Zadar, Croatia
The Zone and Zones - Radical Spatiality in our Times
Recent works throughout the fields of literary and cultural studies, sociology, political science, anthropology, human geography, history, film and art history, to name just the most prominent, have chosen research agendas which reflect a spatial orientation, one which testifies to the (re)emergence of space as being of immense significance to the understanding of the phenomenon of our world. This interest is reflected in diverse conceptual perspectives: heterotopia, rhizome, Third space, hyperreal, time-space compression, placelessness, non-place, contact-zone.... For some there has been too much spatialization which even heralds the end of temporality, including various ends of everything (from the end of history and art to the end of any stable identities). In the end one wonders is there anything left outside of space - or, rather is there anything left in the space that can gesture towards different alternatives, alterities...?
Drawing on Brian McHale‟s concept of zone we would like to discuss these questions on possible spatial alternatives and alterities. The zone originates in a new hellish simultaneity of WW1 and technological explosions bringing different, incoherent entities in a new, surrealistic proximity, like Appolinieare‟s zones, where different parts of Paris intermingle with different parts of the world. McHale expands the notion of zones to postmodern fiction, as compendiums of parallel unrealized worlds, parallaxes, places of haunting, whirlpools of consumption and so on. All of these zones signal, more or less, a kind of ontological insecurity encapsulated in Foucault‟s term heterotopia - "the impossible space in which fragments of disparate discursive orders are merely juxtaposed, without any attempt to reduce them to a common order". We propose to expand McHale‟s reading of the postmodern experience and different zones by exploring various concepts of space - like hyperreal, a rhizome, a symptom and extimacy, a non-place, Third space ... and so on. Therefore, we picture the conference exploring various ZONES and traversing a variety of theoretical concepts, bringing together scholars of diverse backgrounds and interests.
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