african-american

"Money is the root form of representation in bourgeois society." So T. J. Clark put it in 1999. Almost aphoristic in its phrasing, the sentence turns on the set of questions it raises – about markets and money flows, about value and abstraction, about whom money belongs to, about the "social reality of the Sign" and the effect money has on artmaking. Money becomes a central form – maybe the central form – of life, inescapable and intractable. The conditions that shape our present and the failure of the Left to devise a practicable response have only intensified the urgency of the proposition and the questions that ground its pivot.

Where do race and technology meet? Since its emergence cinema has been but one technology to repeatedly build its status on the raced bodies of its subjects. As scholars such as Michael Rogin have argued cinema required black bodies to establish its own identity as an artistic medium. While the transition from moving pictures to talkies was seen to inaugurate a new mode that would open up possibilities for the 'black voice' this was just one moment in the history of media technologies. As the Jazz Singer (1927) traded on blackface, Gone With the Wind (1939) used emerging color technologies to revive both an antebellum era and mark a false fault line with the past.

Waste Matters: Environmental Pollution and Materiality (ASLE Session)

46th Annual Convention, Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)
April 30-May 3, 2015
Toronto, Ontario

Essay proposals are invited for a volume in the MLA's Options for Teaching series entitled Teaching Modern British and American Satire to be edited by Evan Davis (Hampden-Sydney College) and Nicholas D. Nace (Binghamton University, SUNY). The aim of this collection of essays is to gather in one volume a variety of resources for the teaching of satire and satirical texts in order to assist teachers across a variety of different educational levels and settings.

Since the early 2000s, there has been a rise in scholarship about the religious and ethical dimensions of American postwar fiction. The literary historian Amy Hungerford investigates how intense religious experiences can coexist with pluralism by reading postwar authors such as James Baldwin, Flannery O'Connor, J.D. Salinger, Cormac McCarty, and Marilynne Robinson. She suggests that writers often turn to the nonsemantic aspects of language to depict a religious experience that is not doctrine specific. Similarly, John McClure's Partial Faiths uses the framework of post-secularism to argue for the emergence of a partial, hybrid, and weak theology in postwar fiction.

Call for Papers: Department of English Studies One-Day Conference

Durham University, 4th September 2014

Is a Novel JUST a Novel?

Keynote speakers: Professor Andrew Bennett and Dr. Dan Vyleta

The Department of English Studies at the Durham University is convening a one-day conference which will be held on 4th September 2014 in Durham University.

THE LANGUAGE AND LINGUISTICS STUDENT CONFERENCE
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 2014
NIGH UNIVERSITY CENTER
UNIVERSITY OF CENTRAL OKLAHOMA (EDMOND)

"Students engaging, transforming, and empowering students"

Abstract submission deadline: Monday, September 1, 2014
Acceptance notification: Monday, September 15, 2014
Registration deadline: Monday, September 29, 2014

Cities have the ability to set standards, enforce conformity, and dispense punishment to those living in or around urban areas. This ability creates a distinct physical and psychological urban environment. This session will examine how city structures create urban environments and how they are represented in young adult literature. How do these cities act as a unit? How does young adult literature portray cities and their effects on the environment and characters? How do these urban environments affect character development? Papers might address topics such as the development of urban environments, the role of nature in urban environments, or the effects of urban environments on characters and development in young adult literature.

Keynote speakers:
Christoph Reinfandt (Tübingen)
Jussi Parikka (Southampton/Turku)

The Human (issn: 2147-9739) is an international and interdisciplinary journal that publishes articles written in the fields of literatures in English (British, American, Irish, etc.), classical and modern Turkish literature, drama & theatre studies, and comparative literature (where the pieces bridge literature of a country with Turkish literature). To learn more about The Human and its principles, please visit this page:
http://www.humanjournal.org

Proposals are now being accepted for the newly established section area, MOTHERS, MOTHERHOOD, AND MOTHERING IN POPULAR CULTURE for the the 36th Annual Conference of Southwest Popular/American Culture Association (SWPACA)to be held in Albuquerque, New Mexico,
February 11-14, 2015

CONFERENCE THEME
Many Faces, Many Voices: Intersecting Borders in Popular and American Culture

In this inaugural session, we are looking for papers that address mothers, motherhood, and/or mothering, as seen within popular culture, such as seen through:
• representations of mothers, motherhood, and/or mothering including pregnancy, comparison to fathers,

From the BBC's "Downton Abbey" and "Dancing on the Edge," to HBO's "Boardwalk Empire," Woody Allen's "Midnight in Paris" and Baz Luhrmann's "The Great Gatsby," The Jazz Age's presence in recent popular culture has been striking and pervasive. This edited collection aims to complicate familiar images of this iconic period and to better understand its persistent presence "in our time." Essays that situate well-known figures in new contexts or highlight the significance and contributions of the period's lesser-known figures are especially welcome.

The question of how novels understand their place in an increasingly diverse media ecology has been widely debated in comparative media studies, with scholars such as Daniel Punday and Katherine Hayles arguing that traditional written narrative forms are forced to re-imagine their strengths in the face of increasingly digitized, non-linear forms. However, these critical perspectives have only begun to address the way that this new media ecology shapes narratives of memory, trauma, and event. This panel seeks to theorize the way historiographic fictions are adapting to new and hybrid media forms of historical memory. How are digital technologies affecting the way we narrate historical events?

Charles Darwin's work transformed scientific knowledge in the nineteenth-century by offering new modes of understanding and classifying humans that had serious consequences for the studies of race, animals, and affect. This panel intends to explore how late nineteenth and early twentieth century British and American literature engages, affirms or resists Darwin's theories. Many genres, such as Gothic fiction and naturalism, problematically craft characters that conform to Darwin's hierarchical categorizations of humanity. We seek papers that productively participate in the discussion of literature and science with an eye to analyses of science not just as content or theme, but also as aesthetic and generic influence.