[Themaintainers] Maintenance CFP for NeMLA

[brandon benevento]

Hi everyone--

I wanted to spread the word about a maintenance-focused panel I'm chairing
at next year's NeMLA (North East Modern Language Association) conference in
Baltimore (March 23-26-- rather close to the Stevens' conference, as I
realize now).  Despite the wording about "those who work in English
departments..." which slipped into the cfp, I'd love to hear from anyone on
either side of the contrived humanities--sciences/tech line.  Work on Mary
Poppins, welcome as always.


Thanks to Lee and Andy for keeping this thing going.


-- 
Brandon

https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/16159

The interrogation of wide-ranging labor and political-economic issues has
long provided cultural and literary studies with a foundational motive. Not
much has been said about maintenance—at least not directly. Against
modernity’s celebration of progress, development and productivity, and
against neoliberal incantations of innovation and creative destruction,
attending to maintenance reveals a devalorized and oft-hidden form of
labor, one on which productivity happens to depend. And, against that most
fundamental drive in all forms of capitalism—growth—maintenance may offer a
*workable* alternative.

As witnessed by a recent Steven’s Institute conference dedicated to
exploring the individual, infrastructural, systemic and social import of
maintenance and maintainers, such labor currently draws the increasing
attention of social scientists, historians and engineers, among others.
This panel aims to open discussion into what the humanities in general, and
the study of language and literature in particular, offers to this
interdisciplinary area of interest. Even as the subaltern status of
maintenance allows the erasure of relationships of dependence, various
types of mundane, repetitive and care-oriented work receive a great deal of
attention in texts ranging from *Robinson Crusoe* to *The Help*. Those who
work in English departments are thus well-positioned to add much to the
complexity surrounding the figuration of maintenance.

The focus of this panel is maintenance—the work of keeping up the system,
the firm, the structure, the home, the body—and on the problems and
potentials such upkeep entails. All and any of the following are welcome:
Investigation of maintenance in specific texts, genres, and periods;
Connections to other areas of interest, such as feminism, post-colonialism
or ability studies; discussion of the etymology and usage of “maintenance,”
and related terms; examination of the humanist and phenomenological
potential of maintenance; exploration of maintenance in political economy
and (neo)liberalism; and other approaches to maintenance, including its
role in the work of academia.
Abstracts of 200-300 words are due-- through the NeMLA site-- by Sept 30.
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