Call for Papers

“Parimaanam: Images, Embodiments and Contestations”

Sixth Annual Tamil Studies Conference
University of Toronto, May 14, 2011

The conference organizers invite papers and panel proposals on the ways in which images, aesthetic representations and constructs of various kinds have played a significant role in constructing and destabilising ways of being Tamil. The conference organizers welcome papers and panels that discuss, from the perspectives offered by different disciplines and fields, how notions of Tamil-ness have been imagined, identified and embodied in historical, political, cultural and aesthetic practices that engage intellectual perception and subjective response through a range of materials, technologies, visions, models and movements which help fashion ways of being Tamil.

Guiding questions would include:

Constructing and Reinforcing: What role do aesthetics and performances play in the intervention within and the shaping of political debate? How are aesthetics and the body theorised within the context of Tamil poetics? How do either text or performance establish normative ways of seeing, looking and moving and, thereby, shape canonicity and mythology? How do artists, their publics and their mediators, how do theorists, teachers, and consumers of objects, photographs, movies, installations, fetishes and lifestyles contribute to experimenting, imagining and experiencing what it is that embodies being Tamil?

Destabilising and Deconstructing: How does public performance of protest or dissent interrogate the binaries of the local and the global, the modern and the medieval, national and the transnational, the “homeland” and the diaspora? What are the ways in which pre-modern Tamil conceptual categories disrupt or interrogate the binaries of mind and body or local and foreign? How is gender performed and disrupted with Tamil spaces and geographies? What are the sociocultural matrixes of Tamil bodies? Is there a specifically Tamil history of vision which mediates between the observer and the objects visualised?

We welcome individual or panel proposals from all disciplines, and from scholars, students, artists, writers and activists, including proposals that address questions that are not listed here. Papers on the diaspora, can range beyond the theme of the conference, though preference will be given to those that do engage the theme more directly.


Submission Deadline: August 31, 2010

For more information:
Contact Email: info@tamilstudiesconference.ca
Website: www.tamilstudiesconference.ca