CLIFF Complit
Call for Papers
Death and Its Afterlives:
De/composing Boundaries
28th Annual CLIFF Conference
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
March 8-9, 2024
Keynote Speaker: Dr. Susana Draper, Princeton University
Submission Deadline: December 15, 2023
Please circulate widely the following CFP, with more details included in the attached document:
From necropolitics to ecological decline, from digital dead links to haunted sites, from the material ruins of late capitalism to the allegorical decay of “late style,” this year’s CLIFF conference seeks to de/compose the boundaries between the living and the dead. We hope to bring together a diverse set of critical interests and disciplines on a terrain where death and precarious (after)lives lay bare the politics of exclusion, the erosion of memory, and the ethical responsibilities that confront us in the face of current crises. Our graduate student-organized conference aims to foster interdisciplinary dialogues; we welcome researchers, independent scholars, and artists to join us in exploring death, rebirth, and the in-between.
For our 28th annual conference, the Comparative Literature Intra-student Faculty Forum (CLIFF) invites 15 minute presentations based in literary analysis, critical theory, history, politics, anthropology, translation studies, and interdisciplinary work. These presentations may take the form of academic papers, creative work, performance, and/or visual media. We are interested in exploring some of the following concepts:
- Learning to live: trauma, memory, & survivorship
- Necro/biopolitics, sovereignty, & power
- Material vibrancy, non-human agency, animacy, & affective assemblages
- Hauntings and the spectral state of borders & ‘in-between’ space
- Representations of zombies & aesthetics of the undead
- States of precarity, migrant afterlives & refugee narratives
- Carceral poetry & life writing
- Temporalities of the archive and antiquity
- Queer and trans lives, deaths, and afterlives
- “No Man’s Lands,” “Dead Zones,” & Third Landscapes
- Climate catastrophes, environmental degradation, & ecological deadness
- Interreactive media, digital dead spaces, & dissonant anti/phantom narratives
- Ruin pornography, sites of abandonment, & documenting decay
We are very pleased to announce that this year’s keynote speaker will be Dr. Susana Draper, professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University. Dr. Draper is a scholar of Latin American and migration literature, and the author of Afterlives of Confinement: Spatial Transitions in Postdictatorship Latin America (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012) and 1968 Mexico: Constellations of Freedom and Democracy (Duke University Press, 2018), among other publications. Her work includes research on migration in the Americas, Latin American marxisms and feminisms, political theory, memory, and social movements.
Abstracts of no more than 300 words should be submitted as a PDF to cliff.complit@umich.edu by December 15, 2023. The subject line of your email should be “CLIFF 2024 Abstract–(Last Name).” Abstracts will be evaluated anonymously by the conference organizers.
We look forward to seeing your work!
Arianna Afsari, CC Barrick, Delsa Lopez, and Sanjana Ramanathan
CLIFF Committee 2024