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Spectres and Speculations:
Capital, Nations, Texts The Canadian Association for Commonwealth
Literature and Language Studies (CACLALS) hosts its annual conference, May 23
to 25, 2009, at We invite papers dealing with postcolonial literary texts and all that lies outside, beneath, or behind them: the past that haunts and the future that looms; the material underpinnings and the immaterial shadows of exchange value, repressions, and possible worlds. Texts have a strangely insubstantial existence: at once concrete objects and conceptual objects that exist outside the world. They thus prove ideal sites for studying how those other “imagined” entities, capital and the nation-state, pass through the world and through each other, leaving marks and altering the world. Areas of interest include but are not limited to: -the return of the repressed in texts and in the nation-state -the future that texts point to, whether in warning or in hope -the republic of letters and the market for literature -intersections of public policy and artistic production -symbolic capital and finance capital -global capital flows and the nation-state -national literature, literary nations -cosmopolitanism and nationalism -globalization, capitalism, and the nation-state -narrating the nation, the globe, the market -literary history/ national history/ the history of capital The conference will feature two keynote speakers: "Of
Travels, Accents, and Epistemologies: Notes on Postcolonial Meta-theory" Tejumola Olaniyan (Wisconsin
Madison) is the co-editor
of African Literature: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory (with Ato
Quayson; Blackwell 2007), author of Arrest the Music!: Fela and His
Rebel Art and Politics (Indiana UP 2004); Scars of Conquest/Masks of
Resistance: The Invention of Cultural Identities in African, African American
and Caribbean Drama (Oxford UP 1995); and co-editor of African Drama and Performance (Indiana UP 2004). Death Worlds Where Bad Things Happen: Sherene Razack is
professor of Sociology and Equity Studies at OISE, the University of Toronto,
and author of several books, including Casting Out: The Eviction of
Muslims from Western Law and Politics
(2008), Dark Threats and White Knights: the Somalia Affair,
Peacekeeping, and the New Imperialism (2004), Race, Space, and the
Law: Unmapping a White Settler Society (ed. 2002), and Looking White
People in the Eye: Gender, Race, and Culture in Courtrooms and Classrooms (1998). The conference will also feature
the Ninth Annual CACLALS Aboriginal Roundtable: “Art,
Artist, and Reconciliation” Abstracts of approximately 300 words for talks of 20 minutes’ duration, engaged at any level with capital, nations, specters and speculations in postcolonial literature are due December 15, 2008. They can be either e-mailed, along with a short biographical note and a contact address, to Neil ten Kortenaar at kortenaar@utsc.utoronto.ca. or submitted electronically via the conference submission webpage: Spectres and Speculations: Capital, Nations, Texts. Proposals for panels and special sessions should follow the same procedures. Abstracts will be double blind-vetted. Please note that only proposals from paid members will be considered. Forward membership inquiries to Susan Spearey, Department of English Language and Literature, Brock University, 500 Glenridge Avenue, St Catharines ON L2S or sspearey@brocku.ca
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