper idea fits with any of the proposed panels, send your abstract to Molly Lewis at mclewis@gwu.edu with the subject line "EGSA Abstract" and we will try to find a place for you. All abstracts will be due by midnight on January 28.
Below you will find five of the six amazing panel submissions...we are so excited to see what you all come up with!
Temporal Slippages and
Spatial Slidings: A Symposium on Failed Fixities
“Worlding” (Gillman & Gruesz,
226) the Postcolonial
Organizer:
Sreyoshi Sarkar, sreyoshi@gwmail.gwu.edu
Besides functioning
on a temporal plane of signification the “post” in “postcolonial” is
invigorating in its enquiries into substitute/alternative ways of narration,
historicization and governance that critique, contest and better, imposed
colonial systems of the same. In thinking through these alternative discourses,
postcolonial texts – theory, fiction and non-fiction, prose and poetry, films,
music and online archives – have continually set into motion brilliant
conversations amongst resistive and restructuring imaginaries at sites as
different and complex as Africa, South Asia, the South East, the Middle East
and even South America. Thus, postcolonial theory readers have the essential
Said, Bhabha, Appiah, Mohanty, Hall and Suleri texts towards developing a
useful postcolonial critical lens, Cherian Dabis’ Amreeka about the trials and travails of a post-9/11 Arab family in
IIlionois recalls those of the Takahashi family in 1942 (“Family 8108” – Cold Case Season 11) in
Japanese-American internment camps and Palestinian and Arab-American bands take
up the cause of Palestinian self-determination while setting their lyrics to
the rhythms of African-American hip hop.
This panel invites
papers exploring just such a “worlding” of postcolonial discourse as processes
of globalization continue to forge uneasy links across the world that affect
and inflect not only local, national and international politics and economics
but also war and non-war, lifestyles, cultures and countercultures, patterns of
exploitation and displacements of marginalized populations. What do such discursive
networks of the postcolonial hope to achieve? Do they enable more useful and
evolving resistance to imperialist hegemonies as they are instituted, resisted
and transformed? What might be the possible oversights and downfalls of such a
critical lens? Looking forward to engaging in these and more conversations at
sites of the intertextual, cross-thematic, trans-spatial, trans-temporal and
trans-linguistic in diverse postcolonial texts and in different media, this
panel hopes to approach, in effect, an ethics of the postcolonial in a
contemporary world of the global. Please submit abstracts of 250 words to
Sreyoshi Sarkar at sreyoshi@gwmail.gwu.edu.
Spectral Encounters
Organizer:
Emily Russell, erusse4@gwmail.gwu.edu
“75% of Americans believe that there
are events that take place that cannot be explained. Over half of these people
believe they have experienced paranormal events themselves. The identity of
some of these people may surprise you.” These words slowly fade in and out like
a misty message as an eerie soundtrack plays at the beginning of each episode
of Celebrity Ghost Stories, an
hour-long weekly show on the bio channel in which celebrities share their
personal haunted experiences. Some are disturbing while others are rather
sweet, though the aesthetic of the show never varies much – crackly recordings,
old photos, images that skip across the screen in sepia tones. Celebrities are
not the only ones telling their ghost stories to reality TV audiences. In an
episode of My Ghost Story, another
show on the bio channel, a man looks into the camera and explains in detail how
he first became aware that the ghost of a past owner haunts the hotel he has
recently purchased. A glass slid off of the counter. A distinct perfume wafted
from an unseen source. The radio unexpectedly switched stations.
This panel seeks to
explore the fuzzifying effect of spectral encounters – the sensory and agentive
blurring that happens when a cup seems to tip of its own accord or a sound
rings from a bell, unrung. Presenters
are encouraged to interpret this theme very liberally. Some possible topics are
ghostly aesthetics in pop culture/reality tv, haunted/haunting posthumanisms,
agentive objects and other spectral encounters that defy sensory, personal,
agentive borders. Please submit 250 word abstracts to Emily Russell at erusse4@gwmail.gwu.edu.
Dissecting the Gaze:
Corporeality, Spectacle, and Performance in the Theater
Organizer:
Kadie Groh, kgroh@gwmail.gwu.edu
In “Bodies Unseen: The Early Modern
Anatomical Theatre and the Danse Macabre of Theatrical ‘Looking,’” Natalie
Alvarez theorizes practices of display and gazing in relation to Early Modern
anatomical theaters, which turned postmortem examinations and dissections into
a spectator sport. These anatomical theaters mirrored other theaters in many
ways, even going so far as to include refreshments. In these spaces, the
fictional or performative and the “real” collapsed: all bodies became
recipients of a spectatorial gaze, and were exposed and displayed for the sake
of entertainment. Alvarez attempts to “consider the body on display in the
anatomical theatre as an opportunity to investigate potential models of
theatrical reception in the onlooker’s encounter with the body. The
concentrated atmosphere of the anatomical theatre with the insentient body
occupying centre stage is organized around an invitation to look.” Alvarez’s
argument highlights that there is not a “static relationship between the viewer
and the body,” regardless of the fact that corpses in anatomical theaters are
relegated to one location. However, her work focuses entirely on human corpses
in anatomical theaters. What happens when bodies as subjects of the spectatorial
gaze refuse to remain at a safe distance, or even to remain still and/or dead,
as in many Early Modern theatrical performances?
Dissection, representation, and
spectacle, as well as the spectatorial gaze, appear in many plays and other
non-theatrical spaces. Alvarez
references art which attempts to represent these anatomical theatrical
“performances,” such as Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson (1632). She turns her
own spectatorial gaze on “how the onlooker’s experience of the body on display
is shaped by the dynamic of its encodings in representation.” This panel hopes
to explore just such issues of embodiment and dissection through the lens of
disability studies. Some questions this panel hopes to explore are: How might
this long-standing tradition of displaying non-normate or fragmented bodies
(whether human corpses, human actors, or stage props) give us insight into
theoretical discourses about disability, performance, aesthetics, and
spectacle? How do modern prosthetics or donated organs factor into this
discussion? How might questions of dissection and spectacle be applied to
Postcolonial literature and race, perhaps in relation to stereotyping? What’s
the relationship between the viewers, the “performers” (bodies or prosthetic
wearers), and the parts or prosthetics themselves? How do parts or prosthetics,
or representations of them, resist or subvert the spectatorial gaze?
This panel welcomes papers from any
time period and concentration, and looks for papers that cover a wide range of
topics and concentrations, including but not limited to Disability Studies,
Critical Race Theory, Subaltern studies, Queer Theory, Gender/Sexuality
studies, Feminism, Object-Oriented Ontology, Cyborg Theory, etc.
Submit paper abstracts to
kgroh@gwmail.gwu.edu with the subject line “EGSA: Dissecting the Gaze.”
Alvarez, Natalie. "Bodies Unseen:
The Early Modern Anatomical Theatre and the Danse Macabre of Theatrical
"Looking"" Janus Head (n.d.): 35-49. Web. <http://www.janushead.org/Alvarez.pdf>.
"Looking"" Janus Head (n.d.): 35-49. Web. <http://www.janushead.org/Alvarez.pdf>.
Racial Hauntings: Specters of
Citizenship and the Fantasy of National Identity
Co-organizers:
Maia Gil’Adi and Molly Lewis, mgiladi@gwu.edu and mlewis@gwu.edu
In Necro Citizenship: Death, Eroticism, and the
Public Sphere in the Nineteenth-Century United States, Russ Castronovo
states: “As both corporeal fact and political metaphor, death produces bodies
whose materiality disturbs the impersonality of citizenship, but whose remove
from sociopolitical life also idealizes the unhistorical and abstract nature of
state identity. Death, then, structures political life in terms of aversion as
well as desire” (1). This panel will explore the ways in which the social
formations of national identity is erased from our narrative of citizenship and
belonging, in favor of a particular peoples “natural” claims to the nation.
Those who do not fit within these national identities cannot gain access to
this narrative and are thus pushed outside of it--Others are created and
conceived within the national discourse (to which they don’t have access) as
outside of national progression. These Others are racialized, innately and
biologically made different to corporeally display difference; a difference
that concentrated on the body is neither acknowledged or erased from national
discourse.
This panel wishes to
survey those outside of this progression, in a phenomenon that Hortense Spiller
crystallizes as the ways in which the ethnicized subject “freezes in meaning,
takes on constancy, assumes the look and the affects of the Eternal.” We want
to engage with the specters of nation that are simultaneously essential and
impossible to the idea of nation, to explore what is lost when a national
identity is formed at the expense of alternative populations and identities. In
this panel, we hope to explore the following questions: How is a communal
national history created through the formation of racialized identities? How
are history and nation always already marked by death and racial difference?
How are racialized identities of a specific place and time, and yet eternal?
How does silence, erasure, death and abjection reappear and haunt the present,
invoking the impossibility of erasure and death? In what ways do these
racialized identities display themselves in physical manifestations of pain and
sufferings? How do these ghosts of race emerge in political, social, and
cultural aspects of the nation?
We welcome abstracts for papers that
are cross-disciplinary and time periods that explore the function of race and
death in the formation of national histories and identities. Relevant topics
and theoretical lenses might include, but are not limited to: race theory,
queer theory, postcolonialism, nationalism/nationality, historicity, abjection,
citizenship, slavery, haunting identities, narrative, genocide, religious
persecution, and language/linguistics. Send abstracts of 250 words or less to
mgiladi@gwu.edu or mlewis@gwu.edu with “Racial Hauntings CFP” as the subject.
The Full-Blown Sails of
Empire: Travel, Imperial
Exceptionalism, and Anxieties of Cultural Inferiority
Organizer:
Patrick Thomas Henry, patrickthenry@gmail.com
In Dislocating Race and Nation (2008),
Robert S. Levine contends that nineteenth-century American writers had a vested
interest in penning narratives to ease their fears of British influence: “the emergence of a great national
literature would help to ease Americans’ anxieties about their cultural
inferiority to Great Britain while signaling the new nation’s republican values
and potentially glorious future.” This performance occurs in the nautical
ventures in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and Herman
Melville’s Benito Cereno; the eponymous seafarers represent American
individualism to (for Pym) Antarctic savages and (for Cereno) mutinous slaves
unwilling to accept American republican values. Depicting Americans as the apex of political evolution, such
nationalist literatures employ characters’ transits and metaphoric language to
revise reality and to mollify an implied anxiety of national and cultural inferiority.
This project is not
unique to the nineteenth-century nautical adventure novel, but is instead
germane to the imperial projects of English and American letters across
periods. As such, this panel
welcomes abstracts for papers that explore the function of travel in asserting
a national identity during any era, while likewise investigating how those
journeys address the anxiety of looming foreign powers and how this
destabilizes myths of imperial exceptionalism. Relevant ports of entry include, but certainly are not
limited to, the following theoretical lenses: postcolonialism, Orientalism, historicism, critiques of
economic expansion, scientific inquiry, pilgrimage, and so on. Send abstracts of 250 words or less to
patrickthenry@gmail.com, with “Sails of Empire Abstract” as the subject.
1. Robert S. Levine, Dislocating Race and Nation: Episodes in Nineteenth-Century Literary
Nationalism. (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2008), 3.
