[Bilimsel Haber] CFP: Figures of Comparison (grad) (12/31/06; 3/2/07-3/3/07)

[Sule Tarakcioglu]

CFP: Figures of Comparison in the Humanities and the Social Sciences

Date/Place: March 2nd-3rd, 2007/ Columbia University, New York

Keynote speaker: To Be Announced

The Center for Comparative Literature and Society (CCLS) at Columbia
University, New York invites papers for its second graduate student
conference entitled "Figures of Comparison in the Humanities and the
Social Sciences." By "figures of comparison," we mean both objects of
study that call for a comparative approach and comparative methods that
invite us to discuss these objects in new ways. Papers should examine
the question of comparison through a sustained engagement with an object
and/or method that is related to one of the six panel topics outlined
below. Although we prefer papers related to the proposed panels, we are
also willing to take into consideration other paper or panel proposals.

The conference will be introduced by the director of CCLS, Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak. Panels will be moderated by Elizabeth Povinelli,
Susan Boynton, Joseph Massad, Stathis Gourgouris, Bruce Robbins, and
Marianne Hirsch. The conference will close with a roundtable discussion
in which the panel moderators will present their concluding thoughts and
open the discussion to the public.

Please send a 300-500 word abstract to the following e-mail address no
later than December 31st, 2006: figures_of_comparison at columbia.edu.

The conference organizers,

Adam Bund
Arne De Boever
Olivia Harrison
Susanne Knittel


Economies of Translation/Transfiguration/ (mod. Elizabeth Povinelli)

Karl Marx argues in the Grundrisse that the money form is a fantasy of
translation and that commodity exchange emerges at the boundaries of
otherwise distinct communities. This is only one speculative genealogy
establishing translation as a concept/ practice that binds together
multiple economies of circulation. Insofar as comparativism is often
described as a process of translation "between languages, disciplines,
cultures, histories, and more" this panel seeks to investigate the
hegemony of translation as a figure for comparative work. For example,
according to Elizabeth Povinelli and Dilip Gaonkar, the concept of
transfiguration is more adequate to the current moment than the concept
of translation: "Focusing on transfiguration rather than translation"
the refunctioning of a text as such for different demanding-sites
"orients our analysis toward the calibration of vectors of power rather
than vectors of meaning-value." We are also thinking, for example, of
the "musical" notion of transposition as a productive alternative
metaphor; but there are many others. For this panel, we invite papers
that discuss questions such as: Is translatability a conceptual
infrastructure which remains in the face of a new and mathematicized
lingua franca? Is it something else? What is at stake politically or
ethically in a methodological shift away from translation? If such a
shift leads from trans-lation to trans-figuration or trans-position,
what are the implications of insisting on the prefix "trans-"? What
could be the benefits of the prefixes "inter-" or "cross-"? How can we
understand the residual force of the nation or the region in producing
and regulating economic/political/cultural relations in the age of
globalization?


Sites and Sounds of Comparison (mod. Susan Boyton)

In The Production of Space, Henri Lefebvre poses the question of the
metaphor of reading: what does it mean to "read" space? What are the
limits or advantages of approaching an object of study as text? If
architecture has played a prominent role in literary and cultural
studies (monumentality, memorialization, textual architecture), the very
notion of reading has pervaded nearly all non-literary enterprises. In
this panel we seek papers that raise the question of reading in the
study of fields as disparate as architecture, geography,musicology,
anthropology, media and visual studies (radio, film, art history). What
other metaphors might more appropriately describe and body forth the
study of space, sound, or visual material? How might these approaches
supplement or transform the way we read actual text? Can we conceive of
the comparative object as a "site" of comparison, using the spatial
metaphor to designate a juncture, conjunction, or intersection that
defies traditional disciplines or fields?


Enemies, Strangers, Neighbors, Friends (mod. Joseph Massad)

In his book The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy, Gil Anidjar
maintains that Europe's concept of the enemy "remains yet to be
formulated." This "to-come" points toward a "comparative" nature of the
enemy, i.e. the fact that Europe's concept of the enemy is structured by
its relation to both the Arab and the Jew. For this panel, we invite
papers that critically engage with the figures of the enemy "the
stranger, the neighbor, and the friend" through the comparative study of
a specific object: e.g. Europe's construction of a "south-mediterranean
fence" (Balibar), the figure of the pirate in the work of Carl Schmitt,
or the partisan struggle in Iraq. Papers may address some of the
following questions: can there be a political community that would not
be predicated on the production of identity and alterity? Is it possible
to practice an identity politics that would function as a critique of
sovereign power while at the same time insisting on sovereignty's
strongly egalitarian and democratic implications? What would it mean to
think of such an identity politics as comparative? What understanding of
theology is implicit in contemporary concepts of the political? Can
theology still be articulated in opposition to secularism? Should
secularism perhaps be understood in opposition to nationalism? What
could be the benefits of a postsecular perspective?


Figures of the In-Between (mod. Stathis Gourgouris)

Various tropes of hybridity (Bhabha), metissage (Lionnet), mestizaje
(Anzaldua), creolite (Bernabe, Confiant, Chamoiseau), or antillanite
(Glissant), for example, have featured prominently in the scholarship
and aesthetic practices of the last thirty years to figure modes of
cultural mixing. Others "trans- or cross-sexuality, the androgyne, and
forms of sexual indeterminacy" have been used critically in gender,
feminist, and queer studies. This panel proposes to examine figures or
tropes of the in-between that simultaneously call for a comparative
(interdisciplinary, cross-cultural, multilingual, etc.) approach, and
figure the comparative itself. What are the political, social and
economic implications of such figures of hybridity? To what political
uses can (or should) they be put? How does the history of these terms
affect their deployment, or shore up their limits? Because these figures
point to the intersectionality of analytic categories (class, race,
gender) and to the meeting of cultures, languages, and histories, we are
particularly interested in cross-disciplinary and intercultural
approaches: how do these comparative figures test the boundaries of
disciplinary fields and cultural or linguistic formations? Conversely,
how do disciplines, languages or fields shape tropes of the in-between,
or point to their limitations?


Figures of Intellectual Labor (mod. Bruce Robbins)

Claude Levi-Strauss issues a challenge to comparativists when he begins
his Tristes Tropiques by declaring, "I hate traveling and explorers." To
Levi-Strauss, mere movement or the simple encounter with difference can
never constitute the foundations of a truly comparative anthropology. In
The Savage Mind, Levi-Strauss further interrogates the subject of
comparison by distinguishing between two modes of knowledge acquisition:
that of the scientist and that of the bricoleur. Whereas the former
attempts to move beyond the constraints imposed by a particular state of
civilization, the latter makes do with whatever is at hand. This panel
proposes to discuss whether structure, or even structuralism, is a
necessary precondition for acts of comparative imagination. Gilles
Deleuze's notion of the assemblage, "an ensemble of language, affect,
and machine located neither on the side of the subject nor on the side
of the object of knowledge" is one of the many possibilities for
comparative inquiry that refuses the dictates of structuralism. For this
panel, papers should examine various figures of intellectual labor "the
traveler, the explorer, the scientist, the bricoleur, the assemblage" as
they are mobilized to describe comparative work across disciplines by
asking, for example: What is the relationship between journalism and
academic production? Is a focus on the experiences/ itineraries of the
migrant a sufficient basis for comparativism? What is the residual
strength of abstractions like "culture" or "society" as organizing
principles of comparative work? How do various forms of communications
technology structure in advance the possibilities for comparison? Do
some of these forms call for scientists while others call for bricoleurs?


Unthinking Generations: Kinship and Comparison (mod. Marianne Hirsch)

Sigrid Weigel argues that "generation" is a hybrid concept that moves
between different academic fields and discourses, and invites
comparative inquiry. She theorizes generation as a process or movement
less of evolutionary than of cultural, historical, and narrative
patterning: a generation is shaped by commonalities of experience as
well as by temporal, geographic, and cultural differences. In Antigone's
Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death, Judith Butler asks what the
"legacy of Oedipus" will be for those who are formed in family
situations "where positions are hardly clear, where the place of the
father is dispersed, where the place of the mother is multiply occupied
or displaced, where the symbolic in its stasis no longer holds?" For
this panel, we invite papers that contribute to our understanding of
comparative studies by asking, for example, what is the role of
genealogy and family narrative in the study of cultural memory? What is
the role of the family metaphor in political theory? If the comparative
can be rethought (after Weigel and Butler) as a "generational" or
"familial" concept, in what way would it invite us to reconsider the
notion of disciplinarity? Taking into account that the word "generation"
also means "the process of generating," contributions could also propose
to think through comparativism as an "emergent" (dominant? residual?)
mode of inquiry today.

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