CFP: ASA 2008 Narrating the Local: Oral Histories, Ethnographies, and Artist Interviews
Call for Papers Date: March 10, 2008
We are seeking paper proposals for a proposed panel for the the ASA 2008 Visual and Performing Arts subtheme. The conference will take place in Chicago November 13-16, 2008.
This panel seeks to examine the relationship between the production of scholarly narratives and research methods making use of oral histories, ethnographies, and interviews. This paradigm has long been central to Africanist scholarship; in the case of scholarship on African cultural production for instance, local voices are the primary modes through which creative propositions come to be understood (despite claims about the death of the author and discussions around intentional fallacy). Our panel seeks to open up and grapple with this model by exploring the following lines of inquiry: How do individual histories and interviews figure into broader narratives about collective projects or institutions? How do the voices of cultural producers/artists factor into the scholarly representation of their works? How might we complicate the ways interviews serve as evidence substantiating various claims, as data to moor meaning, as a contestable object, and as performative interactions? How does ethnographic production center and de-center scholarly narratives? How do the processes and objectives of interviews relate to issues of representation and the creation of scholarly discourse? What role does audience/reception, local and/or global, play in the writing of these histories? How might interviews extend other discursive frames and theoretical orientations through which this production is understood?
Please submit paper proposals to Carol Magee (cmagee@email.unc.edu) and Joanna Grabski (grabski@denison.edu) March 10, 2008.
Carol Magee
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
cmagee@email.unc.edu
Joanna Grabski
Denison University
grabski@denison.edu
Email: cmagee@email.unc.edu
