DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS: JANUARY 5, 2019

CFP: ALCQ-ACQL (Congress 2019, Vancouver)

Canadian Climate Narratives:  Resilience and Planetary Thinking  

(organized by Susie O’Brien and Heike Härting)

The Arab World as Ghurba: Citizenship, Identity and Belonging in Literature and Popular Culture 21 June, 2019 at the University of Warwick Funded by the Humanities Research Centre and the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies Call for Papers / Deadline: 30 December 2018 Keynote Speaker: Dr Claire Beaugrand (University of Exeter) The Arabic word ghurba, which literally means estrangement or separation, is typically used to refer to the state of being a foreigner in a land away from home, hence evoking feelings of alienation, loneliness and a strong yearning for loved ones.

For at least the last half-century, theories of Blackness have challenged the foundations of modern critical thought. Theorists such as Fred Moten, Jared Sexton, Christina Sharpe, Hortense Spillers, Alexander Weheliye, Frank Wilderson, Achille Mbembe, and Sylvia Wynter variously interrogate the politics, discourse, and materialities of the imperial, capitalist experience of slavery (and its afterlife). One important avenue of consideration is how this perverse institution undermined possibilities for the Enlightenment subject not simply for those of African descent but for all people complicit in the imperial project.

This panel seeks to retheorize social constructivists accounts of Romantic sex and gender circulating since the early 80s that continue to persist and insist—however unwittingly—on a binaristic or universalistic normativity (hetero- or otherwise). Moreover, all such accounts are often firmly anthropocentric, offering little flexibility to engage the nonhuman in all of its material forms. More recent New Materialist accounts of sexes and genders provide resources for moving forward from the confines of the discursive prison of sex and gender that retains within it, again however unwittingly or unwillingly, a binarism between the social and the material, the human and the nonhuman.

CALL FOR PAPERS

African American Literature and Culture Society

American Literature Association

30th Annual Conference

May 23-26, 2019

Westin Copley Place

10 Huntington Avenue

Boston, MA

The African American Literature and Culture Society invites abstracts (of no more than 250 words) for presentations at the annual conference of the American Literature

The world we inhabit is framed, driven, (re)produced, and conceptualised by and through science. Science as a mode of knowing contours the prevailing episteme, whilst technological innovation continues to remake work and leisure experience. At the same time, society is both reflected and in turn formed by science fiction (SF): as contributor to the nostalgia economy, as a dominant visual-commercial aesthetic, as a mimetic index of the present’s utopian and dystopian tendencies. The now is a time of extreme precarity. We face a raft of catastrophes – political, socioeconomic, and, most pressingly, ecological. And yet, even as our own survival comes into question, capitalism itself seems unassailable, primed to outlast ‘humanity.’