Call for Papers

Radical Traditions

The Role of Contemporary Arab Women in Revolutionising Arab Patriarchal Society

Saturday 12 October 2024/ University of Warwick/ Faculty of Arts

Call for Papers / Deadline: 30 July

 Opening and Closing Keynote Speakers: Dr. Ebtihal Mahadeen (University of Edinburgh) & Prof. Rebecca Ruth Gould (SOAS, University of London)

Edited Collection CFP – Warwick Series in the Humanities, Routledge

Editor: Raad Khair Allah (University of Warwick)

In an interview with the Progressive Magazine, Nawal El Sadaawi, the Arab world’s most prominent feminist and writer, says: “Women are half the society. You cannot have a revolution without women. You cannot have democracy without women. You cannot have equality without women. You can’t have anything without women” (2011). Influenced by these themes, this interdisciplinary one-day workshop and the proposed edited collection aim to shed light on the radical traditions expressed in the efforts and achievements of contemporary Arab women in challenging patriarchal social norms and structures and thereby transforming Arab societies.

We encourage participants to critically reflect on the meaning of freedom, challenge existing power systems of oppression, and imagine alternative possibilities for a more liberated and just society. By engaging in dialogue, reflection, and creative thinking, participants will be inspired to become agents of change and contribute to the ongoing struggle for freedom and social justice.

We are calling for papers from across disciplines such as literature, art history, film studies, gender studies, cultural studies, sociology, media, music, and anthropology and more.

You are invited to submit abstracts of maximum 300 words for 15-20-minute papers by 30 July 2024. Full chapters of 5000–7000-word chapters will be due by 30 January 2025 on a broad range of topics including but not limited to:

Ø Resistance and agency in contemporary Arab women’s literary and visual outputs

Ø  Palestinian literature, cinema, and art of occupation

Ø Arab women’s struggle, in anti and post-colonial resistance and civil wars, for liberation and human rights

Ø Anti- colonial nationalism and the nation as a woman

Ø The intersection and the challenge of multiple forms of oppression

Ø Representations and the politics of sexuality, gender, and power dynamics  

Ø The female body as a site of repression and resistance

Ø Intellectual, political, and sexual freedom

Ø Tensions between authenticity and originality in Arab feminist self-expression

Ø Censorship and suppression of feminist cultural artefacts

Ø Arab women’s resistance to localised forms of patriarchy and Western, orientalist stereotypes  

Ø Writing the difference and the invention of “the new Arab woman”

Ø Arab feminism in local dynamics and in international and transnational worlds

Ø Art as a tool for reclaiming sexuality, identity, and power

Ø AI-generated representations and amplifying marginalised Arab women’s voices

Ø Contemporary Arab women’s movements: identity, mobilisation, autonomy

Ø The influence of digital platforms on the visibility and spread of Arab women’s works, serving as new spaces for artistic and narrative freedom

Please send abstracts and short biographies of 200-250 words to radicaltraditions@gmail.com

This conference aims to explore the different forms that the idea of a ‘return of the repressed’ has taken over a broad chronological period ranging from the early 18th century through to the Second World War. The notion of an area, inaccessible to rational consciousness, where memories, thoughts, and images could be ‘stored’ and re-activated without any agency of the conscious mind, is largely credited to Sigmund Freud, whose theoretical model of repression, return and ‘compromise formation’ has been highly influential for a vast part of the 20th century. The idea of the ‘return of the repressed’, however, has a remoter and more ramified history, and its pervasiveness extends far beyond the spheres of psychology and psychoanalysis.

In bringing these areas of research together, this conference ultimately seeks to examine the multifaceted presence of the ‘return of the repressed’ – as a polyvalent metaphor, a philosophical concept, and a theoretical method, or as all three simultaneously – throughout cultural modernity as a whole. In particular, we aim to examine three distinct discourses: that of archaeology, in which the ‘return of the repressed’ applies to the physical exhumation of the past; the discourse of psychoanalysis, covering individual memories; and, finally, that of post-colonial theory, exploring the ways repressed colonized voices are subject to a re-emergence and a haunting return in collective spaces, discourses, and praxes. In doing so, the conference employs the notion of ‘return of the repressed’ as a quintessentially inter- and trans-disciplinary tool, enabling us to cross-fertilize different domains and research practices, provoking questions such as: Does the notion of ‘repression’ change in different historical, geographical, and broadly cultural contexts? To what extent, if at all, can psychoanalysis’s view of the repressed be disentangled from its original cultural context? What role has the repressed played in the legitimation, maintenance, and deconstruction of colonial powers? What was the role of physical excavation in the creation, manipulation, showcasing and exploitation of cultural memory? (e.g. the discovery of ancient ruins and archaeological searches for the garden of Eden)?

Bringing together academics from diverse disciplines and fields (including but not limited to (post)colonial studies, archaeology, literary studies, film studies, media studies, psychology and anthropology), this conference aims to attract the attention of academic staff, postgraduate research students and early-career researchers working in the UK and beyond.

We invite proposals for 20-minute papers with different methodological approaches and temporal focuses. Topics may include but are not restricted to:

• Pre-freudian concept of unconscious in literature and media;
• The notion of the civilized/uncivilized in colonial discourses;
• The representation of personal and collective pasts;
• Return of ‘primitive’ beliefs, i.e colonial engulfment;
• Social and cultural repression;
• The uncanny, memory and trauma;
• Archaeology of the mind: mind as colonial territory;
• Exoticism, orientalism and racism in literary/cinematic discourses;
• The return of the surmounted;
• Colonial literature and cinema;
• The role of archaeology in the legitimization of colonialism.

Those interested in presenting a paper should send a short abstract (max. 300 words) and a biographical note (max. 150 words) to apcwarwick@gmail.com by 15 December 2023. Participants may also be invited to publish their contributions in an edited publication as part of the Warwick Series in the Humanities, published by Routledge.

This conference is sponsored by the Humanities Research Centre (HRC) at the University of Warwick.

We look forward to hearing from you. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact the organizers, Gennaro Ambrosino and Kerry Gibbons at apcwarwick@gmail.com

To participate as a speaker, please submit an abstract of 250-300 words for a fifteen-minute paper, along with a short bio (100 words max), to kinshipconference2024@gmail.com by 30th November 2023.

Please use this email address for any further question and see updates on our Twitter page: @kinshipconference2024.

Saturday 13th May 2023

Keynote Speakers:

Dr Maria Balaska, University of Hertfordshire

Dr Thomas Gould, University of East Anglia

University of Warwick 19 May 2023 Keynote Speakers: Dr Catherine Wheatley, King’s College London Dr Rachel Malkin, University of Oxford