The 16th Biennial Conference for the International Society for Religion, Literature and Culture

University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Cultures of Transition: Presence, Absence, Memory

19-21 October, 2012

CALL for PAPERS (Deadline for all proposals: 31 March 2012).

Today, culture is largely understood to be in transition. While national, regional, religious and local cultures had previously been described, in their various forms, as more or less stable entities, they are now increasingly perceived as determined by developments, influences, changes and conflicts related to secularisation, industrialisation, globalisation, migrations of various kinds, and many other politico-economic, cultural and religious forces.From this perspective, culture takes shape by processes in constant flux, as it negotiates between the presence of new conditions, values, ideas and beliefs on the one hand, and the absence of previously dominant ones on the other. Individual as well as group identities have come under these pressures of transition, and as a result the notion of memory has taken on increasingly central significance: individual and cultural memory provide connections and perform functions that are both indispensable and problematic in processes of identity formation, as manifested in literary, religious, philosophical and other conceptual and imaginative forms of expression. The ISRLC 2012 conference at the University of Copenhagen will address questions concerning religion, literature, the arts and theory within cultures in and of transition:

• In what ways do ‘experiences of presence’ and ‘experiences of absence’ carry and convey meaning in such cultures?

• What is the role of memory in such manifestations as literature, film, music, etc., as well as in ideas of invisible religious mediation?

• To what extent is existential meaning bound to experiences of ‘presence’ as opposed to ‘absence’?

• In what way does memory mediate between these experiences of ‘presence’ and ‘absence’?

• What types of hope and fear prompt visions of the future?

• To what extent are religion and the arts necessary for individual and collective identity in periods of transition and migration?

We invite proposals for the following panels which should be sent directly to the panel leaders. Each panel has its own abstract directing the conference theme to its particular field. Contact information (and deadline) are found on the respective panel pages. All questions concerning proposals should be addressed directly to the panel leaders.

Literature

Panel-convenors: Elisabeth Jay and Lynn Robson.

Raymond Williams’s characterization of the cultural process as a complex interplay between dominant, residual and emergent ideologies and practices carries implications for literature concerned with theological issues. How does a poetics of culture embedded in a narrative of loss – of Paradise, of the Promised Land, of the temple – build its new Jerusalems without neglecting or belittling the sufferings of the past? Are the only persuasive visions of the future rooted in narratives of the past? In an era of increased globalization where is the place for the retelling of national memories and pieties? Can religion negotiate between the individual and collective identity? The theoretical terminology in which these debates are conducted may be a modern phenomenon, but as classical epics remind us, a sense of living amid cultural flux has always been a primal literary impulse.

This panel welcomes proposals for papers which address the way in which literature has attempted to give theological expression to the issues of presence, absence, and memory raised by a sense of living in a culture in transition.

Abstracts of no more than 200 words should be sent to Elisabeth Jay at ejjay@brookes.ac.uk before 31 March, 2012.
For further information concerning this panel, please contact the panel convenor.

Biblical Studies
Panel convenor: Christine Joynes.

This panel welcomes papers that explore the place of presence, absence and memory in the interpretation of biblical texts. We are especially keen to encourage papers that examine the reception history of biblical texts, and engage with the ‘cultures in transition’ conference focus. Papers in this area might, for example, illustrate how biblical interpretation of particular texts has been in constant flux, influenced by certain cultural circumstances; or, in contrast, they may perhaps shed light on dominant threads in biblical interpretation, that have persisted despite changing cultural contexts. Consideration of biblical interpretation in any media (e.g. film, litarture, art etc.) is welcomed.

Abstracts of no more that 300 words should be sent to Christine Joynes at christine.joynes@trinity.ox.ac.uk before 31 March, 2012.
For further information concerning this panel, please contact the panel convenor.

Postcolonial Literature

Panel-convenor: Helga Ramsey-Kurz

Colonization may be understood as a form of intervention upsetting established cultural structures and norms and replacing them by stabilizing regimes, mostly fundamentally foreign to the people concerned. Decolonization, in turn, aims to undo this process of forceful and strategic transformation, to re-assert the presence of those marginalized and oppressed in its wake, to reconstruct their original identities and give new visibility to them. In retelling and re-assessing the erasures caused by colonization as well as celebrating the recuperation accomplished by decolonization, postcolonial literatures provide a wealth of approaches to cultural encounter, change and renewal, and exemplify plural forms of retrieval not only from the realm of the past but also from other states or zones of exclusion.

Contributors to our panel are invited to present work on postcolonial writings mapping these zones, describing the special identities that thrive in them and explaining the different forms of inclusion and exclusion by which these identities tend to be shaped. They may wish to consider which kinds of spiritual certainties and what religious and philosophical frameworks find expression in (post)colonial constructions of being- or not-being-in-the-world, or more specifically, of occupying a place at the centre or on the margins of a culture. Furthermore they may choose to address the question of how literature itself can constitute such a place and either give presence by re-presentation or create absence by omission.

Abstracts of no more that 300 words should be sent to Helga Ramsey-Kurz at Helga.Ramsey-Kurz@uibk.ac.at before 31 March, 2012.
For further information concerning this panel, please contact the panel convenor.

Film

Panel-convenor: S. Brent Plate

In keeping with the 2012 ISRLC theme on Cultures of Transition: Presence, Absence, Memory, we are hoping to host several sessions devoted to film. Cinema can both indicate change within its scenarios, but the cultural function of cinema can also alter culture, making us see and hear differently. It might also redefine urban and rural landscapes and living rooms with the presence and/or absence of movies theatres and high tech in home-theatres.

We are interested in presentations dealing with cinema in terms of secularism, globalism, and post-industrial life. One way to look at this might be through the role of spaces, sacred and secular. From Metropolis to Lost in Translation, cities have played significant roles in film, and we would like to have several papers looking at the place of urban life in the midst of religious and cultural transition. We might also examine the changing natural landscape as reflected in films. Meanwhile, over the years, films like Spellbound, La Jetee, and Memento, have dealt with memory and its loss in the midst of small-scale scenarios that may yet tell us about larger cultural currents.

Abstracts of no more that 300 words should be sent to Brent Plate at splate@hamilton.edu before 31 March, 2012.
For further information concerning this panel, please contact the panel convenor.

Gender

Panel-convenors: Pamela Sue Anderson and Dana Mills

gender, memory, absence

“When we lose certain people, or when we are disposed of a place, or a community, we may simply feel that we are undergoing something temporary, that mourning will be over and some restoration of previous order will be achieved. But maybe when we undergo what we do, something about who we are is revealed, something that delineates the ties we have to others, that show us that these ties constitute what we are, ties or bonds that compose us” (Judith Butler, Precarious life: the powers of mourning and violence, Verso: London and New York, 2004, p. 22)

Some elements of human life draw past, present and future together. Human beings from the ancient polis till nowadays, from Antigone to 9.11 have loved and lost, changed and learnt, grieved and rejoiced. The changing tides of culture and the expansion of the discursive range have brought upon many changes to gender relations and embodiment alike. New challenges bring about new identities, and at the same time, the change leaves its marks in the human body, through traces of memory. Individual and cultural memory interplay with gender relations and moments of absence leave identities scarred and at the same time finding new potential for flourishing.

This panel will seek to explore the relationship between gender, the private, the public and the body. It will strive to emphasize both new vistas for identity construction and the cost memory might bear on the individual as always belonging to a larger cultural environment. Questions that the panel seeks to explore include: how are gender roles in grief changing? What are the physical and metaphysical implications of the new form of absence? What role does the body play in recollection processes? What are the dynamics between individual and collective identities in processes of making present what has been made absent? What are conceptual consequences of the term gendered memory? What role do religion and the arts play in the interface between gender, memory and culture?

Abstracts (up to 200 words) should be sent to both Dr. Pamela Anderson pamela.anderson@regents.ox.ac.uk and Dana Mills dana.mills@mansfield.ox.ac.uk no later than 31 March, 2012.
For further information concerning this panel, please contact the panel convenors.

Music

Panel-convenor: Nils Holger Petersen

Music, Memory and Cultural Transition

During the last century or so, the influence and cultural position of Christianity, and of religion altogether, has often been seen as gradually – and markedly – weakened in the West. In very recent years, by contrast, religious interests have again made themselves increasingly felt, and the role of religion and religiosity of various kinds seems no longer to be only in the defensive.

Music culture has also changed radically in a number of ways over the last century, many such changes made possible only through technical developments. These changes concern general listening practices but also involve changes in performance practices, including for instance revivals of early music or other previously neglected kinds of music. In musical composition, a change in the relationship to past musical styles may also be detected.

The music panel seeks to explore the changing roles of music concerning the presence or absence of religious or existential connections in present day musical cultures. To what extent and in what ways can music’s earlier traditional religious embeddings still be perceived under changed circumstances in modern contexts? Which roles do music practices fulfil concerning identity formation in modern cultures of transition?

The music panel welcomes proposals dealing with these or related questions.

Abstracts of no more than 250 words should be sent to Nils Holger Petersen at nhp@teol.ku.dk before 31 March, 2012.
For further information concerning this panel, please contact the panel convenor.

Visual Arts

Panel-convenor: Aaron Rosen

In his First Diasporist Manifesto of 1989, the painter R.B. Kitaj writes, “Painting is a great idea I carry from place to place. It is an idea full of ideas, like a refugee’s suitcase, a portable Ark of the Covenant.” This panel will explore the numerous ways in which the visual arts might express—and perhaps seek to remedy— the anxieties of transition, whether geographic, economic, or otherwise. We will pay special attention to the mnemonic and ritual roles which visual art can play. What memories do artists stuff into their ‘suitcases’? Can artists help fashion or recover lost ‘arks,’ or other markers of divine presence? How does art accomplish the ‘work of mourning’ (Derrida), as well as the work of rebuilding? While topics are open, papers are particularly welcome which address artistic responses to recent events, including the world economic crisis and related protests, the Arab spring, and the mass displacements caused by natural disasters from Japan to Turkey.

Abstracts of no more than 300 words should be sent to Aaron Rosen at aaronmatthewrosen@gmail.com before 31 March, 2012.
For further information concerning this panel, please contact the panel convenor.

Religion and Modernity

Panel-convenor: Erik Borgman

Religion – and Christianity specifically – has memory at its very core. ‘Do this in remembrance of me’, is Christ’s commission to his disciples. In modernity however memory was no longer primarily seen as presence, but as absence: it is considered as self-evident that a person present in memory is absent in reality. Reflections on the Holocaust and the other major catastrophes of human history led new reflections on the importance of memory of suffering, the memory of absence as a protest against death, and the ambivalences and impossibilities of memory. This led to rediscoveries of religious and theological aspects of memory in late modernity and new reflections on what remembrance actually is, from a theological point of view. Both historical and systematic papers on the relation between memory, religion and modernity may be proposed.

Abstracts of no more than 300 words should be sent to Erik Borgman at E.P.N.M.Borgman@uvt.nl before 31 March, 2012.
For further information concerning this panel, please contact the panel convenor.

Judaism

Panel-convenor: Marianne Schleicher

Seeing religion as a unified system of practices and belief relative to the sacred with an ultimate function of holding society together in the constant processes of cultural change, the panel on Judaism invites papers willing to discuss the importance of memory and oblivion. The panel is particularly interested in papers that combine theories on memory and oblivion with concrete analysis of religious texts and rituals to discuss what factors have facilitated cultural evolution and, in so doing, cultural survival in the context of Judaism.

Abstracts of no more than 300 words should be sent to Marianne Schleicher at ms@teo.au.dk before 31 March, 2012.
For further information concerning this panel, please contact the panel convenor.

Modern Theology

Panel-convenor: Trevor Hart

The panel welcomes proposals for papers on any topic relevant to the conference theme, and especially in the following areas:

Christology – the incarnation as a peculiar locus and mode of God’s presence to the world and its history; incarnation, particularity and universal significance; the promised presence of the Risen Lord to the church
God – the ‘elusive presence’ (Terrien) of God depicted in biblical traditions, and its implications for developing a contemporary theology of God’s presence/absence; problems of identifying God’s presence and activity in the world
Pneumatology – the doctrine of the Holy Spirit as a natural locus for exploring issues of divine presence and absence; the presence of the Spirit as the hallmark of the community of faith
Scripture – the Bible as the church’s ‘founding text’ and primary authority for faith and life in every cultural context; appeals to ‘revelation’, and issues of language and theological hermeneutics
Tradition – forms of Christian tradition as bearers of identity across time and space; the relationship between Scripture, tradition and context; the roles of the arts as forms of Christian tradition
Sacrament – the Eucharist, anamnesis and expectation; models of eucharistic presence; contemporary theological appeals to a wider notion of ‘sacramentality’ (e.g. in forms of nature, in culture and the arts) in pursuit of an account of divine presence available to be experienced beyond the boundaries of the church and its forms of life
Eschatology – presence and promise; memory and hope as imaginative dispositions that shape and orientate the believer’s present; the particular significance of these dispositions in sustaining faith through experiences of absence and godforsakenness.

Abstracts of no more than 300 words should be sent to Trevor Hart at tah@st-andrews.ac.uk before 31 March, 2012.
For further information concerning this panel, please contact the panel convenor.

Higher Education

Panel-convenors: Darlene Bird and Marije Altorf

Higher Education in Transition: the Future of Theology, Philosophy and Literature

In the present time of economic crises universities have been subjected to severe cuts in funding. These cuts affect the humanities in particular. Driven by ideals of markets and privatisation the humanities are constantly asked to prove their worth in economic terms – for the student, his or her future employer and the economy at large.

These developments have been subject of increased criticism in the past few years. Some of the criticism reclaims a notion of university that maybe never was . Others defend universities as needed for good democracy.

This panel invites papers to look to the future. How do the theology, philosophy and literature respond to these changes, and how could and should they respond? Participants are in particular invited to reflect on their own practice of lecturing in the interdisciplinary field of theology/philosophy and the arts.

Abstracts of no more than 300 words should be sent to both bird_darlene@yahoo.co.uk and
marije.altorf@smuc.ac.uk before 31 March, 2012
For further information concerning this panel, please contact the panel convenors.

Theological Humanism

Panel-convenor: Daniel Boscaljon

The responsibility of a theological humanist is the imperative to, in the words of Klemm and Schweiker, “in all actions and relations respect and enhance the integrity of life before God.” The papers in this section of the 2012 ISRLC will examine the problem posed by “Cultures of Transition” by exploring how a Theological Humanist’s emphasis on the integrity of life can stabilize individuals and communities in times of transition and simultaneously question whether this stability is desirable. The culture of transition, outlined in the conference theme as a mediation between presence and absence, explores a binary that theological humanism is equipped to navigate through third way thinking. Presenters will consider how willing that all actions and relations respect and enhance the integrity of life before God allows humans to navigate through the perils of historical overdetermination and futural nihilism without succumbing to despair. Papers might consider one of the following topics:

To what extent do overhumanization and hypertheism manifest as symptoms of a culture of transition? Understanding the culture of transition as a time when individuals are thrown between histories dominated by corrupting influences of cultural, economic and military imperialisms on the one hand and futures tainted by visions of violence and ecological destruction on the other, what might the integrity of life resemble?

Broadly speaking, how does Theological Humanism mediate experiences of presence (the revelatory sphere of what one might call the numinous) and absence (what a Tillichian might identify as an encounter with nonbeing) in a meaningful way? How does it differ—if it does at all—from cultural (artistic or technological) alternatives that mediate these same experiences?

How might Theological Humanism help structure responsible ways of mediating the transition between memory and imagination? How does it prevent memory from slipping into naïve nostalgia, and the imagination from forming fascist hopes of a controlled utopia?

Given this context, how might theological humanism advocate for an integration of memory and imagination to respect and enhance the integrity of life before God—in an uncertain present, and toward an impossible future?

What past models provide examples for integration in times of transition? What resources (basic, social, reflective) can we gather in order to relate our memories and imaginations in ways that respect and enhance the integrity of life before God?

Abstracts of no more than 300 words should be sent to Daniel Boscaljon at boswich@aol.com before 31 March, 2012.
For further information concerning this panel, please contact the panel convenor.

Continental Philosophy and Religion

Panel-convenors: Andrew Hass and Daniel Whistler

But, my friend, we have come too late. Though the gods are living,
Over our heads they live, up in a different world.
(Hölderlin, Brot und Wein)

Hölderlin’s experience of religious absence, of living in a world made destitute by the flight of the divine, resonates in the work of Schelling, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Derrida, and Nancy, among other European thinkers. More generally, presence and absence – ‘what is there’ and ‘what is not there’ – orient many of the major conceptual pairs of modern philosophy: being and nothingness, affirmation and negation, immanence and transcendence, critique and speculation, logocentrism and deconstruction, male and female, etc. The panel invites submissions that rethink and re-evaluate these philosophical binaries or apply them, in modulated or problematic ways, to the themes and practices of and within religion and art. We especially welcome submissions that interrogate the modes of transition (dialectical or otherwise) between presence, absence and their corollaries.

Abstracts of no more than 300 words should be sent to both andrew.hass@stir.ac.uk and
Daniel.Whistler@liverpool.ac.uk before 31 March, 2012
For further information concerning this panel, please contact the panel convenors.

Islam

Coordinated by Jørgen S. Nielsen, and David Thomas

Islam, Christianity and Europe – Cultures of transition

On a number of occasions over the 1400 years of Christian-Muslim encounter, major populations on one or the other side have been profoundly changed in ways which have affected culture and custom, and language, discourse and theology. This panel will provide an opportunity to explore these processes by focusing on two case studies, namely the Arabization of Middle Eastern Christianity in the 7th to 11th century CE, and the settlement of Muslims in Europe and North America (and the wider ‘West’ in the 20th century. The following will help in conceiving of the two case studies:

1. The Christian populations that came under Islamic rule in the Middle East from the 7th century experienced gradual but definite and dramatic change. Within two hundred years of the coming of Islam, Arabic was beginning to replace Greek and Syriac in spoken and written usage, and in intellectual circles Christians were responding to the need to employ terminology and idioms of logic borrowed from Muslim thought. As Islamic culture reached points of maturity in the 10th and 11th centuries the pace of this process increased, with Christians often acknowledging the value of Islamic advances in spiritual, theological and philosophical reflection (while continuing to reject Islam as a system of beliefs), and adopting modes of discourse that largely mirrored those of their rulers.

2. Populations of Muslim background have been settling in large numbers in Western Europe and North America during the 20th century, as labour migrants and refugees. In many countries their descendants now outnumber their immigrant forebears. From different Muslim cultures they have been adapting to new social, political and cultural environments and thus been challenged in various ways to figure out what Islam means, in terms which make sense both to their co-believers and to the non-Muslims context. Muslims have therefore at growing levels of intensity been thinking and debating not only forms of behaviour but centrally what constitutes being Muslim, also theologically, and doing so in discourses which choose to communicate with the context or to separate themselves out from the context, while the context often has chosen to mark them out as the ‘other’ and setting the agendas of the debate.
The two cases serve as examples of how particular well-established religious cultures can be forced into transitions by historical circumstances in which linguistic, cultural and political power play a central function.

Abstracts of no more that 300 words should be sent to panel convenor, Jørgen S. Nielsen at jsn@teol.ku.dk before 31 March, 2012.
For further information concerning this panel, please contact the panel convenor.

Kierkegaard and Grundtvig

Panel-convenors: Anders Holm, Iben Damgaard and Therese Bering Solten

Grundtvig and Kierkegaard: Rewriting and Memory in Golden Age Copenhagen

Behold, I make all things new (Rev. 21:5)

In the first half of the 19th century questions of how to renew the past and how to make old traditions alive became a major concern of writers and artists. The rationalistic mindset and the increasing influence of positivistic science were challenged by thinkers who (as a countermove) attempted to invigorate tradition through a wide variety of literary means.
For two of the most prominent Danish thinkers Søren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813-1855) and N.F.S Grundtvig (1783-1872) this was a pressing problem which they addressed from within different theological positions:

Kierkegaard struggled with the problem of how to renew the Christian tradition which he claimed had been reduced to harmless matter-of-course in 19th century Denmark.
Through rewriting and re-contextualization of the biblical texts as well as other ancient texts, Kierkegaard seeked to provoke and encourage his modern contemporaries into a rediscovery of the existential challenge of Christianity.

Grundtvig’s approach to the historical material was somewhat different. Grundtvig firmly believed that Christianity accesses humans only in the course of history. Grundtvig wished to revitalize tradition by means of historical material such as e.g. Norse mythology by setting up a mirror that would reflect Christian history in its past, present and future realities. Through rewriting Grundtvig thus wished to provide a new historical perspective from where revelation was brought into sharper focus.

This panel addresses the question of cultural memory and the rewriting of the past as a theological concern in the Danish golden age and calls for papers which reflect upon this from the perspective of either Grundtvig, Kierkegaard or one of their contemporaries.

Abstract of no more that 250 words should be sent to both Anders Holm, aho@teol.ku.dk and Therese Bering Solten, tso@teol.ku.dk before 31 March, 2012.
For further information concerning this panel, please contact the panel convenors.

Transnational and Migration Studies

Panel-convenor: Inge-Birgitte Siegumfeldt

Crossing Borders

Transition is one of the key factors in shaping modern life across the planet. We traverse national, regional, cultural, linguistic, disciplinary, generic boundaries all the time, and both artistic and intellectual representations of border-crossing paradoxically become constitutive stories of belonging in vastly heterogeneous cultures. The transgression of both natural and constructed boundaries is inscribed in much contemporary reasoning and is frequently seen to increasingly provide a broader and more nuanced perspective in discussions of contemporary culture. Non-belonging would seem, here, to increasingly inform notions of home, autochthony, authenticity, while alterity, exile, diaspora become central factors in the stories we tell about ourselves and the world.

From this perspective, it would seem that almost any movement could constitute a ‘border-crossing’. But what, more precisely, determines a cultural boundary, and what happens when it is transgressed? Is it true that culture comes more alive when in transit? If so, how is border-crossing represented in artistic manifestations such as literature, film, photography, music, theatre? What happens when artists transgress boundaries between art forms and when writers work across traditionally established genres of literature?

Crossing Borders calls for papers that address imaginative expressions of border-crossing. Contributors should aim to deliver a 20-minute piece with 10 further minutes for questions and discussion.

Abstract of no more that 500 words should be sent to Inge-Birgitte Siegumfeldt at siegum@hum.ku.dk before 31 March, 2012.
For further information concerning this panel, please contact the panel convenor.

Transcendence and Memory

Panel-convenor: Svein Aage Christoffersen

Everything that comes into being seems to be submitted to the passage of time and hence subjected to contingency. Nothing seems to escape or transcend the omnipresent power of time conveying contingency on everything and everyone. In memory, however, time is to a certain extent or in a certain way transcended within the realm of contingency itself. In this interdisciplinary panel we want to explore significant aspects of this kind of transcendence, especially with regard to the materialities of memory in art (i.e. paintings, sculptures, buildings and music). In what way may the past transcend time in art, and what is the role played by materiality and sensuousness in this transcendence? Is the materiality of art just a carrier of opinions which are transferred to or passed off as the past? What is the interplay between presence and absence, between the visible and the invisible, the audible and the inaudible in art as memory? To what extent or in what way is the contingency of time expressed or treated in the act of memorization in art? When art memorizes a past that pretends to have the power to transcend time (as for example the Crucifixion of Christ, the Last supper etc), how is this tension between the contingency of art and the transcendence of the subject handled or expressed?

Abstract of no more that 300 words should be sent to Svein Aage Christoffersen at s.a.christoffersen@teologi.uio.no before 31 March, 2012.
For further information concerning this panel, please contact the panel convenor.