CFP for NeMLA 2027 Conference

Virtual Only Panel

Oral Community Knowledge as Antidote for Empire in Anglophone Literature

If Empire thrives and even conquers through written text: codification of laws and bureaucracy, cartography of territory, travelogues of the exotic Other, it equally seeks to suppress oral indigenous knowledge of the vanquished. Yet orality can also be the site of resistance and community identity for just such a reason. This panel seeks proposals of works that investigate how orality of form and/or content in Anglophone literature disrupts Empire and empowers community. The irony of pursuing orality in literature, which is historically written, is not lost on us, but also provides an opportunity for creative, resilient exploration.

Some possible ways of approaching this topic may include:

Accent and dialect

Pidgins, creoles, and contact languages

Translations and translators

Language and identity

Oral folk wisdom and stories

Glossaries and indices

Textual hybridity or multimodality

Literacy

This is a Call for Papers for the NeMLA 2027 Conference. Submissions will only be accepted through the NeMLA portal, with a deadline of September 30, 2026. This panel is Virtual Only, regardless of whether the participant is physically present at the conference. Paper proposals can be submitted here: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/22648. Only submissions submitted through the NeMLA portal will be considered. For questions, please feel free to email Dr. Dorisa Costello at dcostello@jessup.edu.