2nd International Conference of English and American Studies - Myth and Memory: Representing and Misrepresenting National Cultures and Peoples - 5-6 May 2016

Myth and Memory: Representing and Misrepresenting National Cultures and Peoples - 2nd International Conference of English and American Studies, 5-6 May 2016

organized by

Department of English and American Studies, Faculty of Foreign Languages

“Luigj Gurakuqi” University of Shkodra, Albania

CALL FOR PAPERS

The Department of English and American Studies is pleased to announce a call for papers for an international and inter-disciplinary conference to be held at the University of Shkodra in May 2016.

The end of the 20th  century saw the break-up of several apparently established nation states, often following violent conflict. All this took place paradoxically in an era in which the idea of universal human rights was widely promoted in the context of a so-called globalised economy.

The  virulent  racism  of  the  early  20th   century  returned  as  „ethnic cleansing‟. This  process, compounded by sectarian, linguistic and cultural difference and rivalry has continued into our own century seemingly accompanied by even greater violence. The older religious and imperial orders were largely replaced during the 19th century by the appeal to a new dynamic of „nation building‟. What appeared as a progressive movement of liberation, one of the grands recits of history, had consequences that proved disastrous, not least for Europe‟s „dark twentieth century‟.

The subsequent break-up of Europe‟s overseas empires, the struggles for anti-colonial independence, may be thought in many cases to have produced similar results.

Patriotic sentiment and revolutionary fervour, in both their positive and negative formations, have always been deeply entwined with cultural and educational activities and programmes. The whole fabric of civilisation is present: writing novels, history, poetry, journalism; composing music;  sculpture,  painting  and  architecture;  building  schools  and  universities;  science  andtechnology; mobilising and training armies; founding constitutions; establishing territorial and sectarian/confessional  claims  are  all  necessary  and  complementary  features  of  a  conflicted„modernity‟, that defers to the existence of nation states, while invoking a wider common multi- cultural humanity.