Call for Papers: Living Europe, Writing Europe
From April 15-17, 2014 the Europa-Kolleg of the University of Münster is hosting the conference “Living Europe, Writing Europe: Literary Perceptions of Urbanization and ‹Provincializing› European Identities.”
Dipesh Chakrabarty’s notion of ‹provincializing› Europe is a dissection of the perception of Europe as a cradle of modernity. Its value lies with the production of innovative concepts in a debate of European future(s) after globalization. But the act of ‹provincializing› is just one example from a larger repertoire of critical methods used to identify cultural parameters that shape regional identities (which, in an expansion of Chakrabarty’s concept, can also be localized within Europe). These serve as model identities for larger communities, such as provinces or even states. Similar parameters exist for urban identities, allowing for a comparative approach between urbanization in Europe and similar processes which, according Benedict Anderson, are constitutive for the emergence of “imagined communities”. These include, for example, the development of an institutionalized nexus between religious belief and territory or the increasing centralization of political systems.
Whether cities or regions gain in importance due to this development (or whether they are just perceived differently) remains one of the questions to be clarified. In terms of the “spatial turn”, cities and regions are not only to be perceived as geographical entities. Instead, processes of urbanization and ‹provincializing› should be considered for the social practices and medial procedures that inform them. This conference aims to explore how urban and regional literatures reflect Europe as a semantic space and how these concepts of Europe can be evaluated.