CENTRE FOR CANADIAN STUDIES
JADAVPUR UNIVERSITY
CALL FOR PAPERS
International Conference on Canadian Studies
7-9 March, 2017
Of Conflicts and Landscapes: The Rhetoric of Performance and Visual Art in Canada
No one ever asked Picasso if he was influenced by Canadian art, and yet look at his masks: Who's to say Picasso hadn't seen any of our work?
- Daphne Odjig (Odawa and Potawatomi)
Since the beginning of time, memory has nurtured the arts and challenged histories of conflict. The ubiquitous presence of memory has been inscribed in the hermeneutic mappings and traversing of the urban space, in the seeming solidity of historical monuments and in transient human bodies. This Conference seeks to locate and narrate memory through the mutable structures of performance and visual arts in the world of Canadian letters. Further, the Conference would highlight the dynamics of forgetting and remembering as articulated in diverse media through complex processes of transformation, regeneration and reconstruction. In Canada, Indigenous communities have been engaged in a constant struggle to visit and preserve their identities, combating cultural extinction and conserving local knowledge.
As early as in the 1890s, Canada witnessed the skills of one of her foremost performers, the poet E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake), whose work divulged a dynamic interface between the oral Mohawk inheritance and the English literary heritage with subtle inroads being made by Ojibwe performative traditions of the 1820s and 1830s. Repercussions of identity and transformation have also been reflected in the often incompatible realities of the Canadian diaspora through representations of landscape in different visual idiom. Jin – me Yoon, the South Korean – Canadian activist produced "Souvenirs of the Self" in 1991 – a work that unraveled the notion of the self in juxtaposition to prominent aspects of the Canadian landscape. Performance and visual arts offer alternative modes of remembrance, drawing upon affective and experiential registers. Richard Biernacki wrote of the cultural turn, "these three emerging visions – culture as the corporeal knowhow of practice, as the organizing ethos of practice, and as the experienced import of practice – can easily overlap in any particular study."[1] In the process, they reshape collective memory, thereby resisting official hegemonic narratives.
The Conference would like to invite papers that explore the role of performance and visual arts in narratives of power speculation, resistant imagery, commemorative landscape within the Canadian subcontinent. Papers engaging in an interdisciplinary dialogue within Canadian Studies on the following themes are invited:
- Creativity and Sovereignty
- Belonging and Performance
- Ritual, theatre and the everyday
- Nationhood/Citizenship and Performance
- Performance: Pedagogy and Practice
- Visual Art and Communication
- Hermeneutics of Visual Art
- Censorship and the Arts
- Film and Identity.
- Landscape and Homeland
- Technology and Mediation
Abstracts (500 words) to be sent to canadacentreju@gmail.com by 16th December, 2017.
Acceptance will be intimated by 7th January, 2017. Please note that while local hospitality may be offered to a select number of applicants, travels costs will not be reimbursed.
From 2017, the Centre for Canadian Studies, Jadavpur University would award two student prizes (till the MPhil level) for the best paper presented at a regular session at the Conference as follows:
1. "Victor Ramraj Memorial Prize" for the best paper in Canadian Diaspora Studies
2. "Renate Eigenbrod Memorial Prize" for the best paper in Indigenous Canadian Studies
A student may apply for only one of the above mentioned prizes and should indicate the same during abstract submission. Joint authors would not be eligible to participate.
In order to be considered for the prize and upon acceptance of the abstract, completed papers should be mailed by 31st January, 2017. The Prize(s) would be awarded only if the Screening Committee believes in the originality and academic excellence of the submission. The decision of the Screening Committee would be final.
Conference Coordinators
Suchorita Chattopadhyay
Coordinator, Centre for Canadian Studies
Jadavpur University, Kolkata – 700 032
Debashree Dattaray
Deputy Coordinator, Centre for Canadian Studies
Jadavpur University
Kolkata – 700 032
[1] Richard Biernacki, "Method and Metaphor after the New Cultural History," in Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt, eds., Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 77.
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