Michigan State University's  2001 Modern Literature Conference.
  GLOBALICITIES
  A Conference on Issues Related to Globalization
   Sponsored by the Program in Comparative Literature
  
   Date: October 18-20, 2001
  Location: Michigan State University
  
   Confirmed Keynote Speakers:
   -GAYATRI SPIVAK, Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities, Columbia
   University
  -MICHAEL HARDT, Associate Professsor of Literature and Romance Studies, Duke
   University
  MAHMOOD MAMDANI, Herbert Lehman Professor of Government, Director, Institute
   of  African Studies, Columbia University
  SASKIA SASSEN, Professor of Sociology, The University of Chicago
  
  A number of recent, important works make clear that the present moment's
  metaphor for the economic, political, social, and cultural interrelationships
  between nations  is "globalization," a concept that has come to replace
  earlier formulas of "modernization" and "civilization." This conference,
  "Globalicities," will focus on the limitations and implications of
   theoretically determining these relations.
  
  We are interested in reflections on the anthropological, sociological,
  economic, legal, linguistic, and aesthetical ways in which the "global" has
  been thought and actualized during the last 500 years. We particularly are
  soliciting serious investigations of the rhetorics and practices of recent
  theories of the global, postcolonial, and international. We hope that our
  neologism, "globalicities," stands in relation to commonsense notions of the
  global in the same way that temporalities and historicities stand in relation
   to conventional time and history.
  
   In other words, our invitation is to treat the concept of the "globe" not as
  something given, but rather as something which is politically fashioned
  posterior to our always endless relations.
 
  Possible areas or topics include, but are not limited to:
  Theories of Narrative and the global
  Rethinking travel, exile, migration, diaspora
  Mestizo logics; or, hybrid theory "all the way down"
  Development," "modernization" and "civilization" and the
fate of dependency theory
  Race and gender in globalization theory
  Post-structuralism and the critique of late-capitalism
  Markets, profits, and violent conflicts
  State violence, armed resistance, and limits of international law
  The return of the state in global theory
  The rhetorics of geography, space, and place theory
  Questioning post-Marxism's turn to "culture"
  Subalternities and Solidarities
  Markets, products and the construction of taste
  Queering the sphere
  Genetics, biotechnology and the globe
  
  Abstractions for individual papers should be no more than 500 words long;
  abstracts for panels are limited to a total of 1000 words. DEADLINE for
   Proposals: March 31, 2001
  
   Please send abstracts and one-page vita for each proposed panelist to:
  Professor Kenneth Harrow
   Director, Program in Comparative Literature
   Morrill Hall
   Michigan State University
   East Lansing, MI 48824
   fax 517 353 3755
  e-mail harrow@msu.edu
  
  As in past years, a selection of conference papers will be published by the
  Centennial Review, which in 2001 enters its 45th year of publication and
  interdisciplinary scholarship.
  The Program in Comparative Literature has hosted the Modern Literature
  Conference for many years. Recently the program has developed a special
  emphasis in African and the African diaspora studies, and the program serves
  as a complement to interdiscipinary Ph.D. programs in Michigan State
  University's College of Arts and Letters, including the Literatures of the
  Americas and Postcolonial Studies, founded in 1998, and the Ph.D. program in
  Africa and the African-American Diaspora, which will be launched in Fall 2001.
 
  Olabode Ibironke
  Comparative Literatures Progarm
  318 Linton Hall
  Michigan State University,
  East Lansing, MI 48824