Phantasmic Binds: Culture as Poltergeist
February 26, 2021
About
Conference Description
Conference Description
How can language, often thought to be incorporeal, twist and tie up our lived realities?
How does cultural production reach across this ontological chasm with surprising, and sometimes even shocking, results?
In this impasse, words function as overdetermined phantasms of a culture that orient how we articulate and recognise our aspirations, affections, ambivalence, and antipathy. In this social matrix, words—and by implication, language—are imagined as cultural specters: as ahistorical poltergeistic entities that reinforce a predictable present.
Grappling with the implications of these cultural complexities, the biennial graduate student conference at the Rutgers University Program in Comparative Literature invites responses that meditate on the instability of language and how it acts as a phantasm that shifts our collective culture, in ways both generative and deleterious.
In this conference, we want to explore language’s vitality to our understanding of the porous divide between the public and the private/personal, between human and non-human.
How does language figure in facilitating the discursive, political and lived landscape(s) we are subject to?
What are the limits and possibilities of language, the duplicities of language and the permissibilities of classification, taxonomy, and the nomenclatures that enable or disrupt experiences of cultural, material, physical, and social displacement?
How does the transience of language function across time, space, and borders—including those borders it helps to create—and what is the role of literary and/or interdisciplinary studies in probing these functions?
UPDATE: the deadline for abstracts has passed and all panelists have been selected. Thank you for your submissions!​
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We invite Graduate students who are interested in presenting at the conference, either through research papers, creative nonfiction essays, fiction/short stories, poetry, or performance, to submit an abstract of 300 words that address these questions.
Possible paper topics include, but are not limited to:
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Translation and communication across borders
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Multilingualism and/or translingualism
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Identity, memory, trauma, and mourning
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Nonce words and shifting meanings/definitions
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Silences in cultural production
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Spectral pasts and/or speculative futures
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Anti-colonial/decolonial tongues; linguistic and geopolitical borders
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Artificial intelligence and posthumanism
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The environmental imagination and the language of climate change
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Gender and sexuality discourses
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Hauntology, ghosts, and genre discourses
The deadline for paper proposals is 11:59 PM on January 15th, 2020. All submissions should include the title of the paper, the abstract, and the name, affiliation, and email of the author.
Questions can be emailed to rucomplit2020@gmail.com.
Call for Papers
Program
9:00-9:15am INTRODUCTORY REMARKS
9:15-10:45am (1.5 hours) GRADUATE PANEL 1
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Mushtaq Bilal, “The Poltergeist of Nasuh in Urdu Literature: Reading Nazir Ahmad's 'The Repentance of Nasuh'”
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Qingfeng Nie: “Voices of Gossip”
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Amanda González Izquierdo, “Phantasmic Spanish: Translanguaging and the Spectral Past of Cuba in Richard Blanco’s ‘El Ratoncito Miguel’”
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Chas Firestone East, “The Revolution Made Systematic: A Kristevan Reading of Symbolic Disruption in Il Fu Mattia Pascal”
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Moderator: Sneha Khaund, PhD Student, Rutgers Comparative Literature
10:45-11:00am COFFEE BREAK
11:00am-12:30pm (1.5 hours) GRADUATE PANEL 2
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Yuanqiu Jiang, “Ghostly Transcendence: Life and Death in Li He’s Poetry”
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Ekin Erkan, "Language and the Self-Correcting Enterprise"
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Madeleine Collier, “What’s Inside?: Hapticity, Laying-Waste, and the Globalized Commodity”
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Rudrani Gangopadhyay, “City as Spectral Archive: Reading Delhi in Sarnath Banerjee’s Corridor and Vishwajyoti Ghosh’s Delhi Calm”
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Moderator: Paulina Barrios, PhD Candidate, Rutgers Comparative Literature
12:30-1:30pm (1 hour) LUNCH
1:30-2:45pm (1.25 hours) UNDERGRADUATE PANEL
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Ari Colaprete, "The Phallus Palace: The Grundle Dungeon"
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Daniel Wasserman, "Towards a Theory of Precorporation"
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Jacqueline Goldblatt, "Aestheticization and Eroticization of Death and Vampiric Undeath in Nosferatu"
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Sanaa Rangwala, "Communication, Teaching and Technology are forms that lead to self-identity and self-actualization"
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Moderator: Professor Janet Walker, Rutgers Comparative Literature
2:45-3pm BREAK
3-4pm KEYNOTE
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Professor Lydia Liu, "The Logic of Racism in International Politics"
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Discussant: Professor Jeong Eun Annabel We, Northwestern University (Incoming Assistant Professor Fall 2021)
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Moderator: Yuanqiu Jiang, PhD Candidate, Rutgers Comparative Literature
Keynote
Professor Lydia Liu
Lydia H. Liu is the Wun Tsun Tam Professor in the Humanities; Director, Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. Her research centers on modern China, cross-cultural exchange, and global transformation in modern history, with a focus on the movement of words, theories, and artifacts across national boundaries and on the evolution of writing, textuality, and media technology.
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The title of Professor Liu's talk will be "The Logic of Racism in International Politics":
“Race” has no meaning outside the logic of racism. How does this logic work? What role does it play in the determination of linguistic differences, cultural incommensurability, and so-called civilizational clashes? And what will happen when the logic of racism breaks down?
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In my lecture, I examine a pivotal postwar moment when the logic of racism got in trouble and had to be defended. This happened in the early days of the Cold War as the decolonization movement swept across the world. I will show, in particular, how the norms of human rights were radically transformed by the translingual forging of universalism at the United Nations and how the newly independent nations and colonized peoples succeeded in making "self-determination" into a human right as they repudiated the classic Standard of Civilization in international law. Based on archival research, my story is aimed to bring the contradictions in the logic of racism to light, hence the possibility of its defeat.
Organizers
Conference co-chairs:
Mònica Tomàs and Thato Magano
Design:
Milan Reynolds and Yuanqiu Jiang
Website:
Phil Yakushev and Milan Reynolds
Abstracts:
Amanda González Izquierdo and Yingnan Shang
Communication:
Paulina Barrios
Sponsors
Rutgers Program in Comparative Literature
Rutgers School of Graduate Studies
