"Women’s Transnationality and Literary Forms"
BWWC 2017
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
June 21-24, 2017
Moderator: Linda K. Hughes
“Transnationality” is a term increasingly used for interests and mobilities that cross national borders and for interactive relations with one or more cultures. If this scholarly focus emerges from an increasingly globalized world, the generational legacies of women writers’ transnationality are especially timely after recent votes in the US and UK indicate a turning inward among many to nationalist identities. Transnationlity’s related terms include cultural transfer (or transmission/exchange), cosmopolitanism, and postcolonialism, all of which involve fluid movements in languages, identities, and concepts as well as physical and subjective experiences. Transnationality rejects unilateral action and invites the ostensibly “foreign” into texts, subjectivities, and experiences.
The roundtable organiser invites participants to probe forms of women’s transnationality and its visible residues in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women’s textual forms. How is the experience of transnationality registered? When is the eruption of nonAnglophone language an incorporation of another culture or a signifier of privileged education? Can glossaries or other disruptions of narrative travel writing suggest dispositions to learn from other lands (rather than ethnographic documentation)? When do translations help women reinvent new Anglophone literary forms? Can encounters with “foreign” foods create innovations in the forms as well as ingredients of food or other literary writing? How do inscriptions of transnationality modulate across class, ethnicity, genres, and generations of British women writers? All approaches to the topic are welcome. Send proposals of 200-300 words and a brief bio to l.hughes@tcu.edu by January 15, 2017. For more information on this roundtable and others at the BWWC 2017, please visit http://bwwc17.web.unc.edu/roundtables/.