Deadline for CFP for Bloodworks extended to Nov. 5, 2010
October 20, 2010
Submit abstracts of 500 words for consideration for "Bloodwork: The Politics of the Body 1500-1900." The deadline for proposals has been extended to November 5, 2010.
his conference will explore how conceptions of the blood—one of the
four bodily fluids known as humors in the early modern period—permeate
discourses of human difference from 1500 to 1900. “Bloodwork” begins
with the assumption that the concept of “race” is still under
construction and that our understanding of the term would profit through
an engagement with its long, evolving, history. Specifically, it asks
how fluid transactions of the body have been used in different eras and
different cultures to justify existing social arrangements.
Recent
scholarship has opened up the question of the continuities and
discontinuities between early modern and modern rationalizations of
human difference. In early modern England, “race” commonly referred to
family lineage, or bloodline, and relied upon pervasive notions of what
were believed to constitute the properties of blood. The anxieties
anatomized in Thomas Elyot’s Boke named the Governour (1537)
about the degradation of “race,” or the corruption of noble blood,
describe the physical technologies by which virtue—both physical and
moral—was thought to be conveyed through bloodlines. Daniel Defoe’s
later satire “A True-Born Englishman” (1708) echoes this rationale for
difference. The language of his poem not only insinuates the crossover
of the term “race” from family lines to national groups, but also
supplies evidence that both kinds of racial ideology—whether affirming
social hierarchy or national superiority—rest upon the invisible
qualities of the blood. In late eighteenth-century Anglo-America, Thomas
Jefferson invokes such notions as "White," "Indian," and "Negro" blood
in order to suggest an essential difference between what he calls "the
races," a difference that he sees as "fixed in nature," thereby
anticipating modern racialism.
A comparative conference such as
ours, that is trans-historical and transnational and draws literary
critics and historians of cultures on both sides of the Atlantic world,
will make a significant contribution to this ongoing debate about the
“invention” of race.
Plenary Speakers:
- Jennifer Brody, Department of African and African American Studies, Duke University
- Michael Hanchard, Department of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University
- Ruth Hill, Department of Spanish, Italian & Portuguese, The University of Virginia
- Mary Floyd-Wilson, Department of English, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Questions:
- How does blood rationalize bodily difference in the period in which you work?
- How is blood used as a metaphor in your period? How is it contested?
- How—and why—is the idea of blood transforming? How does it operate in the body?
- What are the physical technologies of the body and how are these pressed into the service of difference? Conversely, how is the rationalization of bodily difference embedded in “scientific” discourse?
- Is religious difference figured in cultural or somatic terms?
- Does the body have a moral constitution?
PLEASE SUBMIT ABSTRACTS OF 500 WORDS FOR COMPLETE PANELS (ABSTRACTS PLUS PANEL DESCRIPTIONS), INCOMPLETE PANELS, OR INDIVIDUAL PAPERS BY NOVEMBER 5, 2010, TO: bloodwork@umd.edu.