[Bilimsel Haber] CFP: Re-Writing the Promised Land: Comparative Diasporas

[Gonul Pultar]

  Comparative Diasporas

From: Ursula Lindqvist <lindqviu_at_colorado.edu 
<mailto:lindqviu_at_colorado.edu?Subject=Re:%20UPDATE:%20%5BEthnic%5D%20Comparative%20Diasporas>> 


Call for Papers
American Comparative Literature Association Conference
April 24-27, 2008
Long Beach, California USA
www.acla.org

Re-Writing the Promised Land: Comparative Diasporas

In 2006, Iranian-born theater director Farnaz Arbabi rewrote Vilhelm 
Moberg’s diasporic novel The Emigrants (1949) for the Swedish stage. 
Moberg’s original depicts the Nilsson family and their neighbors 
emigrating from a town in rural Sweden in 1845, a time of famine and 
crop failures in their homeland, in search of a better life in the 
“Promised Land” of the United States. Arbabi’s play rewrites Moberg’s 
epic tale to feature Balkan emigrants who leave their homeland
in search of a better life in twenty-first century Sweden, which is now 
one of the world’s wealthiest nation-states. Arbabi’s act of re-writing 
attends closely to the trauma modern-day emigrants’ children experience 
over their irreparable separation from a “native” culture that informs 
their ethnic identities in the new land, connecting diasporas of past 
and present and forcing new conceptions of fluid and transcultural 
identities.

This panel invites papers that investigate how writers, as well as 
artists from the non-literary arts, and from a wide variety of 
linguistic and cultural loci, re-write classical and/or 
“nation-building” tales of diaspora in a way that opens up spaces for 
new articulations of transnational culture in the global era.

This panel also invites theoretical investigations of how to conceive of 
comparative diaspora(s) amid late twentieth and early twenty-first 
century challenges to postcolonial studies’ critical formulation of the 
center-periphery model. A few examples of such challenges include José 
Jorge Klor de Alva’s 1992 essay “Colonialism and Postcolonialism as 
(Latin) American Mirages,” Arjun Appadurai’s essay “Disjuncture and 
difference in the global cultural economy” (in Theorizing Diasporas, 
2003), and Brent Hayes Edwards’ reconceptualization of African Diaspora 
in The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of 
Black Internationalism (2003).

Finally, this panel invites papers that investigate gendered re-writings 
of epic tales of diaspora to highlight female
as well as gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered perspectives. Paper 
proposals may be submitted on the conference web site at 
http://www.acla.org/acla2008/?page_id=5.



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