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Building and Contesting the Nation in Cold War Latin America Cinema
“How are you framing that?” It’s a frequent question we hear in the theoretically pluralistic world of the contemporary humanities. The question is seldom complimentary. As an interrogatory salvo, it frequently means: “What are the epistemological assumptions that undergird your conclusions?” The question is often meant to expose undertheorized terrain so that it can be made more intellectually robust with deeper thinking—or set aside as insufficient. Visual culture scholar John Tagg concisely defines framing, used in this sense, as “discursive constraint.” All framing, however, could arguably be seen as a problem of such constraint, regardless of how big or how refined the frame gets.
Cli Fi and BeyondSeminar at the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) Annual Meeting, March 7-10, 2019, at Georgetown University in Washington DC Contact the Seminar Organizers
Digital Humanities and Narratives of Science, Technology, and MedicineNeMLA 50th Anniversary Convention in Washington DC (March 21-24, 2019)
Women’s interest in crime, and violent crime in particular, has become increasingly apparent in recent years. Women now read more crime fiction and thrillers than men, are the primary audience for a number of popular true-crime podcasts (listeners of My Favorite Murder even refer to themselves as “Murderinos”), and increasingly enter fields of study that put them in close contact with the after-effects of violent crime, making up approximately 75% of current forensic science graduates.
This panel invites new positions from which to conceptualize postwar moving-image art, extending into the contemporary moment. Anglo-American and European scholarship on moving-image art through the 1960s and 70s has largely privileged formalist thinking. There is, as Jonathan Walley has written, a “general agreement…that avant-garde filmmakers of this period followed the trend within modernist art toward medium-specific purification: the reduction of the art object to the essential physical or material components of its medium.”[1] In recent years, however, we have witnessed a number of crucial revisionist interventions.
This session seeks to use the concept of the absent present (that which is embodied by students but unacknowledged) within the classroom as a method of disclosure. Such a method is dedicated to both the literal and figurative spaces that foster agency for students and instructors as they embody and articulate multiple critical identities. Particular focus will be placed on the ways student backgrounds and identities are erased or ignored through various means including syllabi, modeled language, instructor feedback, and assignment and assessment structures. Attention to that which is present within our students but goes unacknowledged or undervalued allows for the exploration of ways to better foster more inclusive spaces.
CALL FOR PAPERS
Bearing Witness: Reading James Baldwin in the 21st Century
(A Critical Anthology)
“Perhaps I did not succumb to ideology . . . because I have never seen myself as a spokesman. I am a witness. In the church in which I was raised you were supposed to bear witness to the truth. Now, later on, you wonder what in the world the truth is, but you do know what a lie is.”—James Baldwin, Interview by Julius Lester
CFP: Celebrating WPA, 1979–2019: Forty Years of Research, Collaboration, and Community
The editors of WPA: Writing Program Administration seek proposals for a variety of historical works to be included in a special issue of the journal to appear in summer 2019. To commemorate the 40th anniversary of WPA as a peer-reviewed publication and celebrate this journal’s evolutionary and revolutionary contributions to the field of writing program administration, we encourage proposals for the following:
Workshops of Horrible Creation: 200 Years of Imagined Humans
International Conference and Workshop on Science Fiction
Organized by the Centre of Advanced Study, Department of English, Jadavpur University,
and Kalpabishwa Webzine
22-24 November 2018
This year marks the bicentennial of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. To commemorate this occasion, the Department of English, Jadavpur University and the Kalpabishwa Webzine collective are co-hosting an international conference and workshop on SF. The conference will feature:
academic papers
Call for Presentations:
The Third Annual Ann Radcliffe Academic Conference at StokerCon 2019
Abstract Submission Deadline: October 31, 2018
The Third Annual Ann Radcliffe Academic Conference at StokerCon 2019
Conference Dates: May 9 – 12, 2019
Conference Hotel: Amway Grand Plaza Hotel, Grand Rapids, MI
Call for Papers
Rap and Hip Hop Culture
Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)
40th Annual Conference, February 20-23, 2019
Hyatt Regency Hotel & Conference Center
Albuquerque, New Mexico
http://www.southwestpca.org
Proposal submission deadline: November 1, 2018
“Contemporary Humanities”
“Self-Translations are No Translations at All” was the title of a roundtable discussion at the 2018 NEMLA in Pittsburgh, where participants discussed both their own self-translations and those by renown self-translating authors such as Nabokov and Miłes and also spatial metaphors occurring in theories of self-translation.
This creative session would build upon that discussion and in this specific format allow participants to focus on presenting their own experiences with self-translation and expound phenomena and examples of their own writings and translations to be shared with other creative writers and/or (future) self-translators. Topics to be discussed could include:
Recognizing that the New World economy was historically based on the system of slavery and that the United States came into being as a slave-holding nation, we experience the lasting effects of slavery in all facets of contemporary US society and culture. This panel seeks papers analyzing contemporary representations of slave history from the black and white perspectives. While we are very familiar with African American representations of slavery in a number of cultural media, this panel is particularly interested in how contemporary representations of slavery created by people of European descent differ from those of African Americans. How is slavery remembered differently in black and white?
PCDP 2019: Fairies and the Fantastic
February 22-23, 2019
As recent literary and cultural critics have shown, food, and its presence in literature and film, is not solely linked to corporeal survival. The relationship between food and the body is also one of chemical and physical processes, and of tolerance and rejection (both individual and societal). Food—eating, preparation, choice—therefore also embodies social and cultural nuances and, in their evolution, processes of change. What is more, in the acts of consumption and digestion, food can re-emerge in various, and often socially taboo, ways and, in so doing, highlight sociocultural boundaries and normativities. In other words, food not only reflects on individual biological needs, but it also exposes larger social ontologies.
2019 Popular Culture Association (PCA) & American Culture Association (ACA) Joint National Conference
April 17-20, 2019
Washington Marriott Wardman Park
MYTHOLOGY IN CONTEMPORARY CULTURE
Call for Papers
“Audacity” is having a moment in the women’s movement. Festivals, conferences and training sessions have used the term as shorthand for women speaking their truth and owning the power to direct the outcomes of their lives. (The Audacious Women Festival in Scotland and the Audacious Women’s Network in South Africa are two examples.)
Yet audacity is not new. Throughout history, outspoken women writers of fiction, poetry, and plays have positioned themselves in the vanguard of audacity, defying public censure and personal isolation to write candidly about their world. Transgression is a disruptor of patriarchal norms. Candor is transformational when it is deployed to pose questions, shatter stereotypes, and incite change.
What was medieval style?
According to Walter Mignolo (2013, 2007), the triumphal narrative of modernity is inseparable from coloniality, or the logic of domination, exploitation, and oppression. While modernity builds itself on a triumphal narrative of civilization, progress, and development, modernity hides its darker side, “coloniality.” “Modernity/coloniality” shows that while modernity materializes in the rhetoric of salvation, modernity, capitalism, and coloniality are inseparable aspects yoked to authority and the control of economy. The first conceptualizations of modernity/coloniality/decoloniality, launched by Quijano (2007), focus on economic-political dimensions and the question of knowledge and racism.
Shakespeare gave and withheld knowledge to craft his plot and engage his audience. We are taken on a guided ride from which we glimpse what the playwright chooses thus forming our layers of knowledge through which we are manipulated. What we know can be what we knew before attending the play, based on dialogue from the characters, or from reported speech of events off stage and even in times before the play.
The quest for science and progress at the expense of ethical concerns of (animal) pain is laid bare in Chapter XIV, “Doctor Moreau Explains,” of H. G. Wells’s science fiction The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896). In this chapter, Edward Prendick, protagonist and narrator, discovers that the creatures he has previously encountered on the deserted island are not “animalized victims . . . animal-men," but what Moreau refers to as “humanized animals—triumphs of vivisection” instead. At this juncture, Prendick hears from Moreau “‘[his] colourless delight of . . . intellectual desires,’” which has led the doctor to experiment on different animals to gauge their malleability and submission to human will.
SAMLA 90 Poster Session: A Visual Representation of Scholarly Work
November 2, 2016, 8:00–9:00 pm
Westin Peachtree Plaza
Call for Proposals
For its Poster Session, SAMLA welcomes proposals for visual representations of scholarly work. The Poster Session, which features both traditional posters and new media projects, allows presenters the chance to share their research with attendees through graphic design and multimodal composition. We particularly encourage presentations that focus on the special topic of this year’s conference, “Fighters from the Margins: Socio-Political Activists and Their Allies.”
This panel seeks to explore representations of transnational space and transcultural memory in literature of French expression. Whether through exile, immigration, travel, migritude, errance, or the meanderings of the flâneur/flâneuse, francophones have traversed a wide global terrain. Just as authors integrate place into their creations, they in turn leave their stamp on the memories and associations that accrue to any geographical location. Cultural production then reflects and inflects shifting identitarian configurations.
Greetings! I am soliciting chapters for an anthology to be published with an academic press and which will cover a wide range of rhetorical perspectives on veganism as identity, practice, ideology, and discursive ecology. Broad topic areas may include, but are not limited to, the following:
Veg(etari)an techne: crafting veg(etari)an arguments about ethics, health, the environment;
Rhetorics of anti-veg(etari)an discourses: points of view from science, medicine, nutrition; popular culture – including social media, TV)
Representations of veg(etari)ans and veg(etari)anism in the media
The topic of this seminar is the presence of the “chicas raras” in Modern Spanish literature, also known as “queer women” in English. Queer is the perfect conceptual framework to think about how Spanish authors explore feminist themes, such as discrimination or inequality using their narratives as a tool to examine tensions in female subjectivity. The concept queer includes the idea of gender dissidence that encompasses how female intellectuals experience sex, sexuality and, gender. Even if oftentimes these writers have difficulties conceptualizing these notions, they are perceptible in women narratives, especially through specific genres: autobiography, memoir, romance fiction and letters.
CALL FOR ABSTRACTS
Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)
2019 Convention: March 21-24, Washington DC
Roundtable: GOTHIC TELEVISION (Session 17503, Aoise Stratford, Cornell University)
Please consider submitting an abstract for the roundtable on New Representations of Motherhood in the Literature of the New Millennium, NeMLA Convention, Washington, DC, March 21-24, 2019.
Compared to a few decades ago, the birth rate in many Western countries has dramatically decreased and the roles and representations of maternal figures have changed significantly. Through IVF, gamete donation and surrogacy, motherhood is no longer defined univocally, and family structures have evolved accordingly. This panel seeks at investigating how biotechnology, social and family changes, law, and religion inform the representations of motherhood in the literature of the new millennium from an interdisciplinary perspective.
Much of the work done on the post-45 literary field carries an implicitly Americanist perspective. Even the name of the field suggests a certain literary history, with certain assumptions and blind spots about national spaces, identities, and histories. But what would post-45 look like when considered from outside of the United States? How do the current contours of the field exclude certain voices, either in the United States or elsewhere in the world? And, how would such new perspectives shift the beginning and possible endpoint of that literary period? What new narratives of the contemporary emerge if we begin telling the story in a different year or from a different national or global perspective?