cfp.english.upenn.edu

Imagining Other Histories: Illusion, Elusion, and Reality in Historical Fiction. Attend the vibrant SW/TX PCA/ ACA conference in sunny, historical Albuquerque, the heart of Indian country and Spanish invasion of North America. The area of Historical Fiction invites papers on the role of history and alternate history in fiction. To what extent have fiction writers, poets, filmmakers, myth makers, and other producers of pop culture bent the paths of history into different directions, into ur worlds, friendlier worlds, bleak worlds, parallel worlds, idealist worlds? Take, for example, the way that the reality of African American history was initially omitted from standard American historical accounts and the paths of history were bent toward the hegemony of a White world. Other examples might be how Plato imagined the course of human history in parallel worlds; or the America imagined by Nathaniel Hawthorne in House of the Seven Gables. Submission deadline is December 1, 2009. The conference is held from February 10-13 in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Please consult the website at http://swtxpca.org/ for other information, registration deadlines, and conference organizer contacts.All queries are welcome. Email queries and abstracts to me at solizc@fvsu.edu or at csoliz@csoliz.com. Please submit a vita with your abstract and a short biographical statement (1 paragraph) with your abstract. Cristine Soliz, Area Chair of Historical Fiction, Fort Valley State University, Bond 014, 478-827-3125, Fort Valley, Georgia 31030

The Society for the Study of Southern Literature issues a call for
papers for a session entitled "Southern Writing Beyond Black and White." We are interested in proposals that explore ethnic and racial identities and conflicts in southern literature beyond a binary version of black and white. Studies of particular writers, ethnic or racial identities in isolation, cooperation, or conflict, practical pedagogical strategies, and appropriate creative work are all welcome--any project that complicates the landscape of southern identity in this way.

The American Literature Association will meet at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco in Embarcadero Center on May 27-30, 2010
(Thursday through Sunday of Memorial Day weekend). Please email
abstracts and either a cover letter or 2-page CV by January 15, 2010, to Tara Powell at tfpowell@gmail.com. For information about the conference, consult the ALA website at www.americanliterature.org.

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

The editors of Glossator: Practice and Theory of the Commentary (glossator.org) invite submissions of COMMENTARIES for the next open issue, Fall 2010. Essays and articles relating to commentary will also be considered.

What is commentary? Although the distinction between commentary and other forms of writing is not an absolute one, the following may serve as guidelines:
1. A commentary focuses on a single object (text, image, event, etc.) or portion thereof.
2. A commentary does not displace but rather shapes itself to and preserves the integrity, structure, and presence of its object.
3. The relationship of a commentary to its object may be described as both parallel and perpendicular. Commentary is parallel to its object in that it moves with or runs alongside it, following the flow of reading it. Commentary is perpendicular to its object in that it pauses or breaks from reading it in order to comment on it. The combination of these dimensions gives commentary a structure of continuing discontinuity and a durable utility.
4. Commentary tends to maintain a certain quantitative proportion of itself vis-à-vis its object. This tendency corresponds to the practice of "filling up the margins" of a text.
5. Commentary, as a form of discourse, tends to favor and allow for the multiplication of meanings, ideas, and references. Commentary need not, and often does not, have an explicit central thesis or argument. This tendency gives commentary a ludic or auto-teleological potential.

Submissions may be sent through the journal website or as Word attachment to glossatori@gmail.com. Deadline: March 1, 2010.

ABOUT GLOSSATOR

Glossator publishes original commentaries, editions and translations of commentaries, and essays and articles relating to the theory and history of commentary, glossing, and marginalia (catena, commentum, gemara, glossa, hypomnema, midrash, peser, pingdian, scholia, tafsir, talkhis, tika, vritti, zend, zhangju, et al). The journal aims to encourage the practice of commentary as a creative form of intellectual work and to provide a forum for dialogue and reflection on the past, present, and future of this ancient genre of writing. By aligning itself, not with any particular discipline, but with a particular mode of production, Glossator gives expression to the fact that praxis founds theory.

Glossator is a peer-reviewed open-access journal, sponsored by The Graduate Center, CUNY. It is available online at http://glossator.org.
Editors: Nicola Masciandaro (Brooklyn College, CUNY), Karl Steel (Brooklyn College, CUNY), Ryan Dobran (Cambridge University).

Section Editors: Nadia Altschul (Johns Hopkins), Stephen A. Barney (UC Irvine), Erik Butler (Emory University), Mary Ann Caws (Graduate Center, CUNY), Alan Clinton (Georgia Institute of Technology), David Greetham (Graduate Center, CUNY), Bruno Gullí (Long Island University), Daniel Heller-Roazen (Princeton University), Jason Houston (University of Oklahoma), Heather Jackson (University of Toronto), Eileen A. Joy (Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville), Anna Klososowka (Miami University), Erin Labbie (Bowling Green), Carsten Madsen (University of Arhaus), Sean McCarthy (Lehman College, CUNY), Reza Negarestani, Daniel C. Remein (NYU), Sherry Roush (Penn State University), Michael Sargent (Graduate Center, CUNY), Michael Stone-Richards (College for Creative Studies), Eugene Thacker (Georgia Institute of Technology), Frans van Liere (Calvin College), Jesús R. Velasco (Columbia), Robert Viscusi (Brooklyn College, CUNY), Valerie Michelle Wilhite (Miami University), Scott Wilson (Lancaster University), Yoshihisa Yamamoto (Chiba University).

FORTHCOMING THEMED VOLUMES

The Poetry of J. H. Prynne. Special Co-Editor: Ryan Dobran. Spring 2010.
Contributors: Justin Katko, Sam Ladkin, Ian Patterson, Neil Pattison, Reitha Pattison, Robin Purves, Thomas Roebuck, Matthew Sperling, Josh Stanley, Michael Stone-Richards, Keston Sutherland, Mike Wallace-Hadrill, John Wilkinson.

Occitan Poetry. Special Co-Editors: Anna Kłosowska & Valerie Wilhite. Spring 2011.
Contributions: Vincent Barletta, Bill Burgwinkle, Charles Fantazzi, Marisa Gálvez, Virginie Greene, Cary Howie, Erin Labbie, Deborah Lyons, Simone Marchesi, Jean-Jacques Poucel, Jesús Rodríguez-Velasco, Luke Sunderland, Valerie Wilhite.

Black Metal. Special Co-Editors: Nicola Masciandaro & Reza Negarestani. Spring 2012.
Contributors: Lee Barron, Ray Brassier, Erik Butler, Dominic Fox, Nicola Masciandaro, Reza Negarestani, Benjamin Noys, Steven Shakespeare, Aspasia Stephanou, Eugene Thacker, James Trafford, Stewart Voegtlin, Scott Wilson, Alex Williams, Evan Calder Williams, Ben Woodard.

Nous ne faisons que nous entregloser -- Montaigne
All our so-called consciousness is a more or less fantastic commentary on an unknown, perhaps unknowable, but felt text -- Nietzsche
Not system but commentary is the legitmate form through which truth is approached -- Gershom Scholem

In this century, corporate cinema production has experienced an economic and technological crisis. Yet “glocal” productions featuring global topics, such as human rights, climate, conflict, migration, as well as sports and cultural patterns, have met with worldwide success and challenged the hegemony of Hollywood. Examples are “An Inconvenient Truth” (Davis Guggenheim, 2006), and “Lost Children” (Ali Samadi Ahadi/Oliver Stoltz, 2005).

This seminar explores the narrative strategies employed in such films to foster global awareness as well as global action. This genre typically merges fiction/feature and factual/documentary traits. Docufictions/-drama, mockumentaries and feature films dealing with real issues in portraying “life as it is” are included as well, such as “Traffic” (Steven Soderbergh, 2000), and “Blood Diamond” (Edward Zwick, 2006).

Papers on any aspect of such “glocal” cinema — production, distribution, analysis, aesthetics — are welcome.

Deadline: November 13, 2009
http://www.acla.org/submit/index.php

American Comparative Literature Association Annual Meeting
Creoles, Diasporas, Cosmopolitanisms
April 1-4, 2010, New Orleans

SPECTRUM is an annual journal of art and literature published by UC Santa Barbara's College of Creative Studies. Founded in 1957, it is the longest-standing literary magazine in the UC system. We accept art, poetry, fiction, and non-fiction works from everyone, regardless of age or school affiliation. Art can be either black and white or in color. Any form of poetry and any genre of fiction is allowed; non-fiction works can range from interviews, personal essays, and creative or scholarly essays. We do not follow themes and no subject will be censored.
http://www.ccs.ucsb.edu/spectrum/submissions.html

The West has enjoyed a commanding supremacy in culture and world affairs for several centuries, but the 21st Century finds the East exerting a powerful influence on the West. The economic powerhouses of Saudi Arabia, India, China and Japan, and the expansion of nuclear weaponry to Muslim countries have made dealing with the East critical to the prosperity and security of the West. So as culture has flowed east in the past, it now begins to flow west.
For our 16th annual Multicultural Conference we request papers and presentations that deal with the influence of the East on the West – as played out in culture, the arts, politics, demographics, business, the military and the economy.
Those wishing to present should submit via email a paper title and a 100-150 word abstract outlining the proposed topic and mode of presentation. Individuals interested in reading creative works should submit samples of their work. Completed manuscripts should not exceed 10 double-spaced pages of typescript so that papers can be presented in a twenty-minute presentation. (Individual submissions only.)
Final selection of conference participants will be made by February 1, 2010
Deadline for Submissions: Monday, January 8, 2010
SEND TO:
Laurie Lopez Coleman
LCOLEMAN@ALAMO.EDU
Conference Coordinator Juanita Luna Lawhn
http://www.accd.edu/sac/english/multicultconf/program10.htm

In response to the Pennsylvania Human Relations Committee’s recent finding of probable cause of racial discrimination at a suburban Philadelphia swim club, the Widener Journal of Law, Economics and Race (WJLER) requests the submissions of comments by scholars of any discipline reflecting the racial, economic and legal aspects of this case. A PDF copy of the findings can be found on our website at www.wjler.org. Comments should be approximately 5-8 pages in length, double-spaced, with one-inch margins, include the author’s name on the first page of the comment, and contain footnotes that conform to proper Bluebook format. Please submit a current resume or curriculum vitae with all contact information.

All work must be submitted to wjler@mail.widener.edu by January 2, 2010.

Helena Maria Viramontes (ALA, 5/27-5/30/2010, San Francisco)

I'm putting together a panel proposal on the writings of Helena Maria Viramontes (The Moths and Other Stories, Under the Feet of Jesus, Their Dogs Came With Them). Send proposals for 15-20 minute presentations to Hsuan L. Hsu (hsuanlhsu@gmail.com) by DECEMBER 30, 2009.

The final deadline for paper and panel submissions has been extended to Dec. 15, 2009. Early bird registration ends Dec. 31, 2009 so the sooner papers/panels are submitted and accepted, the better the registration rates. Also, there is a special outing on the Road Runner train to Santa Fe, seats are filling up. Below is the original CFP:
CALL FOR PANEL AND PAPER PROPOSALS

Chicana/o Literature, Film, Culture

The Southwest/Texas Popular Culture and American Culture Associations will hold their 31st annual meeting in Albuquerque, New Mexico, February 10 through 13, 2010. The organizations have met there for several years, and members wanted to return because of the great location, the fine hotels, food, sights, museums, and more. Albuquerque is the home of the National Hispanic Cultural Center, which promises research and entertainment possibilities.

Panels and individual papers on all aspects of Chicana and Chicano culture are encouraged for our 2010 meeting. The “Chicana/Chicano Literature, Film, Culture” area tends to be both multicultural and interdisciplinary, and panels and individual papers may explore any issues relevant to Chicana/Chicano cultural studies.

Presentations might examine themes relevant to Chicana/Chicano culture and politics including but not limited to “resistance and affirmation”; nationalism and ethnic separatism; borders, frontiers, and territorialization; labor unions and social collectivity; sports and Chicana/o contributions to them; machismo, feminidad, feminisms, and gender construction; immigration, internal colonialism, and indigenismo; religion and spirituality; mainstream depictions and ethnic stereotyping; La Raza Cósmica and cultural syncretism. Topics might traverse distinctions within culture expressions and specific genres—corridos, mitos, folklore, poetry, fictions, drama, television. Presentations might cover theoretical and/or creative and/or historical works by individual authors such as José Vasconcelos, Rudy Acuña, Luis Valdez, George I. Sánchez, Gloria Anzaldúa, Ana Castillo, Cherríe Moraga, and others.

Proposals that address any aspect of Chicana/Chicano culture are welcome.

PLEASE SEND SUBMISSIONS BY December 15, 2009.

Please send inquiries or approximately 100-word proposals to:
Jeanette Sanchez
(preferred) email attachment: jeannie8@u.washington.edu
(or) Drama School, Box 353950
University of Washington
Seattle, WA 98195
Fax: 206-543-8512

Also, you may visit the associations’ website for more information: http://swtxpca.org/

The ACLA’s annual meeting in New Orleans seems an ideal time to address the francophone literatures and cultures of the “New World,” too often considered only as an afterthought in comparative American Studies. This seminar aims to examine francophone cultures both in the U.S. and throughout North America, and the linkages that connect these varied traditions. Papers addressing Louisiana’s French and Creole traditions will be especially welcome, but so will be papers addressing other aspects of "New France": Québecois, Martiniquais, Haitian culture, and their composites (Haitian writers in Montréal, or the rural and urban francophone cultures of the Lower Mississippi, for example). Topics are not limited to the literary: discussions of musical traditions, historical self-fashionings, French-language newspapers, radio programs, and other subjects are also solicited. How might “Accenting the French in Comparative American Studies,” as Mary Jean Green’s recent article proposes doing, alter our understanding of the discipline?

Please submit 250-word abstracts by November 13 to the following web address:
http://www.acla.org/submit/index.php

More information about the conference is available here:

http://www.acla.org/acla2010/

The ACLA’s annual conferences have a distinctive structure in which most papers are grouped into twelve-person seminars that meet two hours per day for the three days of the conference to foster extended discussion. Some eight-person (or smaller) seminars meet just the first two days of the conference. This structure allows each participant to be a full member of one seminar, and to sample other seminars during the remaining time blocks. Previous conference programs that show this pattern are available at the ACLA website. The conference also includes plenary sessions, workshops and roundtable discussions, a business meeting, a banquet, and other events.

CALL FOR PAPERS: Transverse 2009-2010: Censorship

I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. (Voltaire)
The dirtiest book of all is the expurgated book. (Walt Whitman)

Transverse, the graduate journal of the University of Toronto’s Centre for Comparative Literature, welcomes academic papers, literary reviews, creative writing, and art on the topic of Censorship. The journal will be published online in the spring of 2010 at chass.utoronto.ca/complitstudents/transverse

For as long as people have been speaking and writing, there have been authorities vested with the power to determine what could be spoken and by whom. The censor was an officer of Rome who, from the 4th century BC, was responsible for the honourable task of upholding good governance. Although censorship was for the Romans a positive thing in that it guaranteed the success of the state, the connotations of censorship today are, at least in the West, undeniably negative. What has censorship meant at different historical moments? What is the status of censorship today? How has it evolved? In order to mark Transverse’s shift to a web-based journal, we are devoting this issue to exploring all issues related to censorship, a topic whose dimensions are complicated by the rapid transformation of communication technology.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

Ancient Censorship
Early Roman conceptions of censorship
The death of Socrates
Censorship in ancient Greek drama
Early Modern Censorship
Milton’s Areopagitica
Dramatic versus print censorship in Elizabethan and Jacobean England
Ancien Regime permission and privilege
Women and self/familial/societal censorship
Government versus inquisition censorship in Golden Age Spain and the evolution
of censorship in Spain from 1558-1631
Censorship and Conquest of the New World
Parody, satire, irony: rhetoric and censorship
Letters and the Art of the Unsaid
Nineteenth-Century Censorship
Sexology and Censorship
Imagined Communities and Censorship
Revolution and Censorship
New World Independence, Birth of Nations, Censors
Twentieth-Century Censorship
McCarthyism
Censorship in the USSR, Cuba
Censorship under fascism/totalitarian regimes
Feminism and censorship
Banned books
Contemporary Censorship
Censorship and Queer studies
Censorship and money or social status
Literary representations of censorship
Censorship and surveillance
Is the Google hegemony a form of censorship?
Censorship in the age of Wikipedia, open source software and media,
blogs, Facebook…
Is the prohibitive pricing of books and other media a form of censorship?
Artistic responses to censorship
Etc.

Guidelines:

Critical essays should be between 3000 and 4000 words, in Microsoft Word, MLA format with appropriate citations.
Literary reviews can be on any work relating to the topic. We are looking for submissions 500-800 words in length, with publication information attached.
Creative writings – we accept poems and short stories (1500 word max.)
Art – please submit in Microsoft Word or Adobe Acrobat (pdf) format.

Contributors must be graduate students at the time of submission. Please direct all documents and inquiries to transversejournal@gmail.com

Deadline: March 1, 2010

The conference is hosted by the Centre for the Study of Sexual Dissidence at the University of Sussex.

Keynote Speaker confirmed: Sara Ahmed, Prof of Race & Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths College, London.

Call for Papers:

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.
-----------
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.

Although scholars have long recognized the centrality of the body in the cultural productions of "Enlightenment" England -- whether it be in terms of empiricism or sensibility, in the context of acting on stage or walking the streets of London -- the history of the disabled body has played a conspicuously minor role in these investigations. One of the reasons for the absence of a vigorous discussion of disability in the eighteenth century may have to do with the belief that such a discussion might be anachronistic, eighteenth-century England having had no operative category of disability. There is some truth to this, but as Daniel Defoe's explicit discussion of disabled soldiers in the 1690s attests, to take but one example, disability as such was acknowledged and seen as presenting a unique set of challenges to English society. Moreover, as the recent work of writers such as Lennard Davis, Helen Deutsch, Felicity Nussbaum, Kevin Stagg, Mary Klages, and others have illustrated, the insights offered by a disability-studies perspective are too vital to ignore when considering the history of the body in the context of Enlightenment. So while a modern understanding of disability may not have yet taken shape in the eighteenth century, it is nevertheless evident that such an understanding was in the making.

This panel seeks papers that explore any aspect of disability in eighteenth-century British literature and culture. Comparative discussions of European and American cultures are also welcome. Papers explicitly discussing what role disability studies and “disability theory” (to use Tobin Siebers’ phrase) might have in eighteenth-century studies are especially encouraged. Please send titles and abstracts of 200-500 words to Dwight Codr, Assistant Professor, Department of English, Tulane University:

dcodr@tulane.edu

Deadline for the submission of abstracts is December 1, 2009. For more information regarding the conference, please visit the SCSECS website:

http://www.scsecs.net/scsecs/2010/cfp.html

Update CFP: 31st Annual Conference (12/15/09; SW/TX PCA/ACA 2/10-13/10)

Our 12/15/2009 Submission Deadline is rapidly approaching!
Reduced registration rates in effect until 12/15/2009

Sign up available now for our train trip to the Georgia O’Keefe Museum in Santa Fe.

Join us in sunny Albuquerque! SWTXPCA.ORG
Southwest/Texas Popular and American Culture Association
31st Annual Conference February 10-13, 2010

Deadline for submission: December 15, 2009 (Reduced Fee Deadline 12/15/09)

Conference Hotel:
Hyatt Regency Albuquerque
330 Tijeras
Albuquerque, NM 87102
505.842.1234

Take the New Train to Santa Fe, Visit the Pueblo Cultural Center, Eat Tacos, Go Ski, and More: http://www.itsatrip.org/media/whats-new/default.aspx

Noted as “One of the best conferences of the year,” the SW/TX PCA/ ACA invites papers for one of its 70+ Area offerings in American Studies, Literature, Film, Television, Science Fiction and Fantasy, Native American Studies, Latino/a Studies, Ethnic and Gender Studies, Ecocriticism, Southwest Culture, Western Studies, Writing Pedagogy, Creative Writing, and many more!

Detail on how to submit an abstract to one of our areas can be found at:
http://SWTXPCA.ORG

Since the 1970s, the Southwest/Texas PCA/ACA has sought to foster interdisciplinary study of popular and American literary, historical, visual, and other cultural and media texts. We like to think we are a unique organization that pioneered the study of Popular Culture before it was cool. While our offerings have grown over the years to include areas of international study, we still invite scholars and artists to share their perspectives on American life in the diverse region of the Southwest.

Information about our areas of study, graduate student awards, conference travel, lodging, and the organization can be found on our regularly updated website:

SWTXPCA.ORG

If you still have questions, contact our conference administrator: Sally Sanchez: pcaacaswtx@sbcglobal.net

McGill Department of English Graduate Studies Conference:
A Measure of Place: Space in Text and Context

5-7 February 2010, McGill University, Montreal

Historical and fictional figures alike, from Odysseus, to Neil Armstrong, to thousands of twentieth and twenty-first century refugees, have struggled with a persistent and defining question: where can one be in the world? Implied in this question are both the parallel, complementary question of where one cannot be, and the complex determinants behind habitation, belonging, exile, and other spatial states. The English Graduate Students’ Association at McGill University will consider these and other issues at its 16th Annual Conference, A Measure of Place: Space in Text and Context. “Space” is here understood in material, public, domestic, digital, and institutional terms. What are the politics of space in a climate of diaspora, mass-migration, and genocide? What are the relations and tensions between public and private space in a given text, or at a given historical moment? What does it mean to speak of virtual or digital space? How do we live and perform our subjectivities in space, and what are the ways in which those spaces are policed? How do these overlapping spatial considerations find articulation in cultural practices of artistic, religious, and intellectual expression?

While this conference emerges from the field of literary studies, our contention is that answering these questions demands an interrogation of the very intellectual paradigms from which they are asked; thus, we invite contributions dealing with space from a range of historical, political, theoretical, and disciplinary points of view.

Please send abstracts of 300 words or less, together with a short biographical statement of no more than 50 words, to mcgillconference2010@gmail.com by 20 November 2009. You may propose a paper on a particular topic, which will then be grouped into a panel; alternately, contributors may coordinate to propose panels of two or three papers, so long as all relevant abstracts are submitted together, along with a brief description of the panel, by the 20 November deadline.

Topics to consider include:

-aesthetics of space: auditory, visual, tactile, and aromatic environments

-marginal urban spaces ("slums," "ghettos," "vice zones")

-mobility, disability, and space

-lieux de mémoire; space and nostalgia

-human space and/as natural space; ecocriticism

-cartography, geography, travel, tourism

-the geographical construction of identity; national, local, and transnational spatial narratives; space vs. sense of place

-the uncanny and space; powers over space; exceptional bodies and physical space

-ceremonial and performative spaces; public versus private spaces; the making of publics

-controlling spaces (domestic, public); physical and mental imprisonment; solitary spaces

-gendered and sexualized spaces

-liminal or interstitial spaces; heterotopias; outer space; undergrounds/abovegrounds

-textual spaces; author, scribe, and text; digitized textual spaces and cyberspace

-the possibilities and difficulties of representing space in visual and textual media

-spaces of knowledge: the archive, library, clinic, university

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.
-----------
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.