1st CHICAGO GRADUATE CONFERENCE
UIC-NORTHWESTERN-UCHICAGO
Call for papers


Main topic: ““exceso/consumo/excesso”

One of the most easily accepted ideas in today’s critical discourses is that, in our time, capitalism is defined by an unlimited power to integrate and absorb any kind of social and cultural production. Everything seems to be subject to a process of commodification, in which the forms of production, bodies, images, sounds, meanings, circulation, and consumption are regulated by the omnipresent logic of capitalist codification. However fruitful this idea may be for understanding modern and contemporary cultural production, it seems crucial to open up a debate concerning different economies that underlie, overlap, counteract, or exceed this logic.

What roots do these forms of consumption have in the guises of pre-modern excesses? What kinds of practices and expressions allow us to rethink categories such as consumption, excess, or lack? What regimes of circulation of bodies, images, meanings, or affects can be found in our literary and cultural manifestations?

The graduate students of the Hispanic Literary and Cultural Studies program of the Department of Hispanic Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Northwestern University, and the Spanish Graduate Students Conference Organization at the University of Chicago invite you to attend the 1st Annual Chicago Graduate Conference, “Exceso/Consumo/Excesso” which will take place during November 12-14, 2015 at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

The list of topics we hope to consider includes, but is by no means limited to the following:

- Forms of appropriation
- Cannibalism/Anthropophagy
- Replication/Reproduction
- Cultural translation
- Economies of writing and speech
- Consumption and the affects
- Erotic economy
- Representations of the sensory
- Sublimity and sublimation
- Precariousness and the arts
- Excess and expenditure
- Performance and language
- Gender excess
- From material to digital
- Text as a commodity

The Conference Organizing Committee welcomes papers from all theoretical perspectives in Spanish, Portuguese, and English. Interdisciplinary proposals are particularly encouraged. Presentations should not exceed 20 minutes in length (7-8 typed pages, double-spaced). Panel proposals as well as abstracts of up to 250 words may be sent as a Word attachment to gradchicagoconference@gmail.com. The deadline for all submissions is July 31st, 2015.

Our confirmed keynote speakers are: Cristina Rivera Garza, Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California, San Diego and award-winning author; Pedro Erber, Professor of Luso-Brazilian Studies at Cornell University; and Neil Larsen, Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Davis and renowned specialist of Critical Theory.

In order to defray some of the costs of the conference, we will be requesting a modest registration fee ($20) which will cover breakfast and lunch for two days of the conference as well as the catering for the opening reception to be held at the beginning of the conference. You may send us a request for this fee to be waived by contacting us directly to our email. Registration for the event is mandatory.

For more information, visit https://gradchicagoconference.wordpress.com or like us on Facebook.