With the rejection of its proposed Constitution in 2005, the European Union has suffered a major setback in its ambition to unite 25 distinct countries around a common vision of Europe. However, a Europe united today by a single market and a Parliament and tomorrow perhaps by yet greater political, economic, cultural and technological exchanges holds enormous potential for a groundbreaking discussion of identity, both national and individual, as well as the reevaluation of concepts like migration, exile and diaspora. In the future, could issues such as these, grounded in distinct cultural codes, cease to hold meaning? Could identity be forged in relation to space rather than, or in conjunction with, collective and/or personal histories? In the present, how are immigration experiences to Europe contributing to a reimagining of Self and Other? In this regard, it is interesting to note that terms such as "creolization" have recently been applied to the construction of ever more diverse European cultures. Recognizing the possible trajectories of the European citizen, present and future, in the "territorial principle" of the nomad - he who "spreads himself" over a "smooth space" by occupying and inhabiting it - this conference will attempt to discern in the new European map the signs of that "deterritorialized place" originally charted by Deleuze and Guattari and explored by writers such as Martinican essayist and novelist Edouard Glissant, who imagines an archipelagic "Tout-Monde" of cultural cohabitation, and the Scottish poet Kenneth White, theorist of the "intellectual nomad" and founder of "géopoétique". It is, in fact, with a phrase of White's that our discussions can find a helpful point of departure: "Je ne suis pas une identité; je suis un jeu d'énergies, un réseau de facultés."
 
Specifically, the conference intends to consider whether the phenomenon of immigration as depicted and explored in European literatures might be giving way to representations of multiple realities and multiform trajectories and to an exploration of Self free of ideologies and social and cultural conditioning, through narrative strategies reflecting the paths, real and imagined of the author.
 
 
Papers addressing questions of nomadism in the contexts of the following issues are particularly welcome:

• Intra-European Nomadism (East/West, North/South) 
  
  
• Extra-European Nomadism (Overseas Territories/Metropole, Periphery/Center) 
  
  
• Real and Imaginary Nomadism 
  
  
• Routes/Oases/Archipelagos: geographies of the deterritorialized European space 
  
  
• Nomadism in the Information Age 
  
  
• Theoretical structures of Nomadism 
  
  
• Nomadic Narratives: an esthetics of movement 
  
  
• Text as Map 
  
  
• Nomadism in European film and music 

Papers should not exceed 20 minutes in length. Proposals should include an abstract (maximum 300 words), name, email and mailing addresses, affiliation, and a brief biography.
Proposals should be sent by email no later than February 28, 2006.
 
Co-convenors:
Jérôme Ceccon: Jerome.Ceccon@ua.ac.be (proposals in French)
Molly Grogan Lynch: Molly.Lynch@wanadoo.fr (proposals in English)
 
Under the direction of Christiane Chaulet Achour, Director,
Centre de Recherche Textes et Francophonies, Université de Cergy-Pontoise,
UFR des Lettres et Sciences Humaines
Les Chênes II - 33 Bd du Port
95011 Cergy-Pontoise cedex
Tél/Fax: (331) 34.25.64.24
http://reseau.u-cergy.fr/index.php?module=news