The history of the commodification of Black bodies within a global context has been central to the Afro-diasporic experience. While in conversation with the Transatlantic Slave Trade and colonization; contemporary scholarship grapples with what it is to interrogate the consumption of Black bodies. Working from the perspective of Blackness and commodification in Black Looks: Race and Representation, bell hooks argues that the "contemporary commodification of Black culture by whites in no way challenges white supremacy when it takes the form of making Blackness the 'spice' that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture" (14).

UCLA Comparative Literature Graduate Student Conference
Mad Love
February 19-20, 2016

Keynote Speaker: Lynn Enterline (Vanderbilt University)
Plenary Speakers: Julian Gutierrez-Albilla (USC); Jeffrey Sacks (UC Riverside)

The uneasy boundary between madness and love asserts itself throughout recorded history. The shifting relationship between these two phenomena exists across most (if not all) societies and epochs, particularly in literature and art. From lovesickness in the Middle Ages, to nymphomania and hysteria in the Enlightenment, to the stalker in modern-day horror films, the line between love and madness is continually conflated, contested, and blurred.

The 2008 global downturn has compelled the social sciences and humanities to refocus on the concept of "crisis" in capitalism and rethink the relations between "core" and "periphery." What is crucial to this era of crisis is the emergence of the BRICS countries and the corresponding shifts in the world system. Debates on world literature and comparitivism have been alert to these readjustments (Moretti, 2000; Orsini, 2003; Damrosch, 2005; Warwick RC, 2015) as well as the proliferation of the neo-social realist novel (Adiga, Hamid, etc).

"Do the Senses Make Sense?": The Five Senses in Nabokov's Work

International Conference organized by the French Vladimir Nabokov Society

Biarritz, France April 28-May 1, 2016

After the 2013 Conference on "Nabokov and France" in Paris, the Enchanted Researchers – The French Vladimir Nabokov Society invites scholars to reflect upon the importance and significance of the Five Senses in Nabokov's work, poetics and aesthetics, for its next International Conference. Keynotes Speakers are Brian Boyd (University of Auckland) and Maurice Couturier (University of Nice).

Theme: REBIRTH

Individuals from around the globe travel to Louisiana early in the year to participate in Mardi Gras celebrations. Whether you're in it for the infamous brass bands, cultural masks, religious traditions, mounds of plastic beads, or the baby inside your King Cake, the Carnival and Mardi Gras Season is a time for rebirth.

Both science fiction and postcolonial theory are concerned with troubling normative understandings of movement, diaspora, and hybridity. Indeed, "The Stranger in the Strange Land" is an oppositional trope that is at the heart of both science fiction and historical colonial encounters. The other-worldliness and futurity of science fiction has offered numerous writers an effective (and increasingly popular) medium to critique political, social, and cultural issues, and in many ways presents an ideal literary landscape to interrogate the colonial enterprise. Even so, there is a relative lack of postcolonial voices in the mainstream SF genre. What accounts for this silence?

In the final week of January, 1977, the ABC miniseries Roots became the most-watched television program of all time. To the surprise of the show's producers, Roots became not only a ratings windfall, but a cultural phenomenon, articulating an African-American counter-narrative of American history, provoking a dialogue about the legacy of slavery, and presenting African-American characters with a dignity and integrity that differed sharply from the caricatured representations common to television up to that time. In many ways, the response to the show by the media and the general public constitutes the first of many "conversations about race" that have punctuated the Post-Civil Rights era.