ACLA 2010 New Orleans

Music or Film: Background or Subtext?

acla1 — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 17:07:31 +0000

This seminar proposes to examine the suggestive role of music in film and how the aesthetic of one impacts the aesthetic of the other. The process of understanding a film script (or its founding novel or play) and the transformative process into film music will be the principal focus. The historical panorama of film music will be traced, from the accompanimental role of music to silent movies through to the present. Particular emphasis will be given to the influence of the emigré generation of composers to Hollywood from Central Europe prior to and during World War II, notably Kurt Weill, Alexandre Tansman, Mikos Rosza, Ernst Korngold, Ernst Toch, and Franz Waxman.

Poetics of HIV: Modernism Revisited

acla2 — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 18:20:04 +0000

What is poetic utterance doing when it addresses itself to HIV? Moreover, what is the basis upon which poetry and HIV can be expressive of one another?
The first wager of this panel is that the function of poetry as an aesthetic practice can not be accounted for in terms of mimesis or representation. That is to say, this panel approaches poetry, and art more generally, not as symptomatic expressions of the cultures in and through which they emerge. In making this claim the panel is not advocating a transcendental or transhistorical reading of art; rather, it is interested in what has recently been called the transpersonal or architectural dimension of aesthetic experience.
The second wager of this panel is that HIV is an exemplary site to explore this transpersonal nature of art. As a disease which changes at every iteration, it is an interesting example of what Leo Bersani has called “inaccurate self-replication.” Although his ostensible intentions with this phrase were to promote an ethical relation to otherness, our interest here is in using it to explore the way ethics and aesthetics intersect. Put another way, rather than reading inaccurate self-replication as a prescription for ethical life (albeit one grounded in the aesthetic connectedness of the world, the communication of forms), this panel asks how the ethical shapes the aesthetic and vice-versa.
Thus when poetic utterance addresses HIV, we might say that, as the aesthetic practice most attentive to form but grounded in language, it gives an answer not to something or someone else but to itself: poetry subtends life not as mimetic or representational (thus jettisoning, as the modernists did, the modish “art is life” gambit) but as the very support against which life exists.
Although we have spoken of art in general, our interest is specifically in the manifestations of HIV in poetic practice. Some possible paper topics might be:

Can HIV be an aesthetic experience, and if so, is this a diminishment of those suffering from HIV/AIDS?
What is the relation between HIV/AIDS poetry and modernist verse? (e.g. In what ways have AIDS poets like D. A. Powell taken up the modernist practices of quotation and citation and redeployed and reinvented them?)
Can we read, following the first wager, the initial waves of poetry in response to the epidemic—which were by and large elegiac—as nonrepresentational or as gesturing towards something “beyond” the space of HIV?
How does form infect (that is the word) content, and vice-versa?

Varieties of Medical Experience in New Orleans

acla2 — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 18:14:55 +0000

Ravaged by regular epidemics and illness, New Orleans has welcomed a wide range of medical traditions over its three-hundred-year history. The diverse origins of these traditions reflect the people, the art, and the artifacts of this creolized culture. Herbals, folk medicine, homeopathy, spirit-infused remedies, and practices based on theories of mind-body connection remain strong competitors today to conventional medicine. We invite papers that explore any aspect of this variety of healing systems in New Orleans culture.

A Jazzy Reading of Francophone Cinema and Literature/Une lecture jazzique du cinéma et de la littérature francophones

acla1 — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 19:01:39 +0000

Jazz is the product of an encounter between Europe and Africa in the New World. The same can be said of francophone literature. Kamau Brathwaite, in his article “Jazz and the West Indian Novel,” defines jazz as music “played in an Africanized manner on European instruments.” We can extend this definition to francophone African and Caribbean literature, understanding these texts as being written in an Africanized manner using a European instrument — French, the language of the colonizer — on a new territory. Historically, jazz has its roots in francophone New Orleans. It resulted from the encounter between Creoles of the French Quarter who could read music and Uptown Blacks who knew how to improvise: a friction between the oral and the written which is also felt in francophone literature.

The same tensions are reproduced with variations (one of the main tropes of jazz) in the use of jazz in French and francophone cinema, as soundtrack (e.g. Miles Davis’ in Louis Malle’s Lift to the Scaffold, 1958), subject (e.g. Tavernier’s ‘Round Midnight, 1986), or form of hybrid aesthetics (e.g. Mambety’s Touki-Bouki, 1973). Viewing francophone films through the lens of jazz and its distinctive distortions of standard themes and powers of improvisation lead to a fertile reading of its production and rebellious aesthetics.

Inspired by these parallels, we looking for contributions in French or English that explore modes of francophone cultural expression which, like jazz, are based on an African inheritance yet built on a superstructure of Euro-American languages, attitudes and techniques.

Le jazz est le produit d’une rencontre entre l’Europe et l’Afrique. La littérature francophone est issue de cette même rencontre. Kamau Brathwaite, dans son article « Jazz and the West Indian Novel », définit le jazz comme une musique «jouée d’une façon africanisée sur des instruments européens.» On peut élargir cette définition et dire que la littérature francophone est écrite d’une façon africanisée sur un instrument européen : la langue du colonisateur, le français. Les origines mythiques du jazz se situent à la Nouvelle-Orléans où la rencontre entre les Créoles du Quartier français qui savaient lire la musique et les Noirs du quartier ouest de Canal Street qui savaient improviser créa un nouveau genre. On ressent une tension similaire entre l’oral et l’écrit dans la littérature francophone.

Les mêmes tensions se reproduisent avec des variations (une des caractéristiques du jazz) dans le cinéma français et francophone: dans la bande-son (Miles Davis dans Ascenseur pour l’échaffaud de Louis Malle, 1958), le sujet du film (Autour de minuit de Tavernier, 1986), ou encore dans une possible forme esthétique hybride (Touki-Bouki de Mambety, 1973). Ainsi, analyser le cinéma francophone à travers le prisme du jazz et des distorsions spécifiques qu’il imprime aux thèmes standards et à travers ses pouvoirs d’improvisation peut mener à une lecture fertile de sa production et son esthétique rebelle.

Prenant notre inspiration de ces parallèles, nous cherchons des interventions en anglais et français qui explorent les modes d’expression culturelle francophone qui, tout comme le jazz, sont basés sur un héritage africain mais aussi construits sur une superstructure de langues, attitudes, et techniques euro-américaines.

Between Alienations: Mimicry, Parody, and Desire in Transnational Spaces

acla2 — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 19:44:15 +0000

The presence of a transnational community entails the recognition of a non-singular national identity, a paradigm understood, variously, as a shattered norm or a hybrid ideal. While focusing on how this transnationality gives voice to diaspora and creole communities, we will examine how transnational spaces, bodies, and motion are constructed from forms of mimicry and parody already extant within the construction of the nation-state. Is what Judith Butler calls “an insurrection at the level of ontology” required to make room for such potentially monstrous or alien proliferations? This seminar welcomes papers from a wide variety of disciplines, geographical areas, and scholarly perspectives.

General Pool

acla1 — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 19:00:42 +0000

General Pool (submissions to the conference theme at large)

Radical Diasporas

acla1 — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 15:52:02 +0000

Papers for this panel should explore one or more texts that propose, depict, suggest or imply a radical form of diaspora — radical in the root sense of the term: where the geographic or historical dispersal of elements has been cut off from its grounds in a future place or time. One point of departure for the panel is a text written by Ahad Ha’am (Asher Ginsberg) in 1909, whose title is translated as “Negation of Diaspora.” In it this figurehead of “cultural Zionism” lays out the paradox of any diaspora: that it only exists in and through the wish to annihilate itself. The negation of diaspora is the root of the thought of diaspora, according to Ahad Ha’am. A radical diaspora, therefore, would attempt to conceive of a non-self-negating dispersal. Another way to think of this is as a diaspora without a promise, whose historical and geographical structure is not defined against the expectation of eventual consolidation.

There are no ethnic, national, historical or other restrictions on the locus for your reading. Readings of literary texts are particularly welcome, but objects in any genre that treats this topic will be considered, legal documents, philosophical systems, treatises in political theory, films, poetry, visual art, and others.

Spirits, the Supernatural and the Spectator

acla1 — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 15:47:55 +0000

Claims of a spectral world resonate within film and literature, spawning their own ghostly genres and creating an audience eager to consume representations of the paranormal. This seminar, open to a variety of disciplines and media, seeks to explore how literature and film generate a supernatural dimension through filmic and narrative devices, and how artistic representation of the paranormal transcends the boundaries between horror and reality.

Food in World Literature

acla1 — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 15:44:06 +0000

Following on Massimo Montanari’s 2006 volume Food Is Culture, this seminar invites papers on any topics involving food and world literature.

Crossing Borders: Personal Narratives of 20th Century Writers/Critical Thinkers

acla1 — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 15:41:55 +0000

This panel focuses on autobiographical writings of twentieth-century poets, writers, and critical thinkers who have been exiled or dislocated from their place of origin. Such personal narratives offer a unique and significant contribution to questions concerning the notions of “place,” “borders” and “diaspora”; they also frequently attest to personal suffering and shed light on the influence of traumatic experience on the writers’ literary, philosophical or theoretical work. How does the relation between writing and remembering manifest itself as the beginning of a discursive (sometimes but not always national) space? How can the transmission of loss or trauma across borders generate a theoretical discursive space? How do these autobiographical narratives redefine space?

We welcome papers on topics including but not limited to: writing and remembering, exile and nation, displaced subjects, new identities, perception and consciousness, physical and/vs. psychical realities, the interrelation between private and public voice.