cfp.english.upenn.edu

ImageTexT Special Issue: The Hernandez Brothers

Guest Editors, Christopher Gonzalez and Derek Parker Royal

For nearly thirty years the Hernandez brothers (Gilbert, Jaime, and Mario) have created comics that have expanded beyond superhero and sci-fi, bringing so-called “alternative” comics to the fore. Their fictive worlds are as sprawling and complex as Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, and more scholars are beginning to take a closer look at their comics, specifically Love and Rockets. In keeping with this interest, ImageTexT will devote a special issue to the works of the Hernandez Brothers. This volume will seek to explore a multitude of theoretical perspectives that may further illuminate the brothers’ oeuvre. Possible topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Their influence on other graphic novelists, alternative comics, or mainstream comics
• Representations of the Latino/a subject
• Depictions of violence and trauma in their work
• Issues of gender, the body, and the sexual subject
• The act of consuming (eating, addiction, pornography, etc.)
• The significance of the telenovela as a metaphor for reading their comics and as a possible stylistic influence
• Any aspect of the non-Love and Rockets stories, e.g., their work with larger publishers such as DC and Dark Horse
• Their uses, or deconstruction, of Magical Realism
• The growth or evolution of prominent characters (Luba, Fritzi, Hopey, Maggie, etc.)
• Their possible influences on text-only authors such as Junot Díaz
• Comics and the political subject
• Narrative theory, narration, and narrative techniques of the Hernandez Brothers
• The Hernandez Brothers’ place and/or legacy (either as individuals or collectively) in the comics medium

All essay submissions should not exceed 10,000 words, including notes. Contributors should format submissions based on the MLA Style Manual, 3rd edition, and use endnotes. Authors will be responsible for securing copyright permission for all images used. Address all inquiries, and submit all completed manuscripts, to the guest editors at gonzalez.283@osu.edu. Please include the words “Hernandez Special Issue” in the subject heading.

Deadline for final manuscript submission is April 2, 2010.

ImageTexT is a peer-reviewed, open access journal dedicated to the interdisciplinary study of comics and related media published by the English Department at the University of Florida with support from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. For more information on ImageTexT, please visit http://www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/

Creoles, Diasporas, Cosmopolitanisms
American Comparative Literature Association annual meeting
April 1-4, 2010
New Orleans, LA

Between Alienations: Mimicry, Parody, and Desire in Transnational Spaces

The presence of a transnational community entails the recognition of a non-singular national identity, a paradigm understood, variously, as a shattered norm or a hybrid ideal. While focusing on how this transnationality gives voice to diaspora and creole communities, we will examine how transnational spaces, bodies, and motion are constructed from forms of mimicry and parody already extant within the construction of the nation-state. Is what Judith Butler calls “an insurrection at the level of ontology” required to make room for such potentially monstrous or alien proliferations? This seminar welcomes papers from a wide variety of disciplines, geographical areas, and scholarly perspectives.

Paper Abstract Deadline (250 words): November 13, 2009.

Paper submissions online: http://www.acla.org/acla2010/?page_id=6

Seminar description online: http://www.acla.org/acla2010/?p=1153

The presence of a transnational community entails the recognition of a non-singular national identity, a paradigm understood, variously, as a shattered norm or a hybrid ideal. While focusing on how this transnationality gives voice to diaspora and creole communities, we will examine how transnational spaces, bodies, and motion are constructed from forms of mimicry and parody already extant within the construction of the nation-state. Is what Judith Butler calls “an insurrection at the level of ontology” required to make room for such potentially monstrous or alien proliferations? This seminar welcomes papers from a wide variety of disciplines, geographical areas, and scholarly perspectives.

http://www.acla.org/acla2010/?p=1153

The theoretical conjunction between queer and postcolonial studies emerging over the past fifteen years has produced work on identities and political movements as well as interrogating the history of non-heteronormative gender and sexuality in postcolonial contexts. Dissident Citizenship will bring scholars working at this nexus together at a time when postcolonial nations are taking divergent turns in their relationship to sexual dissidence (gender and sexuality), some with a focus on religious, ‘normative’ restrictions and others turning towards various forms of legal inclusion. Both turns have relationships to the politics of former colonisers, but are also the product of the way independent nations have been structured as secular or theocratic, as well as the way their postcolonial nationhood has been 'imagined'. Queer theory has been accused of irrelevance in certain western metropolitan corners as well as postcolonial contexts, and yet its potential seems under-exploited in the context of queer postcolonial subjectivity, where a ‘nation-centred view of sovereign citizenship can only comprehend the predicament of minoritarian ‘belonging’ as a problem of ontology - a question of belonging to a race, a gender, a class, a generation [and one might add, a sexuality] becomes...a naturalization of the problems of citizenship’ (Bhabha, 2004).

In order to explore the multiple strands of political, social and cultural contexts that produce and impact on sexuality in the postcolonial nation, we invite papers from scholars working on legal and citizenship discourses, social sciences such as anthropology and sociology, and humanities, particularly literature, film and media, as well as those working in relevant critical theory.

Working with the concept of queer postcolonial citizenship, the intention is to impact both fields. Postcolonial studies has until recently mainly assumed ‘universal’ norms of gender and sexuality, which this conference seeks to disrupt in a productive way for further work. We acknowledge this has perhaps been as a guard against orientalism, but consider that the deconstructive tools of queer and postcolonial may in working together explore the effects of this to form a challenging reconceptualisation of pleasure. We also seek to impact studies of sexual dissidence and queer theory, which have tended to take their theoretical approaches from within a privileged metropolitan western political framework that can sometimes be applied intrusively or insensitively in the postcolonial context. How might queer theories be re-worked in non-western historical contexts and through postcolonial conceptualisations of past and self? What potential risks are there in bringing the conceptual frameworks together and what sort of limits (if any) might be necessary?

We would like to invite papers on relevant themes as outlined by but not limited to those below, and particularly, those exploring frameworks that might advance a local understanding of queer in the postcolonial context. We welcome critically creative and activist work.

- Diaspora/Transnational Spaces
- Queering Geographies/Spaces
- Postcolonial Race/Ethnicity
- Canonical Traditions in Postcolonial and Queer Theory
- Law, Sexuality and Postcolonial Subjectivity
- Postcolonial/Queer Literature(s), Film and Media(s)
- Comparative Models of Queer Postcolonial Belonging
- HIV/AIDS and postcolonial citizenship: Monstrous bodies and effeminised ‘victims’
- Sex Work/Sexual Economies (inc. Sex Tourism and Pornography)
- Hetero/Homo-Normative Citizenship Discourses
- Queering the Postcolonial Nation

Dissident Citizenship is hosted by the Centre for the Study of Sexual Dissidence with the support of the Centre for Colonial & Postcolonial Studies.
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Please send 350 word abstracts and a short biography in an attachment by return of email to:
Dr Shamira A. Meghani

Deadline for abstracts: 31st December 2009

Please feel free to forward to interested parties.

CALL FOR PAPERS FOR THE INAUGURAL POSTGRADUATE CONFERENCE OF

THE POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES ASSOCIATION

Date: 21–22 May 2010

Venue: University of Stirling, Scotland

Keynote speakers: TBC

Contemporary events with catastrophic global ramifications, such as the current economic crisis or ongoing conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, are not only mediated by super-fast digital communication and information networks but also conditioned by these rapidly advancing technologies. From the social networking site Facebook to the Middle Eastern satellite news channel Al Jazeera, digital forms of culture have multiplied in recent years, proliferating conduits and connections across the globe which shape our lives in multifarious ways. In the light of this, a postcolonial perspective on information and communication technologies is pressing. How far is cyberspace mediated by metropolitan centres of knowledge production, and how might new media entrench existing structures of inequality, by serving corporate capitalist interests or by saturating consumers with hegemonic representations of global events? Conversely, to what extent can technologies operate as tools of empowerment or resistance for marginalised peoples, by bypassing forms of censorship and facilitating access to global arenas of debate and alternative communities? How have new technologies impacted on issues of identity, place and nation, and shifted the parameters of postcolonial thought?

This inaugural postgraduate conference of the Postcolonial Studies Association will consider the cultural, political, and practical effects of information and communication technologies on postcolonial peoples and spaces. The PSA invites papers from postgraduates working in the disciplines of literature, history, cultural studies, film, human geography, linguistics, politics, psychology, religious studies, art, music, media & communication, and informatics, among others. Our aim is to bring together a wide variety of scholarly interests and methodological approaches.

Papers may focus on, but are not limited to, the following conceptual intersections:

Technologies and neo-imperialism: cultural imperialism and homogenization, digital media and hegemony, technological warfare and its virtual representations (computer games);
Technologies and capitalism: commodification of information, web marketing and advertising, uneven access to technology, uneven development of technologies (industrial and agricultural);
Technologies and resistance: alternative virtual communities, ‘indigenous’ media and self-determination, sustainable technologies, open-source soft ware communities, hackers and cybercrime;
Technologies and communication: new forms of language, literacy, transnational social networking sites, censorship and its circumvention, ‘freedom of speech’, media as social and political commentary;
Technologies and place: spatial dislocation, the erosion of national boundaries, cosmopolitanisms (tele-technologies such as mobile phones, email, internet telephony, webcams);
Technologies and youth identities: music as sub-cultural expression (downloads and MP3 players), virtual subjectivities and transnational communities (computer games, YouTube, chat rooms);
Technologies and text: new filmic and literary genres, the production of alternative modernities, textual representations of technologies;
Technologies and knowledge: education and e-learning, data and surveillance, globalisation and the idea of ‘democratised’ or ‘universal’ knowledge (web-based search engines);
Technologies and the ‘new’: new uses of old technologies, modernity and cultural innovation.

Panels will normally comprise three 20-minute papers. Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words to Brian Rock by 15 January 2010: brian.rock@stir.ac.uk

The JPW/PSA Essay Prize 2010 will be awarded at the conference. Details about the prize will be available shortly on the PSA website: www.postcolonialstudiesassociation.co.uk

As conceptual categories that both derive from and frame our understanding of particular works, genres are determined largely by what Ludwig Wittgenstein calls “family resemblances” rather than by particular qualities that all works in a given genre necessarily share. While ambiguities at the periphery of genres produce hybrid forms like the prose poem or collage, even works at the center of a genre are shaped by disputes at its edges. For example, one could argue that the growing popularity of the novel as a chief means of narrative expression at the end of the eighteenth century urged poets to re-conceive the fundamental features of their art, thereby shaping the conventions of Romantic poetry. Other examples include photography’s influence on the development of Impressionist painting and the effects that adaptations of a given work into other media might have on one’s understanding of the work in its original form. In this seminar, we propose to gather a diverse set of papers for a discussion of questions regarding the formation and maintenance of genres and other conceptual categories. How does an artist’s differential awareness of genre characteristics serve to blur such distinctions in cross-genre hybrids? How are the essential features of a genre defined for a particular moment in cultural history? How do genre boundaries relate to the formation and maintenance of other conceptual categories like those determining personal and national identities? We welcome proposals for papers that adopt an interdisciplinary approach or that address genre distinctions within a single discipline.
**Please send us any questions/comments, but proposals must be submitted through the ACLA website to be considered: http://www.acla.org/acla2010/

Call for Papers

American Comparative Literature Association Annual Meeting
April 1-4, 2010 in New Orleans, Louisiana

Deadline for a 250 word paper proposal: 13 Nov. 2009
(to be submitted through the ACLA website at http://www.acla.org/submit/index.php)

Transnational Feminist Responses and the Torture of “Enemies”

In "Beyond Terror: Gender, Narrative, and Human Rights" Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg underlines:

“The structure of scenes of human rights violation, and of many cultural texts that represent such violation, depends upon dominant gender norms linked to exclusionary practices of citizenship and human rights, and therefore gender as an analytical category must be afforded space at the very center of the study of and struggle to maintain international human rights. This effort presumes a feminist struggle that refuses to restrict its focus to gender, but rather highlights the connection between dominant gender normalization and the brutalities of racism and economic imbalances in global and local contexts.”

In fact, much work in transnational feminism remains to be done with regard to the politics of torture of the “enemy”. How does transnational feminist politics respond to torture of the “enemy” or representations of such torture in the face of governmentality? How do we responsibly examine the structure and ideology of torture of the “enemy”? How does transnational feminism responsibly speak to the role of women in the politics of torture? What obligations does it have to address the historical relationship between legacies of colonialism/neo-imperialism and the torture of people in the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries? However, these are just a few lines of critical inquiry, and this seminar looks forward to many more stimulating approaches to the issue. This 9-12 person seminar invites the study of the politics and representation of torture not only through literary texts, but also other media.

Depending on the number of papers, this panel will meet on two/three consecutive days. Presenters are strongly encouraged to attend all sessions of the panel. This unique conference set-up allows a small group of researchers (8-12) to pursue a particular topic intensely within the format of a larger conference.

For questions about the panel, please contact the seminar organizer: Basuli Deb (bdeb2@unl.edu)

For submitting paper proposals and for more information on the conference, please visit the official conference website at http://www.acla.org/acla2010/

Restrategizing Essentialism

Seminar Organizer: Jonathan E. Abel, Penn State; S. -C. Kevin Tsai, Indiana U Bloomington

If essentialist notions of identity can be tolerated as expedient means for political ends, at what point do they become unquestioned categories for academic inquiry? Can identity continue to generate radical moments for ethical criticism when the Other is appropriated as a foil for the Western self; when the rhetoric of identity serves to shield Area Studies from engagement with the world; or when the original impetus behind expanding the canon is replaced by “expansion for expansion’s sake”? Encounters with the “brute reality of the Orient” or the “incomprehensibility of the South” often produce new epistemologies revealing the limitations of Western theory. Yet, this strategy can also be its own limitation, too committed to the particularity of the local to have relevance to the global. Indeed, despite valuable attention on the non-European in recent criticism, the asymmetry of “the West vs. the Rest” persists, condemning studies of “the Rest” to a cultural fetishism, bound in temporality, locality, and nativity outside of theory. Is it still possible to invoke the ethical necessity of strategic essentialism when the provisional nature of its strategy has been forgotten? Can criticism employ identity without continuing to risk the reinscription of the very asymmetrical relationship it aims to unseat? Do the new categories of cultural materiality, ecology, and the posthuman constitute a future form of this debate, or do they merely reiterate the old ontological dilemmas? What are the ends to identity criticism?

This CFP may be found at:

Submit by November 13th at:

Representations of Love in Film and Television
2010 Film & History Conference
November 11-14, 2010
Hyatt Regency Hotel
Milwaukee, WI
www.uwosh.edu/filmandhistory

Deadline Extended! Second Round Deadline: March 1, 2010

Film & History invites proposals for individual papers, panels, and roundtables for our upcoming conference, "Representations of Love in Film and Television," to be held November 11-14, 2010, in Milwaukee, WI. Please see the list of active topic areas, below.

The conference will look at how love — as psychology, as dramatic principle, as historical agent, as cultural stage, as ethical standard — has been represented in film and television. How has the depiction of love defined a society or a period? Which people — or institutions or ideas or animals — have been promoted as subjects (or objects) of love, and which ones have not? In what ways do we love or not love because of film and television? How has the screen represented the love of country, the love of one's neighbor, the love of God, or the love of family? How has it represented the repudiation or reformulation of love, and what are the historical ramifications?

Questions about the nature of love define not just couples or parents and their children but whole communities and nations, shaping their religions, their economic policies, their media programming, their social values, their most powerful fears and ambitions. Love in each era defines the struggles worth enduring and the stories worth telling, from Gone With the Wind and Casablanca to Hamlet and Cleopatra, from The Jazz Singer and The Sound of Music to The Graduate and Boogie Nights, from Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and The Ten Commandments to Easy Rider and The Right Stuff, from The 400 Blows and Life Is Beautiful to Amelie and Muriel's Wedding. This conference will examine the aesthetic representations of love on screen and will assess their historical, cultural, and philosophical implications.

Areas currently open for paper and panel submissions include:

Across the Tracks: Love and Class
Affairs of Race
Agape: Faith, God Mission
America's Love Affair with Movie Gangsters
L'Amour Noir
An American Bromance
Blaxploitation Films
The Bond Girls
Cinephilia
The Dark Side of Love
Different Bodies
For the Love of the Fans
The Intrusion of Love
Jane Austen
Jazz and Film
Jewish-Gentile Romances
The Landscape of Love
Love (Early) American Style
Loving the Machine
Listening to the Music of Love
Love and Commitment in Fraternity/Sorority Films
Love in the Ancient World
Love and Death
Love and the Family Man
Love and Food
Love and Sex in the Graphic Novels of Alan Moore
Love at the End of Life
Love in a Time of War
Love in the Golden Age of Television
Love, Marriage, and a Baby Carriage
Love Thy Leader
Love and Violence
Lovers on the Side
Lust in Space
Medieval Love and Sexuality
Office Romance
Patriotism in Film and Television
Performing Love/Loving Performance
Reality-TV Love
Sex and Love in Asian Contexts
Things of Love/The Love of Things
Vampire Love
Women and Children First: Gender and Ethics
Writers in Love

(Additional area proposals continue to be welcome.)

We are also delighted to welcome director and film theorist Dr. Laura Mulvey, as the conference's keynote speaker. Dr. Mulvey, professor of film and media studies at Birkbeck College, University of London, is widely known for her influential essay, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (1975), and is also the author of _Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image_ (2006), and _Fetishism and Curiosity_ (1996), along with numerous articles. Her films, co-written and co-directed with Peter Wollen, are recognized for their complex explorations of identity, symbolism, and the female experience.

Please consult our website (www.uwosh.edu/filmandhistory), or email Director of Communications, Cynthia Miller, at cymiller@tiac.net, for additional information.

ACLA (New Orleans, Apr. 1-4, 2010)
Cultures of Migration: Local Cosmopolitanisms

Immigrant communities have often been depicted as either inward-looking, focused on preserving cultural practices from the “old country” or outward-looking, intent on fitting into the new “host” country. In recent years, there has been increasing recognition that “immigrant” communities are often also migrant communities, with complex social and travel networks between their country of origin, their new country of residence and sometimes third and fourth countries where their offspring choose to live. This panel invites papers that investigate how these complex patterns are reflected in creative works of literature, film, theater or music.

Questions to address include, but are not limited to the following. Looking at cultural works, how do immigrant communities place themselves with regard to “home” and “host” nations? How do identities form within and across national borders? How do creative works portray the relations between communities with the same origins but different destinations (e.g. Algerians in London vs. Paris)? How do they identify with immigrants of other ethnic, national or religious backgrounds living in the same space (e.g. Turks, Maghrebis and Asians in French suburbs)? How are these identities transmitted in works of literature, theater, cinema and music? How do national identities play out against local identities (e.g. French or Moroccan vs. identification with a city such as Lyon or Rabat)? How do creative works themselves encourage or impede the transmission of an identity? How do creative works seek to get beyond local or national identifications to declare themselves “citizens of the world”? What are the benefits and costs of such a gesture?

Format of seminar:
This panel will meet on two or three consecutive days (depending on the number of papers), and presenters are strongly encouraged to plan to attend all sessions of the panel. This is a unique conference format that allows a small group of researchers (normally 8-12 people) to pursue a particular topic in depth within the context of a larger conference.

For more information on the conference, please visit the official conference website at http://www.acla.org/acla2010. Please note that paper proposals must be submitted through the conference website at http://www.acla.org/submit/index.php.

Deadline to submit proposals: November 13, 2009

For questions about the panel, please contact the seminar organizers:
Marika Preziuso, Birbeck, University of London (marika.preziuso@googlemail.com)
Annedith Schneider, Sabanci University (schneider@sabanciuniv.edu)

Gatekeeper, Mother Hen, Culture Agent?: Selecting the Appropriate Metaphor for Compositionists in the Era of Linguistic Diversity

In the postmodern and postcolonial age, linguistic diversity poses a challenge to the role of the composition instructor, and has politicized the compositionist by drawing attention to the ways in which the composition classroom can and often does determine a student’s success or failure at higher education. This politicizing has resulted in the construction of a striking metaphor for the compositionist, namely the gatekeeper, barring access to scholarly and, consequently, economic agency for those whose linguistic prowess is in creolized, rather than in standardized English. This gatekeeper metaphor has in many conversations replaced the previous and equally problematic metaphor of the “mother hen”. More recently, postcolonial scholarship in composition has introduced the notion of the compositionist as culture agent, intervening in the discursive conflict between the “home languages” students bring with them to the composition classroom, and the “school language” they are expected to appropriate, and attempting to offer students access and agency without hampering their contradiscursive potential.

While these metaphors all hold a place in discussions of the English teacher, this panel would like to invite presenters to consider whether any of these metaphors are sufficient, relevant, and/or useful in the context of their particular teaching practices as well as in the context of English’s growing linguistic diversity. The panel would also invite presenters to propose new, more relevant metaphors for the English teacher, ones that perhaps more closely define the work we do, the agendas we make for ourselves, and the potential we see in our students.

Deadline for abstracts 11/13/09

Submit abstracts to ACLA site: http://www.acla.org/acla2010/?page_id=6

Submit querries to Toni Francis: tfrancis@cob.edu.bs

The world is currently facing a crisis in the revitalisation of indigenous languages. On average, every fortnight an indigenous language becomes extinct as sole surviving speakers pass away or indigenous languages are overwhelmed by those of a dominant culture. In line with this ethos, AlterNative aims to publish one article in its original language per issue.

AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples is a multidisciplinary, peer-reviewed journal which aims to present indigenous views from native indigenous perspectives. We are dedicated to the analysis and dissemination of indigenous knowledge that belongs to cultural, traditional, tribal and aboriginal peoples, as well as first nations, from around the world.

In line with this ethos, AlterNative publishes one article in its original language per issue. Papers should respond to one or more themes of the journal:

• Origins
• Place
• Peoples
• Community
• Culture
• Traditional and oral history
• Heritage
• Colonialism
• Power
• Intervention
• Development
• Self-determination

Submission and deadlines

Articles should be in an indigenous language and address the themes of the journal. AlterNative primarily publishes substantive articles that address a particular indigenous issue or theme. Each article should be accompanied by a 100-150 word abstract in English.

Submissions received before 31 December 2009 will be considered for our first general issue of 2010. However, we accept submissions throughout the year via our online portal.
For more details, please visit our website: www.alternative.ac.nz
Or contact us directly to discuss your planned submission on editors@alternative.ac.nz

Please note: All submissions will be subject to our peer review process. The Editors retain discretion at all stages of the publication process to accept or reject an article.

American Comparative Literature Association, 2010 Annual Meeting

April 1-4, 2010 (New Orleans)

Title: Mistakes, Mistranslations and Mendacity: The Logic and Language of Cosmopolitanism

Seminar Leaders:

Julia Ng (Northwestern University), Markus Hardtmann (Northwestern University), Tülay Atak (Rhode Island School of Design)

Contact: Julia Ng (j-ng@northwestern.edu)

Description:

According to Kant, truthfulness is a moral obligation: man cannot use himself as a mere means, or “language machine” (Sprachmaschine), because he is bound to the inner end of communicating his thoughts. Yet in one of the foundational texts for the post-Enlightenment understanding of cosmopolitanism, Towards Perpetual Peace, Kant writes that the sovereign signatories of a future and lasting peace will, despite themselves, establish the possibility of a cosmopolitan alternative to mutually assured destruction out of the sheer and formal possibility of their uttering “right” in a truthful and meaningful manner. Structuring the promise on language’s automatic communication of truth—machines, as it were, cannot lie—Kant opens up the possibility that cosmopolitanism might rest on a certain form of non-intentional language that tests the limits of autonomy.

Departing from but not restricted to the problem posed by Kant, this panel investigates “other” uses of language—mistakes, mistranslations and mendacity, for instance—as the linguistic conditions for the possibility of cosmopolitanism broadly conceived. As such, we especially welcome theoretical reflections on any period or literature that bear upon the “logic” of a cosmopolitan idea and its peculiar interplay with “languages” both formal and local at its foundation. If a certain kind of rationalism is commonly aligned with an abstract humanism suggestive of European hegemony, yet cultural relativism, its counterweight, is associated with nationalisms of varying degrees, then how might one characterize the uneasy position occupied by cosmopolitanism in between them in terms of logical modality, linguistic strategy and literary structure? Possible topics include: modern philology in exile; modernization and linguistic reform; the politics of constructing languages; projects, programs, and other counterfactual narratives; grammar wars; writing and rewriting perpetual peace.

Please submit paper proposals of up to 250 words by November 13 via the "submit a paper proposal" button on the ACLA 2010 page of the acla.org website, designating the name of this panel from the drop-down menu.

Interdisciplinary Arts Conference 2010

HOPE

Uncertainty, Pluralism, and Innovation

CALL FOR PAPERS

We invite submissions on the topic of interest from all Faculty of Arts students, at both the Undergraduate and Graduate levels. Some related topics may be, but are not limited to:

Human Rights; Global Issues; Philosophy; Religion and Culture; The Environment; Politics; Psychology; Economics; Multiculturalsim; Visual Culture and Media; Academia

To be held on March 27th, 2010 at Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.

Deadline for abstracts, artwork and photography is JANUARY 15th, 2010. Please submit to r.c.executive@gmail.com. For more details please visit our website at www.religionandculturesociety.com.

Hosted By: Religion & Culture Society, Wilfrid Laurier University

Deadline: December 15th, 2009

CALL FOR PAPERS

7th Annual Duke-UNC Graduate Islamic Studies Conference

Graduate students in Islamic Studies at Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill are now accepting papers for the following conference:

No!: Subjectivity and Agency in Muslim Rights/Rites of Negation

February 27-28, 2010

Duke University

Keynote Speaker - Kecia Ali, Boston University

“And when a limit is established, norms and interdictions are not far behind”

—Jacques Derrida

The concept and practice of “No!” can establish barriers and break them down. As Georges Bataille explained, “No” can be passive negation or active rebellion. Who gets to refuse and how they do so involves subjectivity—ways in which individuals relate to themselves and the other. The act of negation enacts the affirmation of possible alternatives. Such acts range from Satan’s refusal to bow before Adam to a wife’s legal inability to refuse her husband’s sexual overtures in Muslim jurisprudence. In ordinary life, individuals enunciate negation through multiple media, including expressions of tact and satire. In politics, the state expresses its agency by codifying certain political ideologies, while individuals actualize their agency by negating or affirming them. Practices of negation, refusal, and dissent both constitute and are constituted by subjectivity and society. This connection has often been overlooked in recent studies of Islam. Therefore, we welcome diverse approaches to examine negation, agency, and the subject in the study of classical, medieval, and contemporary Islamicate contexts. We are particularly interested in interdisciplinary approaches to this theme with regards to Muslim political theologies, Islamic textual canons, and Muslim minorities, including those of gender, sexuality, race, and class.

In addition to formal papers, we also welcome films related to theme of the conference.

Possible paper/film topics may include:

* Refusal or Appropriation of Normative Categories of Gender and Sexuality
* Approaches to Difference in Muslim Intellectual History
* The Construction of Sunni and Shi'a Theology Through Mutual Refusal
* The Role of Dissent in Contemporary Muslim Politics
* Rejection of Arabized Muslim identity
* Negation as a hermeneutical tool in the construction of authority in jurisprudential methodology
* Re-defining Collective Muslim Narratives and Representations
* Appropriation or negation of legal rulings through the utilization of Objectives of Islamic Law
* Annihilating the Self in Sufism
* Muslim Dissent as Political Threat
* Asceticism and Martyrdom as Socio-Political Refusal in Early Sufism
* Disavowal of Muslim Minorities
* Refusing Racial Categories within Islam
* Turns from Ash‘arite Theological Hegemony in Contemporary Sunnism
* Appropriations and Negations of the Muslim Past in Contemporary Apologetic Discourses

The conference will proceed in an interactive workshop format. We ask that those invited to present papers remain for the duration of the conference in order to engage the work of fellow participants. This two-day conference will take place at Duke University.

To apply, please send the following to dukeuncconf@gmail.com:

* Proposal of no more than 500 words, double-spaced
* Paper title
* Curriculum Vitae

The deadline for submissions is December 15, 2009

Organizers:

Brandon Gorman, Department of Sociology, UNC-Chapel Hill
Matthew Hotham, Department of Religious Studies, UNC-Chapel Hill
Nadia Khan, Department of Religion, Duke University
Ali Altaf Mian, Department of Religion, Duke University
Saadia Yacoob, Department of Religion, Duke University

http://english.louisiana.edu/laconference/Home/index.php

The Louisiana Conference invites papers and creative work on the effects of transformative moments and experiences—textual, cultural and academic. Topics might include but are not limited to: effects of historical and political crises on literature and culture; revolutions; linguistic transformations; bodily transformations; religious conversions; personal turningpoints in autobiographies, literary characters, academic careers, etc.; genre transformations; texts into film; dissertation into book; academic turning points.

Guidelines for Submission:

* 350-500 word proposals for 20 min papers should be submitted via email as attachment in rich text (.rtf) format by our extended deadline of November 14, 2009 to langlit2010@louisiana.edu. Do not include name on abstract. Include name, affiliation, email address, phone number, and title of paper, as well as a brief biographical statement in the body of the email. Indicate possible A/V needs.
* Panel proposals (three presenters) should explain in 500 words the panel topic and include a 500 word abstract and biographical statement for each presenter.
* Creative submissions should include a short, descriptive abstract as well as a sample of the work to be considered. Please specify “Creative Submission” in your proposal.

Darrell Bourque Award

The Louisiana Conference on Language, Literature, and Culture is organized to meet the needs of advanced graduate students and junior faculty, but welcomes contributions from academics at all levels.
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Debates around how "the human" is defined, interrogated and regulated often delineate boundaries that separate the human and its others (e.g. the animal, the divine, the monstrous). Far from being abstract exercises in taxonomy, assessments of these boundaries impose ways of knowing, reading and seeing. Political, ideological, scientific, religious and economic regimes participate in framing the human. Determining who or what counts as human under these regimes has profound consequences. For example, one can be biologically but not politically human (e.g. undocumented workers). One's political "human-ness" can be stripped away or called into question after certain violations of the law (e.g. enemy combatants). Recent genealogies of gender, race and ethnicity remind us to what extent our "humanity" is precarious and contingent upon culturally coherent frames that not only produce the (in)human but reflexively legitimate that production. Definitions of the human are not fixed temporally or qualitatively but rather shaped by various lenses, filters and paradigms. This symposium will consider objects of literary, linguistic and/or cultural study, which engage with frames that produce, perform, disqualify, marginalize, or maintain and (re)appropriate conceptions of the human.

We encourage submissions from a wide variety of fields including (but not limited to): literature, art history, linguistics, music, theater arts, history, political science, philosophy, medicine, disability, gender and women's studies, religious studies, anthropology, geography, sociology, American studies, African Diaspora studies and cultural studies.

Please send an abstract of up to 300 words in anticipation of a 15-20 minute presentation in English to agsrs@umn.edu by December 31, 2009. Proposals for panels are also welcome.

31st Annual Conference February 10-13, 2010
Southwest/Texas Popular and American Culture Association
http://swtxpca.org/
Abstract Deadline: 12/05/09, Priority Registration Deadline 12/15/09
Conference Hotel:
Hyatt Regency Albuquerque
330 Tijeras
Albuquerque, NM 87102
505.842.1234

Panel Title: Wild West II: Mythologizing Europe in Inglourious Basterds

This panel seeks participants for a roundtable discussion of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds for the European Popular Culture and Literature area of the SW/TX PCA/ACA conference in February 2010.
Scholars, teachers, professionals, and others are encouraged to participate. Graduate students are also particularly welcome with award opportunities for best graduate papers.

Some possible topics to consider (but not limited to):

Mythologizing Europe (as opposed to Europe mythologizing U.S. in the “spaghetti western”)
European vs. U.S. cultural paradigms
Notions of “Jewishness” and the Holocaust in the film
Gender and race in the film

Please share this CFP with colleagues.

Please send a short bio and a 200-350 word abstract that presents a discussion topic on the film to mjonet@nmsu.edu or to the physical address below (electronic submissions preferred) by 05 December 2009.

Dr. M. Catherine Jonet, European Popular Culture and Literature Area Chair
MSC 3WSP
New Mexico State University
P.O. Box 30001
Las Cruces, NM 88003-8001

We are seeking proposals for an anthology focused on gendered communication practices. (Articles need not be completed at this time to submit).

This collection, accepted for publication by McFarland press, aims to update existing theories of orality in the light of technological advancements which have altered communication practices on a large scale. Although these shifts in communication practices affect both genders, this book looks specifically at how the last century of technological inventions have specifically affected women’s means of communication. Women have long been stereotypically associated with the oral realm. We aim to reexamine the so-called essentialist notion of women’s relation to oral culture by attending to their shifting practices at the onset of the 21st century. Moreover we seek to understand how women learn gendered talk/communication, how they have (historically) utilized this in everyday practices, and how these practices now, when combined with current technological apparatuses, allow gendered spaces to be co-opted by women to an extent that gendered “talk” might, in fact, be eliminated and/or replaced by non-gendered communication practices and androgynous “talk.”

This text will be organized into three sections representing three key arguments about women and oral culture that have yet to be brought into conversation with one another. Section one will deal primarily with performative spaces where women learn and act out gendered ways of communication. Section two will delve into literary spaces, revising theories of oral literacy and residual literacy by analyzing texts where print culture and oral culture meet to further the needs of women’s communities. And section three will focus solely on technological spaces where “talk” itself is transformed in the digital era and narrative forms are forever altered.

For this contributed volume, the editors seek previously unpublished essays from a wide array of disciplines and theoretical approaches. Writing may explore, but need not be limited to, the following topics:

• How performative spaces (literal locations and mediated zones) construct “gendered” communication practices
• How chick flicks and (feminist) television teach women how to interact with one another
• How “feminine performances” revolve around exaggerated (and sometimes emotional) moments of talk, tell alls, gossip, gab.
• How certain locations lend themselves more to idle chit chat than others (waiting rooms and lobbies) and how men and women fill “down” time with conversation differently within these situational spaces
• How the chat of motherhood differs from other social conversation (for example, the difference between talking in front of [and about] the K-I-D-S)
• How women adapt speech to fulfill the needs of different environments and the effect this has on their interpersonal communication practices
• How literary (print) spaces utilize orality in the discourse(s) of “feminine” communities
• What the historical practice of female letter writing reveals about women’s communication
• How and when the act of diary and journal writing became a “girl” thing to do (how diaries are marketed today versus the famous canonized diaries and travel journals of the past)
• How technological spaces transform “talk,” genre, and narrative form in the 21st century
• How text messaging and emoticons have changed female communication patterns and friendships
• How men and women’s communication has altered differently due to their active text messaging or instant messaging practices in an era of waning face-to-face communication
• How contemporary media practices, and technology, change long-standing communication practices and “print” genres, such as memoir, in terms of gendered production, authorial intent, and social reception
• How the autobiography genre morphed into blogging and became, initially, a masculine practice focused more on the reporting of opinions (often politically-based ones) rather than personal happenings (as associated with female autobiography)
• How social networks, such as MySpace and Facebook, have un-gendered and transformed the genre of autobiography
• The Internet provides a multitude of forums for a new type of “talk” emerging on screen rather than in person
• How, with coded and/or ambiguous user names like AR711 and SoxFan, chatrooms and fan sites provide spaces where gender cues are erased and how this erasure may help to bring about a form of technological talk that is androgynous and free of the usual gender clues usually found in written formats that would often tie the speaker to his or her gender
• Other topics related to gender and communication are welcome as well

Deadline for Abstract (500 word maximum): November 15th, 2009

Please send abstract and a brief biographical statement to Sarah Burcon & Melissa Ames at: sburcon@gmail.com and mames@eiu.edu. The subject line should read: Submission for Women and the Gendering of Communication.

The International Association for Philosophy and Literature will be hosted from May 24 to 30, 2010 by the University of Regina in Saskatchewan, Canada. The conference theme is "Cultures of Differences: National / Indigenous / Historical". The final deadline for applications is approaching (November 7), but inquiries may be directed to Dr Hugh Silverman at execdir@iapl.info or Dr Lynn Wells at wellsl@uregina.ca We welcome proposals for individual papers and for organized sessions.

Call for Papers: American Studies Area
Southwest/Texas Popular Culture & American Culture Associations 31st Annual Conference
February 10-13, 2010
Hyatt Regency, Albuquerque, NM
Submission Deadline: 12/15/09, Priority Registration Deadline 11/1/09
Conference Hotel:
Hyatt Regency Albuquerque
330 Tijeras
Albuquerque, NM 87102
505.842.1234

Further conference details are available at http://www.swtxpca.org

Panels are now being formed in the American Studies area. Scholars, researchers, professionals, teachers, graduate students and others interested in this area are encouraged to submit an abstract. Graduate students are especially encouraged and will be assisted in accessing any and all award opportunities the conference and/or associations provide.

American Studies is a broad area and one that MUST be interdisciplinary. While the area is one that should be centered in the cultures of the Americas, especially the United States, a particularly vibrant area of inquiry is increasingly found in the transnational, intra-national and global considerations of these cultures. Topics offering multiple perspectives in this vein on the American Southwest are especially welcome. Listed below are several possible topics, however, these should not be considered either prescriptive or limiting in regards to your creativity in this area.

•The Invisibility of the American Worker in National, Transnational and Colonial Contexts
•American Mobility and Power: Intersections between Culture, Identity and Travel
•The International Metaphor of the Western Frontier
•Transnational Hollywood: Fact and Fiction
•Post-Borderlands
•Intersecting the Biopolitical, the Transnational and the Indigenous
•The Trouble with Citizenship: Community, Resistance, Migration
•“States of Exception” in the U. S. Empire
•World Perspectives on the Obama Presidency
•Perspectives on Race, Ethnicity and Culture in Obama’s America

Email 250-word abstracts for individual presentations or 500-word abstracts for panel proposals to Area Chair Lisa K. Stein (English Department, Ohio University Zanesville) at stein@ohio.edu. Please include a current CV and contact information for each participant. And, if you mention the conference or the American Studies area in your subject line, it will insure the speedy attention to and handling of your submission.

Upon acceptance, all presenters must register by December 31, 2009. Registration is available online at the Southwest/Texas Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association website: http://swtxpca.org. Early registration discounts are available, as is hotel and transportation information.

Lisa K. Stein
Area Chair: American Studies
stein@ohio.edu
Ohio University Zanesville
Visit the website: http://swtxpca.org

NEW PLENARY SPEAKER: DARKO SUVIN

Modernism and Utopia: Convergences in the Arts

Confirmed plenary speakers:

Doug Mao, Johns Hopkins University
Patrick Parrinder, University of Reading
Darko Suvin, McGill University

Proposals are invited for 20-minute conference presentations that consider modernism in relation to utopia and utopianism, in written, visual, aural, and plastic media.

The aim of the conference is to encourage debate between and across disciplines with a focus on the varied historical, cultural, technological, and intellectual settings in which the modernism/utopia nexus might be clarified and explained.

A principal goal of the conference is not just to engage with but to challenge, build on, and extend current work in the new utopian and new modernist studies. Suggested points of departure for these last two critical domains might include, but are by no means limited to, all current and forthcoming volumes of the Ralahine Utopian Studies book series and the latest articles in periodicals such as 'Modernism/Modernity' and 'Utopian Studies'.

The conference organizers will be working towards a publishing outcome for this project: an essay volume based on essays worked up from the best conference papers, as well as specially commissioned articles (for which the organizers have already had talks with a major academic publisher).

Suggestions for topics might include, but are not restricted to, the following:

- modernism and authors/painters of utopias
- sound/music, utopianism, and modernism
- modernist architecture/sculpture and utopia
- utopia, modernism, and modernity
- modernism, science fiction, and utopia
- specific traditions of utopian thought in relation to modernism
- modernism and philosophers of the utopian
- utopianists as modernists/modernists as utopianists
- modernism and utopianism as ‘isms’
- ethics in relation to modernism and utopia

The conference will be held in Birmingham, England, April 23rd – 24th 2010, and is being organized by James Barnett, Alice Reeve-Tucker, and Nathan Waddell. Postgraduates are highly encouraged to attend and/or give a paper. The conference website can be found here: www.mod-utopia.bham.ac.uk

For further information or to offer a conference paper please contact Nathan Waddell by email (preferred) or post.

Email:

modernism-utopia@hotmail.co.uk

Post:

Department of English, College of Arts and Law, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham, B15 2TT

PLEASE SEND PROPOSALS OF 250 WORDS BY DECEMBER 1st 2009

Official Call For Papers – “Bruce Kirle Memorial Emerging Scholarship Panel”

The Music Theatre/Dance (MT/D) Focus Group of The Association for Theatre in Higher
Education (ATHE) announces its call for papers for the “Bruce Kirle Memorial Emerging
Scholarship Panel in Music Theatre/Dance” for the 2010 ATHE conference in Los Angeles, CA (August 3–6, 2010). This annual panel is held in memory of Dr. Bruce Kirle, a longtime member of the Music Theatre/Dance focus group. Dr. Judith Sebesta will serve as the respondent. Dr. Sebesta, Chair of the Department of Theatre and Dance at Lamar University, is co-editor of Women in American Musical Theatre (McFarland, 2008), and currently serves as chair of the ATHE Nominations Committee and performance review editor of Theatre Journal.

Papers may address any area in the purview of the Music Theatre/Dance Focus group, which includes opera, operettas, musicals, dance theatre, performance art with music or dance elements, and pedagogy in music theatre and dance. Submissions are open to graduate students and scholars who have not presented at a national conference, as well as established scholars who have not presented or published in the areas of music theatre or dance.

To be considered for this panel, please email your 10-12 page paper and contact information as an MS Word attachment by January 30, 2010 to Jason Fitzgerald via email at jason.fitzgerald@yale.edu. Please remove your name from anywhere in the body of the essay, and include a cover page with your name, paper title, affiliation and contact information.

Submissions will be vetted by a committee comprised of select MT/D officers as well as senior faculty in the field. Three of the essays will be chosen for inclusion on this competitive panel. The selected authors are expected to attend the conference in August to present their papers. They will receive a year-long subscription to the journal Studies in Musical Theatre (Intellect), and their essays will be published in the journal. Papers selected will need to be shortened for their presentation at the conference, but will be published in their full-length form. Selected authors will also receive a complimentary copy of Bruce Kirle’s Unfinished Show Business, generously donated by his family. If you have any questions, please email Ronald Zank at rjzc46@mail.missouri.edu. For more information on the ATHE conference visit http://www.athe.org.

The Society for the Study of Rebecca Harding Davis and Her World will host two sessions at the annual conference of the American Literature Association. The conference will be held May 27-30, 2010 at the Hyatt Regency (Embarcadero Center) in San Francisco, California. For further information about the conference, please consult the ALA website at www.americanliterature.org.

Session One: Approaches to Teaching Davis’s “Life in the Iron Mills.” We envision this session as a roundtable discussion among participants who teach at all levels and who offer a variety of approaches to this complex text. To encourage discussion, presentations will be limited to 8-10 minutes.

Session Two: “Open” Topic. We are interested in proposals that touch on any topic in Davis’s work and especially welcome proposals that draw attention to her lesser-known texts. Presentations will be limited to 20 minutes.

Deadline: December 15, 2009

Please send a one-page abstract and a brief C.V. to Mischa Renfroe.

Email: mrenfroe@mtsu.edu

Postal Mail:
Mischa Renfroe
Middle Tennessee State University
Department of English
P.O. Box 70
Murfreesboro, TN 37132

First Women and the Politics of Looking: Gender, Indigeneity and Representation

Ed. Wendy Gay Pearson, Kimberly J. Verwaayen, Ernie Blackmore and Renée E. Bédard

Description:

This anthology will focus on the representation and especially the self-representation of Indigenous girls and women in the arts. The editors are particularly interested in articles that address questions of cultural imagination, resistance, recuperation and the complex politics of representation within the fraught spaces of cultural and geopolitical contexts that may be considered variously colonial, post-colonial and neo-colonial.

Some of the questions that contributors might address include: How are Indigenous girls and women both traditionally and non-traditionally signified in either Indigenous or non-Indigenous cultural production? How do such significations vary in mainstream cultural products compared with avant-garde or experimental work? How do artistic and theoretical contributions by Indigenous girls and women intervene – if they do – in cultural understanding of gendered indigenous lives? Are the “appropriation of voice” debates still meaningful in an era of heightened production by Aboriginal women artists, film-makers, writers and theorists? How does collaboration between non-Indigenous and Aboriginal individuals or communities work in relation to the representation of girls and women broadly, and what are its cultural and political implications? How do the histories and genealogies of Indigenous representation affect contemporary cultural work? What are the implications of generic choices, including autobiography, ficto-criticism, fiction and varieties of non-fiction? How do Aboriginal women speak differences of class, sexuality, age, location and other forms of identification in ways that can be heard and understood across a collective cultural imagination?

What we’re looking for:

The editors of this anthology invite papers that respond to any of these issues through a critical concern with the (de)construction of historically raced, classed, and sexed subjectivities of Aboriginal women, especially in relation to issues of identity and the representation of Aboriginal girls and women in works of art, film, music, literature, or other forms of cultural production. We also invite articles that explore particular intersections of ‘postcolonial’ theory and feminism in relation to gendered indigeneity and its varieties of representation, or which assess how canonical and other understandings of cultural, theoretical, and aesthetic “value” are embedded in histories of colonization (and resistance) to limit (or encourage) self-representation by Aboriginal girls and women.

Deadlines:

Abstracts of no more than 500 words should be received by the editors on or before January 1, 2010. Email submissions are preferred, in WordPerfect, MS Word or RTF format.

Notifications of acceptance will be sent out by February 26, 2010, and the finished articles will be due by June 30, 2010.

To submit abstracts or for more information, please contact one of the editors:

Dr. Wendy Gay Pearson, Film Studies, University of Western Ontario (wpearson@uwo.ca) or Dr. Kimberly J. Verwaayen, Women’s Studies and Feminist Research, University of Western Ontario (kjverwaa@uwo.ca) or Dr. Ernie Blackmore, Woolyungah Indigenous Centre, University of Wollongong (ernie@uow.edu.au) or Dr. Renée Bédard, Native Studies, University of Western Ontario (renee.bedard@gmail.com)

POSTGRADUATE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE

THE EUROPEANNESS OF EUROPEAN CINEMA

Keynote Speaker: Thomas Elsaesser

Confirmed Plenary Speakers: Susan Hayward and Ginette Vincendeau

Studies in European cinema have often been focused on specific countries, genres or auteurs. However, there has been, since the 1990s, a renewed interest in European film as an entity with a significance beyond the sum of its parts. Promoted by the policies in support of the audiovisual industry set in motion by the Council of Europe and the European Union, this new interest led to an amplified debate on Europe and the cinema that is produced and consumed there.

Meanwhile, top of the theoretical agenda, the issue of identity has surfaced as the prime concern. As the framework shifts from national to transnational cinemas and concepts such as ‘hyphenated identity’ and ‘double occupancy’ gather strength, this conference seeks to explore the ongoing validity of Europe as a reference in film. Papers are welcomed on any aspect of how European identity might define itself through cinema, spanning issues of representation, industry and cultural policy. Areas of interest might include:

- pan-European production and distribution strategies;
- the label ‘Europe’ in film distribution and exhibition, including festival circuits;
- examples of films that engage with the idea of Europe;
- how particular national cinemas might simultaneously identify themselves as European;
- the issue of language, dubbing and subtitling;
- and how any of these questions might have shifted historically and with the advent of new European initiatives.

Please submit an abstract (max. 300 words), contact information and short bio (max. 100 words) to: europeanness@kcl.ac.uk

New Directions in Critical Theory
April 30-May 1, 2010
The University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ

New Directions in Critical Theory: Borders, Power, Community

“Borderlands, contrary to frontiers, are no longer the lines where civilization and barbarism meet and divide, but the location where a new consciousness . . . emerges.”
—2010 New Directions Keynote Walter Mignolo
(From "Globalization, Civilization, and Languages")

The 2010 New Directions in Critical Theory conference, an annual interdisciplinary conference organized by graduate students at the University of Arizona, seeks papers, panels, and presentations that focus on issues regarding borders, power, and community. These concepts have seen increased exposure in academic and public spheres due to the rapid rate of globalization, and the pressure globalization puts on communities, such as the pressure to define and protect their integrity at intersections of the local, national, and international.

While the connections among borders, power, and community can be useful in theory, they can be problematic in practice, leading to such diverse questions as: In what ways do shared communities create, and perhaps constrain, one’s identity (gendered, sexual, racial, ethnic, etc.)? How does one define borders within one’s profession or discipline, and how does this definition inform one’s practice? How might the border between written and visual production influence one’s work? How do the implicit/explicit borders shared by the local, the global, and the institutional influence research methods? How have you used your poetry/creative writing to complicate, define, and/or deconstruct a border concept? How has your community organization responded to implicit/explicit cultural and/or institutional borders?

We invite papers and panels that attempt to address these questions and questions like them; we also invite presentations such as round-table discussions, short play readings, poetry readings, performance art or installations, community projects, etc., that open dialogue among various disciplines.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:
• Borderlands and literature
• Borders in ethnographic study
• Border thinking
• Borderlands in postcolonial literature and theory
• Decolonizing practices and epistemologies within and external to the university
• Geopolitics of knowledge production
• Cultural studies
• Border pedagogies
• Border rhetorics
• Gender studies
• Mestizo/a identities
• Spatial rhetoric
• Borders in an historical/psychological context
• Borders within and among communities
• Borders and community in journalism

Please submit 100-250 word individual abstracts, or panel proposals consisting of a 100-250 word panel abstract and 100-250 word individual abstracts for each presentation. Include names, email addresses, mailing addresses, institutional affiliations, technology requests, paper titles, and abstracts by December 15th, 2009 to New Directions Co-Chairs at ndconf@gmail.com.

We are pleased to announce the following Keynote Speaker:

Walter Mignolo
William H. Wannamaker Professor of Literature and Romance Studies
Duke University

“Coloniality and de-coloniality of knowledge has been one of my permanent and central concerns. Lately, and as a consequence of understanding the rhetoric of modernity and the logic of coloniality, I have been reflecting on the grammar of de-coloniality… I have investigated different and seemingly interrelated issues, from history and cartography to religion and political theory, from Latin America to Europe and post-Soviet societies; from Indigenous to Latino/as and Afros in the Americas. In the end, I am a semiotician who abandoned semiotics as a discipline to read the word, the signs and the world.”
(http://waltermignolo.com)

Regards,
Ashley Holmes, Regina Kelly, Jonathan LaGuardia, Katie Silvester, Reena Thomas, and Cassie Wright
New Directions 2010 Co-Chairs
University of Arizona

CALL FOR PROPOSALS:

Caught in the Act: Performance and Performativity is an interdisciplinary graduate conference to be held April 17th at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Performativity is inescapable; we all take part in it. Linguist J.L. Austin's notion of the performative speech act--"I do" in a marriage ceremony, for instance--does rather than describes, a theory that has re-shaped our thinking about the power of language. Immensely productive in its broad, interdisciplinary applications, performativity has influenced projects engaged in configuring identities in non-essentialist ways, as well as focused scholarly attention on how performativity is manifest in everyday and staged performances. Judith Butler's expansion of Austin's performativity to the areas of sex, gender, and subject formation has prompted questions regarding how (or if) regulatory discourse brings subjects into being. Performativity has asked us to consider the extent to which identities are performed and maintained through discourse. What are the political and artistic implications, then, for language and culture? This conference seeks to explore how performativity and performance intersect in everyday behaviors as well as in performances in literature, theatre, language, visual culture, and politics.

We invite submissions from a diverse range of critical perspectives and enthusiastically welcome performance pieces, as well as research that goes beyond the boundaries of a conventional conference paper, including creative responses to this topic, performative papers, and multi-media approaches.

POSSIBLE TOPICS AND POINTS OF ENTRY INCLUDE (BUT ARE NOT LIMITED TO):

* Performances in/of literature and language
* Performativity and identity or post-identity (including but not limited to race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and nation)
* Performance and technology or the web, including surveillance technologies
* Subjects of the public and private spheres
* Resistant performances
* Limits and potential of performativity
* The legacy of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
* The iterative versus the authentic
* Affect in/and performance
* Teacher and student identity and performances in or out of the classroom
* Performativity in art and visual culture
* The body and performance or the performative body
* Performances in history and historiography
* Memory or trauma and performance
* Social dramas and the performativity of everyday life
* Speech as performative
* Social protest performance
* Political discourse and the performative
* Performativity and the reader or audience
* The politics of translation
* Performativity and metaphorical thinking/poetics

WAYS TO PARTICIPATE:

* Participate as part of a proposed panel
* Present an individual paper
* Present a performance or creative piece

DEADLINE AND SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS:

We will accept three different types of submissions:

1) Individual papers, including performative papers: please submit an abstract of 500 words, with your name, paper title, institution, and email address.

2) Panels: please submit an 800 word proposal for an entire panel of presentations (3-4 presenters). Included in this proposal should be abstracts of all presentations, an abstract of the panel itself, title of the panel, and information for each presenter (name, paper title, institution, and email address). If you are forming your own panel, you have the option of providing your own chair.

3) Performances and creative presentations/panels: we welcome submission of creative works, including creative writing, visual art, and dramatic performance. Please include a brief description of your project, as well as your name, project title, institution, and email address.

All submitters: In your submission, please inform us if you need a data or video projector. For individual papers or creative presentations, the conference committee will work to place you with other papers dealing with similar goals/issues. Paper presentations should run no longer than 15 minutes. Time restraints for presentations within creative panels and performances will be more flexible and will be dealt with on a case-by-case basis.

Please send your submission materials by email or email attachment to the Conference Committee at umassengconf@gmail.com no later than January 23, 2010. See our call online at http://www.umassenglishgrad.com/2010-conference.

The Center for Worker Education at the City College of New York is proud to host its first hip-hop conference, Is Hip-Hop History? As the first hip-hop conference hosted by a worker education program, it aims to provide a forum that features the work of researchers, hip-hop industry practitioners, artists, and working adult students.

The conference invites proposals that explore how conflicting standards and values by artists and others, challenge hip-hop's viability as one of the U.S.’s most important popular cultural forms. We also invite papers that address hip-hops current and potential function among established academic disciplines (education, psychology, history, communication, the arts and social sciences), as well as the role of gender, class and race in assessing the wide range of meaning invested in its various elements. We expect that these bodies of work will appropriately engage and challenge prior scholarship and most importantly, represent the future direction of hip-hop.

Paper, panel and roundtable proposals should be submitted in the form of 200-500 word abstracts by January 2, 2010. Please email paper proposals and C.V. to oran@ccny.cuny.edu.

Submission Guidelines

Interested participants should submit an abstract and bio. Abstracts must be 500 words or less, and they should include the title of the paper, a brief bio and description of your current work and interests, and contact information (name, institutional affiliation, department and e-mail address). All abstracts should be submitted as a Microsoft Word document that includes double-spacing, 12 point Times New Roman font, and a header with your name and page numbers. Conference presentations will be approximately 30 minutes.

Abstracts should either be mailed to The City College Center for Worker Education, ATTN: Elena Romero, 25 Broadway, 7th Floor, New York, New York or sent via e-mail to oran@ccny.cuny.edu. All abstracts must be received by 5:00 p.m. CST on January 2, 2010.

Graduate students working in all areas of humanities studies, including art, film, history, religion, literature, and the performing arts are encouraged to submit abstracts. Papers on a wide variety of subjects will be considered. Topics may include, but not be limited to:
The Life of the Text: Creation, Reception, and Explication
(how texts are produced, read, or investigated)
Creation: conditions of composition and inspiration
Reception: seeing the text/reading the text
Explication: practices and examples of scholarship on texts
Visual texts/auditory texts/tactile texts
Children as producers or consumers of texts
Film as/and text: the intertextuality between film and other disciplines
History as art/Art as history
Textual lives: biography and bibliography
Ecocriticism: ‘Natural’ explication

Paper titles, 50 word abstract, and 250 word paper summaries should be submitted to gradengl@lasierra.edu with the subject line “Natures Conference” by December 1, 2009. A $35 registration fee will be due by January 20, 2010.

NATURES 2010 DISTINGUISHED SPEAKER—Professor Char Miller
Director, Environmental Analysis Program—Pomona College
W. M. Keck Professor of Environmental Analysis

Plenary address: “Streetscape Environmentalism:
Flood Control and Social Justice in the American Southwest”

Seminar on Academic Writing and Publishing: “Making Book:
Gifford Pinchot and the Historian’s Craft”

The Center for Global Nonkilling, an organization working to promote change toward the measurable goal of a killing-free world, is launching in January 2010 its “Global Nonkilling Working Papers” series. The collection will published in a regular basis both on print and online, with all contribution been made freely accessible through its website. The series will incorporate original scientific works that tackle issues related to the construction of nonkilling societies, where killing, threats to kill and conditions conductive to killing are absent. Extension should be within the 10,000 to 20,000 word range.
For a comprehensive list of possible research topics download the two following publications: “Toward a Nonkilling Paradigm” (2009) and “Nonkilling Global Political Science” (2002; 2009). Both available for free download at: http://nonkilling.org/node/18

Before and after 9/11: American Literature and Visual Culture
A one-day conference at the University of Leicester
Friday 18 June 2010

The twenty-year span from the end of the Cold War to 2009, a period that has 9/11 almost at its mid-point, has been a fertile one for American literature. Especially in the wake of 9/11 and the “war on terror” writers have re-engaged with politics: recent writing has commented on Guantanamo, the political responses to 9/11, the war of image and rhetoric waged by the government against the American people and America’s role in Iraq. Environmental and cultural policies have also seen increased attention. Political decisions after 9/11 have had an undeniable impact on contemporary literature and visual representation, but can these art-forms exert any influence in return?

The relationship between word and image has also come under examination in this period of reassessment. A generation of creative and critical thinkers have begun to chart the difficult moral and ethical territory of the responsibilities inherent in any act of representation after 9/11. Critics argue that political responses to 9/11 have created a ‘Culture of Fear’ that “limits our intellectual and moral capacities, it turns us against others, it changes our behavior and perspective”[1] This culture has encouraged acts of resistance in both literary and visual expression.

We invite papers that investigate any aspect of American literature’s engagement with the politics surrounding 9/11, from Canada and Latin America as well as the United States. We are especially interested in papers that explore formal and ideological developments in American writing across this period, either through the investigation of changing priorities and themes or through developments in the work of specific authors, and in those that look at the impact of visual culture on American writing.

Papers could address:

• American writing and/or visual culture after 9/11
• The use of word and image to manipulate public opinion
• Responses to the images of 9/11 and the Iraq war
• Writing about the environment or the construction of cultural memory
• Resistance through formal innovation
• The theory and ethics of representation after 9/11

Please submit 200 word proposals for 20 minute papers to Emma Kimberley (ek36@le.ac.uk) by 30th January 2010.

Call for papers

Saving Private Reels

Presentation, appropriation and re-contextualisation of the amateur moving image

An international conference at University College Cork, Ireland
17-18 September 2010

Often underrated as a private and, thus, socially irrelevant phenomenon, and equally dismissed in aesthetic terms or at least confined to the domain of amateur pictorialism, in the 1960s the home movie became central to the personal, subjective avant-garde and experimental filmmaking of New American Cinema. The practice of incorporating private home movies in experimental film and video resurfaced powerfully over the past decades, with artists such as Alan Berliner, Péter Forgács, Rea Tajiri, Daniel Reeves and Michelle Citron, among many others.

The socio-political impact of which private footage is potentially capable is epitomized by the most complete and most viewed recording of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, filmed on 8mm by Abraham Zapruder on November 22, 1963, as well as by more recent examples, such as the beating of Rodney King, videotaped in Los Angeles by bystander George Holliday on March 2, 1991, which played an important part in triggering the Los Angeles riots of 1992.

Even films that do not happen to capture significant events and historical moments, but focus instead on domestic settings, private occasions or everyday scenes in the public sphere have now become valuable documents of the customs, values, identities, practices, rituals and historical realities of generations of amateur filmmakers. What makes them so relevant today is precisely what previously relegated them – their ephemeral, private and subjective nature.

As a result of the waning of authority and objectivity as compelling social narratives, alternative, subjective and contingent accounts of reality have become more appealing. The proliferation of amateur videos and video-diaries on the Internet testifies to the strength and intensity of the phenomenon. In parallel, the humanities have registered an ever-growing interest in self-representation, first-person narratives and practices of memorialization that go beyond official historiography. The success of recent non-fictions such as Andrew Jarecki’s Capturing the Friedmans and Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation has once again demonstrated the eloquence and power of private images when used for purposes of historical and cultural investigation and of self-scrutiny and representation.

This conference aims to explore the pressing issues of the use, presentation, appropriation and re-contextualisation of the amateur moving image, of our relationship with it, both historically and today, and of the senses and meanings of its encounters with a variety of contexts, technologies and discourses.

Papers of the duration of 20 minutes and pre-organized panels of up to 4 papers can address the following or related aspects and issues:

• (Re)presentation and the archive
• Private document, memory, memorialization
• The first-person documentary and autobiographical cinema
• The personal on the Internet: YouTube, Videoblogs
• Amateur footage meets art film
• Orphan films
• The re-contextualization of amateur footage in fiction and documentary
• Amateur form and aesthetics
• Capturing the Zeitgeist, making history: amateur newsreels
• Representing the family
• Imagining the nation, imagining the self
• Leisure and pleasure and the touristic gaze
• Amateur filmmaking and modernity
• The banal, the commonplace, the repetitious
• Audiences and reception
• Reflections of class, ideology and society
• From 8mm to digital: evolution of amateur technologies
• Identities, sexualities, genders
• Amateur fictions, amateur genres
• Shooting on the edge: guerrilla filmmaking
• Self-censoring and selection

Confirmed keynote speaker: Patricia Zimmerman, Professor in the Department of Cinema, Photography and Media Arts at Ithaca College, Ithaca, New York, USA, author of Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film (Indiana, 1995) and co-editor of Mining The Home Movie: Excavations In Histories and Memories (California, 2008)

Submissions: Panel and single paper proposals (abstracts of 300/500 words plus short bibliography) should be sent to the following email address, along with a brief biographical note, by the deadline of February 8th 2010 : ucchomemovies@gmail.com

Conference homepage: For further information and for updates visit our homepage,
http://www.ucc.ie/en/filmstudies/research/conferences/amateur/

Organizers: Dr Barry Monahan, Dr Laura Rascaroli, Dr Gwenda Young (University College Cork, Ireland)

A multi-disciplinary conference on Geoffrey Chaucer will be held in the National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland on 19th-20th May 2010. Proposals for papers on any aspect of Chaucer’s work, life, milieu, influence, etc. are welcome. Individual sessions will be framed around the themes that emerge from the call for papers.

Key-note papers will be given by

Professor Alastair Minnis of Yale University
Professor Helen Phillips, Cardiff University
Professor John Thompson, Queen’s University, Belfast

Please send a 200-word proposal by 25th January 2010

The 4th Christina conference explores the complex connections among gender, nature and culture. Recent research has increasingly viewed nature and culture as inherently entangled and inseparable, suggesting that nature is often understood through discourses of gender and, conversely, that gender is made sense of through historically contingent assumptions about nature. Building on this growing body of scholarship, the conference asks how this mutual intertwining of nature, culture and gender has been theorized, represented and experienced in the past as well as the present. The conference aims to be a meeting point for researchers from different disciplines. The conference is organized by the research project “Representing and Sensing Nature, Landscape and Gender” (Academy of Finland) and Gender Studies, University of Helsinki, Finland.

The conference has three thematic foci:
• We explore how advances in genomics, evolutionary biology and other fields of science have refashioned cultural discourses of gender, and how cultural representations of gender and nature have changed the ways in which scientific projects are formulated or popularized.
• We ask how works of art (in visual arts, literature, film, etc.) have imagined and rethought gendered assumptions implicit in the conceptual distinction between nature and culture that has been so prominent in Western culture.
• We focus on everyday experiences and the ways in which daily practices reinforce or challenge cultural assumptions about the connection between gender and nature.

While addressing these issues, we also explore how assumptions
about gender, nature and culture take shape through discourses of sexuality, ethnicity and other intersecting categories of difference.

Keynote speakers
Rosi Braidotti, Utrecht University, The Netherlands
Sarah Franklin, London School of Economics, UK
Marja-Liisa Honkasalo, Linköping University, Sweden
Priscilla Wald, Duke University, USA

The Organizing Committee is pleased to invite abstracts for individual 20-minute presentations. The deadline for submissions is December 15, 2009. For more information, please visit www.helsinki.fi/kristiina-instituutti/conference or contact us at christina-conference@helsinki.fi