"Migration, Border, and the Nation-State," ACLALS, Comparative Literature Program, Texas Tech University, April 9-11, 2009.

As our age of globalization continues to be defined by endless war and persistent economic crises, migration and border crossing have increasingly become tropes of cultural imagination and sites of critical intervention. Not only has the traditional singular pattern of human migration from the "periphery" to the "core" nation-states been diversified and supplemented by two-way and circular movements of human populations around the planet, but new border economies, hybrid identity formations, growing planetary consciousness, and transnational cultural productions have also flourished in challenge to the nation-state and the capitalist world-system. How have these defining moments been captured, negotiated, and represented in literary and cultural productions? How have creative writers, visual and performance artists, as well as cultural theorists intervened in the process of globalization and articulated their new cultural visions, artistic sensibilities, and political agencies? The joint conference looks for presentations that investigate new meanings, assumptions, and implications of migration, border crossing, and nation building as well as papers that explore the representations of emigration, borderlands, and nation-states in different cultural forms, literary genres, and technological media. We welcome both proposals that examine the interrelations among migration, border, and the nation-state in political and historical terms and projects that offer innovative interpretations of cultural productions that foreground the new dynamics in relation to our everyday life, social practice, and planetary awareness. Possible topics may include but are not restricted to the following: - Migration, border crossing, and changing family structure - Migration, gender, and social justice - Homeland security and the militarization of the Mexico-U.S. border - Borderland and mestizo consciousness - Borderland, natural environment, and planetary consciousness - Border crossing and critical cosmopolitanism - Border literature, Chicano/a theory, and hemispheric studies - The fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of Soviet Communism, and the representation of the Cold War - Post-socialism in China, Russia, and Eastern European countries - The Trans-Pacific movement of Chinese in diaspora - Wall Street and the future of "market democracy" - Westward movement and American Southwestern literature - Globalization and transnational American studies - Human rights and human abuse in an age of endless war - Postcolonial literatures from South Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and the Caribbean - Colonialism and neocolonialism in Asia, Africa, and Latin America - Casualties of war: displacement, migration, and expulsion - Vietnamese in diaspora and the global memory of the American War in Vietnam - Transnational feminist and queer studies - Postcolonial studies and beyond Please send your one-page proposal and one-page C.V. by January 19, 2009, to Dr. Yuan Shu. Dr. Yuan Shu Department of English Texas Tech University P.O. Box 43091 Lubbock, TX 79409-3091 USA Email: yuan.shu@ttu.edu Visit the conference homepage here: http://english.ttu.edu/complit/annual_symposium.html.