38th GAFIS Symposium

Co-sponsored by the Center for European Studies and the Department of French and Italian

For any questions please contact gafis_symposium@frit.wisc.edu

Symposium Co-Chairs: Enzo Cantinelli and Francesco Satta

Keynote: Hadji Bakara

Hadji Bakara is a Assistant Professor of English language and literature at the University of Michigan. Dr. Bakara specializes in 20th and 21st century global, Anglophone, and American literatures, in their relation to histories of war, empire, migration, and human rights. Based on these areas of interest and his most recent publication on a literary history of human rights in the twentieth century called Governments of the Tongue: A Literary History of Human Rights (under contract with University of Chicago Press), we believe that his participation in the round table discussion at the closing of the symposium would be an enriching academic event not only for the Department of French and Italian but also for the whole UW-Madison campus.

Exploring the Liminal

The concept of liminality as coined in a text entitled Rites de Passages (1908) and described as a three-fold process–separation, transition and incorporation– and would go on to become a trope found in fields as varied as psychology, literature, botany, geography, medicine, to name a few. From the latin limen or threshold, the term itself emphasizes the importance and value of transitions. To define something is to determine its limits, drawing a line separating what it is from what it is not. By simultaneously embracing beginnings, intersections and ends, and an in-between space challenging the notion of enclosed categories, liminality provides the opportunity to reassess traditions and boundaries, opening up new thresholds. For the 38th GAFIS Symposium, we would like to explore liminality as an interdisciplinary topic providing an auspicious subject around which to come together, where different fields in science, social sciences and humanities can resonate. We would like to invite scholars to submit a paper from any but not limited to these areas : political science, geography, anthropology, botany, mathematics, sociology, gender and women’s studies, literature, art and art History, History, philosophy, religious studies, post-colonial and colonial studies, film and theater studies, law.

Keywords : beginning, crossroad, inbetween, interdisciplinary, transition, mutation, fluidity, periphery, ambivalence, ambiguity, contact, porosity

Keynote Speaker abstract: Refugee Futures and the Politics of Time

Few figures embody the condition of liminality as explicitly as the modern refugee. Whether it is a refugee’s experience of life in transit or their perpetual waiting, their relegation to ‘temporary’ spaces like camps and detention centers, or their displacement from historical time into exceptional temporalities of ‘emergency’ or ‘crisis,’ refugees are barred from the inhabitation of accepted community, a stable present, and a common future. What’s more, attitudes towards refugees show how closely the boundaries of an imposed liminality can double as the boundaries of the political imagination. As Hannah Arendt predicted nearly a century ago, the imagined exceptionality of refugees––their perpetual betweenness––has become the condition of intelligibility for conceiving both territorial sovereignty and historical progress. Only if refugees are kept in suspension, that is, can order be maintained in both space and time. In recent decades, however, several interlocking forces––including neoliberalism’s pervasive dispossessions, perpetual war, and climate catastrophe––have created an unprecedented number of refugees globally, and so dissolved the imputed boundaries of the refugee’s liminal position. As it becomes increasingly common to anticipate what Donna Haraway calls a collective future “without refuge,” the refugee’s place morphs from one of liminality to universality. This lecture uses refugee writing from the last century––from Jewish refugee writers in the 1940s, to South Asian refugees in the 1980s, and African migrant writers in the present––to examine and theorize the political effects of unsettling the liminal status of the displaced, migrant, or otherwise non-sovereign person.