MCLC: ACLA settler colonial lit seminar--cfp

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: YU-TING HUANG <ythuang at ucla.edu>
Subject: ACLA settler colonial lit seminar--cfp
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Dear all,

please consider participating in the seminar I am organizing for 2015
American Comparative Literature Association Annual Meeting. The call,
enclosed below, aims for a global and comparative assessment of settler
colonialism as a framework for literary study, and we welcome all who are
interested in the topic.

Thank you,
Yuting

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ACLA 2015 Call for Papers: Settler Colonial Literatures in Comparison

 
We are inviting papers for a seminar to be hosted at the American
Comparative Literature Association's 2015 Annual Meeting, in Seattle,
Washington on March 26-29. This seminar explores how settler colonial
studies contribute to our study of comparative literature, both within and
beyond Anglophone settler spaces.

 
Recent scholarship has re-conceptualized settler colonialism as a distinct
structure of domination. Despite inherent heterogeneity within settler and
indigenous societies, structural opposition between the two continues
beyond invasion. As such, ethnic minorities in white settler countries may
participate in indigenous dispossession, and third-world postcolonial
nation states may have untold histories of settler colonialism. Settler
colonial history in the global scale thus entails particularly complex
flows of power and structures of relation, whereby one moves vertically
(structurally) from being indigenous to being settler (or vise-versa)
along the horizontal global flows of migration, invasion, and settlement.
In this framework, it may also become possible to examine migrants in
Australia, the USA, Canada, and New Zealand for their participation in the
settler order, and to query how much settler colonial domination has given
legitimacy to states like Taiwan or Japan's many islands and contributed
to the ongoing conflicts in Israel or the Chinese borderlands.

 
In response to these complex networks of relation brought to light by
settler colonial studies, this seminar examines the particular challenges
and new possibilities in reading literatures comparatively across settler
colonial conditions and structural positions, between postcolonial,
indigenous, and ethnic literary studies. What may be our new ethos and
strategies of reading and how can we engage with the particular temporal
and spatial juxtapositions and scaling in settler texts? In what sense may
it be productive to study literatures outside of the Anglophone settler
colonies as settler colonial? Then, do settler literatures in Chinese,
Japanese, or other tongues, invoke distinct literary traditions to narrate
settlement and do these narratives produce divergent structures of
relation? Perhaps even more importantly, can literary texts effectively
narrate and envision the decolonization of settler colonialism?

 
We welcomes theoretical and methodological explorations of comparative
settler colonial literary studies, close readings of specific sites of
settler colonial heterogeneity, or comparative works that investigate
relations across locations, languages, or political systems.

Proposal by Aug 24, 2014.
Contact: ythuang at ucla.edu.