In what ways does the metropolitan urban landscape shape the migrant experience of belonging and the unhomely? How does the migrant transform the metropolis with her movements amidst its embedded histories? If the city constitutes a body, how is the trauma and triumph of migration inscribed on its landscape? How do migration narratives portray the body as a carrier of history and postcoloniality through space? Can visual and literary texts figure and reconfigure the migrant and the city as codependent bodies? What are the roles of racialization, gender, and sexuality in the dialectics of body and the urban? This NEMLA seminar hopes to explore the body as migration and metropolis. Possible themes may include (but are not limited to) the image of the crowd; places of labour; the imaging of the migrant body; city as panopticon; transnational/ local/ global; reclaiming space and identity; the body within the visual/ literary text; and broader issues of globalization, postcolonialism, gender, race, sexuality, religion, genre, media and technology, the body as chronotope, and interpretations that constitute lenses for the migrant experience.

How does the urban landscape shape migrant experience? How does the migrant body shape and become shaped by the city? This NEMLA seminar hopes to explore the body as migration and metropolis. Themes may include the image of the crowd; the imaging of the migrant body; city as panopticon; reclaiming space and identity; the body within visual/ literary texts; and broader issues of globalization, transnationalism, postcolonialism, gender, race, sexuality, and genre that constitute lenses for the migrant experience.

Please submit a 300 word abstract and brief bio by 9/30/2016.

Please note that you do not need to be a current NeMLA member to submit an abstract. Contact Ashna Ali at aali1 at gradcenter.cuny.edu, Sarah DeMott at sjd311 at nyu.edu, Eleanor Paynter at paynter.42 at osu.edu, or Anita Pinzi at anitapinzi at gmail.com with any questions.

Additional details and a submission link can be found here: https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/16471