CALL FOR PAPERS
Literature and
International Law at the Edge
New York City,
December 14/15, 2018
Abstracts/proposals
due by October 31, 2018
The past decade has seen a steady increase in interdisciplinary scholarship interested in the relationships between literature and international law. Much of this scholarship has remained deeply rooted in the home disciplines of the scholars, who not only operate with the prevailing assumptions and methodologies of those disciplines, but also tend to treat the other disciplines as stable and unproblematic. Moreover, while claiming to tell a global history, that scholarship largely repeats the Eurocentric bias that has historically characterized the fields of comparative literature and international law. In fact, much of the new scholarship on comparative literature and international law not only fails to take account of imperialism and its histories in the formation of disciplinary knowledge, it also tends to marginalize events and thinkers at the colonial and global edges, ignoring their roles as actors and agents of literary and legal world-making. In doing so, this new scholarship seems to be replicating the traditional prejudices of its contributing disciplines.
Through a series of events to
be held in 2018 and 2019 (in, amongst other places, New York, London and
Nairobi) this project aims to explore the imbrications of literature and
international law at the edges. The project seeks to challenge many
of the basic disciplinary blindnesses and Eurocentric assumptions that have
characterized the emerging conversation by putting the Global South at the
center of our interdisciplinary inquiry.
For a day-long
workshop/conference, to be held in New York City on December 14/15,
2018, we are seeking contributions that:
- Explore interdisciplinary interfaces among literary,
historical, and legal studies, and from positions of geo-historical
marginalization across the Global South.
- Address the intersections between particular texts of
“world literature” and Third World Approaches to International Law.
- Map the theoretical and historical relationships
between comparative literature and international law as world-making,
world-imagining, and world-governing regimes.
- Trace the historical global flows of knowledge at the
“margins” of world literary and legal space that have been overlooked in the
canonical and narrow focus of the separate disciplines, as well as new flows of
global knowledge among the disciplines and across (and about) the Global South.
- Consider how the basic assumptions and doctrines of
international law and comparative literature (e.g., sovereignty,
self-determination, territoriality, equality of states, ethno-cultural
nationalism, national languages, and rights to natural and cultural resources)
were worked out historically in the Global South.
Please email short
proposals/abstracts/inquires by 31 October 2018 to: iL.Lit.events@gmail.com
We
hope to have some funds to assist scholars from the Global South with travel
costs.
Organizers: Joseph
Slaughter, Columbia University; Vasuki
Nesiah, New York University, Gerry
Simpson, London School of Economics; Christopher
Gevers, University of KwaZulu-Natal
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