Please circulate widely:


The 32nd Annual FSU Conference on Literature and Film


Cosmopolitanism: Thinking Beyond the Nation





February 1-4, 2007
Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida

http://english.fsu.edu/filmlit/



Keynote Speakers:

    * Timothy Brennan, Professor, Departments of English and Cultural 
Studies & Comparative Literature, University of Minnesota
    * Pheng Cheah, Associate Professor of Rhetoric, University of 
California, Berkeley
    * Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Associate Professor of Modern Culture and 
Media, Brown University
    * Patrice Petro, Director of the Center for International Studies 
and Professor of English and Film Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
    * Screening, TBA

In his introduction to Cosmopolitics, Pheng Cheah writes, "The main 
purpose is to explore the feasibility of cosmopolitanism as an 
alternative to nationalism." Indeed, ever since Kant, the concept of 
cosmopolitanism has been central to thinking about social relations, 
culture, and the problem of war outside of the relations of the 
nation-state. As the nation-state has organized the fields of 
literary and cinema studies as well as the broader field of culture, 
questioning such categorization is crucial, as it opens up new ways 
of thinking about literary and filmic production as part of a larger 
context of interaction. It can also account for novel ways of 
describing the field of contemporary knowledge and experience.

The question of the nation seems particularly important now because 
of two main transformations on the world scene: (1) economic 
globalization, in which the category of the nation-state is only one 
among many of possible identifications and sites of transaction, and 
(2) the growing inevitability of perpetual war (what Kant called 
"perpetual peace") and the endless expansion of global militarisms. 
Is cosmopolitanism just another form of elitism that re-inscribes 
social hierarchies, or does it provide an opening for new alliances? 
What new cultural formations, social networks, and institutional 
structures have arisen, both now and historically, in response to 
what Bruce Robbins called "the moral and cultural existence of 
non-citizens"? What resistances to global capitalism and global 
warfare might fall outside of such liberal solutions as the 
nationalized welfare state, nativism, or local communitarianism? In 
what ways do the current circulations of language systems, aesthetic 
orders, semiotic codes, national identities, and genres in film and 
literature transcend economics and politics formerly envisioned in 
national terms?



Possible topics include:

    * Marxist Internationalism in Contemporary Context
    * The Global Corporate Class
    * The Worldwide Proletariat Class
    * Civil Society
    * Race
    * Translation Studies
    * Migration
    * Immigration
    * Tourism
    * Labor
    * Borders and Border Crossings
    * Professionalism
    * Feminism
    * Global Hollywood
    * Modernism
    * Urbanization
    * Human Rights
    * Citizenship
    * National and Transnational Cinemas and Literatures
    * Consumption
    * Imperialism
    * Totalitarianism
    * Outsourcing
    * Global Markets for Film & Literature
    * New Media
    * The Intelligentsia
    * The Age of the World Picture
    * Cinema and the City



2007 Conference directors:

    * Robin Truth Goodman: [log in to unmask]
    * Barry J. Faulk: [log in to unmask]
    * Maricarmen Martinez: [log in to unmask]
    * Frank P. Tomasulo: [log in to unmask]
For more information, visit our website at http://english.fsu.edu/filmlit/  

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Screen-L is sponsored by the Telecommunication & Film Dept., the
University of Alabama: http://www.tcf.ua.edu