Annual Conference

Humor, comedy, and play represent the ingrained performances of morality that shape both everyday and academic life as we balance socialized behavior with comedic instinct. The tensions of academia—the barrage of critical symposiums on existential issues, the weight of global and local tragedies, and the looming threats to academic autonomy and funding—create daily moral dilemmas. These dilemmas point to the fundamental paradox of comedy and despair at the heart of humor studies.

This year’s conference, “Humor, Comedy, and Play in Times of Crisis,” invited UC Santa Barbara community to reflect on the humor in their work and lives and to join scholars in discussing the stakes of laughing—or not laughing—in times of crisis.

Keynote Speaker: Dorota Dutsch (UC Santa Barbara)

Water is an essential and ever present feature in our lives, a substance whose salience often goes unnoticed in its ubiquity. Indeed, not only does water sustain the possibility of life as we know it, it also connects us—humans and non-humans— across vast countries and disparate continents. Down to the very fabric of our beings, so much of our collective history is tied to water. From stories of creation and waterborne travel to the ongoing horrors of (neo)colonialism and enslavement, water holds a reflective mirror up to us and our societies. Today, however, our relationship with water is perhaps more tenuous than ever as the global socio-ecological crisis threatens to—among other things—submerge even more of our shared world beneath the waves. 

In addition to its powers of reflection, liquid water is also unique for its properties as a “universal” solvent, one which is able to dissolve more substances than any other. In this sense, water’s abilities to bind and unbind relationships on a molecular level can also be extended to the study of culture, literature, history, and media more broadly. Amongst a wealth of others, the Martinican philosopher-poet Édouard Glissant and his work on the “poetics of relation” stands out as one notable example that traces liquidity in this fashion. 

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Elizabeth DeLoughrey (UCLA)

Considering the expansiveness and complexity of conceptions of collectivity alongside its dispossessions in global contexts of colonialism and structural and systemic violence, this year’s conference brought together papers that explored collectivity and its shifting identities, representations, political, social, and class affiliations, and affects.

Collectivity—be it social or spatial—can be fluid and even conditional, and is often not bound to a single form of representation or space. This can be seen in various participatory social projects uniting communities across geographies through shared experiences. This is apparent, for example, in the rise of transnational feminist collaborative art spaces throughout the 1970s, where the creation of socially engaged art programs, spaces, magazines, and feminist archives became new sites of solidarity. Another example can be found in commemorative objects like the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, which displays collectivity while evolving in form through time and space. Beginning in 1987, the quilt continues to grow as individuals contribute to it in communal grief and remembrance of lives lost to AIDS.

With these ideas in mind, this year’s conference posed the following questions: How is collectivity imagined, built, and sustained in art, literature, performance, and film? What conditions are placed on the collective, and to what extent is individual participation negotiated? How does resistance manifest itself collectively when the site of community is dispersed or disconnected from its roots? Alternatively, how can individuals resist being drawn into social identifications that no longer serve them?

Keynote Speaker: Professor Meryem Kamil (UC Irvine)

As conversations around landscape and nature became central to global discussions in film, art, and literature studies—at a time of ecological reckoning and social reframing— this conference brought together emerging and established scholars from a variety of disciplines for a one-day conference.

Landscape and garden have produced a broad variety of often conflicting attitudes and narratives that frame our relations with what is considered natural, from romanticized notions of wilderness to the expansive opportunities of the urban landscape; from colonial dreams of exploitation and hegemony to the laborious process of decolonization; from the picturesque to the banal and the inhospitable landscapes of the global fringes.

This year’s conference examined current and past practices to reframe conversations about this ubiquitous topic as it has been interpreted in literary fiction, the arts, and filmic media.

Keynote Speaker: Professor Ellen Moore (University of Washington, Tacoma)

Amid growing global interest in linguistic diversity and calls for forms that transcend monistic or monolingual paradigms, the UCSB Graduate Center for Literary Research (GCLR) invited both emerging and established scholars from a variety of disciplines to come together for a one-day hybrid conference. The conference aimed to reframe conversations on this ubiquitous topic as it has been interpreted in literary fiction and the arts. This year’s theme, “Forked Tongues,” explored the role played by translingualism, polylingualism, multilingualism, non-nativism, and translation in literature, art, and film across disciplines.

A diverse, international array of presenters gave papers that reconsidered literary and artistic representations of “speaking with forked tongues”—from biblical allusions to the pervasive violence of linguistic suppression—and how these forms offer radical potential to disrupt existing and/or imaginary monolingual paradigms, allowing for a more ethical approach to theorizing language beyond fixed borders. In addition to the keynote address and four virtual graduate student panels, this year’s conference also featured a special undergraduate panel.

Keynote Speaker: Professor Yasemin Yildiz (UCLA)

As climate change has become a central topic of discussion, laced with the uncertainty of tomorrow, the UCSB Graduate Center for Literary Research invited scholars from a variety of disciplines to reframe their conversations with a focus on this ubiquitous topic as it has been interpreted in literary fiction, as well as within the arts. Originally coined by Dan Bloom, Climate-Fiction, popularly known as Cli-Fi, is a type of fiction that explores what the earth might become if climate change continues at its current rate, and specifically if humans do not intervene to save the planet. As many successful authors, such as Margaret Atwood, T. C. Boyle, Amitav Ghosh, Ursula Le Guin, Lydia Millet, David Mitchell, and Leslie Marmon Silko, have contributed to promulgating the topics of climate change and global warming into the public eye, Cli-Fi has gained prominence as more than a fringe genre. 2020 conference papers addressed the mediums that engage with climate change -- from genre fictions to fict-documentaries, mainstream novels, poetry, works of nonfiction, and film, and their tenuous borderings - asking how they overlap, diverge, reflect and/or imagine the nonhuman/posthuman experience of enviromental change and destruction, compel us to rethink geopolitics, and complicate questions of post-coloniality. 

Keynote Speaker: Professor Sven Spieker (UC Santa Barbara)

he study of memory has developed dynamically, transculturally, transnationally, and through ongoing scientific and sociohistorical discoveries and changes. In collaboration with the Memory Studies Reading Group, the sixth annual GCLR conference examined the interplay between memory and movement through a wide range of perspectives and disciplines. Presentation topics included the effects of neuroscientific discoveries and digital discourse on our understanding of individual and collective identity, the role of literature and art in thinking through trauma and transgenerational memories, the role of narrative in the possibility for healing after disaster, and the power of memories held within buildings, structures, and cities. The wide range of presentations that guided our conference's conversations showcased the immense significance, scope, and implications of the field of memory studies both across disciplines and at this particular moment in our world.

Keynote Speaker: Professor Michael Rothberg (UCLA)

In an era when civil wars, breakaway movements, economic upheavals, nationalist politics, and isolationist policies are at once thickening, erasing, and redrawing the lines that divide us physically and figuratively from one another, a unique opportunity arises for scholars to investigate critically what these lines mean for world communities and individual lives. The Graduate Center for Literary Research at UC Santa Barbara provided a forum for this scholarly inquiry at its 5^th annual conference, Borderlines, gathering a variegated range of critical voices on the questions raised by the borders, real and imagined, that divide us. How do we overcome labels and defy categories? How do we bridge linguistic, cultural, and ethical divides? What does it mean to cross the threshold, transgress the boundary, hop the border, to deport or import, or to at once immigrate and emigrate? In short, what does it mean to cross the line?   

Keynote Speakers: Professor Amanda L. Petersen (University of San Diego) and Professor Jahan Ramazani (University of Virginia)

In a year when the Nobel Committee has invited a critical reexamination of a border between the sonic and the textual by awarding the Nobel Prize in Literature to Bob Dylan, UC Santa Barbara’s Graduate Center for Literary Research held its fourth annual interdisciplinary conference: Resonance. Resonance explores configurations of the graphic, phonic, textual and sonic, among and between cultures, literatures, languages, media, musics, and inter(subjects). How can resonance guide our inquiry into the dynamics between texts, stages, performers, artists, spaces, and audiences? How do bodies and materials generate and mediate resonance? How might we engage with resonance “to replace the binaries of structuralist thought with [a discourse] diametrically opposed to a distancing and objectifying form of knowledge”? (Veit Erlmann, Keywords in Sound).

Keynote Speaker: Professor Ashon Crawley (UC Riverside)

Our third annual graduate conference seeks to explore the topics of translation, memory and exchange within the context of migration. We are interested in how questions of cultural transfer and linguistic translation—using translation in an expansive sense of the term—inflect textual and media representations of migration. Papers analyze the translative practice of migrant writers, artists, filmmakers and intellectuals as they navigate the increasingly ephemeral and shifting spheres of co-existence in the age of globalization. How does translation serve to mediate space, belonging and intersubjectivity in literature, film and art? How can we expand the fields of translation and literary studies to encompass these urgent questions of movement and migration?

Keynote Speaker: Professor Efraín Kristal (UCLA)

The term “Cut ‘n’ Mixed” summons the image of a sound engineer mixing at an editing desk, or a DJ juggling samples together at a turntable or even the creative insurgent who scavenges the resources of culture to produce new forms that challenge and resist. “Cut ‘n’ Mixed” displaces conceptions of cultural production that affirm originality and authenticity, valorizing instead the remix, sampling, multiple versionings and other forms of rewriting. The broader theoretical implications of an aesthetics of turntablism, with its rhizomatic roots in the Jamaican sound system and U.S. urban culture, demand engagement. Issues of cultural hybridity, intellectual property, culture jamming, the politics of reappropriating found objects and the aesthetic and social implications of electronic dance music and hip hop all converge in the coordinates of “Cut ‘n’ Mixed.” “Cut ‘n’ Mixed” successfully made connections between this paradigm and literary research; the conference remained interested in the ways cuts, breaks, mixes and improvisation can be incorporated in performances. Both traditional academic presentations and presentations that had a performative component were included.

Keynote Speaker: Professor Sohail Daulatzai (UC Irvine)

The first annual GCLR conference centered upon the theme "Disclosure." While disclosure is often defined in terms of divulging information and sharing secrets, it also evokes hidden, withheld, or disavowed knowledge(s). Disclosure can serve as a destabilizing act or influence in a range of contexts, from sharing “forbidden” information on the internet (à la Wikileaks) to confiding difficult truths to a caregiver. As disclosures erupt into existing discourses, narratives, and epistemological landscapes, alternative topographies emerge: ideas about what can be known, what may be hidden, and what must be shared become mutable. Disclosure therefore suggests transformation; it prompts a (re)evaluation of the multiple contexts and positionalities that give shape to the ways we understand our worlds.

Keynote Speaker: Glyn Salton-Cox (UC Santa Barbara)