The focus of the 30th Annual International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts is on time and the fantastic.  The conference will be held in Orlando, Florida, from March 18 - 22, 2009 at the Orlando Airport Marriott Hotel. For more information and updates about the conference, please visit www.iafa.org.

Topics include (but are not limited to):

• How audiences/communities construct their own folklore, legends, and urban legends
• Archiving and transmission of community folklore and legend
• How folklore, myth, and legend impact individual and group expressions of identity
• Linguistic and philosophical elements of folklore, myth, and urban legend and how these impact audience interaction with the texts
• How fantastical personae impact the expression and definition of personal identity
• Media representations of fantastical communities

CONTACT INFORMATION:
Barbara Lucas, Division Head Community and Culture in the Fantastic Division barbedwriting@yahoo.com

You can review all conference information at the IAFA website: www.iafa.org. Bookmark the site so you can check for updates. For information and updates specific to the Community and Culture Division, visit: http://community.livejournal.com/ccfantastic/.

South Pacific Resort Hotel, Norfolk Island
9-17th October, 2009

Papers are invited for a conference on Australian Literature to be held on Norfolk Island in October, 2009. While papers are welcome on any aspect of Australian writing, we are particularly interested in writing by and about the convicts, or any writing associated with Norfolk Island. Papers can be up to 30-minutes long, but there are strict limits on the number of papers we can accept (up to 20) as conference sessions will occupy only the mornings of the conference period. There will also be a session where participants can present brief outlines of their current projects to the assembled group.  Abstracts for papers of 200-300 words should be sent to Susan Lever (s.lever@adfa.edu.au) or Julian Croft (juliancroft@bigpond.com) by 2 March, 2009.

This conference is open to all ASAL members and friends, though it is designed primarily for those who have retired from university teaching, with conference sessions in the mornings and time to explore Norfolk Island. The conference will not be beholden to the priorities of the current university system (no invited papers, no special postgrad sessions, no parallel papers). Spouses, partners, friends are welcome.

Accommodation: Travel and accommodation bookings through Oxley Travel. Contact Belinda Riordan: belinda@oxleytravel.com.au

American Comparative Literature Association
Annual Meeting
26-29 March 2009, Harvard University

In her essay "Comparative Literature and Global Citizenship," Mary Louise Pratt states that the changing social and political climate triggered by the processes of decolonization and globalization revitalizes comparative literature into “an especially hospitable space for the cultivation of ultiligualism, polyglossia, the arts of cultural mediation, deep intercultural understanding, and genuinely global consciousness.” Though exciting and stimulating, this space is not completely free from the politics of national boundaries and the uneven stratification of power in the global production of cultural values.

As David Damrosch suggests in What is World Literature? , even when we conceive the “national” extensively, cultural texts still embody local and national configurations in global circulation. It is due to the circulation of texts that remnants of local and national connotations are consistently dispersed into fragments, complicating definitive categories such as the national, the transnational, the world and the global in cultural production. This seminar hopes to continue the discussion started at last year’s ACLA meeting in Long Beach by proposing to investigate the production and circulation of Asian texts (literature, music, film, and other arts) between geopolitical spaces of the global and the local.

Focusing on the concept of production and circulation, in conjunction with this year’s theme, “Global Languages, Local Cultures,” the seminar will discuss both literary and cultural studies of Asian and Asian diasporic experience, internal and external immigration, (un)translatable national traditions, cultural (re)negotiations, etc, and the translational/ transnational politics of textual production and circulation.

E.K. TAN, Assistant Professor
Department of Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies
Stony Brook University
2120 Humanities Building
Stony Brook, NY 11794-5355
(631)632-7457
Email: entan@notes.cc.sunysb.edu
Visit the website at http://www.acla.org/acla2009/