Vernacular Practices across East Asia: Call for Papers
The University of Chicago Graduate Student Conference 2016
Friday, October 7th through Sunday, October 9th
CFP deadline: July 15, 2016
Keynote Speaker: Bao Weihong, Assistant Professor in the Chinese Program and Film Studies, University of California, Berkeley
Special Event: “Kagawa Ryo Live in Chicago,” a performance of Japanese folk music
Conference Description:
The study of East Asia is perennially haunted by the specters of standardization, and the centralization of political and cultural capital in the nation-state. What is often lost in the margins is the particular, the non-standard, the suppressed, the minor, and the indigenous experience in which vernacular practice and its potential for various modes of reproduction, resistance, transcendence, and imminence takes place. Recently, postcolonial studies, area studies, media studies, and other fields have taken a common interest in how and to what extent the vernacular as language, aesthetic, and sensibility and more importantly as literary, cultural, and political practice can offer new perspectives and possibilities to our understanding of East Asia. Rather than defining the object of this project through the arbitrary political demarcations of nation, or the structural mechanisms of the state, or an oversimplified, homogenized discourse of particular -isms, we want to focus on place, community, and people created by and through a variety of practices. Practice is embodied: it is always localized and informed both by geographically-defined environments and by ever-changing networks of power. The vernacular holds the prospect of specificity, and practice, that of immediacy: in combination, they can be used to address dynamic issues of democracy, agency, and power.
It is with this in mind that we invite graduate students and postdocs from various disciplines (including but not limited to language, literature, history, media studies, theater and performance studies, art history, music, political science, and anthropology) to submit proposals for papers that consider vernacular practice in East Asia. Presenters should prepare twenty-minute conference papers, which will be grouped into panels with time for questions and comments for each paper. The thematic orientation of this conference will provide a basis for participants of diverse methodological and regional backgrounds to find commonality between their work, while simultaneously encouraging breadth. To that end, we expect and encourage work that crosses national, temporal, and disciplinary boundaries to critically rethink the categories that both bind and sub-divide area studies.
Potential topics may include (but are not limited to):
- Rethinking vernacular language(s) in East Asia
- Vernacular literature and modernity
- Vernacular literature and literary canons
- The vernacular and global capitalism
- Musical performance as a political vernacular practice
- Vernacular practice in theatrical performance
- The vernacular, cosmopolitan, and neoliberal
- The vernacular in global media
- Translocal vernacular practice
- Vernacular and trans-lingual practice
- The technologically (re)producible vernacular
- Vernacular modernism in film
Please send your application to vernacularpractice.uofc.2016@gmail.com by July 15th 2016, 11:59pm Central Standard Time. The application should include:
*Your full name as you would like it to appear in the conference schedule
*Contact information (e-mail, address, and phone number)
*Institutional affiliation
*Title of your paper
*250-300 word abstract in print-ready format
Successful applicants will be notified of acceptance in early August.
This conference is funded with the assistance of the China, Japan, and Korea Committees of the Center for East Asian Studies, the Franke Institute, and the Division of the Humanities at the University of Chicago.
CONTACT INFORMATION:
vernacularpractice.uofc.2016@gmail.com
University of Chicago, Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations
1050 E. 59th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, #301
Anne Rebull <anner@uchicago.edu>