The City in Literature & Culture special session of the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association (PAMLA) is now accepting proposals for the organization’s 117th annual conference. The call-for-papers deadline is Monday, June 10, 2019.

This special session welcomes proposals focused on the varied ways of constructing the city’s identity as broadly conceived, particularly beyond North America. Since this year’s conference theme is “Send in the Clowns” https://pamla.org/2019/conference-theme, we are interested in papers/presentations that consider the ways in which texts address the city as an arena for generating, reflecting, and/or facilitating the construction of characters who slip between the interstices of city spaces and criss-cross borders of identity, both real and imagined. However, other proposals will also be considered outside of the conference theme.

How does the city perpetuate the spectacles of power and alternate perceptions through the design of Disneyfied (even “clown-like”), simulacral, panoptic, or carnivalesque constructions? What are the possibilities for reordering systems of power or unmasking and unraveling hierarchies through narrative (and counter-narrative) productions of city space? In way ways can the city subvert or activate (or simultaneously be subverted or activated by) the flâneur/flâneuse, the dérive, the pilgrim, the carnival reveler (etc.) as a means for unveiling overt/covert power imbalances?  Consider why the constellation of urban sites— streets and freeways, markets and malls, plazas and parks, gardens and graveyards, mirrors and museums, brothels and cinemas, and other sacred or secular, public or private spaces throughout a city—can produce opportunities for the personal and collective to intersect, for binary constructions and opposites to dissolve, and for physical and psychological borders and barriers to be transgressed.  

Possible topics and focuses to consider include, but are not limited to, the following:

• the city street as social, artistic, and/or performative stage for the urban dance (Jacobs)
• odysseys through third-spaces in a city’s texture (Soja)
• the function of proxemics to articulate encounters (Hall)
• labyrinths/undergrounds as conduits for traversing through city spaces (Borges, Eco)
• the city’s role as heterotopia and its inhabitants as heterotopians (Foucault, Morales)
• characters, including the city itself, who disrupt spatio-temporal constructions
• the city as a palimpsestic armature of histories, memories, and layerings
• comparative readings of cities that challenge conventional discourses
• city as site of contestation and border criss-crossing: exile, im/migration, othering, intersectionality, etc.
• the overlapping of Eastern and Western epistemologies and ontologies in the city
• employing genres of reading the city that produce a fluid kaleidoscope of cultural identities via literature, film, public art/murals, architecture, etc.

The PAMLA 2019 Conference will be held at Wyndham San Diego Bayside from Thursday, November 14 to Sunday, November 17.

How to Submit: Submit proposals to this panel area using this link: https://pamla.ballastacademic.com/Home/S/17939. You will need to register and login to access the form (if you created an account last year, you can use it again; if you forgot your username or password, visit the Password Recovery page). You do not have to pay membership dues necessarily to submit an abstract; however, should your proposal be accepted, you will need to pay membership and conference fees by July 15, 2019. Again, the proposal deadline is Monday, June 10, 2019.

Please know that PAMLA accepts individual papers rather than organized panels. You can submit up to three proposals to three different sessions, although each proposal must be distinct, and you can ultimately present only one paper at the conference. PAMLA is a congenial and welcoming forum that presents excellent opportunities for meeting with scholars formally and informally from in and outside of your respective fields of study.

Contact Info:  Dr. Michael Moreno, Professor of English & Diversity Studies, Green River College