[Jen Boyle]

2019 MLA Convention

Special Session CFP

Fragile Sovereignty, Precarious Transactions

The promise of becoming in mediated transactions is fragile and unpredictable. Such transactions

might act as an instrument of interpellation that produces sovereign subjects, on the one hand,

and precarious objects, on the other hand. Or, as is often the case, mediated exchanges allow for

the emergence of complex identity positions that are simultaneously objects and subjects, whose

sovereignty shades into precarity, and vice versa. Such transactions are also inherently dependent

upon various states of mediation and the transactions of media, across material, aesthetic, and

political strata. Joanna Zylinska has suggested that new attention to the transactional power and

particulars of mediation might intervene in the rhetorical excesses of non-human and post-human

discourses in the interest of a “media-ecological perspective.” If precarity emerges, as Judith

Butler contends, in the failure of interpellation, it is nonetheless, as Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

argues, the condition of vulnerability.

In response to the MLA’s 2019 Presidential Theme, “Textual Transactions,” this session invites

papers to consider forms of sovereignty, precarity, and fragility as effects and producers of

mediated transactions: textual, material, digital, visual, and aural. All approaches and periods

welcome. 250-word abstract by 10 March 2018; Jen Boyle (jboyle@coastal.edu) and Wan-

Chuan Kao (kaow@wlu.edu).

This topic was also posted in: EMDC: The Early Modern Digital Collaboratory, LLC 17th-Century English.

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