Starting Date: 03-04-2004
Ending Date: 03-06-2004
University Of Alaska
Anchorage
Anchorage, Alaska 99508
United States
907-277-4348The Pacific Rim Conference on Literature & Rhetoric is a graduate conference held every year on the campus of the University of Alaska Anchorage. As always, we welcome critical papers on all topics pertaining to literature, literary studies, and rhetoric; however, this year, in an attempt to effect broader discursive and political analyses, we are also encouraging multi-disciplinary submissions.
Call for Papers:
Crisis�or the state of exception as Giorgio Agamben terms it�has come to constitute the very conditions of our political economies. Although there is no single crisis, there is a singularity of crisis invoked in such a way as to foreclose cultural conversations and limit the terms of our ethical investigations. The state of exception, then, is the state in totality, whereby the juridical and the ethical empty into the same singularity and exhaust future questions of possibility and resistance; thus, state sovereignty legitimated through crisis is marked by its ability to either efficiently absorb dissent or entirely repress discourse in a ruthless declaration of positive right. In this state of crisis, any expression of desire outside the symbolic logic of power is deemed impossible or judged illegal�or worse, appropriated through economies of fantasy as �utopian� and thus harmless.
The title and theme for the 2004 conference��Laws Without Outlaws: Territory / Utopia / Transgression��aims to invoke multitudinous states of oppression, repression, and suppression as enforced across networks of ideological and textual registers. In this regard, we are interested in opening a forum of critique in which to excavate systems of political, discursive, and ethical totalities and situate questions of liberation across a broad spectrum of disciplines, periods, and cultures. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
? Illegal jouissance: anarchy and post-structuralism ? Utopia in the discourses of nationalism and resistance
? Laughter, transgression, philosophies of un-knowing ? Representations of outlaws: outlawed representations
? Homo Sacer: narratives of sublime delinquency ? The borders of bodies: corporeal transgression, erotica, sexuality
? (Post)colonial insurgencies; literatures of resistance ? The bodies of borders: architecture, geography, subjectivity
? Surveillance unveiled ? �Carceral Archipelagos� vs. �Pirate Utopias� ? Crisis as kairos as topos
? Ideology: interpellation, insurgency, desire ? [Levinas]: Effecting an �ethics before and beyond ontology�
? Resistant histories: civil rights, class conflict, & critical feminisms ? Arrestive rhetorics and generative rhetorics
? Aesthetic resistances: situationalism, immediatism, flash mobs ? Blogs as political weapons
? Cyborg & Posthuman discourses as sites of crisisGeographical Scope: National Conference |
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