徵稿啟事 2023 EALA
英美文學學會 2023年會
譜寫「照／顧」：想像、行動與理論

     Care, as human response to devastation and oftentimes belated recognition of transindividual bonds, concerns itself with the work of repair and transformation. In Anglo-American and Anglophone literature, we have seen various scenarios of unexpected and laborious caregiving in the aftermath of catastrophic events, be they caused by natural calamities, man-made hazards, or disquietingly beyond. Rob Nixon reminds readers and scholars of literature that while capitalism induces complex economic, political, and ecological predicaments with the relatively invisible “slow violence”—which “occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically viewed as violence at all”—literature persistently bears witness to them despite varied representational challenges (Slow Violence 2011: 2). In addition, as writers explicate the multiple meanings of care by staging stories about lives, places and objects removed or excluded from care, we see cross-categorical precaritization and co-creation in new lights. Such stories may counter dominant narratives of “prehensive futurities,” the concept Jasbir Puar uses to designate politicized chronology that posits the secular doomsday “as if this thing is happening to us, when indeed, we made it happen” (The Right to Maim 2017: 148). Or they may animate us to trace “deep history” along the imperialist footsteps of the English language and ground ourselves simultaneously with what Dipesh Chakrabarty calls as the global perspective, “a humanocentric construction,” and the planetary perspective that decisively “decenters the human” (The Climate of History in a Planetary Age 2021: 17-18). In other words, the literary worlds in English, near or from afar, offer us diverse vantage points to revisit life which, as Rosi Braidotti magnificently characterizes it, “encompasses both bios and zoe forces, as well as geo- and techno-relations that defy our collective and singular powers of perception and understanding” (Posthuman Knowledge 2019: 45), and therefore enable us to know more about who “we” are and go deeper in critically engaging works of care.

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     This conference centers on care as a pivotal site for embedded analysis of various societies in the past, present, and future. We understand care in both empirical as well as conceptual sense and know that acts of caring can be done with and across differences. Feminist critique, disability studies, ecocriticism, posthumanism, and other approaches of critical theory have enabled us to navigate the dynamic formation of contingent communities, border-crossing dialogues, and unforeseen circumstances of crisis and dilemmas regarding care that prompt emergent strategies and ethical imagination. In this spirit, we look for creative and transdisciplinary work from the humanities that opens up new possibilities to see how literature may function in probing intricate relationalities through and beyond care.

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Papers are invited on topics related but not limited to the following:

• Bodies excluded/disqualified/deemed “unworthy” or “unreasonable” from or for care

• Intersectionality between care work and politics of race, gender, class

• Scenes of care in literature and historical context(s)

• Care as labor

• Care as resistance

• Care and social inequities

• Embodied care and emotional labor

• Care in thought vs. care (not) in action

• The multivalence of desires for caring for others

• Border-crossing care: Thoughts, actions, and effects

• Care and deep history

• Care in posthumanist times and the Anthropocene

• Care and technology

• Care and financial/cognitive capitalism

• Care and the nonhuman