NeMLA 2022: Embodiment and Agency in Postcolonial Literature
This panel holds space for depictions of embodied practices/practices of agency in bodies of women of color, queer, nonbinary, trans, and other subjectivities in postcolonial literature and literatures of the Global South. What is the relation between the body and exercising agency? How might we think of these practices as embodied and embodying: as practices done in/through/by the body, as well as practices that reify the body? What are the limitations of these projects, and to what degree are they successful? How might these practices be adopted by readers outside of the text?
Panelists may consider practices as they relate to performance, gesture, memory, trauma, knowledge, care and other areas, in conversation with the body and various feminist strands (including but not limited to Women of Color, Third World, and Transnational feminisms), or may attend to Saba Mahmood’s concept of modalities of agency, which pushes back against the imposition of Western standards and values of feminism.
Comparative projects encouraged. Please send questions to Rebecca Forney at rforney1@binghamton.edu
Abstracts should be uploaded to the NeMLA portal (https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/login) by the September 30th deadline.
Rebecca Forney