The Clowes Center for Conflict and Dialogue presents
States of Violence:
Representations of Conflict in Film, Fiction, and Media of South Asia
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A Conference hosted by:
The Clowes Centre for Conflict and Dialogue
Comparative History of Ideas Program (CHID)
University of Washington, Seattle
February 20 – 21, 2009
Deadline for abstracts: October 30, 2008
As a geopolitical entity, South Asia has had a long history of violence: anti-colonialist movements, post-colonial secessionist uprisings, religious fundamentalism, gender conflicts, caste wars, ‘racial’ strife, ethnic struggles, regional conflicts, and terrorism. The conference aims at looking at representations of these in the media, literature, and cinemas in the region’s historical, political, social, economic, and globalized and diasporic contexts. The conference will evaluate these topics in the contexts of gender, class, race, ethnicity, ideology, and caste. To this end, we solicit papers that speak, but are not limited, to the following themes:
1. Cinema as a counter narrative to neo-liberal narrative construction 2. South Asian digital media and democratizing of representation 3. Gender, nation, violence and the media 4. State-sponsored media and ‘nation’ formation 5. Oppositional cinema as a tool for resistance and social mobilization 6. Mumbai terror films / India’s new middle cinema 7. New ‘third cinema’ in South Asia 8. Mainstream Bollywood and representation of political violence 9. Decolonization, nationalisms, linguistic and/ or religious differences: Re-Thinking Post-colonial literary representations of violence and domestic conflict 10. Caste, class, and prejudice: ideological and physical violence in South Asian fictions 11. State torture and representation in fiction 12. Internal and external civil strife: negotiating articulations of gender and sexuality in the literatures of South Asia 13. Divisions of territory and the self: representations of partition in South Asian fiction and film 14. Violence at ‘home: re-thinking belonging and strife in cultural texts of the South Asian diaspora 15. Race and space: literary configurations of identity and conflicts in place. 16. Terrorism and suicide bombings: representations of violence and self-sacrifice in south Asian film, fiction and media. 17. Replacing the “Hindi” in “Indian (film):" Kollywood's growing international presence and its conflicting articulation of Indian national identity 18. Navigating the Palk straight: Kollywood, the Tamil diaspora and the sexual politics of dispossession.
Please send abstracts (250 – 300 words) and a brief biographical note (2-3 sentences) to Amy Peloff, Assistant Director, Comparative History of Ideas at the following address: cccd@u.washington.edu
Accepted proposals will be announced in about 30 days. The conference committee will organize the abstracts in panels of three papers each. Each paper will last 20 minutes and there will be a joint panel discussion lasting no more than one hour. For more information on the Comparative History of Ideas Program at the University of Washington and/ or The James Clowes Center for Conflict and Dialogue, please see: http://depts.washington.edu/chid/description.php