Other Globes: Past and Peripheral Imaginations of the Global Earth

Other Globes: Past and Peripheral Imaginations of the Global Earth

Veranstalter
Simon Ferdinand, Irene Villaescusa and Esther Peeren, Amsterdam Centre for Globalisation Studies
Veranstaltungsort
Ort
Amsterdam
Land
Netherlands
Vom - Bis
04.07.2017 - 05.07.2017
Deadline
15.01.2017
Von
Simon Ferdinand

Contemporary cultures are saturated by figures of the global. From photographs of the planet taken from spacecraft or its moon, through ubiquitous references to globalisation in politics and the media, to the logos that brand transnational corporation’s claims to international reach, these pervasive figures have sunk into the taken-for-granted background to everyday life. In the imagination of globality that predominates today, the earth is widely conceived as a neoliberal globe of frictionless circulation, through which commodities and communications move unimpeded by the constraints of time and geography; as a calculable geode, available to measurement and technocratic manipulation; and as an increasingly compressed social system or single ecological organism, in which all seemingly autonomous localities are shaped in advance by planetary processes.

Yet the prevailing vision of a capitalist, calculable and totalised globe represents only one of many possible ways in which the global has been - and might be - articulated. Alternative visions of the globe, the world and the earth abound in past and present cultures, from the utopian planets narrated in science fiction to the uncanny glitches and voids of Google Earth; from the subaltern internationalisms and glocal realities evoked in transcultural literature, to the revolutionary world-views portrayed in Soviet art. Accordingly, this conference calls on scholars and critics across disciplines to explore alternative imaginations of the world, the earth, the globe and the planet that emerge as counterpoints to hegemonic projections of globes and globalisation. We invite papers that consider peripheral and past fictions of the global, or probe moments of difficulty, difference and crisis that interrupt dominant global discourses. How might conceptions of the global be rethought in attending to its fragments, recast through literary expression or relativised by retrieving bygone world-pictures that cut against our own? Which marginal visions can be brought forward to offer perspectives on globalisation’s breakdowns, undersides and hidden complexities? How can the notions of “world” implicit in world literature, music and cinema be mobilised so as to challenge and complicate the “globe” realised through globalisation?

In addressing these and other questions pertaining to “Other Globes”, contributors are invited to broach narratives, images and practices from any era and cultural context, and in any genre and medium. Possible topics might include (but are by no means limited to):
- alternative narratives/depictions of the global and globalising processes in literature, film, television, photography and visual art;
- geographical representations of the global earth from alternative religious, political and cultural perspectives;
- divergent philosophies and manifestations of world, earth, sphere and planet; globalisation and mondialisation; and the local, global and glocal;
- alternative literary and artistic depictions of ecology, environmentalism and planetarity;
- political discourses of anti-, counter- or alter- globalism, and subaltern internationalisms;
- crises and complexities in prevailing imaginations of globalisation;

Submission
Please submit abstracts (max. 300 words, for 20 min. presentations) together with a short academic CV (max. 200 words) to otherglobes@gmail.com by 15 January 2017.

Please note that selected contributions will be included in an edited volume on the conference topic for the book series Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society. For any inquiries, please contact the organisers Simon Ferdinand, Irene Villaescusa and Esther Peeren through the conference email address: otherglobes@gmail.com.

Programm

Kontakt

Simon Ferdinand
Irene Villaescusa
Esther Peeren
Amsterdam Centre for Globalisation Studies
email address: otherglobes@gmail.com

https://networks.h-net.org/node/73374/announcements/148554/other-globes-past-and-peripheral-imaginations-global-earth