11TH INTERNATIONAL SAAS CONFERENCE

“TRANS-”: The Poetics and Politics of Crossing in the US

Universidad de La Laguna (Tenerife).March 20-22, 2013

Transcending roles and borders, as well as physical and mental boundaries, has always been a primary motif in the narrative of the United States of America. Coming across the “Other”—either by pioneering into new territories, traveling East & West, South & North; or by colonizing/contacting/contesting other cultures, languages, identities—has resulted in complex and problematic experiences of crossing. The 11th SAAS International Conference, to be held at La Laguna University, Tenerife, aims at exploring those transits in order to understand the American practice of transgressing limits and crossing real and metaphorical, political and cultural borderlands. Some issues that could be addressed are the following:

A) Transnational: Border crossings; inter- & multi- Nations; Geo- & Supra- Nations; dis- & post- locations; political subsidiarity; global, local, & “glocal” places.

B) Transliterary: Trans-genre; trans-mediality; literary “exhaustion;” e-books; trans-lations; computering literature; cyber-palimpsests: reusing and recycling documents; trans-publishing.

C) Transgender: Transcending gender roles; androgyny; trans-sexuality; /hetero/bi/homo/pan/poly/a/-sexual normativities; “post-genderism.”

D) Transhuman: Cyborgs and ultra-humans; “transSci-fi”; post-anthropocentrism; dialogues and disruptions between humans and non-humans; environmental & toxic discourses; transgenic foods; human-made catastrophes.