Border Crossings:Translation, Migration, & Gender in the Americas, the Transatlantic, & the Transpacific
Society for the Study of American Women Writers & Université Bordeaux Montaigne
Dates: 5th – 8th July 2017
Venue: Université Bordeaux Montaigne, France
Conference director: Stéphanie Durrans

To maintain a continuity with their previous conference (in Philadelphia, November 2015) on liminality and hybrid lives, the organisers would like this first SSAWW conference in Europe to address the significance of “border crossing[s]” in the lives and works of American women writers. Such experiences have always been important to American women. Early diaries and travel notes left by 17th– and 18th-century women provide us with valuable records of and about their migratory experience to the New World and their lives and experiences in America. Besides offering more records of such experiences, the 19th century also witnessed an explosion in travel writing, fiction, and poetry treating with travel, as growing numbers of American women writers could afford to travel across Europe and more widely.

Throughout the 20th century, more American women writers found in foreign lands a source of inspiration and creativity (e.g. Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, Kay Boyle, and Djuna Barnes in France, Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil, Katherine Anne Porter in Mexico) and some of them even made the choice to write from abroad. Meanwhile, women writers originating from other countries drew on their first-hand experience of migration, border-crossing, and uprooting to add to the growing canon of American literature (e.g. Jumpa Lahiri, Bharati Mukherjee, Shirley Geok-lin Lim). No study of border-crossing can afford to neglect the rich mine of writing contributed by Chicana writers throughout the 20th century. As pointed out by Carmen Tafolla, “[Chicanos] did not cross the border; the border crossed [them].” This was also true of many other women, moving into or across America. From such a perspective, crossing borders lends itself to the most radical strategies of subversion and defamiliarization. Last but not least, such writers as Toni Morrison explored the darker side of border-crossing by seeking to express and represent the trauma of the Middle Passage for whole generations of Africans, and the multiple dilemmas facing African American women down the decades.

The conference theme invites participants to explore the broad spectrum of possibilities generated by such cross-cultural interactions, as well as the challenge consequently posed to literary canons. How has this experience affected women writers’ worldview and conception of language? To what extent do their modes of exploration differ from that of their male counterparts? How important were such contacts in allowing women writers to develop a consciousness of otherness and/or forge a community of feeling and experience transcending national and/or cultural barriers? “Chroniclers bind the inner and outward history of isolated humanity, but travellers connect all humanity together,” stated Grace King in one of the first entries to her diary. More often than not, indeed, geographical borders assume an ontological dimension, and crossing them amounts to an exploration of the self as much as to a confrontation with otherness. Crossings have always involved a necessary stage of transition, transformation, and consequent redefinition of the self that questions the very stability and permanence traditionally associated with women’s conventionalized roles. Thus the organisers are very happy to consider writers using the idea of border crossing and travel symbolically or metaphorically as well as literally: early female travellers, explorers, and adventurers crossed borders in more ways than one, often by transgressing gender expectations, using this experience or awareness to reshape the conventions of many genres. One might also approach the topic by focusing on what happens when literary works cross national borders to reach foreign readers in translation. In this respect, translation studies and studies of American women writers’ reception abroad constitute another potentially fruitful arena.

As a multiethnic, multilingual society, the U.S. undoubtedly provides fertile terrain for the development of a transnational consciousness that will be pivotal to the questioning on the topic. Possible approaches to the conference theme may include but are not limited to such keywords and ideas as:
§  Women writers and travel writing
§  The migratory experience
§  Expatriate American women writers
§  Expatriate women writers in Paris
§  The Lost Generation
§  Redefining the national canon
§  Transnationalism
§  Transatlantic studies
§  Transcontinental/Transpacific/Transatlantic literary relationships
§  Geographical borders/ontological issues
§  Representations of otherness
§  Cross-cultural interactions
§  Cross-linguistic perceptions/living between two languages
§  Women and frontier experiences
§  Translation studies
§  American women writers’ reception in foreign countries
§  Women writers’ reception in America and Europe

Submission Instructions
Deadline: August 31, 2016 (Individual Papers)
Submissions are electronic. Submit individual proposals and completed panel proposals to ssaww2017.bordeaux.montaigne@gmail.com both attached in Word or rtf, and pasted into the body of the message.
The conference organizers welcome and encourage complete session submissions as well as individual paper abstract submissions. Affiliate associations and regional groups should follow the submission guidelines for complete session submissions.
Conference participants may appear on the program twice as presenters: once on a panel presenting a formal academic paper, and once in an additional way (for example, on a roundtable, as a respondent, or in a “professionalization” session).

Individual Paper Abstract Submission Guidelines-Deadline August 31, 2016
Email Header: Please put “Individual Submission” in the subject line, followed by a brief title of the paper (one to five words)
In the body of the email, as well as attached in Word or rtf, please include the following:
To facilitate the copying of accepted submissions directly into the program, please provide the submission in the following format at the beginning of the submission:

Name, affiliation (if any), title of paper in quotation marks; the items are separated by commas and there is no period at the end.
Example:
Mary Smith, Nu University, “Empowered by Literature”

Then, please provide the following:
§  Name and affiliation (if any)
§  Email and phone contact (phone will only be used in the event of email failure)
§  Title of paper:
§  Abstract (250 – 300 words)
§  A/V requirements: please indicate none or yes; if yes, please specify the equipment required.
§  Brief biography (60 word limit)

Submit to: ssaww2017.bordeaux.montaigne@gmail.com by August 31, 2016 (individual papers).

Every attempt will be made to notify submitters of the status of their proposals by October 31, 2016 and to have the draft program in place by November 30, 2016.

Estimated Conference Costs

Early registration (between November 1, 2016 and January 31, 2017):
§  Faculty members: circa 130 euros (incl. lunch, coffee breaks and closing banquet)
§  Students: circa 100 euros (incl. lunch, coffee breaks and closing banquet)

Late registration (after February 1, 2017): circa 145 euros (faculty)/115 euros (students)
Accommodation: 60-150 euros per night (hotel) or 30-40 euros per night (basic student accommodation)
Questions about conference registration can be directed to:
ssaww2017.bordeaux.montaigne@gmail.com