[KS] CFP: Vernacular Practices across East Asia (The University of Chicago Graduate Student Conference 2016)

[Minna Lee]

*Call for Papers:*

*Vernacular Practices across East Asia*

*The University of Chicago Graduate Student Conference 2016 *

*Friday, October 7th* through *Sunday, October 9th*

 *Keynote Speaker: Bao Weihong*, Associate Professor in the Chinese Program
and Film Studies, University of California, Berkeley

 *Special Event*: *“Kagawa Ryo Live in Chicago*,*” *a performance of
Japanese folk music

Conference Description:

The study of East Asia is perennially haunted by the specters of
standardization, and the centralization of political and cultural capital
in the nation-state.  What is often lost in the margins is the particular,
the non-standard, the suppressed, the minor, and the indigenous experience
in which vernacular practice and its potential for various modes of
reproduction, resistance, transcendence, and imminence takes place.
Recently, postcolonial studies, area studies, media studies, and other
fields have taken a common interest in how and to what extent the
vernacular as language, aesthetic, and sensibility and more importantly as
literary, cultural, and political practice can offer new perspectives and
possibilities to our understanding of East Asia.  Rather than defining the
object of this project through the arbitrary political demarcations of
nation, or the structural mechanisms of the state, or an oversimplified,
homogenized discourse of particular -isms, we want to focus on place,
community, and people created by and through a variety of practices.
Practice is embodied: it is always localized and informed both by
geographically-defined environments and by ever-changing networks of
power.  The vernacular holds the prospect of specificity, and practice,
that of immediacy: in combination, they can be used to address dynamic
issues of democracy, agency, and power.

It is with this in mind that we invite graduate students and postdocs from
various disciplines (including but not limited to language, literature,
history, media studies, theater and performance studies, art history,
music, political science, and anthropology) to submit proposals for papers
that consider vernacular practice in East Asia.  Presenters should prepare
twenty-minute conference papers, which will be grouped into panels with
time for questions and comments for each paper. The thematic orientation of
this conference will provide a basis for participants of diverse
methodological and regional backgrounds to find commonality between their
work, while simultaneously encouraging breadth. To that end, we expect and
encourage work that crosses national, temporal, and disciplinary boundaries
to critically rethink the categories that both bind and sub-divide area
studies.



*Potential topics may include (but are not limited to):*

Rethinking vernacular language(s) in East Asia

Vernacular literature and modernity

Vernacular literature and literary canons

The vernacular and global capitalism

Musical performance as a political vernacular practice

Vernacular practice in theatrical performance

The vernacular, cosmopolitan, and neoliberal
The vernacular in global media

Translocal vernacular practice

Vernacular and trans-lingual practice

The technologically (re)producible vernacular

Vernacular modernism in film



Please send your application to vernacularpractice.uofc.2016 at gmail.com by *July
31st, 2016, 11:59pm Central Standard Time*. The application should include:

*Your full name as you would like it to appear in the conference schedule

*Contact information (e-mail, address, and phone number)

*Institutional affiliation

*Title of your paper

*250-300 word abstract in print-ready format


Successful applicants will be notified of acceptance in early August.

This conference is funded with the assistance of the China, Japan, and
Korea Committees of the Center for East Asian Studies, the Franke
Institute, and the Division of the Humanities at the University of Chicago.

 CONTACT INFORMATION:

vernacularpractice.uofc.2016 at gmail.com

University of Chicago, Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations

1050 E. 59th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, #301
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://koreanstudies.com/pipermail/koreanstudies_koreanstudies.com/attachments/20160725/2e2c7354/attachment.html>