Indigenous Peoples Literature: Fake Identities? Impostors, ConMen, Wannabes in North American Culture.

Sunday, January 1, 2012

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

Call for Papers

April 26 - 27 2012, Friedrich Schiller Universität Jena

Deadline: February 1, 2012

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

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

Indigenous Peoples Literature