Conferences

Taking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Pascale Casanova’s field-defining La République mondiale des lettres (The World Republic of Letters, 1999) as its point of departure, this conference seeks to decentralize the praxis of cultural reading and literary critique that the notion of Paris as the world capital of literature represents. Drawing inspiration from a host of decolonial projects that seek to renegotiate the terms in which we understand the world—a process that Walter Mignolo terms “epistemic delinking”—we seek to examine trans-peripheral and counter-hegemonic cultural infrastructures that flourished despite, in resistance to, and in the aftermath of colonial domination. This project is historical, but also oriented toward the present and, crucially, dedicated to rethinking the epistemic assumptions that undergird the study of literature and associated forms of cultural production in the present. 

The Conference Trauma, Memory, and Counter-Culture. Borders and Border Transgressions in (Post-)Communist Europe explores borders and border transgressions in the context of trauma, memory, and counter-culture and aims to highlight the specific relevance of Border Studies for better understanding literature, arts, and everyday culture in repressive, transformative and post-war societies.