Underground Imaginaries

In this conference, we invite comparative literature contributions that engage with the rich imaginaries of the underground, which may include reflections on:

• Theory of human spatiality in its relationship with the literary symbols of the underworld (verticality and descent, spatial symbols ofregeneration and epiphany, zeniths and nadirs)
• Literary Urban Studies on subterranean cities (utopias, dystopias,Atlantis), underground urban architectures (sewers, bunkers and bombshelters, catacombs, ghost metro stations, domestic undergrounds),urban countercultures.
• Mobility Studies focusing on tunnels, underground portals, lifts, stairs,escalators, excursions, rites of passage, transitions and borderlands.
• Migration Studies and literary rendering of journeys, hiding, exile,trafficking, smuggling, GBV.
• Gender and Sexuality Studies on dissident sexualities and their relation to the underground (sex parties, public sex, cruising, sex workand prostitution).
• Night Studies dealing with nocturnal regimes and their aestheticrepresentations of illegality, danger and the taboo.
• Necropolitics: burial grounds, inhumation/exhumation, mass graves,ossuaries, mourning, subterranean genealogies, archives, ruins.
• Mythical approaches to hidden geographies and folklore of theunderworld (infernos, caves, labyrinths, cenotes, Aos sí, selkies).
• The symbolic underground and mental health from a MedicalHumanities perspective (depression, trauma, psychoneuroses,paraphilias)
• Anthropocene and Capitalocene: ecocriticism, geological strata,underground landscapes.Translation / Reception Studies that engage with censorship,propaganda, underground rallies and protests, resistance movements,underground networks and the dissemination of literature.