Polish Association for American Studies 2023 Annual Conference held and hosted by the Department of American Literature and the Department of Studies in Culture, The Faculty of English, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland
America and Deep Time: Alternate Geographies, Temporalities, and Histories
25-27 October 2023
In Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time (2006) Wai Chee Dimock proposed a radically new way of interpreting American texts. The scholar argued that the current practice of reading American literature and culture within their customary context, the national boundaries of the U.S., should be replaced by interpreting these subjects through alternate, more widely dispersed, geographies. This would loosen up the critical hold of such exceptionalist narratives as Puritan colonization, the American Adam or the frontier; it would be more sensitive to placing American texts within a global totality and within a world literature. Dimock also argued that the short time-frame of history within which criticism of American texts is usually penned up (starting from 1620) ought to be replaced by a more extensive concept of “deep time”. These concepts invite us to look at America from wider points of view, which seems a reasonable response to the recent surge of global crises.
We invite papers about American themes, written from perspectives that present the U.S.A. as a “planetary entity” (Spivak), part of a wide and complex network of events and processes, often beyond America’s control, imaginary power, or understanding: global biology and epidemiology, Anthropocene, global warming, transnational politics, cosmopolitan wealth and poverty, global migration flows, new historical epochs and timescales, global crime networks, fluctuating global energy and food markets. Such themes and events call for a new timescale, or a new spatial perspective.
Specifically, but not exclusively, we invite papers on the following issues:
Deep time, deep past, deep memory, deep future
Planetarity, glocality, wide and complex networks of events
Quantum realities, speculative realities, fractal spatialities
Permeation of cultures, overlapping territories
Migration, immigration, diasporic cultures and writing
Hybridity, assimilation, creative appropriation, adaptation, and translation
Creolization of languages and cultures
Borderlands cultures and histories, contact zones
Modifications by periphery cultures of genres and plots from core cultures
New readings of “the international theme” in American literature and culture
Non-standard cartographies, imaginary geographies
Global environmental change, global extinction events, climate change and the related ecoglobalist affects and traumas
Aesthetic narratives of catastrophies and extinction, e.g., the elegy, the sublime, the tragic, the pastoral
Apocalyptic visions and narratives
Discourses of the self-conscious Anthropocene/ Capitalocene/ Chthulucene
The past and the current pandemic discourses
Time and narrative
Arrows of time
Synchronic and diachronic realities
Ultra-long timescales in history, longue durée, paleontological and geological perspectives in history
Values and evaluations of past events, the use of non-American timescales and epochs, polycentric historiographies
Elusive, forgotten, neglected, and repressed events and historical relations
The literature and history of slavery as a transatlantic phenomenon
The long history (histories) of Native Americans
Indigenous topological knowledges
Critical perspectives on American archeology and anthropology
Multispecies histories, interspecies responsibility
The posthuman and more-than-human ontoepistemologies
Ecosophical and ecocritical approaches to American literature and culture
Blue Humanities, the oceanic turn, the oceanic archives, Wet Globalization
Ocean narratives as global narratives (for example, Melville, Poe, Katherine Anne Porter, Toni Morrison)
Foreign interference in American politics
The Global North and the Global South
The US and world religions
Digital activism, algorithmic cultures, digital citizenship, metadata society, networked affects, partial communities
Medianatures
Transnational sonic phenomena, network noise, bioacoustics
American visual, film and (new) media studies, including ecocinema and ecomedia, from a transnational perspective
Transnational and transcultural relations, cooperations, movements, and trends
The transnational model in Black and African American studies
Transnational America and women’s studies
The transnational model in gender and queer studies
Keynote speakers:
Prof. Wai Chee Dimock, Harvard Center for the Environment, Harvard University, USA
Prof. Julia Fiedorczuk, University of Warsaw, Poland
Prof. Wiesław Kuhn, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland
The auxiliary event for Ph.D. students: The conference will be preceded by an online workshop, co-organized by The Faculty of English and The AMU Doctoral School of Languages and Literatures, and aimed at Ph.D. students participating in the conference. The workshop will be devoted to the methodologies of cultural and literary studies relevant to the topic of Deep Time. The workshop will be held via Zoom, on October 24 , and conducted by two scholars: prof. Paweł Frelik, from The University of Warsaw (part I), and our keynote speaker, prof. Wai Chee Dimock, from Harvard Center for the Environment (part II). The enrollment for the workshop will be possible as a separate option via the conference registration form.
The language of the conference and of the workshop is English.
Abstracts (ca. 250 words) or panel proposals together with a short bio (up to 100 words) should be sent to paas2023@gmail.com by June 15, 2023. For panel submissions, please include the title of your panel, the bios of each participant as well as the short bio of the panel chair.
Notification of acceptance will be sent by June 30, 2023.
Conference fee: to be announced.
Deadline for registration and payment of the conference fee: September 15, 2023.
The conference is planned as an in-person event.
Conference venue:
The Faculty of English
Collegium Heliodori Święcicki
Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań ul. Grunwaldzka 6
60-780 Poznań
Conference website: http://paas2023.amu.edu.pl
Conference email: paas2023@gmail.com
Organizing Committee:
Paulina Ambroży
Elżbieta Wilczyńska
Ewa Łuczak
Jacek Fabiszak
Paweł Stachura
Wiesław Kuhn
Kornelia Boczkowska
Katarzyna Macedulska
Małgorzata Olsza