(apologies for cross posting)

Cultural Borrowings: A Study Day on Appropriation, Reworking and Transformation

University of Nottingham, UK 
Wednesday March 19th, 2008

Plenary Speakers will include Professor Christine Geraghty (University of
Glasgow) and Professor David Hesmondhalgh (University of Leeds). 

Throughout history, artists have appropriated, sampled or borrowed elements
from pre-existing work for use in new cultural texts. When hip-hop artist
Dangermouse mixed samples from The Beatles White Album with Jay-Z’s Black
Album to produce The Grey Album; or when Todd Haynes paid homage to the
works of Douglas Sirk in the film Far From Heaven (2002); or when Jean Rhys
reworked Jane Eyre to tell the story of the creole Antoinette in Wide
Sargasso Sea, they were all appropriating elements from prior cultural texts
for use in the creation of new works. 

This one day conference, in association with the MeCCSA Postgraduate
Network, seeks to interrogate the nature of such cultural borrowings,
looking at how we can draw together insights from across the disciplines in
order to further develop academic models of appropriation, reworking and
transformation. 

Submissions will be welcomed from both research students and interested
academics working in the fields of film and television studies, cultural
studies, literature, media anthropology, history, music, new media and
sociology. 

Topics may include, but are not limited to the following:

- Remakes and Reworkings 
- New media/Convergence culture 
- Globalisation and cultural/regional crossings
- Rethinking postmodernism/postcolonialism
- Fandom (fan films/slash fiction)
- Borrowings between high and low culture
- Sampling and remixing in music
- Appropriation in the visual arts
- The Politics of Pastiche/Parody/Camp
- Culture Jamming/Adbusters
- Fair Use and intellectual property

Please submit an abstract of 200-300 words along with a short biographical
note to:
Iain Robert Smith: [log in to unmask]

Iain Robert Smith, Cultural Borrowings Conference
School of American and Canadian Studies
University of Nottingham
Nottingham NG7 2RD
  
Deadline for abstracts is 30 November 2007		   http://www.meccsa.org.uk/pgn/

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Online resources for film/TV studies may be found at ScreenSite
http://www.ScreenSite.org