| Epistemologies
of Torture: Limits, Bodies, Black Sites
The 5th Annual CLTC Graduate Student Conference
University of California, Santa Barbara
April 6th, 2007, Centennial House
Submission
Details
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| Keynote Address
| Schedule
| Staged Reading
Call for Papers
Keynote Speakers: Alicia Partnoy (poet,
activist, torture survivor and author of The Little School:
Tales of Disappearance and Survival in Argentina) and Gail
Wronsky (poet and translator of both Alicia Partnoy and the
Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo)
The Call: Both the humanities and torture have historically
been bound up with the pursuit of truth and knowledge. This
conference will probe how we know torture and how we torture
to know (or to suppress knowing). We will also investigate
the conceptual limits and ethical boundaries of this knowledge
production at both extremes.
As scholars in the humanities - a project intimately concerned
with the necessary and inescapable bond between language and
practice - we must not be silent in the face of current linguistic
manipulations that have redefined torture to justify its practice
within the limits of law.
In addition to ethical and legal epistemologies, this conference
will take up the particular knowledge of torture survivors
as well. In the words of Jean Améry, "If from
the experience of torture any knowledge at all remains that
goes beyond the plain nightmarish, it is that of a great amazement
and foreignness in the world that cannot be compensated by
any sort of subsequent human communication" (1980: 39).
We seek to acknowledge and know better this permanent foreignness,
how we allow it to come into the world, and the extent to
which communication, though it will never serve as compensation,
might be a way of looking forward.
We invite 250-word abstracts that
speak to any of the following topics:
torture and language
torture and memory
torture and law
the history of torture
economies of torture
torture and memorialization
torture and urban design
documenting torture
torture and the academy
torture and the intellectual
the performance and performativity of torture
writing torture
teaching torture
reading torture
defining torture
Please send abstracts to tortureconference@yahoo.com
by Monday, 12 March 2007.
Notifications of acceptance will be sent out by 17 March.
*As with the CLTC Roundtables, a presentation at the CLTC
Graduate Student Conference qualifies the presenter for applying
for a travel grant.*
This event is a part of the Critical Issues
in America series:
Torture
and the Future
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