Conference

This conference will be centred on the way North American minority and exilic literatures problematize such generally received notions as home and belonging. Often localised on an anxious border between an originary, imaginary "homeland" — only recuperated through myth and storytelling — and the lived present, caught between here and there, departure and arrival, such literatures readily generate themes and tropes of nostalgia and the in-between: an "insider-outsider" status caught between community affiliations of origin and the social and cultural space of the adopted nation.

Yet at the same time "minoritized literatures remind us that nations are made, not born, and are thus open to refashioning" (Cho, 2007) suggesting that the "insider-outsider" both confirms and calls into question the norms and values that construct national unities. Do minority and exilic literatures therefore contribute to a dynamic political imaginary, envisaging alternative modes and discourses of citizenship? Can they contribute to reconceptualising the notions of home and nationhood and to challenging fixed assumptions of authentic origins?

In this case what strategies - patterns, themes, metaphors, images - serve to reflect on and reshape the network of relations tying the individual to the community? How does textual, representative space deflect or reflect the political and ideological?

Possible (non-exhaustive) avenues of inquiry: Utopias, Auto-ethnography, Alternative, subjective cartographies, Embodied identities, Globalisation, transcultural, transnational discourses, Places and heterotopias, Racialised poetics, The body as politics, Mythmaking and revisions

Keynote speaker – Larissa Lai (University of British Columbia) – The Look of Like: Fields of Vision in Asian/Indigenous Relation

David Stirrup (University of Kent, Canterbury) – Art, Borders, Citizenship: Containment and Flux in Selected Works by Eric Gansworth and Thomas King

Françoise Kral (Université Paris 10) – Virtual Communities and the “Non-places” of Hypermodernity

Hans Bak (Radboud University, Nijmegen) – Flights to Canada: Jacob Lawrence, Ishmael Reed and Lawrence Hill

Martin Kuester (University of Marburg) – A Minority Within a Minority: Literary Views of “Marginal” Members of the Canadian Mennonite Community?

Ada Savin (Université de Versailles) – Geographies of the Carribean in Cristina Garcia’s The Aguerro Sisters (1997)

Pilar Cuder-Dominguez (University of Huelva) – The Psychology of Immigration: Map-making and Map-breaking in Nalini Warriar’s The Enemy Within (2005)

Marie-Claude Perrin-Chenour (Université Paris 10) – Jamaica Kincaid’s Regressive Writing

Catherine Khordoc (Carleton University, Canada) – Multiculturalism and Transculturalism in Neil Bissoondath’s and Nédi Bouraoui’s Fiction and Essays

Paule Lévy (Université de Versailles) – A Reading of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée

Anca-Raluca Radu (University of Gottingen) – Surpassing Multiculturalism: New Cosmopolitanism in Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For

Keynote speaker – Deborah Madsen (University of Geneva) – The Rhetoric of Double Allegiance: Imagined Communities in North American Diasporic Chinese Literatures

Yves-Charles Grandjeat (Université Bordeaux 3) – Deterritorializing and Reterritorializing the Barrio in H. M. Viramontes’s They Came with their Dogs: Fictional Ventures into the Borderlands

Belén Martin-Lucas (University of Vigo) – (Un)becoming Laura Ingalls: Narratives of Asian Settlement in North America

Michel Feith (Université de Nantes) – Intertextual Homelands in Two Southwestern Novels by Louis Owens

Lianne Moyes (Université de Montréal) – Out of My Skin: Contesting Home and Native Land

Claire Omhovère – Pop Culture and the Construction of Ethnicity in Miriam Toews’s and Richard Van Camp’s Writing

Marie-Agnès Gay (Université Lyon 3) – “Across America picking up ghosts”: home and unheimliche in Shawn Wong’s novel Homebase

Kirsten Sandrock (University of Gottingen) – The Ethics of Exile Writing: George Elliott Clarke’s George & Rue (2005)

Virginia Ricard (Université Bordeaux 3) – Ludwig Lewisohn’s Imagined Community: An Island in the Stream

Nicoleta Alexoae-Zagni (Université Paris 7) - “Homelands of the Memory”, “Homelands of the Future”: Roots and Routes in Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s Among the White Moon Faces: An Asian-American Memoir of Homelands

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