CALL FOR PAPERS ACLA 2015, SEATTLE Dear colleagues, I am spearheading an interdisciplinary seminar for the ACLA conference taking place next year in Seattle from March 26-29. I am looking for paper submissions, which are due October 15, from a variety of fields. Please forward to those who may be interested (grad students through faculty): acla.org/legitimate-voices-contested-spaces Information about the seminar found below: Operating in liminal spaces, multilingual figures, in literature as in history, represent the quintessential marginality of subjects operating between languages and cultures. For instance, La Malinche, the sixteenth-century Nahua woman who would become Hernán Cortés’s slave, interpreter, and mother to his son in Mexico, occupied the fluid spaces of the contact zone, a position that has rendered her a deeply ambiguous figure in the Mexican imaginary. But while her biography is familiar to many critics in the fields of early modern literature and cultural studies, she--like other historical multilingual subjects--has elicited relatively little interest from linguistics scholars. In this seminar, we hope to bring together papers from many disciplines in order to explore questions of legitimacy as it is constructed through narratives of multilingual subjects. We define subject as “a symbolic entity that is constituted and maintained through symbolic systems such as language. It is not given, but has to be consciously constructed against the backdrop of natural and social forces that both bring it into being and threaten to destroy its freedom and autonomy” (Kramsch, 2009, 17). In exploring identity construction through language use, we are interested in questions such as the following: What does it mean to be a legitimate speaker of any language? How does the act of narrativizing a subject’s life offer opportunities for critical self-reflexivity? The interdisciplinary dimensions of this seminar respond to the need for new categories for understanding the relationship between linguistics and literature, a problematic that crystallizes around the question of linguistic legitimacy. • intersections of linguistic, cultural, and national identity • urban centers as multilingual spaces • language classroom as liminal space • figure of the translator and / or interpreter • translation as transgression • interdisciplinary approaches to narrative analysis • linguistic prestige (perceptions of different linguistic codes) Thanks! Maya Maya Smith ------------------------ Maya Angela Smith, Ph.D. Assistant Professor - Division of French and Italian Studies Affiliate Faculty - Comparative History of Ideas Core Faculty- Graduate Certificate in Second and Foreign Language Teaching University of Washington
Posted on: Tue, 07 Oct 2014 08:58:45 +0000
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