[Comicsstudiessociety] CFP: Crisis Lines: Coloniality, Modernity Comics (online June 9-10)

[Candida Rifkind]

Full CFP with program schedule is attached.

Crisis Lines: Coloniality, Modernity, Comics
Wednesday 9th & Thursday 10th June 2021
Online (Zoom)

Convenors: Dominic Davies (City, University of London)
Haya Alfarhan (King's College London)

Confirmed respondents: Professor Tim Ingold; Professor Hillary Chute;
Professor Frederick Luis Aldama; Professor Candida Rifkind

Call For Papers

Colonial modernity has materially reshaped our world through the force of the line.
Epitomized in the modern cartographic map, the colonial line is deployed as a technology of
delimitation and enclosure, often in relation to land, but also to seas and to skies. It is drawn
across territories, fragmenting communities and framing populations, and prioritising
occupation and ownership over habitation and presence. It authorizes borders, inscribing
with pens and walls and satellites an imperial !visuality" (to use the nineteenth-century term
expertly scrutinised by Nicholas Mirzoeff) onto the surface of the earth. Beginning in the
slave plantation and settler colony, evolving through the heights of European imperialism,
and calcifying into the military-media complex of our screen-oriented age, visuality has
combined the lines of maps with other information-lines - treaties, bureaucracies,
infrastructures, code - to contrive colonial modernity into a self-evident and indisputable
reality.

However, while the colonial line extends into the present moment by controlling the very
crises it has advertently created, it is not the only genre of line. As Tim Ingold has shown,
lines can also trace modes and chart histories of resistance. There are hand-drawn lines,
sketch lines, story lines, wayfaring lines; lines that carry counter-histories, that index the
sway of rebellions lost and revolutions overturned. These lines orient positionalities and
denote relationalities, both situating us on and habituating us into the world. As a gesture
of encounter, they take place against structures of power, a ground from which "the right
to look" might be claimed. This is not only an ocular but also an acoustic ground, an
atmosphere that slips through and away from the frame, or as Tina Campt suggests, a
frequency into which we might tune to better apprehend the affects and impacts of the
image. "When the painted image is not a copy but the result of a dialogue," John Berger
writes, "the painted thing speaks if we listen."

This conference invites papers that contend with the ways in which these lines are
manifested and contested in comics, graphic novels, photo essays, zines, picture books, and
other combinations of image and text. Amidst the intensifying crisis of colonialist and
capitalist endeavour, we are searching for contributions that consider the constructive role
of lines, their utility as technologies and tools of analysis and resistance, and as bridges
between conceptual and concrete worlds. We are looking for lines that sketch new futures,
methods, and modes of engagement, and that collaborate against modernity's cartographic
vision. Lines unravel but they can also contain; they disentangle but they can also build. In the
architect's hand, the line is a weapon that concretizes into steel and cement; in the
painter's, the line dissolves the subject-object distinction that undergirds modern thought.
We welcome submissionsthat consider how lines operate on the page and through multiple
dimensions of hearing, feeling, and sight, shaping and reshaping our perception of reality
itself.

Papers might respond to the following issues or themes:

  *   hand-drawn lines and the material of the page
  *   peripheral realism and realist/modernist lines
  *   genealogical lines (blood, kinship, affiliation
  *   climate crisis and the entangled lines of the Anthropocene
  *   racial lines and anti-racist movements
  *   lines of sight and the distribution of the sensible
  *   lines of movement, stasis, and flight
  *   colonialism and empire in/as crisis (partitions, occupations, legacies)
  *   Indigenous cosmologies, cultures, and ways of being
  *   political and artistic representation (photography, portraiture, sketches)
  *   "the migrant "crisis" and the global border regime
  *   acoustic atmospheres, sound waves, sonic lines
  *   architectural lines, blueprints for future worlds
  *   neoliberal lines (managerialism, bureaucracy, deadlines)

300 word abstracts for 20 minute papers should be submitted to Dom Davies
(dominic.davies at city.ac.uk) and Haya Alfarhan (haya.alfarhan at kcl.ac.uk) before midnight
on Friday 9 April 2021. We particularly welcome papers that bridge pages with problems,
and lines with lives. Our aim is to begin with drawings and to draw out from them new
discussions and communities. We aim to be back in touch with speakers by mid-April.

A note on format
The conference will use an experimental panel-responder-roundtable format (please see
programme template below). There will be three parallel sessions, with a panel of two
papers in each stream. A respondent will sit on each panel and offer a 10-15 minute
response to panelists' papers. Panelists will then be given the opportunity to respond to the
respondents, with plenty of time allocated for a wider Q&A. The conference will conclude
with a Roundtable session, in which respondents will re-convene for a final discussion of
central and emerging themes. Confirmed respondents are listed above.

N.B. This format means that panelists will be required to submit written drafts or detailed
outlines of their papers to their respondents by Monday 24 May 2021. Please bear this
deadline in mind when submitting an abstract for this conference.

Dr. Candida Rifkind (she/her)
Professor & University SSHRC Leader | Department of English | University of Winnipeg
515 Portage Ave., Winnipeg, Manitoba R3B 2E9 CANADA
@candidarifkind | https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://www.candidarifkind.com__;!!KGKeukY!nJIcrEypkFWN1u9L4ICQvgX_oqNX57V1EqQcoxQhQuXJRazeaRq0I00uoNsw6yY3PMiqan2MHUpR$ <https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://www.candidarifkind.com/__;!!KGKeukY!nJIcrEypkFWN1u9L4ICQvgX_oqNX57V1EqQcoxQhQuXJRazeaRq0I00uoNsw6yY3PMiqagf3rC6n$ > | uwinnipeg.ca/english<https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.uwinnipeg.ca/english/index.html__;!!KGKeukY!nJIcrEypkFWN1u9L4ICQvgX_oqNX57V1EqQcoxQhQuXJRazeaRq0I00uoNsw6yY3PMiqar3ABufm$ >

I live and work on ancestral lands, on Treaty One Territory.
These lands are the traditional territory of the Anishinaabeg, Cree, Dakota, and Oji-Cree Nations and
the heartland of the Métis people. In Winnipeg, our water is sourced from Shoal Lake 40 First Nation.

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