Call for papers

Academics and writers are no strangers to the pressures of censorship and political hostility; however, in recent years, the efforts of states, corporations, and other institutions to oversee, curtail, and dictate what can be written or said have become even more pressing. Across much of the world, legislation banning gender/sexuality studies or critical race theory has reached higher education and primary/public school systems alike; scholars and students advocating for Palestine have likewise found themselves tracked and documented online, sanctioned, and—in the United States—detained by ICE; and book bans in Canada and the U.S. have surged in the last three years, with non-compliant librarians often being fired or doxxed. Such repressive efforts tend to be coordinated with moves to rewrite the past or present in a mode favorable to right-wing, authoritarian, or ethnonationalist political agendas, leading to a growing contestation of what can be said to constitute “fact” versus “fiction” — a symptom of totalitarianism diagnosed by Hannah Arendt in 1951.Yet the act of “rewriting” is not just used to consolidate power, but also as a tool with which to confront it: oftentimes, it can be a site of innovation that resists the ways that dominant voices have controlled historical narratives. Saidiya Hartman’s “critical fabulation” describes a method that amplifies creativity, experimentation, and beauty against the grain of a classifying, criminalizing, racist archive, while Christina Sharpe has modelled a use of redaction that protects—rather than erases—subjects from the violence of hostile gazes. Such Black feminist acts of rewriting dovetail with similar traditions in queer theory, such as José Esteban Muñoz’s “disidentification” or Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s “reparative reading.” These are just some of the many ways that minoritarian thinkers and writers have approached texts from an oblique angle, deploying rewriting as a means of entering the past/present/future anew. With these strategies, they carve space for those who have been erased, undermined, or exploited by the archive and its investments in preserving power.Rewriting also describes a broader set of practices that evolve, circulate, and revisit prior texts. This winter sees numerous buzzy book-to-screen adaptations, including Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet, Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, Nia DaCosta’s Hedda, Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights, and Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another — many of which bring texts into conversation with the current moment, try on different forms, or seek to reach different audiences. What is lost or gained in these exercises of rewriting, and why does it matter? Similarly, the growth of “world literature” prompts us to ask related questions: to interrogate the politics of translation or translatability; to identify collusions with global capitalism and the strategic flattening or accentuation of difference; and to tap into the possibility of emboldening solidarity, transnational organizing, and a challenge to Western hegemony.Rewriting has, therefore, an ambivalent character — an isomorphic potential as a tool of both control and domination as well as creativity and resistance — likewise inducing both loss and generativity. How can the framework of rewriting help us to understand the role of literature today, or the relationship that it stages between the past and present? What role can rewriting play in helping us see canonical, historical texts or events with new eyes? Can we rewrite the ways that knowledge is formed, or use it to interrupt the flow of power and violence? And what happens when we do? This graduate conference seeks papers that attend to these questions or others inspired by the concept of “rewriting” and the many forms this takes for us as scholars of literature and/or the interdisciplinary Humanities more broadly.Areas of interest may include (but are not limited to):
• Literature and politics
• The archive
• Censorship
• Translation
• Adaptation — film, theatre, graphic novel, video game, sequel, fan fiction, etc.
• Historiography
• Critical theories of the past
• Fictionality
• Visibility / invisibility
• “Canon” formation
• Theoretical traditions and lineages
• Anachronism
• Memory
• Critical fabulation and speculative histories
• Writing and technology / the digital / AIIf you have any questions feel free to contact us at [email protected]We look forward to reading your submissions!