CFP: “Culture Shock Philosophy”: A Dissensual Approach to Comparative Studies

“Culture Shock Philosophy”: A Dissensual Approach to Comparative Studies --- Prospective Anthology

Edited by Amy Donahue, Leah Kalmanson, and Sam O. Opondo

Fields such as comparative philosophy, indigenous studies, postcolonial theory, and transnational feminism challenge assumptions about the homogeneity and peripheral status of nonwestern cultures in ways that potentially refuse presumptions of western privilege. The editors of this prospective anthology invite submissions of papers that bring together — in new, creative, and perhaps contentious ways — these various disciplines working within, across, or against comparative theoretical studies. We especially encourage work that refuses to solely extend genealogically western textual tools, such as critical theory and deconstruction, into nonwestern contexts, but instead also draws on indigenous, nonwestern, and postcolonial intellectual resources to suggest theoretical and practical possibilities that analytic or continental comparative approaches may foreclose. For example, how do particular concepts and methods of nonwestern intellectual traditions strengthen, challenge, conflict, or resonate with concepts and methods that contemporary critical theorists deploy to contest the central position of the western subject and the forms of knowledge it privileges?

Topics that you might choose to engage include, but are certainly not limited to:

• Being and Becoming / Substance and Event
• Empty, Relational, or Intersectional Selves
• Deconstruction / Feminism / Marxism
• Indigeneity / Environmentalism / Ecocriticism
• Repetition / Performativity / Ritual
• Subjectivity / Embodiment / Desire
• Truth / Knowledge / Power 

Please send abstracts of approximately 250 words to Amy Donahue at [email protected]> by April 15, 2012.