[iberoamericanmusiclist] CFP: "Global Cosmopolitanisms" Panel, ACLA 2026 Montreal

[Cottle, Alyssa]

Dear Colleagues,

We invite paper submissions for our panel titled "Global Cosmopolitanisms"
at the 2026 Annual Meeting of the American Comparative Literature
Association, held in person at the Palais des congrès de Montréal, February
26 - March 1, 2026.

Since at least the nineteenth century, literature produced in what is today
known as the Global South has been expected to be both cosmopolitan and
nationalist at the same time. On the one hand, it seemed that all
institutionalized forms of literature (from prose fiction and
historiography to performing arts and cinema) were alien to the so-called
periphery—especially in the Latin American context. The creation of these
literatures was not simply about serving their own national communities
from within, but also about embracing a form of cosmopolitanism—an
appropriation of the literary languages of Europe and the United States.
Often, such literary works were written in languages unfamiliar to the
local population, aiming for a kind of spectral international recognition.
Examples include Latin American writers composing books and plays in French
(Joaquim Nabuco, Visconde de Taunay, Pires de Almeida), the widespread
practice (sometimes by choice, sometimes by necessity) of composing operas
in Italian (Carlos Gomes, Raoul Hügel, Eliodoro Ortiz de Zárate, Remijio
Acevedo Gajardo), and later even the common practice of composing songs in
English regardless of the composer's position within the popular music
spectrum (Caetano Veloso, Sepultura, Angra, Milton Nascimento, Los Mac's,
Los Vidrios Quebrados, to name a few). On the other hand, these
cosmopolitan works of art faced increasing scrutiny and even mockery during
the twentieth century for their perceived lack of nativism and vernacular
authenticity. The aim of this seminar is to critically explore both
movements—not only within Latin America, but across the entire Global
South—by addressing both the cosmopolitan ambitions of these works and the
resistance they often provoked. We are particularly interested in moments
when such literary works are accused of lacking nationalism, and how we
might engage with and reassess this ostensibly “unnational” literature,
seeing its potentialities and originalities.

We welcome papers that address these issues across all forms of media
produced in the Global South—film, theater, novels, music, historiography,
essays, and more.

Paper proposals (max. 1500 characters) and bios (max. 500 characters)
should be submitted to the ACLA portal (
https://www.acla.org/seminar/86e7768c-2fcc-4b55-8e50-c3006db0ad63) by
Thursday, October 2, 2025.

Panel co-organizers:
João Marcos Copertino (Harvard University)
Alyssa Cottle (University of Western Ontario)
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.ucr.edu/pipermail/iberoamericanmusiclist/attachments/20250831/08993996/attachment.htm>