african-american

March 6-9, 2027
Newport, RI
Convention Site: Salve Regina University

Environmental racism predates its own name. The term entered public discourse in 1982, but the conditions behind it, namely exposure to hazard and unequal claim to safety, go back to slavery itself. Historian Carl Zimring traces this to a basic split in American thought: white meant clean, Black meant dirty. That split decided who did the dirtiest, most dangerous work, and who lived closest to pollution, for generations. In 1968, Memphis sanitation workers went on strike over exactly that: unsafe, degrading labour shaped by the same racial split. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis while there in support of the very strike. That split still operates today.

CALL FOR PAPERS

In Brightest Day: Race, Justice, and the Speculative in HBO's Lanterns and the Green Lantern Mythos

Proposed for New Suns: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Speculative -- The Ohio State University Press

Edited by Julian C. Chambliss, Ritesh Khandelwal, and Harry M. Foster (Michigan State University)

ABSTRACT DEADLINE: October 15, 2026
Send abstracts (300-500 words) and a bio (approx. 100 words) to greenlanternbookproject@gmail.com with the subject line "Lanterns CFP -- [your surname]."

OVERVIEW

The idea of hospitality as a simple, symmetrical exchange of welcome becomes fraught in the context of travel to the various places associated with the African Diaspora. For example, in Lose Your Mother, Sadiya Hartman considers the symbolic loss of a homeland and the sense of relation between her and the people of Ghana. Like many other African Americans, she questions whether a connection to Africa is real or just a necessary fiction. Her narrative marks the loss of identifiable origins or homeland as the primal loss for African Americans. The loss of this connection creates issues of subjectivity for the African diasporic community in general and for individuals who intimately feel this loss.

Call for papers, international conference, University of Nantes, 24 and 25 March 2027

The Subversive Work of Gayl Jones Beyond Borders: Rediscovering a “Liberating Voice” of the Black Atlantic World

Call fort submissions

"Conversations with the Dead: Excavation as Re-vision"

Chair: Edvige Giunta, Kean University
The session invites presentations of prose, poetry, and/or hybrid writing that “turn” to the dead—not for the purpose of elegiac reminiscence but to unsettle or dismantle notions of chronology, inheritance, and other forms of linear, unidirectional connection between the living and the dead. Writers who turn to the dead find that that past transforms the present through the very process of excavation: communities are remade in the turning. This session will examine what that practice looks like across genres such as intergenerational memoir, speculative memoir, investigative essays, and personal rewritings of myths.

                                                           Call for Chapters

            The Routledge Handbook of Hip Hop and Sport, Culture, and Activism

Poetic Responses to Prisons and Policing (SAMLA Panel #19707) - DEADLINE EXTENDED 

2026 marks multiple milestones for the legacy of legendary Afrofuturist author Octavia E. Butler: fifty years since the publication of her first novel, Patternmaster (1976), and the twentieth anniversary of her passing, on February 24, 2006. It also marks the announcement of a film version of one of her most famous and most prophetic works, Parable of the Sower (1993), as well as the surprise republishing of her disavowed novel, Survivor (1978), for the first time since the 1980s. These anniversaries arrive at a moment when Butler’s work continues to gain public attention for its prescience and political relevance, and as she continues to amass scholarly attention across scholarly disciplines.

In the summer of 2026, Elizabeth and Ines Soto were sentenced to fifty years in prison for their participation in the anti-ICE protests at Prairieland, including a charge of “providing material support to terrorists.” In the trial that led to these exorbitant sentences, the Sotos’ production and distribution of zines, including literature on protest strategy, anti-ICE arguments, gay and trans issues, and plant propagation, were used as evidence in their conviction. Their printing press (a home office printer) was confiscated by the FBI. At the same time, Daniel Sanchez Estrada, who was not present at the protest, was sentenced to thirty years for “concealing documents,” including zines labeled as “political literature.”

Transatlantic Connections and the ‘Special Relationship[s]’: BAAS Postgraduate Symposium, 2026

V&A East Storehouse, London

9th November

In 1946, Winston Churchill declared the need for a “special relationship between the British Commonwealth and Empire and the United States” in order to maintain world diplomacy, citing our shared language and cultural values as connecting the two countries. Although this ‘special relationship’ has continually been called into question by scholars, there is undoubtedly a channel of cultural and political exchange between the US and the UK, as well as with other countries, which has become even more urgent for discussion in recent years.

Conventional cinematic views of New York City are often characterized by aerials, panoramas, and long shots of the archetypal Manhattan skyline, montage of crowded sidewalks, and quick shots of the yellow cabs in congested traffic. Scholars have regularly linked such city views to their historical urban contexts: studies of city symphonies emphasize the concomitance of capitalist modernity, scholars of film noir associate the genre with Cold War anxieties magnified by urban disorientation, while studies of Blaxploitation link the films to the immediate precedents of urban crisis in the 1960s and 1970s.

Panel topic: "Consuming Serialized Fiction in the US, from 1800 to today.”

Venue: American Literature Association Symposium, Santa Fe, NM; Nov. 5-7, 2026

Note: as indicated here, ALA does not require presenters to be paying members of the organization

I'm seeking participants for an APPA roundtable discussion on "The Poet in the Novel" at the upcoming ALA symposium "The American Novel: Forms, Genres, Traditions," to be held at the Drury Plaza Hotel in Santa Fe, NM, 5-7 November 2026.

Proposals on novels or experimental prose forms that feature a poet as protagonist will be welcome for this session. Our definition of "novel" can be as broad as your claims for it will support. Samuel R. Delany is likely to feature significantly.

For best consideration, please send a precis of no more than 500 words to mrh@unm.edu by Sunday, 19 July