Boston College Grad Conference
The Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Boston College is holding a graduate conference, Exile: narratives of exclusion and belonging that will take place in Chestnut Hill, MA on March 31, 2023-April 1, 2023. Please kindly circulate to your graduate students the attached call for papers. If you have any questions, please feel free to send an email at rll@bc.edu
“Exile: narratives of exclusion and belonging”
Dates: March 31, 2023-April 1, 2023
Boston College, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures
What does it mean to be an exile? The idea of exile has been defined by politics, immigration, and globalization. Exile has been used as a political tool to silence individuals and erase cultural contributions. However, it has also served to expose historical issues, bypass censorship, and create community. The current state of global political affairs provokes us to question the ways in which we define the condition of exile.
This conference seeks to explore the exilic experience in its many forms, through the analysis of literary and cultural productions of displaced authors. We invite presenters to consider the way writer Iosif Brodsky in his essay The Condition Which We Call Exile defines exile as a device of self representation. How does the experience of exile catalyze the process of self-representation? In what ways is the narrative of exile controlled by those who cause displacement? What is the nature of exile as a shared experience that is simultaneously highly individual?
Due to the pervasive nature of the phenomenon of exile, we encourage papers from the most diverse fields of studies, including but not limited to:
➢ Literature
➢ History
➢ Anthropology
➢ Psychology
➢ Philosophy
➢ Colonialism, neocolonialism
➢ Environmental studies
➢ Africana studies
➢ Gender studies
➢ Disability studies
Please submit an abstract of 200 words for a 15-minute presentation held in English at rll@bc.edu with your name and academic affiliation. The deadline for submission is January 16, 2023.