Keynote Speaker: Ngugi wa Thiong'o
Plenary Speakers: Sianne Ngai, Anton Vidokle
October 22-25, 2009 / Crowne Plaza Hotel / Knoxville, TN
Deadline: April 1, but the conference site will accept late proposals until April 15

A.S.A.P.'s launch conference "ASAP/1: Arts of the Present" will be held October 22-25, 2009 and hosted by the Department of English at the University of Tennessee. The conference will be held in downtown Knoxville, Tennessee, at the cozy, award-winning Crowne Plaza Hotel, and will feature an opening night reception and plenary talk by Anton Vidokle at the Knoxville Museum of Art. Vidokle is an installation artist whose work has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale, Lyon Biennial, Dakar Biennale, Lodz Biennale, and the Tate Modern, London. Our second plenary speaker will be Sianne Ngai, Associate Professor of English at UCLA and the author of Ugly Feelings (Harvard University Press, 2005), which has generated energetic discussion in literary critical circles. Our keynote speaker is Ngugi wa Thiong'o. An internationally recognized writer from Kenya, Ngugi is the author of Weep Not, Child (1964), the first novel in English to be published by an East African. He is the author of ten novels, eight major books of postcolonial theory, a collection of short stories, three plays, three children's books, and numerous interviews, and his most recent novel, Wizard of the Crow, was published in English in 2006 to international acclaim.

"ASAP 1: Arts of the Present" challenges participants to address the society's founding questions: What are new or current directions in the contemporary arts? What do the contemporary arts have to teach us? How we can help to give the arts direction and a voice? Papers exploring the following questions are welcomed:

• What are the new developments in literature (or painting/sculpture, architecture, performance) today, culturally and formally? What shifts? What debates?
• How does literary, visual, and/or performce art today recuperate, revise, revolt against, or rehearse the aesthetic aims and social interventions of art past?
• What are the aesthetic, ethical, and political commonalities shared by the literary, visual, and performing arts? What divides them?
• In what ways do formal, cultural, or political concerns shape specific techniques and/or production of literature, painting, sculpture, theater, media art, performance art, dance, and/or music?
• How should we understand or redefine historical periodization in relation to contemporary literature? visual art? drama? What is the relation of the contemporary arts to such movements as Romanticism, Modernism, Postmodernism, Altermodernism?
• How should we understand the contemporary arts' relation to theory and criticism? to such perspectives offered by marxisms, postcolonial theory, poststructuralism, formalisms? What new theoretical perspectives and vocabularies are provoked by today's arts?
• What new approaches are needed to address new intermedial arts? relational arts? remediating arts?
• What works and artists in contemporary literature--or painting and sculpture, or media art, or drama, or music, or film--are forging new paths and opening new formal possibilities?
• How do today's arts define beauty, creative practice, and art's place in the social world?
• For the arts of the present, what is new, what is old, and what stands outside of the language of paradigms and post-ness?

While papers concerning individual artists and art works will be considered, program organizers will give priority to papers that articulate relations between the arts, deal with numerous texts or an author's oeuvre, or posit new theoretical perspectives for research. We are particularly interested in panels, roundtables, and seminars that include scholars from multiple arts disciplines.

We are accepting proposals for four types of presentations: individual papers; panels; roundtables; and seminars. Panels, roundtables, or seminars comprised entirely of participants from a single department or a single institution are not likely to be accepted. Advanced graduate students are welcomed, but sessions comprised entirely of graduate students are unlikely to be accepted, and we suggest that all proposed sessions include established scholars and practitioners.

Deadline for all proposal submissions: 5 pm EST on April 1, 2009, though our website will accept late submissions until April 15.

Registration for the conference is $130.00 before July 15, $185 after July 15. Registration includes conference badge, break stations, banquet, reception, and 1-year membership in A.S.A.P.

An FAQ page for conference registration has been created HERE.

[Click here to go to the conference site ]

For further information, contact the conference organizer Amy J. Elias at info@artsofthepresent.org

Contact: info@artsofthepresent.org with subject line: "ASAP Query"