(B)orders of Empire: Colonial Pasts, Imperial Presents, and Implicate Futures of the Global Middle East
Call for Symposium Abstracts
University of California, Irvine
April 19-20, 2018
Keynote Speaker: Ronak Kapadia, Assistant Professor in Gender and Women’s Studies, University of Illinois Chicago
How do (b)orders constitute empire? How do visual and narrative representations of (b)orders help us understand the constitution and consequences of empire? What is media’s role in instigating an engaged commitment to critical and radical thought production about empire’s (b)orders?
These questions stem from a yearlong UC Humanities Research Institute graduate working group that investigates how media from the Global Middle East is mobilized towards political ends in light of changing political and economic conditions, ranging from nationalist to transnationalist—and most recently—ultra- nationalist tendencies.* (B)orders of Empire seeks to explore the (after) effects of colonial incursions and continued imperial expansions on the Middle East region and its diasporas by examining media’s role in narrating, interrogating and challenging concepts of empire through the articulation of various (b)orders. We define (b)orders broadly to include not only physical manifestations of (b)ordering (such as walls, checkpoints, passports and IDs), but also affective and representational (b)orders, epistemic (b)orders, and economic (b)orders. Similarly, we are open to broad definitions of media, and welcome submissions that apply creative and experimental approaches toward understanding the production, function and mediation of empire’s (b)orders.
We encourage submissions from across disciplines, including but not limited to: literary, visual, media and performance studies, as well as religious studies, history, ethnic studies, anthropology, political and social sciences. We are particularly, but not exclusively, interested in papers that address the following themes as they relate to conceptions of the Global Middle East:
– Limits of the Political: (B)ordering the Human
– Containing, Managing, and Controlling Migrant/Refugee Populations
– Lawfare, Captivity and Structures of Surveillance
– Humanitarian Violence, Economic Development, Neoliberal Governance
– Contagious anxieties, porous borders: statehood, citizenship, and formations of race
– The nanotechnologies of (B)order regimes
– (B)order abolitionism: Decolonial Praxis
– The academy, disciplinary borders, and activism/politics: (B)ordering the radical Imagination
– Inter/transmediality as/against (B)orders
– Cosmological imaginaries and the planetary ([Afro-]Arab/Middle Eastern/Islamic futurism)
– Time/Temporality and the Border: [re](B)ordering time
– Touch, the Border, and the Erotics of Transgression
– Sensing (B)orders: affective tactics of and against (b)ordering
– Critical Media and the Disobedient Gaze
– Imagined Elsewheres and Utopian Possibilities
We are accepting abstracts for individual presentations of 20 minutes. Please limit abstracts to 300 words, and attach abstracts as a word or PDF document. Please do NOT include your name within the attached document; instead, write only your institutional affiliation.
In the body of your email, please include your name, paper title, and institutional affiliation. Submit abstracts to ucibordersofempire@gmail.com by 11:59PM on Friday, January 5, 2017.
*(B)orders of Empire emerges from a UCHRI-funded graduate working group titled The Global Middle East / Transnational Media, History and Theory.
(B)orders of Empire 