Carceral geographers may be interested in the following call for papers for a seminar organised as part of The American Comparative Literature Association’s 2012 conference, which is taking place at the University of Toronto, Canada, April 4-7th 2013. The call is posted below:
Organisers: Brett Story (University of Toronto) and Jill Stoner (University of California, Berkeley)
“An entire universe added to my Time.” – Jacobo Timerman, Prisoner without a Name, Cell without a Number
It is in the nature of imprisonment to alter the space of Time, to skew location in all its dimensions. Prisons and their analogous cultural counterparts, so often designed according to strict Cartesian geometries and precise temporal segmentation, nevertheless establish their own geographies, and their own histories, outside these systems.We invite participants to reflect on sites and scenes imposed and invented through various states of imprisonment: solitary confinement and its attendant tactics of subversive communication; death row and its Kafkan politics of infinite postponement; urban contexts that effectively establish their carceral qualities with assortments of cameras, gates, laws and keys.
We hope to assemble within the seminar a wide representation of genres – including conventional and new forms of literature by and about prisoners – and to chart these various discoveries onto a new, shared map that will allow us to better navigate the current landscape of incarceration in its various iterations. Thus will emerge a new positioning system – perhaps global, perhaps not – without the conventions of latitude or longitude, its distances not measured in feet or miles. We refer here to literature in its broadest sense: fiction, texts, documents, film, etc.
Paper proposals should go through the conference website, and acceptance is competitive. International submissions are welcome; international participants should just make sure to obtain any necessary visas well ahead of time.
Carceral Geography 