Diaspora, Transnationalism, Transculturalism, and the Layered Self (PAMLA)
The PAMLA 2025 Conference (its 122th one) will be held at the InterContinental San Francisco in San Francisco, California. The conference runs from Thursday, November 20 until November 23, 2025.
As part of PAMLA's 2025 theme “Palimpsests: Memory and Oblivion,” our special session entitled "Diaspora, Transnationalism, Transculturalism, and the Layered Self" invites scholars from diverse disciplines to consider the palimpsest as a symbolic metaphor for diasporic, transnational, and/or transcultural subjects. In light of troubling nationalisms, what might it mean to be a diasporic, transnational, and/or transcultural subject? What might it also mean to study texts and subjects that defy borders and neat categorizations?
Diaspora, transnationalism, and transculturalism are not siloed categories but overlapping modes of being. While the diasporic subject mourns a lost homeland, the transnational subject navigates multiple citizenships, and the transcultural subject invents a new tongue to narrate that journey — often all in the same body. Continual motion defines such subjects traversing routes, roots, and remixes.
As a figurative palimpsest, the diasporic/transnational/transcultural subject-cum-identity is a layered self embodied with languages and histories of migration, trauma, colonization, assimilation, and resistance. Importantly, these individuals and/or communities often cross borders (be epistemological, physical, cultural, or political) and expose myths and artifices of national discourses. However, such complexities are often denied, reified, or silenced by national rubrics, institutional power, and the monolingual publication industry.
This session provides a space for scholars to talk about diaspora, transnationalism, and/or transculturalism — whether as themes or as lived subjectivities. We invite proposals that examine these concepts across a variety of texts (such as literature, film, television, social media posts or videos, and advertisements). Simultaneously, we welcome scholars who want to address institutional struggles and silencing gestures toward work that resists or transcends national frameworks.
Areas of inquiry may include but are not limited to
-- Language: language policy, language loss, preservation, multilingual and formally experimental works, cultural translations and mistranslations
-- Spiritual: myth, folklore, ghosts, spirits, and spiritual healing in diasporic storytelling
-- Memory: inherited memory, food as cultural archive, story-telling, and counter archives
-- Politics: politics of forgetting, politics of (in)visibility, politics of care in migration
-- Transoceanic imaginaries: Kala Pani and the Black Atlantic
-- Institutional marginalization
-- Affect: grief, sadness, displacement, and longing
-- Indigenous transnationalism and sovereignty
-- Queer diasporas and transnational sexualities
-- Economics: racial capitalism, remittances, and emotional economies and migration
If interested, please submit a 250-500 word proposal and a brief bio by May 15, 2025.
Paper proposals must be submitted via PAMLA's online system:
https://pamla.ballastacademic.com/
From the list of sessions, choose session number 19588, "Diaspora, Transnationalism, Transculturalism, and the Layered Self."
More information about the conference can be found at PAMLA's conference website:
https://www.pamla.org/pamla2025/
If you have any questions, feel free to email me Monique Attrux (mattrux@yorku.ca).
Monique Attrux