[AIW] CFP: Fake Identities? Impostors, ConMen, Wannabes in North American Culture

[AIW - Bartl]

Call for Papers (Deadline February 1, 2012)

 

Fake Identities? Impostors, ConMen, Wannabes in North American Culture. A
Symposium 

 

April 26 - 27 2012, Friedrich Schiller Universität Jena

 

Impostors, ConMen, and Ethnic Impersonators pretend to be someone they are
not. They thrive on a fabricated identity that other people take at face
value and break pacts of authenticity and sincerity that are culturally
defined. Impostures, confidence games and the like therefore reflect
cultural strategies of identity work, self-fashioning, and recognition. In
addition, they render the parameters of a Western, modern idea of identity.

 

Our inquiry is situated between the force fields of American cultural
studies, narratology, and biographical/figural interest. We would like to
focus on North American specimens and the cultural implications related to
fakery, ‘frautobiography’ (Egan), and imposture, which become obvious both
in the making of these new identities per se and in cultural products and
rewritings of these fake lives: Confidence man Frank Abagnale transgressed
boundaries of class and profession by evoking trustworthiness; his life was
fictionalized in the Hollywood bio pic Catch me if You Can (2002). Fake
performances of Otherness also include Whites ‘going native’ like Grey Owl
or Iron Eyes Cody, racial passing like journalist John Howard Griffin’s, who
darkened his skin and travelled as black man, or the fabricated gender
identity of Dorothy/Billy Tipton’s, who posed as a male jazz musician and
was fictionalized in Jackie Kay’s novel Trumpet (1998). Hence, examples of
imposture may encompass ‘real life’ cases, their representation in fiction
(novels, films, or other), as well as invented impostors and imagined
fakery, all addressing the particulars of the Western ‘authenticity pact’
across genres and ages.

 

Contributions may address, but of course are not limited to, the following
questions:

 

• How do fakes work?

• Which culturally specific pacts are broken in imposture?

• How is cultural value attributed to authenticity and sincerity in North
America?

• How do the ‘real’ self and the fabricated, ‘impostor self’ interact?

• Why do people believe their self-fashioning to be authentic and what makes
a person authentic in the eyes of others?

• Which rhetoric strategies are employed in the production and reception of
imposture?

 

Please send your abstract and proposals by Feb 1st, 2012, to both

 

Prof. Dr. Caroline Rosenthal

Dr. Stefanie Schäfer

Caroline-rosenthal at uni-jena.de

Schaefer.stefanie at uni-jena.de

Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik Ernst Abbe Platz 8, 07743 Jena

 

http://www2.uni-jena.de/fsu/anglistik/bereiche/literatur-und-kulturwissensch
aft/amerikanistik/

 

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