ethnicity and national identity

It has become increasingly difficult today to characterize cultural belonging. This is not to suggest that cultures have disappeared but that it has become impossible to think of them as homogeneous, providing us with totalizing expressions of collective identity. The globalizing movement of modernity, the deterritorializing flows of its economic relations and the migration that follows it show that the borders between cultures have dissolved while the concept of culture itself is more than ever characterized by internal tensions. It is then neither cultural identity nor its constitutive outside that is central to culture but rather the movement in which it already resides.

CFP: Racial Passing and Colorism in Literature Panel

Society for the Study of Southern Literature
Biennial Conference
Austin, Texas
15-18 February 2018

Racial passing has been a common theme in literature, especially in texts dealing with escaping to freedom during the antebellum period.  The Nadir period also witnessed a spike in racial passing and colorism themes as racial tensions heightened anti-black violence throughout the United States. This panel seeks papers that examine texts dealing with racial passing and colorism.  Questions for consideration might include:

Call for papers for a roundtable at the 2018 Northeast Modern Language Association conference in Pittsburgh, April 12-15. 
Deadline for Submission: September 30, 2017.

This roundtable will examine teaching methods and strategies for addressing the fiction of terrorism in the contemporary literature classroom. With a focus on teaching after 9/11, and in a moment fraught with tensions about politics and secondary education (see, for example, the “Professor Watchlist”), this roundtable will also address the ways faculty can frame their classes—not only for the students they teach, but for a general public concerned with the politics of college and university faculty.

Soldier, psychoanalyst, political activist, and post-colonial theorist—in his intense and brief life, Frantz Fanon wore many masks. And his influence has been as variegated as well; the list of those who fell under his sway include, to name just a few, Sartre and De Beauvoir, Homi Bahba, film director Gillo Pontecorvo, and the Black Panthers. This panel invites papers that explore and meditate upon how Fanon’s vibrant life and enduring writings influenced and continue to operate upon our present cultural and political moment.

This panel focuses on the enduring influence of Frantz Fanon by looking at specific works, ideas, and connections between Fanon and events, especially those of national liberation between his lifetime and the present time.

In his 1938 essay, “Figura,” Erich Auerbach asserts that a figura, unlike an eidosconveying static form, is inherently invested in a relation to time. As Auerbach's use of the figure was polemically mobilized in order to undermine the manufactured barbarism of fascist philology in his time, so might the figure in yet other chronotopes direct readership to structures of barbarism, power, or erotic desire, for example, and their material and philosophical lineages in the world.