“The Aesthetics of the Tropics” Conference CFP
June 23-24, 2017 | Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Language: English or Chinese
The conference “The Aesthetics of the Tropics” invites multidisciplinary papers that focus on the tropics as a location of cultural encounter and innovation, a trope of imagination, desire, and memory, or a site of knowledge production and social engineering. If the tropics loom large in the foundational writings of anthropology as an academic discipline, the melancholy embedded in Levi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques speaks unmistakably to the impossibility of authentic cultural encounters and the catastrophic result such encounters may cost the indigenous societies. In academic fields ranging from anthropology, history, to postcolonial studies, the tropics not only continue to function as a key site for the self-understanding of human culture and history, but are also inextricably entangled in a cultural logic that reinforces the north-south, self-other, colonizer-colonized demarcation and the struggle against it. While “the south” evokes in Chinese culture rich connotations such as the barbaric, the exotic, or the radical revolutionary, the boundary and the hierarchy between the center and the periphery is no less prominent. From the perspective of the outsiders to that of the indigenous, this conference seeks to revisit and reformulate, through the lens of the tropics, the cultural, historical, gender, linguistic, geographical, environmental, medical, and /or technological discourses regarding the region.
Confirmed keynote speakers:
Professor David Damrosch (Director of World Literature Institute, and Ernest Bernbaum Professor and Chair, Department of Comparative Literature, Harvard University)
Professor Chen Sihe 陳思和教授 (Fudan University, China; Changjiang Scholar, China; International Advisory Panel member to Chinese program at NTU)
The deadline for proposal submission is April 10, 2017.
All proposals should include:
- Paper title and abstract (300 words max)
- presenter’s personal info (name, affiliation, mailing address, email address)
Please submit proposals by e-mail to RC-LITCULT@ntu.edu.sg
You may also contact conference secretary, Dr Woo Hyo Kyung (hkwoo@ntu.edu.sg), or Chun Chun Ting (ccting@ntu.edu.sg) for inquiries.
Learn more about the conference at http://www.hss.ntu.edu.sg/aesthetics/
Posted by: Ting Chun Chun <ccting@ntu.edu.sg>