CFP for ACLA 2017

the Annual Meeting of the Comparative Literature Association
by July 31, 2016

http://www.acla.org/annual-meeting

We are writing to invite you or anyone you think might be interested to submit proposals to a seminar we will be submitting for the Annual Meeting of the Comparative Literature Association to be celebrated at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, on July 6-9, 2017. Individual paper proposals will not be due until September but, since the ACLA’s annual
conferences have a distinctive structure in which most papers are grouped into twelve-person seminars that meet two hours per day for three days of the conference, we would like to start considering as many participants as possible before the portal opens in September for paper submissions. We also hope to produce a co-edited volume of essays including extended and revised versions of some of the papers on this seminar.

Wild-ing Subjects: Queer Contestations in Latin/o America between 1900 and 1970

This seminar seeks to address the various ways in which cultural and literary productions emerging in Latin/o America from 1900 to 1970 have contested some of the tenets at the foundation of cultural  historiography as it is often articulated. Within this cultural history, it is oftentimes overlooked how cultural artifacts, intellectual trajectories and
creative subjects‹whether or not they introduce themselves as queer or
dissident in actuality do enact forms of intervention that can be called queer or wild, following Jack J. Halberstams terminology. The presentations on this three-day seminar will invoke a new understanding of Latin/o American cultural history and its archives by engaging theories and methods that are wild in that they fail disciplinary knowledge, to quote Halberstam (Charming for the Revolution 7). The potential of a queer wildness as
explored by J. Halberstam and José Esteban Muñoz will serve to trigger a different understanding of improvised, surprising, or collaborative interventions that have been read as ³nonsensical and inconsequential. Instead, such interventions will be seen as failing and surpassing traditional understandings of nation and national belonging, practices of sociality, gender & genre hierarchies, sexuality and desire, the production and consumption of cultural goods, relationships among bodies and objects, temporalities and spatialities. Like Muñoz, Halberstam confesses, I seek a queer vitality that we might call wildness that skews towards collapse and works always on behalf of failure² (³Wildness,
Loss, Death 141,147). We invite papers that explore contributions staging this vitality in Latin/o America and help reconfigure and unsettle the Latin/o American archive. In so doing, this seminar aims to unravel new readings and break away from conventional hegemonic narratives of Latin/o American culture.

Send 300-500 word abstracts and bios to
Claudia Cabello Hutt at c_cabell@uncg.edu
Mariela Méndez at mmendezd@richmond.edu
by July 31, 2016

Mariela Méndez de Coudriet, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Latin American, Latino and Iberian Studies
Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies
330 Carole Weinstein International Center
University of Richmond, VA 23173
www.marielamendez.com