Socialist World Cultures
University of California, Santa Cruz
May 26-27, 2022
Since the early 2000s, world literature has served as the dominant paradigm for studying the global circulation of literature. In recent years, critics of world literature have turned their attention to an alternate mapping of world culture, one centered on the networks surrounding Moscow as a core location within the socialist world of the 20th century. Within this alternate orbit, writers from far-flung corners of the world formed a part of networks that connected people, places, institutions, and cultures through circuits oriented around socialist ideals, politics, and hegemony. The conference brings together scholars and students to participate in discussions on the socialist versions of world literature and culture. From interwar revolutionary realism and proletarian culture to the literary and cultural production accompanying national liberation movements of the 1960s and the 70s and the trajectory of the socialist literary imagination throughout the Cold War, the symposium critically engages with the turn towards charting alternative cultural worlds. Specifically, we invite proposals on cultural traditions that developed at a distance from the Soviet Union or from locations and regions that were peripheral vis-à-vis the Soviet world. Furthermore, a focus on how Socialist World Cultures drew on and engaged with social and political movements of the 20th century, such as radical nationalisms, Third Worldism, and national liberation, ethnic and racial struggles, gender and social reproduction, queer communism and radical experiments with sexuality, gender, and family abolition, artistic experiments and the avant-garde, are welcome.
We invite proposals for 20-minute papers and proposals for workshops or roundtables on topics relevant to the conference themes. Particularly, graduate students and post-docs are encouraged to submit proposals. A small reimbursement is available to offset travel costs for early career scholars. To propose a paper please submit a 250-word abstract with a short biographical note by Monday, January 31, 2022, to socialistworldcultures@gmail.com. Workshops and roundtable submissions should consist of a 1,000-word outline of the session's purpose and the contribution of each speaker sent to socialistworldcultures@gmail.com by Monday, January 31, 2022.
Please Note
The Organizing Committee is planning for an in-person event while monitoring travel restrictions and campus-rules adjusting the schedule as needed.
Sponsored by
University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI)
The Humanities Institute at UCSC (THI)