african-american

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.

This virtual seminar takes its inspiration from Saidiya Hartman’s citation of the Greek etymology of the word chorus: “to dance within an enclosure.” For Hartman, the chorus also furnishes a paradigm for thinking—to play on Jean-Luc Nancy’s notion—Black (non)being singular plural. In Wayward Lives, Hartman suggests that any of the minor figures can stand in for the others, not as a claim of homogeneity, but rather as a contention that their singularity can be read as paradigmatic of waywardness—in its queer heterogeneity—in general. The chorus of black femme and queer youth is thus at once a singular plurality and a plural singularity as they make beautifully riotous lives within the enclosure of social death.

Call for Papers | Society of Early Americanists

American Literature Association | “The American Novel: Forms, Genres, and Traditions”

November 5–7, 2026 | Santa Fe, NM

The Novel in/and Early America

For this upcoming ALA Symposium, the SEA invites papers and presentations that deal with any aspect of “The American Novel: Forms, Genres, and Traditions” prior to (approximately) 1830. Topics might include (but are not limited to):

Where and how does African American culture begin?

Every story has a beginning, yet every beginning is a choice: a conscious decision about where, when, and how to start. Beginnings are contextual constructions as are endings.

In Africa and the African diaspora, knowledge is often produced, circulated, and critiqued in “minor forms”—small-scale oral, visual, material, and digital ephemera such as proverbs, folktales, rites, images, social media, and other non-canonical modes of expression that structure everyday cultural life but are frequently marginalized within dominant academic and cultural hierarchies. While “major forms” such as the literary canon, the national archive, and peer-reviewed scholarship obscure the complexity and vitality of African cultural production, minor forms interact with, resist, coexist alongside, and reshape those dominant modes.

In her resolute commitment to telling stories about Black life without the white gaze, Toni Morrison articulated a model of community empowerment grounded in local knowledge, intra-communal collaboration, and the self-reflexive narration of Black worlds. While Morrison remains one of the most visible public advocates of this aesthetic and ethical orientation, practices of Black worldmaking across African and diasporic literatures have long exceeded mere response to anti-Blackness. Even under conditions structured by racial violence, coloniality, displacement, and social rupture, Black communities have continually generated modes of life, relation, memory, and imagination that assert the possibility of worlds otherwise.

Since 1991 the Pulitzer Prize has been awarded to four novels that reimagined literary works that have long been a part of the canon. They are: A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley (a contemporary King Lear); March by Geraldine Brooks (Little Women from the perspective of the absent father); Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver (David Copperfield set in Appalachia); and James by Percival Everett (Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim). This panel looks to open a discussion about how these and other contemporary novels both explore and challenge the themes of the source material. What do they say about society, race, gender, feminism, and marginalization?

Resources for American Literary Study (Penn State UP), a peer-reviewed journal of archival and bibliographical scholarship in American literature, invites submissions for our upcoming 2027 issues. Covering all periods and genres of American literature, RALS welcomes both traditional and digital approaches to archival and bibliographical analysis. We also welcome proposals for our "Prospects" series in which scholars forecast future developments (and identify scholarly gaps) in the study of major authors.

Instructions for submissions may be found @ http://www.psupress.org/Journals/jnls_rals.html. 

Tentative Title- Cross Imagination and Literary Production: African Writers and Indian Characters, Indo- African Writers and African Characters

Globalectics is the interrelationship of all things, the mutual containment of the local and the global.”
— Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing (2012)

One hundred years:
still, the fire burns.

In 1926, Wallace Thurman, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Aaron Douglas lit a match called FIRE!!, a journal by younger Black artists who refused to wait for permission.

It ran one issue. It changed everything.

Now, we strike the match, one century later.

FIRE!!! returns to publish twenty-one new pieces, paid, in the spirit of the original.

There are seats at this table for emerging African American writers, poets, photographers, makers, and artists.

This proposed panel for the November 2026 Tunisian Association for English Language Studies International Conference | Home-Making: Reinventing Home in Anglophone Literatures and Cultures invites papers that examine Black and African fatherhood as a site of un-homing, home-making, and reinvention across Anglophone literatures and cultures. While scholarship on families has often centered mothers and children, fathers remain understudied as agents of domestic life, memory work, and cultural transmission.

As its title indicates, this seminar will take a broad geographic and temporal view of the Harlem or New Negro Renaissance to invite considerations of the historicity and historiography of Black writing at the turn of the twentieth century. Seminar participants will be invited to consider how history shaped and was shaped by Black art, literature, and thought in the period stretching from approximately the end of Reconstruction through the Civil Rights era. How did Black writers, artists, and thinkers use historical concepts, forms, narratives, figures, events, philosophies, discourses, and other materials to craft original works of art and literature?

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS — Mini Plays Review | September 2026 Issue 

Theme: Echoes of the Digital Age

This issue explores how human connection, conflict, identity, and memory are being rewritten in a hyper-connected yet deeply isolated world. We are looking for sharp, short scripts that capture the friction between our physical lives and our digital existence.

Subthemes for Submission:

• 1. Phantom Vibrations: The psychological weight, anxiety, or obsession of waiting for a notification that never comes.

2026 Meeting of the Society for Comparative Literature and the Arts

October 29-31, 2026
Embassy Suites Austin Central
Austin, TX

“Justice”

Keynote Speaker: TBA