CFP: 9/11 Popular Culture (Panels for MPCA,Oct 1-4, 2015); April 30 deadline
The 2015 Midwest Popular Culture Association / American Culture Association conference will be held at the Hilton Cincinnati Netherland Plaza from Thursday-Sunday, October 1-4
The 9/11 Popular Culture area seeks essays that explore the convergence of post-9/11 themes in contemporary television, film, fiction, poetry, comics, and other artistic expression. I am especially interested in those texts that extend concepts of post-9/11 culture in new directions, from Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch, Amy Waldman's The Submission, Laila Halaby's Once in a Promised Land, Ayad Akhtar's plays Disgraced and The Who & the What , and films like Abderrahmane Sissako's Timbuktu. New takes on more canonical texts like Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close are also welcome.
Of equal interest would be the rush of texts taking on the Iraq War, from Phil Klay's National Book Award-winning Redeployment, Cara Hoffman's Be Safe I Love You, Elliot Ackerman's Green on Blue, and Michael Pitre's Five and Twenty-Fives, assessing both the ways in which empire motivated the war and the collateral of the human cost. Before that, Kevin Powers's The Yellow Birds and Ben Fountain's Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk served as some of the most trenchant assessments, and are both currently in film production. What do these texts reveal about the shifting consensus and representational focus of the Iraq War and 9/11 generally?
Please submit abstracts of 250-300 words by April 30, 2015, by logging into the following site http://submissions.mpcaaca.org/ and submitting your abstract, together with contact information, to the 9/11 Popular Culture area. If you run into difficulties navigating the site, please email me at pauldpetrovic@gmail.com