13th Annual Graduate Symposium in Romance Studies

13th Annual Graduate Symposium in Romance Studies

March 7, 2009 - University of Minnesota Twin Cities

Performing Violence: Re-creating the “Other� across Space and Ages

Violence is often thought of in terms of destruction, trauma, and displacement. We will reframe the question by looking at what violence itself does or shows—its performance or execution. This symposium is centered first of all on how violence transforms the nexus of social relations, identity, and differences that constitute a particular community. The events and aftershocks of conquest and post-coloniality inform and reshape notions of cultural, ethical, and aesthetic standards by forcing the acknowledgment and incorporation of otherness into the domain of social discourses. Secondly, we consider how discourses—oral, textual, imagistic, linguistic, cinematic, performative, or other—often enact violence as agents of socio-political, cultural, and/or ideological change. Rather than merely depicting the image of violence in a static, detached fashion, discursive violence may also serve as a rhetorical embodiment of the “other’s� confrontational position that exists simultaneously within and beyond the limits of normative representation.

Possible topics include but are not limited to:

rhetoric of “otherness�

counter-hegemonic discourses

identity, space, and nation in “post-modernity�

theatricality and violence of representation

the politics of sacrifice and public spectacle

relationships of dominant/minority languages

baroque and neo-baroque manifestations of cultural difference and/or dissent

violence and metamorphosis

evolutions and revolutions

the bifurcated self, alienation, the self as “other�

vision and hearing: the limits of representation

Please send proposals for submissions, including your name, affiliation, contact information, paper title, and 150-word abstract to agsrs@umn.edu by November 31, 2008.