cultural studies and historical approaches

We invite presentation proposals for The Fifties and Pop/Visual Culture: Film, Television and Beyond Conference, to be held at Texas Christian University (Fort Worth, Texas) November 9-10, 2018.

The conference organizers are seeking historically and theoretically intriguing contributions that explore any noteworthy aspect(s) of popular and/or visual culture during the 1950s, whether in the United States or elsewhere, in relation to cinematic, televisual, and other types of media offerings.

This panel examines the role of avant-garde women in confronting models of gender, domesticity and political practices safeguarded by patriarchal society. From the margins of vanguardism women effectively engaged in syndicalist and anarchist movements that reacted to state politics, while urging the importance of launching social reforms and radical art. This panel will thus provide an overview of artists who participated in a variety of experimental trends such as Cubism, Futurism, Expressionism, Imagism, Vorticism, Dadaism and Surrealism, among others.

Full Name / Name of Organization:

Chelsea Adams, University of Nevada Las Vegas, The Blues and Jazz Dance Book Club

Emily Winerock, Co-Director, Shakespeare and Dance Project

“If you are not a myth whose reality are you? If you are not a reality whose myth are you?” –Sun Ra, Prophetika, Book One

Since the publication of Mark Dery’s now-seminal article on Afrofuturism, “Black to the Future” (1993), several critical studies have expanded the concept of black speculative fiction and claimed it as a full-fledged genre of its own. Indeed, the mainstream releases of a graphic novel adaptation of Octavia Butler’s Kindred, Marvel’s Black Panther and Ava Duvernay’s A Wrinkle in Time point to the existence of what we might now might call an “Afrofuturist canon.”

Maritime Modernities: Literary and Cultural Representations of The Indian Ocean World

Ed. by Anupama Mohan

Special Issue, Postcolonial Text

Projected date of Special Issue: June 2019