[Discussion] CFP: Narrative Violence: Africa and the Middle East (3/15/05; MLA '05)

[Sule Tarakcioglu]

The MLA's 121st Annual Convention
27-30 December 2005
Washington, DC

Proposed panel: Narrative Violence: Africa and the Middle East

		If it were a bridge we would have crossed it already,
		but it's a home, it's an abyss.
							=97Mahmoud Darwich

If anything has proven as undefeatable as the recourse to violence, it
is the unquenchable desire to bear witness, translate, and narrate it.
 From Sabra and Shatila to Rwanda to Jenin to Fallouja=97not to mention
Darfour, and especially not the wars on Iraq=97the second half of the
twentieth century is full of countless scenes of global, local, and
ethnic civil wars. Far from being =93a bridge=94 to democracy, war is
in fact a life-hell or a =93home-abyss,=94 as Darwich demonstrates, of
bastard brands of theocracy. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri argue, for
instance, that contemporary global warfare exercises extreme violence
and implants a biopolitical =93form of rule aimed not only at controlling
the population but producing and reproducing all aspects of social life=94
(Multitude 13). Hardt and Negri, along with such globalization critics
as Mary Kaldor and David Held, point out that contemporary global wars
draw from the decentralized and therefore regenerative network
structures of command of earlier forms of anti-colonial liberation
struggles. Such an observation makes us wonder about the extent to which
contemporary theories of global violence and war eclipse the
postcolonial moment that underlies many of today=92s wars and their
various cultural and social proxies. What are the imperially
and colonially inherited =93necropolitics=94 (Achille Mbembe) of global w=
ar
and violence? How and for what reasons does global war create abject,
disposable, and unmournable subjects? How do more covert configurations
of global crisis management, such as humanitarian interventions and
peacekeeping missions, generate normalizing narratives of global
violence? How does narrative take account of the ways in which
global war transforms social life into =93bare life=94 (Giorgio Agamben)?
How does it legitimize this transformation and relay it into a
presumably acceptable state of being for the vast majority of the
planet? If you think narrative is incapable of doing all that and more,
how does it then engage modern and contemporary scenes of violence? And
how do we theorize the passage from the event to its narrative
inscription? What are the tropes, the techniques and the linguistic
resources that compete to signify the event as it flits by in the
contingency of the imagination and the frailty of memory?

We invite proposals that explore any of the above questions as well as
any other aspect of narrative violence. Selected proposals will be
submitted as part of an application for a panel at The MLA's 121st
Annual Convention meeting at Washington, DC, 27-30 December 2005.

By 15 March, please send 1-page abstract together with a brief CV to
either Heike Harting (heike.harting@umontreal.ca) or Nouri Gana
(ganan@post.queensu.ca)



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