Looking forward to participate today and tomorrow (14-15 October) in the symposium “Urban (Im)mobilities and Borderland Narratives“, a collaboration between the Fringe network and the Association for Literary Urban Studies. The symposium is hosted by the University of Alcala, Spain. Unfortunately, we will not be able to meet in person – hope I will the opportunity to visit Alcala in person in the not-too-distant future!
Thriled by the promising array of keynote speakers, and especially looking forward to the talks of Anna-Leena Toivanen on “Mobilities and the City in Francophone
African Literatures” and Tania Rossetto on “From the Cartographic Fringes: Map
Mobilizations and the Urban”.
My own presentation, ”Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist: Contesting Elevation in the Modern City”, will approach the allegory of the elevator in The Intuitionist as figure that contests urban modernity’s promises of universal upward mobility.
Conference abstract:
“Our symposium builds on recent contributions of literary scholarship on mobility (Marian Aguiar, Charlotte Mathieson and Lynne Pearce) and is rooted in the “new mobilities” framework developed by the sociologists and geographers (Miloš N. Mladenović, Catherine N. Nash, Andrew Gorman-Murray, Mimi Sheller and John Urry). This framework is sensitive to the intersecting dimensions of power and discrimination that shape urban kinetic features. We invite scholars across disciplines and geographical contexts with an interest in examining how (im)mobility in the city is constructed and narrated by intersections of race, nationality, disability, class, gender, sexual orientation and other social categories and status markers. We are particularly interested in work that addresses liminal or queer identities, urban borderlands (alleyways, bridges, roads, borders between neighborhoods) and experiences that operate in or between peripheral urban environments, from post-industrial zones in capital cities to (sub)urban environments that are situated outside the canonized capitals of modernity and postmodernity.”
Many thanks to the brilliant Patricia Garcia for hosting the conference, for bringing together exciting scholars from a range of background!