Conference Scope: Literature, Language, Translation, Cultural Studies

 

Intercultural adaptation, globalization, and risk are three interrelated concepts, each complicating the other two and engaging vital issues in our society and world. Globalization has increased the possibilities and forms of intercultural adaptation and kinds of risk, even as the concept of risk has shifted from the rational management of outcomes toward a preoccupation with uncontrollable hazards and threats, from socio- economic  fields  toward  those  of  culture  and  environment.  In  an  increasingly globalized world where technology and economic development (or exploitation) asymmetrically connect different nations, intercultural adaptation and risk emerge and often overlap in contact zones that themselves proliferate ever more numerously in both physical and virtual spaces, in both material and abstract ways. As such, intercultural adaptation, itself a form of risk, opens opportunities for dialogue among “clashing cultural perceptions” that would otherwise remain “mutually exclusive certainties” (Ulrich Beck, World at Risk 12). Meanwhile, the representation of risk can involve transmediation (or remediation)—for example, from novel to film, from computer game to film, from graphic novel to television series, etc.—as it addresses “[t]he meanings of proximity, reciprocity, dignity, justice and trust” transformed by risk realities (Beck, World at Risk 188).

 

This conference seeks papers that engage with any of these key concepts: intercultural adaptation, globalization, risk, and/or intersections among them. How does the experience of risk serve to refashion cultural and linguistic boundaries? How, reciprocally, do border-crossing and intercultural adaptation shape the experience of risk and/or globalization? What kinds of risk are associated with political, economic, and cultural contact zones? Moreover, what is the line between cultural appropriation and respectful use, and how might these concerns involve risk? We are particularly interested in exploring how the transmission of narratives and tropes across media and/or  cultural  and  linguistic  boundaries  has  responded  to,  or  impacted,  the experience of risk on a global scale; and how the logic of risk and/or globalization is reflected in the forms of narrative, film, and graphic texts at different historical moments. Topics may include (but are by no means limited to):

 

--Intercultural adaptation in literature, theater, film, visual art, architecture, as well as linguistic usages

--Intercultural application of theory

--Literary modes and devices that foster or contain intercultural adaptation, e.g., allusion, allegory, typology, parody

--Intercultural communication via telecommunication

--Risk and global connectivity in culture

--Narratives of risk, trauma, and cultural memory

--Time-space of risk and contact zone in culture

--Migration and subjectivity at risk (nomad, refugee, homo sacer)

--Risk society, intercultural communication, and/or global flows