CFP: Geographies of Comparison: Ireland / Africa
Geographies of Comparison: Ireland / Africa (ACLA 2017, Utrecht, July 6-9, 2017))
Ireland was, as Robert Young writes, England’s first and always exceptional colony. But it was far from the only one. Its unique colonial status has yielded productive scholarship addressing its anomalous integration into the colonial world. While this scholarship has resulted in some excellent work on Ireland / India relations and an influential volume on the ‘green and black Atlantic’ that performed a valuable intervention in addressing the African dimensions of the Irish world, both Irish and African literary scholarship have largely neglected affiliations between these literary worlds. The organisers of this panel invite papers that will consider literary and cultural intersections between Ireland and select African nations.
Papers might cover (but are not limited to) topics such as:
Peripheral/Regional/Alternative modernisms
Literature of anticolonial revolt
Transnational Solidarities
Translocalisms
Nationalisms and religion
Gendered nationalisms
African and Irish theatre
Travel writing
Africa / Ireland networks
Africans in Ireland / Irish in Africa
Migration and Asylum
Beckett / Joyce and African writing
Apartheid in the Irish cultural imagination
Peacekeeping and War
Modes of comparison across postcolonial sites
Form and scales of comparison
We welcome papers covering all aspects and periods of literature.
Please submit your paper proposal through the ACLA’s online submission portal, which will be open from September 1 to September 23, 2016. http://www.acla.org/seminars
Queries can be directed to the seminar organisers:
Agata Szczeszak-Brewer (brewera@wabash.edu) and
Cóilín Parsons (coilin.parsons@georgetown.edu)