african-american

As a popular genre, detective fiction often refers to or even uses as its foundation social issues, crises, and questions contemporaneous with its production. Recent examples of this, by authors such as Henning Mankell and Stieg Larssen, rely on even more extreme engagement, bringing attention in their plots to the rights and exploitation of political refugees, sex trafficking, and modern warlords. Such a dark turn in an already dark genre may cause one to wonder: is the genre foreshadowing the end of civilization, esp. given that such crimes and injustices occur in supposedly modern, just societies, such as Sweden and are often investigated by overtaxed, exhausted detectives and police systems?

Papers discussing religious topics related to U.S. ethnic literatures and authors are invited.

Send a one-page abstract, with working title, along with your school affiliation and any a/v needs you have, to J. Stephen Pearson at stpears11@gmail.com by Sunday, 21 October. All submissions will be acknowledged by the 23rd, and final notifications sent by Monday the 29th.

All presenters will need to join MELUS; more information on the conference can be found at http://melus.org/cfp2013.pdf .

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View the CFP on our webpage here: http://pi.library.yorku.ca/ojs/index.php/pivot/announcement/view/103/

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Sometimes silence is not golden – just yellow.
- Anon.

When they hold their tongues, they cry out.
- Cicero

Call for Papers: Experimental Writing and Aesthetics

Abstract/Proposals by 16 November 2012

Southwest/Texas Popular & American Culture Associations 34th Annual Conference
"Celebrating Popular/American Cultures in a Global Context"

Albuquerque, NM, February 13-16, 2013
Conference Hotel:
Hyatt Regency Albuquerque
330 Tijeras
Albuquerque, NM 87102
505.842.1234

Panels are now forming on topics related to Experimental Writing and Aesthetics in contemporary American poetry in such areas as

• the aesthetics of experimental writing in any genre or in multi-genre/multi-media works including digital and graphic compositions involving language,

York University 2012 English Graduate Students' Association Colloquium: FRENZY

But everybody is drugged with his own frenzy, and the pageant marches at all hours, with music and banner and badge.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson

Prophecies of a 2012 end of days; Black Friday at Wal-Mart; Howard Beale in Network inciting viewers to scream "I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!" From mass hysteria to individual neuroses, the elusive nature of frenzy lends itself to dramatically different conceptualizations across the disciplines.

The contemporary moment is fraught with the rhetoric of failure and decline. Daily, it seems, political, artistic, and entertainment outlets alert us to broken systems, policies, and promises. How might we rethink failure as an opportunity to engage in more ethical human and nonhuman relationships? Can the failures of democracy, the economy, the classroom, and of culture more broadly open up possibilities for success? How do we recognize our fallibility, learn from it, and cope with it?
In a moment when dysfunction is such a significant part of both private and public life, this conference will embrace an interdisciplinary approach to considering failure's destructive and productive aspects in historical and contemporary culture.

Hannah Arendt argued that labor is anti-political because its collective nature precludes the possibility of individual consciousness and because it is performed in the name of the economy of the household. Similarly, scholarship on labor and class has been accused in the past of being too invested in the problem of economic distribution to the detriment of identity and political recognition.

Stet, the online postgraduate journal of the English Department at King's College London, is now accepting submissions from current postgraduate students for its third peer-reviewed publication. In this issue, we will present articles from an international pool of students on the concept of dis/orientation. We seek to explore the question of how we are and have been located or dislocated in space, time, and history. Which parts of our personal, social, cultural, geographical, genetic, or technological landscape orient us? What incidents construct our conception of ourselves and our environments?

Theodor Adorno famously contended that "Even in a legendary better future, art could not disavow remembrance of accumulated horror, otherwise it's form would be trivial." How then, is one to think a better future in (post)colonial societies, while attending to the horrors of violent and unjust pasts? This collection seeks to address this question.

Hospitality & Society is an international multidisciplinary social sciences journal focusing on academic perspectives on hospitality and addresses all aspects of hospitality's connections with wider social and cultural processes and structures.

Aims and Scope

• To consider issues associated with hospitality leading to its advancement and understanding, including developing new approaches to the study of hospitality.
• To serve as a multidisciplinary forum encouraging interdisciplinarity with contributors coming from a wide variety of disciplinary bases
To be international in scope and inclusive in its coverage addressing hospitality from the macro to the micro level

CFP: CAPTIVITY NARRATIVES
Abstract/Proposals by 16 November 2012

Southwest/Texas Popular & American Culture Associations 34th Annual Conference Celebrating "Popular/American Culture(s) in a Global Context"

February 13-16, 2013
Hyatt Regency Albuquerque
330 Tijeras
Albuquerque, NM 87102
Phone: 1.505.842.1234
Fax: 1.505.766.6710

It might be said that regional literature has a photographic memory. Dialect, landscape, micro-culture and spatiality are drawn with exacting precision. The connection between art and authors, or art and regional literature, may be causal or merely influential. This panel will explore how the term ekphrasis has grown in inclusivity, how regional literature intersects with the sister arts, and what these connections imply. Submit 250 word abstracts to Brandi So, Stony Brook University, Brandi.So@stonybrook.edu.

This panel will explore the 'cognitive turn' in literary studies as it emerges in contemporary American fiction and non-fiction. Since George H. W. Bush declared the 1990's the "decade of the brain," there has been a surge of cross-disciplinary work done at the site of cognitive studies, neuroscience and the humanities. For example, scholars such as Lisa Zunshine and Paul John Eakin have called for literary methodologies that account for cognition and perception in their analyses. Additionally, a growing number of fiction and non-fiction texts use cognitive studies and neuroscientific research to upend generic constraints, as well as challenge assumptions about how we construct, perceive, and describe the world and ourselves within it.

1st International Conference of the University of Banja Luka (BiH) in cooperation with De Montfort University (UK)

CELLS - CONFERENCE ON ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERARY STUDIES
GOING AGAINST THE GRAIN
Contemporary Approaches to the Study of Language, Literature and Culture
Banja Luka, 6 – 8 June 2013

CALL FOR PAPERS