“Writing Resistance and the Figure of the Trespasser” by John McLeod of the University of Leeds, United Kingdom, has been announced as a keynote plenary to be presented at The 3rd Barcelona Conference on Education (BCE2022) and The 3rd Barcelona Conference on Arts, Media & Culture (BAMC2022).
Circuits of permission and prohibition have long regulated human mobility, but ever more so today in an increasingly portable and checkpointed world system. In this presentation, McLeod considers the recent literary and cultural representation of mobility with particular reference to those funnels and fictions of sanctioned motion in which only selected subjects – the 'good' immigrant, the compliant arrivant, et al. – are certified as legitimate.
The BCE/BAMC2022 Organising Committee is currently calling for papers to be presented. Please submit your abstracts by July 5, 2022.
To participate in BCE/BAMC2022 as an audience member, please register for the conference.
This plenary will also be available for IAFOR Members to view online. To find out more, please visit the IAFOR Membership page.
Abstract
Writing Resistance and the Figure of the Trespasser
Circuits of permission and prohibition have long regulated human mobility, but ever more so today in an increasingly portable and checkpointed world system. In this presentation, I consider the recent literary and cultural representation of mobility with particular reference to those funnels and fictions of sanctioned motion in which only selected subjects – the 'good' immigrant, the compliant arrivant, et al. – are certified as legitimate. What happens when those figures granted leave to remain in the ambiguous environs of neoliberal consumption refuse to accept the prefabricated constraints of their compliance? How might their uncommissioned behaviour refuse the ever-shifting line between licensed and illegitimate life? Or in other words: what happens when we trespass beyond the lines that tell us where, and who, we are meant to be? I will explore the ways in which recent literary and cultural texts are mobilising this figure of the 'trespasser', as I term it, in order to ask critical questions about the extent to which the predominant constraints of transpersonal relations can be effectively exposed, challenged, and firmly resisted by those who appear to refuse their readied place.
Speaker Biography
John McLeod
University of Leeds, United Kingdom
John McLeod is Professor of Postcolonial and Diaspora Literatures at the University of Leeds, United Kingdom. He is the author of Postcolonial London: Rewriting the Metropolis (Routledge, 2004), Beginning Postcolonialism (Manchester UP, 2nd ed. 2010), and Life Lines: Writing Transcultural Adoption (Bloomsbury, 2015). He has edited special issues of the journals Kunapipi, Moving Worlds, and Études Anglaises, and is the co-editor of The Revision of Englishness (Manchester UP, 2004) and The 1970s: A Decade of Contemporary British Fiction (Bloomsbury, 2014). His essays have appeared in journals such as Wasafiri, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, and ARIEL. He is an Executive Board Member of the Alliance for the Study of Adoption and Culture (ASAC) and co-editor of the Ohio State University Press series Formations: Adoption, Kinship, and Culture. In April 2022 he was Visiting Professor at the University of Paris Sorbonne, France. His new book, Global Trespassers, is forthcoming with Liverpool University Press.
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