Panel for 2010 American Comparative Literature Association Annual Meeting
April 1 through 4 2010, New Orleans
Deadline for papers: November 13, 2009
Submit proposal to http://www.acla.org/submit/index.php

ACLA site: http://www.acla.org/acla2010/







As illustrated by the blast of True Blood series inundated by the monstrous but amenable others, within the cinematic mode of production, South in general and Louisiana in particular is and has always been the spatio-temporal platform on the basis of which the freak, the monstrous, the unnamable, the ineffable, the subject of transgression par excellence find their voices. This panel aims to situate the particularity of such representation of the South in cinema, one that sets the marginalized free, as in the case of Jim Jarmusch’s Down by Law, or one that awakens the prohibited sensual pleasures in the body as Alan Parker’s Angel Heart, one that contaminates the pure and the normal and transforms it into the tainted and the abnormal as in the case of Skeleton Key; in short one that comprehends South as the gateway to another (im)possible world.

Questions of interests include (but not limited to) the following: How are the minor forms of subjectivities represented in the Southern cinematic space? How is the cinematic representation of space and time formulates South as a political space of the marginalized subject who can speak and be heard? How can we conceptualize the notion of traveling to south as a gateway to becoming other? This panel welcomes analysis of films and media that represents Louisiana as a space of an ethico-political encounter with the other as well as readings of subject positions related to Creole qua minor forms of subjectivity.