ethnicity and national identity

Carmen Maria Machado's short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties (2017), was the winner of the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize and Shirley Jackson Award, and the finalist for the National Book Award and PEN/Robert W. Brigham Prize for Debut Fiction. Received to great acclaim, Her Body and Other Parties provocatively navigates between eerie and moving narratives that toy between science fiction, speculative fiction, horror, and fan fiction to underscore the various violences inflicted on women's bodies.

CALL FOR PAPERS: CAAS at Congress 2020

Western University, May 30-June 1, 2020

The Canadian Association for American Studies invites paper proposals for our 2020 conference, which will be held in conjunction with the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences at Western University in London, Ontario, Canada. Applicants may submit a proposal to one of our CAAS-sponsored panels or roundtables (listed below), or to our General CFP.

Deadline for Paper Proposals: November 15, 2019

General CFP

In his 1903 The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois poses a question at the heart of the African-American literary tradition: “How does it feel to be a problem?” We see the question’s precursors in Walker’s Appeal, Douglass’ address on the Fourth of July, and Harper’s anti-slavery poetry. It reverberates in Hurston’s “How It Feels To Be Colored Me,” Ellison’s “black and blue,” Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, and Rankine’s Citizen. Taking up the affective relationship between race and national belonging, these texts ask us to contend with what it feels like to be black in a nation founded on anti-blackness. Indeed, as Baldwin and Coates make clear, the problem lies ever “between the world and me.”

Mythological narratives constitute a significant portion of the world’s most influential literature; nevertheless, they are glaringly absent from contemporary literary studies. Students interested in the study of mythology are directed to departments of anthropology, religion, or intellectual heritage, and these fields certainly conduct invaluable examinations of world-mythology; however, myths are unequivocally literary in nature, and their omission in departments of literature is both a detriment to the field and a disservice to world cultures. What went wrong with the study of myth-as-literature, and how can we revive this genre to reinvigorate the field of literary studies? 

What went wrong?

NeMLA 2020: Boston, MA

http://www.buffalo.edu/nemla/convention.html

In his 1961 essay “The New Lost Generation,” James Baldwin argues that Europe gave the “new” African American expats of the late 1940s and the 1950s “the sanction, if one can accept it, to become oneself. No artist can survive without this acceptance. But rare indeed is the American artist who achieved this without first becoming a wanderer, and then, upon his return to his own country, the loneliest and most blackly distrusted of men.” Indeed, Baldwin asserts that African American expats in Paris gained a kind of liberation through their experience with a culture wholly unlike their own.