MCLC: Pirates in World Literature--acla cfp

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Pirates in World Literature–acla cfp
CFP: Pirates in World Literature (ACLA 2019)
The image of the pirate resonates universally across cultures and periods. Taking the pirate’s broad cultural relevance as its starting point, this seminar explores piracy’s representation in the early modern world. Works such as Claire Jowitt’s The Culture of Piracy(2010)  and Lauren Benton’s A Search for Sovereignty (2010)  argue for the importance of piracy to the study of early modern European transatlantic empires, highlighting piracy’s role in the consolidation of British national and imperial identity and the formation of early modern notions of sovereignty. East Asian historian Peter Shapinsky in Lords of the Sea (2005) considers pirates as cultural intermediaries, emphasizing pirates’ desire to remain autonomous by positioning themselves between land-based powers. In addition to exploring piracy’s relationship to early modern global politics, recent studies have reframed piracy’s relationship to literary history. Key interventions by Margaret Cohen in The Novel and the Sea (2010) and Gretchen Woertendyke in Hemispheric Regionalism (2016) have offered revisionist histories of the novel and romance forms by shifting the analytical focus from the land to the sea. These interventions demonstrate the dynamics of recent oceanic, trans-oceanic, and hemispheric turns in literary and cultural studies.
This seminar aims to expand upon this work by limning the contours of an emergent piracy studies program defined by its global and comparative orientation and its interest in piracy’s critical relation to early modern political forms and techniques of literary representation. The seminar aims to explore similarities and differences in the representation of pirates and piracy across cultures and historical periods and to interrogate the causes and effects of these similarities and differences.
We welcome submissions from scholars working in traditional genres of literary studies such as poetry, drama, and the novel, but we also welcome submissions from scholars who conceive of the literary in more capacious terms, including those working on the histories of travel and trade and legal history.
We welcome papers that address (but are not limited to) following questions and topics:
How are pirates and piracy represented across various early modern literary forms? What are the cultural poetics of piracy as represented by these forms, and what do we learn about their respective literary histories by studying their representations of piracy?
What are the linguistic registers of early modern piracy? How do pirates speak? What roles do multilingualism and translation play in the history of piracy and in its literary representation?
How does piracy relate to notions of physical and intellectual property?
How do transnational and transoceanic frameworks alter our understanding of early modern piracy’s global significance.
What is piracy’s relation to the process of state formation, either as a catalyst or as a mode of resistance?
How does piracy engage with the logics of sovereignty and the sovereign exception?
What would a truly comparative history of piracy look like? How might we study the reception and influence of the image of the pirate across cultures?
Please submit a 250-word abstract and a short bio through the ACLA website, https://www.acla.org/seminars, by 9 AM EST on Thursday, September 20.
For questions, please send email to Yuanfei Wang at yuanfeiw at uga.edu and Jason M. Payton at jmpayton at uga.edu.
by denton.2 at osu.edu on September 10, 2018
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