Call for Papers Politics and Poetics of Belonging

University of Sfax, Tunisia
Faculty of Arts and Humanities
The English Department and the Laboratory on Approaches to Discourse (LAD) jointly
organise on 2-3-4 April 2015 an international conference on:

Politics and Poetics of Belonging
In “Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?”, Jean-François Lyotard argues that “[e]clecticism
is the degree zero of contemporary general culture: one listens to reggae, watches a western, eats
McDonald’s food for lunch and local cuisine for dinner, wears Paris perfume in Tokyo and ‘retro’ clothes
in Hong Kong.” In this sense, each of us would adopt a number of cultural identities that cater for the
dominant cosmopolitanism and weaken one’s national anchorage. As all people and nations experience a
state of flux, national culture loses its solidity in the context of major world transformations where
international social, political, and cultural institutions attempt to construct and defend a global unified
culture to which we are called, or rather forced, to belong.
This conference will set to explore how the concept of belonging has been defined, encoded, acted out,
and de/constructed through literary and cultural texts, the visual arts, and the media across time and space.
In fact, the search for belonging spatially, linguistically, intellectually, politically, ideologically,
aesthetically, or emotionally produces discourses and narratives of one sort or another that help us
understand the way we are included or excluded, accepted or rejected, represented or misrepresented.
The objective of this conference is to bring together papers that attend to the ways belonging is imagined,
constructed, and articulated as an unavoidable need.
Contributors may explore, but are not restricted to, the following topics:
●Language and belonging
●Belonging and identity discourses
●The media and belonging
●Nation-centred belonging and transnational belonging
●Immigration and diasporas
●Diasporic cultural texts
●Imaginary homelands and belonging
●Imagined communities and belonging
●Ethnic conflicts and belonging
●Globalisation and belonging
●Belonging and cyberspace
●Virtual spaces of belonging
●Western culture, colonisation, and cultural mimesis
Please send your abstract of no more than 300 words, along with a short bio, to belongingconference@yahoo.com
by 6 December 2014.

Notification of acceptance/rejection: 13 December 2014.