[csaa-forum] Anxiety of Belonging CFP

[Ian Buchanan]

Call for Papers

The Anxiety of Belonging: Partitions, Reunifications, Modernity

Cardiff University, Wales, July 15th-17th, 2009

In an increasingly globalized world, the fractures caused by Partitions and their papering over by
Reunifications raise one of the most important questions of modernity, that of belonging.  The focus
of this conference will be to do comparative work on Partitions and Reunifications and understand
these political events in their global complexity.  “The Anxiety of Belonging: Partitions,
Reunifications, Modernity” conference calls for papers that will open up new ways of theorizing
and new approaches to Partitions and Reunifications by problematizing political and nationalistic
frameworks in an era of the postnational and the global. How will a cultural studies approach with
its emphasis on cultural practices and their relationships to power, the focus on culture in its
complex forms, and on the practices of everyday life, along with its variety of theoretical
frameworks and interdisciplinarity invigorate Partition and Reunification studies?  How do
contemporary discourses of identity, gender, sexuality, intellectual traditions, religion, the
re-imagination of the nation-state, and memory work reshape the scholarship on Partitions and
Reunifications? Further, how do the structures of partition function in settler countries, which
though not politically partitioned, spatially separate the indigenous from settler populations.  
  
The Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory in Cardiff University, Wales, will host an
interdisciplinary conference to explore the social, cultural, and historical dimensions of
Partitions and Reunifications and relate historically located Partitions and Reunifications within
contemporary discourses of nationalism, the postnational and the global.

The broad themes of the conference will include:
*   Comparative partitions and reunifications
*   The importance of partition study in the face of the declining nation-state and the
postnational
*   The reshaping of knowledge in the wake of a partition or a reunification (for instance what
impact does the loss of archives at partition have on a new nation’s knowledge production)
*   The impact of partitions and reunifications on the discourse of diaspora
*   The meaning of reunifications in the face of globalization
*   The re-imagination of the nation-state and reunifications
*   Race, ethnicity and religion in partitions and reunifications
*   Gender, sexuality, identity and partitions and reunifications
*   Indigenous populations and their relation to a segregated nation-space
*   Memory, Trauma, and Forgetting


The Conference invites 20 minute papers from the following disciplinary areas: Critical theory,
history, sociology, cultural studies, literary and media studies, politics, visual culture, and
religious studies.  This list is not exhaustive.  

Send 200-250 word proposals by November 15th to partitions at cardiff.ac.uk 

Conference Organiser:
Radhika Mohanram (mohanramr1 at cf.ac.uk)

Details:
http://www.cf.ac.uk/encap/partitions/index.html