Dear colleagues,

I would like to inform you about the international and interdisciplinary
conference "Narrating and Constructing the Beach" (Keynote: Michael
Taussig) at the Amerikahaus München, 14.-16. June 2018. Please find the
CfP below (deadline for abstracts: 14 January, 2018).

We would be very pleased to welcome some musicologists to our
conference!

Best regards,
Dominik Pensel

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Dominik Pensel
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
Institut für deutsche Philologie
Schellingstraße 3 / RG 416a
80799 München
Tel: +49 (0)89 2180-6220
http://www.ndl3.germanistik.uni-muenchen.de/index.html
http://www.germanistik.uni-muenchen.de/personal/ndl/mitarbeiter/pensel-dominik/index.html

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CFP: NARRATING AND CONSTRUCTING THE BEACH, MUNICH (ABSTRACTS: 14
JANUARY, 2018) 

International and interdisciplinary conference at the Amerikahaus
Munich, 14 - 16 June, 2018 

Keynote: Michael Taussig, Professor of Anthropology, Columbia University


The beach has recently become the site of important transformations:
understood in the context of mass tourism for many years, nowadays we
perceive the beach as bearing witness to the arrival of refugees, to
pollution and climate change (e.g. tsunamis, rising sea levels), and to
a growing number of sociocultural conflicts (e.g. over dress codes as in
the case of burkini / nudist debates). As an area of unregulated
movement as well as an institutional / institutionalized border, the
beach receives growing media interest, but still remains at the
periphery of maritime studies in academia. To do justice to the complex
spatial concepts, dynamics, practices, and aesthetics of the beach, the
international conference ›_Narrating and Constructing the Beach_‹ views
it as a (border) phenomenon in its own right and sets out to analyze it
systematically and historically. 

The (European) »invention of the beach«, which Alain Corbin situates
approximately in the 18th century, is connected to a myriad of
discourses and practices which crystallize at, and are projected onto,
the beach. In this respect, the conference will trace the manifold,
changing, and at times competing representations and experiences of the
beach in artwork, culture, and society as well as the many cultural
imaginaries of the beach in their global and historical diversity. One
focal point will concern the techniques employed to narrate, construct,
and reshape ›the beach‹: it is our cultural, artistic, and perceptual
practices that produce the beach as an ever changing aesthetic,
sociocultural, political, historical, and also geographic space. As
such, the beach is at once liminal and multiple, determined by the
juxtaposition of land, ocean and sky as well as the blurring of the
lines that separate them. It can turn from a representational space to a
living space, and is at times perceived as a non-place or a heterotopia.


From differing and decidedly interdisciplinary research perspectives,
the conference also inquires into how ways of experiencing the beach
interact with sociocultural body practices and markers of difference
(such as gender, ethnicity, nationality, religion, class, age,
dis/ability, etc.): locals and travelers alike can perceive the beach as
a space of encounter with the - erotic or dangerous - other, leading to
(transitory) loss or vehement demarcation of the self. Contributing
practices include _Grand Tours_, medical / health retreats, beach
pastimes (swimming, promenading, building sand castles, collecting
seashells as well as flotsam and jetsam), (mass-)touristic colonization,
gender specific productions of subspaces (e.g. through towels, gazes),
or the artificial incorporation of beaches into cities. Contributions
could investigate these and other aspects from the point of view of
changing cultural, medial, or aesthetic forms. 

But even when not thinking of such sociocultural ties, the beach remains
a fluid and a non-localizable space which constitutes itself mainly via
relations: for example, it is dependent on, yet also autonomous from,
the sea and water, the harbor, urban structures, and other forms of the
shore and the coast. The beach can be read in analogy or opposition to
the harbor when representing the clandestine or the disturbances and
disruptions in global systems of institutionalized trade currents and
travel itineraries. To reach the beach might, thus, result from going
astray, evading the harbor, or missing it - from being stranded. By
analyzing the establishment of sanatoriums, the regulation of trade,
tourism or migration, presentations could detail how processes of order
and institutionalization remain (in)visible, how they (temporarily)
establish structures, or even how they are in vain. 

While the conference is interested in how these liminal and multiple
border spaces are narrated and constructed by sociocultural practices,
it also investigates how beaches are generated by literature, music,
theater, performance, film, photography, and art as (aesthetic) spaces
and in which ways ›the beach‹ shapes and transforms both poetics and
aesthetics. 

We thus invite contributions from all fields interested in cultural
studies and pertaining to all epochs and places around the globe to
analyze beaches as cultural artifacts or in cultural artifacts.
Researchers can take into account the connections and interactions
between the discursive conditions of the beach, its aesthetic
dimensions, and its historical and cultural practices. 

Abstracts in English or German (300-500 words) for a 30-minute
presentation and a subsequent 15-minute discussion can be submitted with
a short academic C.V. by January 14, 2018 to the following email
address: [log in to unmask] Submissions should not have been
previously published as we plan to publish the conference proceedings.
Please indicate whether you might be comfortable speaking in English
and/or German so we can find a balance between both conference
languages. 

Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich
Organization: Graduate School Language & Literature - Class of
Literature
Team: Stefan Brückl, Ines Ghalleb, Dominik Pensel, Roxanne Phillips,
Katharina Simon, Florian Telsnig
[log in to unmask]
http://www.en.prolit.uni-muenchen.de/projects/conference/index.html
Organized in cooperation with the Bavarian American Academy and the
Amerikahaus Munich: http://www.amerikahaus.de/