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    • [CFP Conference] Decentering Jewish Literatures in the Americas

    In-Person Conference
    Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies
    The University of Texas at Austin
    February 16-17, 2025 

    Conference organizers: Naomi Lindstrom (University of Texas at Austin), Benjamin Schreier (Penn State University), and Maeera Shreiber (University of Utah)

    This conference seeks to explore, analyze, and theorize Jewish literature in the Americas—Canada, the United States, and Latin America and the Caribbean—outside traditional national and U.S.-Americanist paradigms. Where can we locate centers of gravity for the study of hemispheric Jewish literature when we destabilize identity-concepts like “Jewish” and “American,” or when we don’t take for granted categories like “Jewish American literature,” or hierarchies valuing North over South, or the privileging of the U.S. in the understanding of America? What do literary historical, literary theoretical, and cultural critical methods look like that aren’t shaped by methodological nationalism, that displace US normalization, or that are anchored in other critical traditions such as Latin American and Caribbean theories or other theories that displace national norms? How can we imagine—or desire—a decentered literary practice?

    Possible topics might include (but need not be limited to!):

    ·       Creole and creolized Jewish identities

    ·       Migration: locations and dislocations 

    ·       The Holocaust, refugees, and the Americas

    ·       Retheorizing diaspora

    ·       De-nationalizing literary study

    ·       After Jewish studies and American studies

    ·       The politics of Jewish literary study in the Americas

    ·       Jewish literature and race

    ·       Memory, trauma, multidirectionality, and implication

    ·       The politics of theory in Jewish literary study of the Americas

    ·       Interpretive frames: Zionism, Hemispheres, Judeopessimism, Teleology, Colonialism

    Panel and individual paper proposals—in English—are due by Monday September 16, 2024 at 17:00 Eastern Daylight Time. The conference will be held entirely in person and in English. 

    Individual paper proposals should be approximately 150-200 words and gesture toward the critical importance/relevance/urgency of the paper.  Panel proposals should add to the individual paper abstracts an approximately 150-200-word panel description/justification. Please designate a moderator for the panel and include current email addresses for all panel members. All proposers should be identified either by institutional affiliation or as independent scholars. Please indicate the surname under which they should be indexed.

    Please submit abstracts/proposals: https://forms.gle/tLkZtfbMSXsK15pG9

    Please address questions to all three organizers:  lindstrom@austin.utexas.edu,   bjs44@psu.edu,  m.shreiber@utah.edu