african-american

CALL FOR PAPERS

CFP: A Peaceful Place to Lay My Weary Body: Race, Ethnicity, and the Home

An area of multiple panels for the 2017 Film & History Conference:

Representing Home: The Real and Imagined Spaces of Belonging

November 1-November 5, 2017

The Milwaukee Hilton

Milwaukee, WI (USA)

EXTENDED DEADLINE for abstracts: August 1, 2017

Whenever someone tells me that they “hate” Kanye West I immediately ask them if they are familiar with his music, most of the time the answer is an emphatic: “no!” Granted, West seems to almost fetishize this self-created divide between his abrasive and confrontational public persona, and his introspective and heartfelt musical lyrics. However, this is due to his insistence on having both his public appearances and music act as provocations that actively question norms around masculinity, the black experience in America, and the life of an artist.

Teaching American Literature: A Journal of Theory and Practice (TALTP), a peer-reviewed open source online journal, is accepting articles for our Winter 2014 special issue, Who Is Teaching U.S.? We are interested in articles by instructors and their experiences in teaching American literature in countries outside the United States. How are the classic and contemporary American authors taught and received in other countries? What are the difficulties? The benefits? Any issue pertaining to teaching American literature is welcome, from assignment creation, gender issues, difficulties with translations, to first-hand accounts of both successes and failures.

This session welcomes papers that will investigate the range of comedic forms embedded within African American literature. On the heels of the twentieth anniversary of the release of Saidiya Hartman’s seminal monograph Scenes of Subjection, this panel’s exploration of the use of humor in black literature offers a new critical framework for exploring the ways that spectacles of violence have continued to undergird representations of black performance in contemporary critical thought. From the auction block to the jazz stage, “blackness” manifests epidermally and externally, often through public articulations of shared racial grief. As such, recent critical work has often framed humor as a tactical response to racial violence.

                                             When Objects 'Write Back': Rethinking Material Culture in the  Tricontinent