Conference: Cross-Cultural Poetics

Dates: October 16-19, 1997

Despite artificial disciplinary barriers, ethnographers & poets have in recent years come to realize how similar their projects are. Cross-Cultural Poetics seeks to address the increasingly untenable boundaries between poetic & ethnographic practices. The conference will focus on the role of poetry in the on-going discourses of multiculturalism, ethnography, and literary theory and practice. While recent years have seen a debate in "how culture is written (about)" and most of these debates make extensive use of the term "poetics," poetic discourse itself has not been foregrounded as a significant measure and critique-mechanism in the matrix of cultural writings. Construing the term "poetry" fairly broadly, we invite poets and scholars working in a broad range of fields -- anthropology, urban studies, ethnic studies, folklore, literature and literary theory, sociology, history, publishing, film, American studies, performance studies, ethnomusicology, cultural studies, etc. -- to propose readings, papers or panels that address one or more of the following areas:

• Comparative Poetries &/or Poetic Traditions
• Oral/Literate Interfaces or Standoffs
• Anthropological Methodologies Applied to Poetic Texts, Communities, Events, or Individual Poems or Poets
• Ethnography as Poetry/Poetry as Ethnography
• Ethnic, Folkloric & Vernacular Poetries
• Poetry as Cultural & Social Praxis
• Poetry as Cultural & Social Critique
• Constituting Communities through Poetic Activity
• Poetry as Mass Culture
• Poetry & the Public Sphere
• The Anthropology of Writing & the Writing of Anthropology
• Representing Self/Other
• Issues in Cultural Translation
• "Ethnopoetics": Reappraisals?
• Poetry & Other Media (Song Lyrics, Music, Film, Movement, Visual Arts, etc.)
• Close Readings of &/or Listenings to Ethnographic Documents
• The Poetics of Thick Description
• Ritual, Play, etc. as Elements in Poetic Composition
• The Act of Inscription: Fieldnotes, Notebooks, etc.
• The Cultural Migration of Texts
• Hybridization of Genres & Traditions
• Trans/Post/Supra -National Poetics

PAPERS, WRITING SAMPLES (FOR POETS WANTING TO READ) AND PANEL PROPOSALS (a 1-2-page abstract) should be sent by March 15, 1997 to Maria Damon, English Dept., 207 Lind Hall, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis MN 55455.