Reinventing Borderlines in a Transnational World
Tunis
Organization: ISSHT University Tunis El Manar
Today’s transnational and “digitalized world” (Hayles, 2012) is marked by massive mobility,
heavy border crossing, and the incessant negotiation of (and conflict over) frontiers (Appadurai,
1996). The current global shifts and border re-mappings, along with the radical digital
transformations, have been strongly echoed in creative, critical, and philosophical productions.
Traditional identity “boundaries” are now rethought through groundbreaking poetics, radical
aesthetics and original interpretive methods, echoing what Paul Jay detects as a “transnational
turn” in current literary and cultural studies (2010). Texts are reread in light of hybrid
hermeneutics, multivocal expressions, cultural pluralities, and “non-mainstream” testimonies.
The radical alterations that mark our age, along with the ‘maddening’ rise of Artificial
Intelligence and digital technologies, have affected the very definition of literature itself. Old
‘truths’ about ‘pure’ literary texts, rigid generic boundaries, the ‘sacred’ canon, literary
hierarchies, norms of reception, and conventional readings seem to hold no more (Braidotti,
2013 and Hayles, 2012) in a world whose borderlines are constantly redefined and reshaped. In
such a digitalized world, and almost borderless world, our conference seeks to raise a number
of questions: how do writers engage with borderlines, trans-nationalism, passage, transfer,
migration, relocation, displacement, and other related subject matters? How do these profound
changes in our “transnational” world require new literary expressions, narrative and critical
paradigms that depart from traditional genre divisions, language hierarchies, regional
cataloguing, racial tagging, and other forms of othering?
In cultural studies, transnationality has often been associated with cultural mobility, hence, the
free circulation not only of people, but also of their ideas, traditions, and values across nations’
borders. Such a practice is not a modern phenomenon; it is as old as “traditional cultures,
[which] are rarely stable or fixed” (Greenblatt, 2009), and even came to be understood as a
component of globalization (Klingenberg et al., 2020). Conversely, re-inventing borderlines may
invoke, particularly in our contemporary world, the re-mapping and re-arranging of space to
assimilate new forms of expansionism and more complex frameworks of colonialism. From
“consensual” agreements through “conflictual” interests and power relationships (Avelino,
2021) to Realpolitik and Machtpolitik or “power politics” (de Wijk, 2016), borderlines might,
accidentally or systematically, morph within or across its imagined communities (Anderson,
1986) into more co-operative social organisms; or desperately disintegrate as entities. In this
sense, transnational identities, understood as dialogical formations shaping power relations,
serve as elements within what Mignolo (1998) describes as the “oppositional process of
relocating cultures and identities in a conflictive dialogue with the colonial allocation of
cultures.” Recent global migration flows and crises, perhaps more shockingly, in the
Mediterranean, and the indifferent, at times, cynical reactions from Global North and even from
Global South, may equally re-call, if not rebuke the validity of such many pre-established
societal models, as cultural diversity, multiculturalism, and superdiversity (Meissner, Sigona, and
Vertovec, 2022). Still, beyond the geo-political sphere, the recent global embrace of A.I.
technologies has transformed nations’ borders and borderlines into parallel worlds and multiple
X spaces. Academically, one way to approach transnationalism and borderlines in cultural
studies is to adopt a universal and transdisciplinary understanding, mitigating therefore
borders/borderlines. We should move beyond Anderson’s “imagined communities”, and
instead, call for de-westernizing academic production of geopolitical knowledge and reinforcing
critical reflexivity (Fornäs, 2020). Practically as well as methodologically, in this conference, we
urge participants to re(invent) borderlines by deconstructing, re-appropriating, negotiating, and
de-colonizing transnational culture within and outside of academia.
The conference aims to explore but is not limited to the following themes:
1. Redefining borders
2. Identities in a globalized world
3. Norms of survival in ‘contact zones’
4. Decolonial encounters
5. Positionalities and normativities
6. Reinventing the canon
7. Representing identities in literature
8. Hybrid narratives
9. Transnationality and (de)coloniality
10. Rethinking knowledge, power and belonging
11. (In)-security in contemporary times
12. Identities in a transnational world
13. Translation as transgression of borders
14. Truth and post-truth
15. Neoliberalism and Resistance
16. Digital narratives
17. The post-anthropocentric
18. The geopolitics of invisibility
19. Migration and borderlines
20. ‘Imaginary home'
21. Translingual Practices and Negotiation of Identity
22. Digital Communication and the Reconfiguration of Linguistic Borders
23. Translation, Mediation, and the Politics of Linguistic Crossing
24. Linguistic Mobility, Migration, and Transnationalism
25. Normativity and Variation: Standardization, Marginalization, and Resistance
26. Educational Borderlines and Pedagogical Innovation in Multilingual Contexts
27. Language, Power, and the Construction of Social Boundaries
28. Artificial Intelligence and the Human–Machine Interface
29. AI and the reinvention of identities and communities
Amal Hlioui