[Discussion] UPDATE: Hybridity, Liminality and Boundaries Parallel with South African Children's Literature (South Africa) (2/15/05; 6/30/05-7/2/05)

[Sule Tarakcioglu]

Second Call for Papers
International conference on hybridity, liminality and boundaries

The Potchefstroom research group into space and identity in literature
and the Literator Society
June 30-July 2, 2005
Potchefstroom, South Africa

New deadline for abstracts: 15 February 2005
Deadline for early registration: 15 April 2005

The Potchefstroom research group into space and identity in literature
and the Literator Society  (who publishes the journal Literator) are
inviting papers for an international conference on hybridity, liminality
and boundaries will be held in Potchefstroom, South Africa, from 30 June
to 3 July 2005.

Literature registers the disjunctures between different global flows (A
Appadurai) and the effects of such flows on people's identities and
views of the world. The diffusion of temporal and spatial boundaries in
an age of globalisation has expanded the reader's awareness of possible
worlds and stretched the limits of the imagination. Many literary texts
are centrally concerned with boundaries  crossing boundaries and the
effects of such crossings.  Systematic investigation of boundaries,
crossing boundaries and the new landscapes that come into being in
literary texts could be very fruitful - and that it would be extremely
interesting to study the literary reflection and modelling of processes
of identity formation as well as the nature of the identities that come
into being in such new landscapes by focusing on boundaries and the
effects of crossing boundaries.  By moving characters beyond boundaries
of various kinds (mostly connected to the heritage of the past) writers
create liminal zones where transformation, reconfiguration, or
hybridisation can take place. Interaction between different zones or
frameworks can be conceptualised as a process of hybridisation, since
there is a double movement between the different zones that is expressed
in different, mixed or hybridised forms and language.

Central questions are i.a.:
1. How do we define and model hybridity, liminality, and
boundaries?
2. How are boundaries, liminal spaces and hybrid processes of
identity formation represented and configured in literary texts in the
context of comparable international literatures and traditions?
3. What are the social implications of these configurations?

The aims of the conference are to discuss the reflection and
refiguration of boundaries, liminal spaces and hybridisation of
identities in recent important literary texts in order
* to take stock of the literary response to local transformation and to
the forces of globalisation,
* to chart and systematise these responses, and
* to evaluate the ultimate significance of these responses by focusing
on boundaries, liminality and hybridity.

Please mail or e-mail 300 word abstracts to Hein Viljoen
(afnhmv@puknet.puk.ac.za) by 15 February 2005.

Conference fee: R500 if you register before 15 April 2005.
Registration after 15 April closes on 15 June 2005 and the conference
fee will then be R700.


Prof. Hein Viljoen
Afrikaans and Dutch
School of Languages
Northwest-University (Potchefstroom Campus)
Private Bag X6001
Potchefstroom
2520 South Africa
afnhmv@puknet.puk.ac.za     tel +27-18-299-1501
fax +27-18-299-1562


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