CFP: The City and the Ocean: Urbanity, (Im)migration, Memory, and Imagination

Center for the Humanities and Social Sciences
National Sun Yat-sen University, Taiwan

Call for Papers / 2010 International Conference
The City and the Ocean: Urbanity, (Im)migration, Memory, and Imagination

4th International Conference of the Center for the Humanities and Social Sciences, National Sun Yat-sen University, 16-17 October 2010, 80424 Kaohsiung, Taiwan.

Through history, cities and their inhabitants are locations of encounters between peoples, the trade of goods and services, the evolution of various forms of urban space, and the production of culture and technology. Cities continue to reproduce a series of familiar "common places," each a site of shared memory: centers of government and other public buildings; places of worship and other sacred spaces; neighborhoods and other residential areas; markets and other commercial zones; and public spaces such as squares, monuments, and parks. Throughout history, many cities are located at oceans and the conference's theme of the city and migration is understood in relation to the ocean. With the twentieth and twenty-first centuries a new set of global megacities in Asia, Africa, and Latin America has emerged to challenge the primacy of European and North American metropolitan centers. This expanded landscape of the city and urbanities -- here in relation to cities located at the ocean -- suggests to both re-imagine and to re-member the city where memory functions to organize aspects of the city in its now increased pluralistic globalized cultural context. With the movements and flux of (im)migrants, exiles and refugees, climate refugees, ethnic and racial minorities, alternative or countercultural groupings, etc. continue to contest and complicate the ways in which cities articulate their pluralized identities and societies through literature, history, architecture, social function, and various forms of artistic and cultural production. Papers in the conference examine the problematics of urban identities in cities at the ocean in the context of memory, (im)migration, and imagination in order to offer interpretations on the multiple and parallel versions of the city today.

Abstracts of papers in 200 words with CV are invited by 15 February 2010 to Professor I-Chun Wang at chsc705[at]mail.nsysu.edu.tw. Revised and peer-reviewed long versions of the conference papers are planned to be published in the National Sun Yat-sen University Humanities and Social Sciences Monograph Series and participants in the conference are required to submit their papers after the conference.

Proposals are welcomed, but not limited to the following topics and areas:

• Between ocean and city
  
• Ocean and migration
  
• Geography and literature
  
• Landscape and cityscape
  
• Cross-Atlantic or cross-Pacific travel
  
• Harbor city and Maritime city
  
• City and human rights
  
• City, ocean and war
  
• Slaveship
  
• Travel
  
• Geopolitics
  
• Maritime material culture
  
• City and maritime history
  
• Navy and sea battle
  
• Seafaring
  
• Maritime heritage
  
• Seapower
  
• Translantic Trade
  
• Men of the sea
  

Center for the Humanities and Social Sciences National Sun Yat-sen University, Taiwan 國立中山大學人文社會科學研究中心 [Tel] +886-7-5252000 ext.3241 [Fax]+886-7-5250818 [E-mail] chsc705@mail.nsysu.edu.tw [Web] http://humanitiescenter.nsysu.edu.tw