Dear colleagues,
Could I kindly bring to your attention, and ask you to share as widely as possible, the call for papers for a seminar on 'Mediterranean Europe and/as the Global South' which I am proposing to convene together with my colleague Dimitris Papanikolaou (Oxford) at next year's Annual Conference of the ACLA (American Comparative Literature Association) (Chicago, March 19-23, 2023)
Details on the seminar can be found here (and here below): https://www.acla.org/mediterranean-europe-andas-global-south
The deadline for submission of paper proposals is 31 October.
Many thanks, and all the best,
Alexis
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Dr Alexis Radisoglou
Assistant Professor in German Studies
School of Modern Languages and Cultures
Durham University
Leverhulme Research Fellow 2022-23
The organizers of this seminar invite papers that interrogate cultural imaginaries and broader theorizations of Mediterranean Europe both in its relationship to and as the Global South. We conceive of the Global South, thereby, as simultaneously a deterritorialized “geopolitical area, a global economic process, a collective actor, a discursive event, and a body of theories, paradigms, and texts” (Russell West-Pavlov) that stand in a complexly antagonistic, or “heterological” (Jacques Rancière), relationship to the dominant epistemologies, conceptual taxonomies, and political-historical mappings of the contemporary world. Our particular interest lies with the question whether a (re-)orientation of Mediterranean Europe towards the epistemological, conceptual and (de-)territorial(ized) space of the Global South can be catalytic both for a “new vision” (Boaventura de Sousa Santos) of the political, historical and discursive domain of “Europe” and for a critical interrogation and performative re-configuration of the formation of neoliberal globality.
Though we are particularly interested in contemporary iterations of this problematic, we also welcome papers by scholars working in the area of medieval, early modern, and modern cultures more broadly, acknowledging that any attempt at reading Mediterranean Europe as and through the Global South will always entail a praxis of critical genealogy and a troubling of archives. While we anticipate that the majority of papers will be concerned with the areas of Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece, we accept any proposal that critically engages the seminar topic, including from the vantage point of the cultural production of the Global North. We particularly welcome submissions with a decolonial focus and comparative approaches that seek to problematize hegemonic narratives about Europe, and we are especially interested in papers that address the topic of the seminar through case studies of works of literature, film, and the visual arts more broadly.
Possible topics to be addressed through the prism of the seminar title include, but are not limited to:
- the discourse of crisis
- global capitalism and neoliberal governmentality
- migration
- colonialism, crypto-colonialism, and (de-)coloniality
- racialization and discourses of whiteness
- “Southern theory” and epistemologies of the South
- translation and transculturality
- the politics of comparative literature
- classical reception and its geopolitical and racializing legacies
- affiliations across the Global South
- alternative archives and genealogies
- art and activism
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