University of Versailles St Quentin, France, November 4-5, 2010

Hosted by Suds d’Amériques at the University of Versailles Saint-Quentin, this event is the first in a series of international seminars that will bring together scholars and graduate students, writers and visual artists whose work focuses on the experience of migration and /or exile. The impulse for this new project stems from the encounter of professors (mainly in North-American and Latin-American studies) from various European and American universities (Lille 3, Caen, Cardiff, UNAM and Montevideo). Scholars and graduate students from other institutions are encouraged to join.

Taking George Steiner’s statement – “the 20th century is the age of the refugee” – as a prompt, we intend to explore the aftermath of personal and /or collective displacement on the textual and visual strategies of “unhoused” writers and artists. These exilic creators are calling into question the very concept of “at-homeness”, of a territorialized national identity. The experience of nostos (return to the homeland), often fraught with disillusion, translates into images of nostalgia and in-betweenness. In what way are notions of home, mother tongue, cultural and political belonging affected by the crossing of borders (inter-American or trans-Atlantic)? How do tropes, themes, textual and visual images attempt to reconfigure the tenuous links between the artist and his community of origins? Given their “insider/outsider” status within the host country and their homeland, how do minority /exiled artists negotiate their ambivalent sense of belonging? To what extent can their “partial and plural perspective” (Salman Rushdie) contribute to re-conceptualizing the notions of home and nationhood and to challenging rigid assumptions of authenticity?

Suggested areas and topics of exploration (non-exhaustive):

-Autobiography/ auto-ethnography

-Testimonial literature

-Photography, film

-Roots and Routes

-Borders and Boundaries

-Transcultural, transnational discourses

-Mythmaking and Revisions

-The Body as Politics

-Personal Geographies

-Writing across Languages

Send your abstracts (one full page) by June 30, 2010 to: adasavin@noos.fr .

Papers in French. Spanish and English are accepted.