SUNY Grad Conference
SUNY Department of Romance Languages & Literatures
9th Annual Graduate Student Conference for Romance Languages and Literatures
April 3rd-4th, 2020
Call for Papers
Belonging in Worlds:
Occupying Spaces and Forming Relationships
Diversity is becoming an ever increasing value in today’s society. The sense of belonging in sociocultural groups and spaces whether defined by borders, language, or belief systems is a complex human need and desire. In addition to the notion of citizen and belonging to physical groups and regions, we can explore various spaces and relationships including online locations and that of the link between human groups and nature, ecologically speaking. Furthermore, the repurposing of public spaces questions how we manage to belong when they are commoditized, and even when they are being destroyed. Many things can bring people together including a call to action for a cause or a shared trauma endured. These questions are paramount in the studies of literature and language as they relate directly to contemporary analysis and critique of literary and linguistic production.
In his book, What is a World?: On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature, Pheah Cheng asserts that “Because world literature has the normative vocation of opening new worlds, its study cannot merely consist of historiographical or sociological analyses of how literary texts circulate globally and the effects of circulation at the level of form and style.” In addressing the limits of contemporary literature analysis as it relates to the spatial awareness of literature circulation and readership, Cheng confronts the potential of opening across the disciplines of the postcolonial within the temporal. In this manner, we are influenced by what we read or are told by entities such as educational institutions and the government, and by what we experience and see, including cleaned up landscapes that erase historical vicissitudes in favor of homogeneity. On the other hand, we can occupy and inhabit public spaces to use them in different ways to break barriers and hope to find a sense of belonging. For example, immigrants bring with them new ideas when inhabiting old spaces, but what happens when no spaces are available?
Through interdisciplinary means, this conference invites you to reflect on and discuss the questions of world making in literature, market in relation to regulation and production of spaces as well as readership in text, the effects of language and translation in literature throughout the world, the decolonization of language and space, and the tradition of disciplinarity in literature and linguistic analysis, in addition to cultural competence. In what ways does the market affect social groups and spaces? What type of individuals makeup collectives that are successful in their endeavors of resistance? How does world making shift along with immigration? Where do worlds reside and what regulates the relationships within and between them when attempting to truly understand one another? Who belongs in public spaces and who does not when seems to be a lack of them? Finally, how do we navigate belonging within communities and spaces when we are faced with defamiliarization and an illusion of transparency, or even when the notion of world may cease to exist?
We especially encourage but are not limited to approaches such as:
- Transnational Studies
- Political and Sociocultural Spaces
- Linguistics
- Gender and Queer Studies
- Body and Disabilities Studies
- Language Pedagogy
- Language and Literature
- Contemporary and Social Media
- Psychology and Psychoanalysis
- Historical and Environmental Studies
Proposal Submissions by Wednesday, January 15th 2020
To submit your proposal, please email the following to ubromance@gmail.com:
- 250-word abstract in English (Presentations cannot exceed 20 minutes)
- Indicate in which language you will present (English, Spanish, or French)
- Indicate what kind of technology you will need for your presentation, if any
- A short biography including your name, institutional affiliation, and research interests that you would like the moderator to read to introduce you.
Presentations may lead to publication in the SUNY Buffalo Romance Studies Journal
Please email ubromance@gmail.com with any questions or for more details.