Call for Papers: Literature and International Law

Call for Papers

Deadline for Abstracts: 15 May 2019

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In December 2018 scholars from multiple disciplines and locations met in the first of a series of encounters that aim to explore the imbrications of literature and international law at the edges, and do so in a manner that seeks to avoid these basic disciplinary blindnesses and Eurocentric assumptions and places the Global South at the center of this conversation.

The next event will take place on 26-27 July 2019, where we hope to continue the conversation with a broader range of scholars at a two-day workshop at the London School of Economics and Political Science. The final event will take place in Nairobi in early 2020. For the workshop to be held in London in July, we are seeking contributions that:

• Explore interdisciplinary interfaces among literary, historical, and legal studies, and from positions of geo-historical marginalization across the Global South.
• Address the intersections between particular texts of “world literature” and Third World Approaches to International Law.
• Map the theoretical and historical relationships between comparative literature and international law as world-making, world-imagining, and world-governing regimes; and consider how literature might be used to map radical alternatives to these regimes.
• Trace the historical global flows of knowledge at the “margins” of world literary and legal space that have been overlooked in the canonical and narrow focus of the separate disciplines, as well as new flows of global knowledge among the disciplines and across (and about) the Global South.
• Consider how the basic assumptions and doctrines of international law and comparative literature (e.g., sovereignty, self-determination, territoriality, equality of states, ethno-cultural nationalism, national languages, and rights to natural and cultural resources) were worked out historically in the Global South.

Please email short proposals/abstracts by 15 May 2019 to: iL.Lit.events@gmail.com We hope to have some funds to assist scholars from the Global South with travel costs.