Paris Noir: Changes in the Margin
Newport, RI
Organization: NeMLA
This panel seeks papers on artistic movements, individuals or events that demonstrate how living as an outsider or in exile can facilitate cross-cultural learning and creating. The call is based on ideas of reterritorializing lost, outside, and minoritarian cultures such as the Négritude movement—which was recently celebrated at the center of the Paris-Noir exhibit at the Pompidou— and what Gertrude Stein calls the Lost Generation to find empowerment in exile. We seek to share techniques of research and teaching about the power of the powerless by studying overlooked artistic communities, individuals and cultures.
For example we welcome submissions about how artists of the Paris Noir and/or Lost Generation relate to issues of culture, creating and community in our time. Many are unaware that James Baldwin, Miles Davis, and Jean-Michel Basquiat worked alongside Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and Henry Miller. These expatriates and African American artists electively inhabited the creative "Undercommons" of Paris Noir to remain generative despite fascism, racism, and war. These artists who were foreigners and outsiders are now classic and read inside the classroom by a majority in culture.
Submit papers that analyze minorities, foreigners, strangers, exiles and outsiders in literature, film, or culture as a model for reflecting upon ways of reterritorializing the classroom and community. Below are some questions to orient your submission, although you are not limited to working on these:
How does the marginalized turn the margin to a source of empowerment?
What type of artist or work demonstrates change on the margins?
What does it mean to inhabit to the role of foreigner, outsider, or minority?
How does the existence of the stranger, immigrant, minority, or neighbor facilitate cross-cultural dialogue and generativity?
How do we inhabit and engage vulnerability, process, child-like discovery, repetition and outside as a way of innovating that resists an authoritarian or artificial rule?
Hybrid: The session will be held in-person but a few remote presentations may be included.
All abstract submissions must be submitted through the NeMLA portal. https://cfplist.com/nemla/ Home/S/22549
Chair: Dr. Jessica Datema, jdatema@bergen.edu, https://bergen.edu/academics/academic-divisions-departments/english-department/our-composition-literature-faculty/jessica-datema/
https://www.nemla.org/convention.html
Dr. J. Datema