CFP: Intercultural/Intermedia Shakespeare

CALL FOR PAPERS

Outerspeares: Transcultural / Transmedia Adaptations of Shakespeare

The 1st Annual Conference of the Guelph Early Modern Studies Group

University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario - November 1, 2011

Deadline for Proposals: April 1, 2011

 Description:

 Our globalized, digitized textual environment has truly become, in Shakespearean terms, a “brave new world” of virtual realities, post-/trans- national identities, and unprecedented constructs of communication and meaning that shapeshift transculturally across different media. Ania Loomba suggests that “emerging national/imperial identities in Europe could never be entirely pure, could never successfully erase the long histories of intermingling.” In our contemporary globalized and digitized media environment, the concept of “intermingling” speaks not only to our distant past but also to our sense of our post-national and increasingly virtual future.

 As conceptions of the world have changed, so has Shakespeare accommodated new attitudes to culture, cultural negotiations, and emerging forms of human expression. Shakespeare's continual, pervasive adaptation across an array of cultural contexts and media platforms forces consideration of the ways meaning is assigned to literary texts, and how meaning is located in the particulars of these cultural events. Transcultural, Intercultural, Multicultural and cross-,  mixed-, or transmedia adaptations of Shakespeare reconfigure the relationship between textual autonomy and historical particulars, pushing beyond conventional understandings of the literary event and the complexities of historical time.

 This conference explores transcultural and transmedia adaptations of Shakespeare and the Shakespeare effect through a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives, welcoming papers that address the transcultural and/or transdisciplinary aspects of Shakespeare in the contemporary world. Outerspeares focuses on the radical reshaping that multiple forms of media sampling engage to produce new forms of knowledge associated with “wild Shakespeare," a form of anarchic “engagement with prior texts that cannot be policed and refuses containment.”

 Keynote:

 The keynote speaker at the conference will be Tom Magill, Director of “Mickey B,” The Educational Shakespeare Company’s innovative adaptation of Macbeth featuring prisoners from Belfast’s Maghaberry Prison, who will screen the film and give a plenary talk. Click here for more information on the film.

  Papers on the following topics are of particular interest:

• Transcultural adaptations of Shakespeare across media platforms (Film, Television, Visual Art, Performance Art, and the like)

• Transmedia Shakespeares with a focus on how Shakespeare has been sampled, appropriated, and transformed in and across a variety of new and old media

• Theorizing the transculturation of Shakespeare

• Shakespeare and the transculturalism of the Global Early Modern Period

• Shakespeare and Media Subcultures (Graphic Novel subcultures, Film Subcultures, etc.)

• Shakespeare and Diaspora

• Any other topic that falls within the conference theme.

 Contact:

 Send a (maximum)one-page Abstract to the conference organizers at gems@uoguelph.ca.

 Please note any audio/visual equipment required. For more information, use the above contact or visit our conference website, which will be launched in early 2011.

 Conference organizers encourage graduate students to submit proposals. A range of events will occur during the conference and conference organizers plan to produce a book based on conference proceedings.

 This conference is co-sponsored by the School of English and Theatre Studies, the College of Arts, and the Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project, directed by Dr. Daniel Fischlin.