african-american

Call for Papers · Annual Conference

MELUS 2027 | Albuquerque, New Mexico

“Imaginaries and Insurgencies: Speculative Visions in Multiethnic Culture”

Hosted by the MELUS Ad Hoc Conference Committee

 
Venue: Isleta Resort & Casino, Pueblo of Isleta, New Mexico

Conference Dates: Thursday, April 8 – Sunday, April 11, 2027

Optional welcome activities will take place Wednesday evening, April 7. The conference concludes Sunday morning, April 11.

Call for Papers: Horror Studies

Special Issue: 'What Did Get Out Get Us?'

Abstracts due: 31 October 2026

View the full call here>>

https://www.intellectbooks.com/horror-studies#call-for-papers

 The Carson McCullers Society proposes the following two panels for the 2027 American Literature Association conference to be held in Boston, Massachusetts, on May 26-29, 2027. The work of graduate students and early career scholars is particularly encouraged and welcomed.

Please send a 250-word abstract and a brief bio to Erin Bell at bellee@udmercy.edu and Melanie A. Marotta at mmarotta@georgiasouthern.edu by January 8, 2027 and include ALA Proposal in the email subject line. These panels will be in-person only.

Second newsletter by end of September, and conference panel plans soon, from a new scholarly society - SSUPFUS- for studying unconventional US fiction from the era usually called "postmodern" 

- sign up here - https://docs.google.com/forms/d/13ZGTYU1vgzj-WMtrtKIYkpE8I1FmYY_kZH0Sldnxbfo - and see below for more details...

March 6-9, 2027
Newport, RI
Convention Site: Salve Regina University

Environmental racism predates its own name. The term entered public discourse in 1982, but the conditions behind it, namely exposure to hazard and unequal claim to safety, go back to slavery itself. Historian Carl Zimring traces this to a basic split in American thought: white meant clean, Black meant dirty. That split decided who did the dirtiest, most dangerous work, and who lived closest to pollution, for generations. In 1968, Memphis sanitation workers went on strike over exactly that: unsafe, degrading labour shaped by the same racial split. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis while there in support of the very strike. That split still operates today.

CALL FOR PAPERS

In Brightest Day: Race, Justice, and the Speculative in HBO's Lanterns and the Green Lantern Mythos

Proposed for New Suns: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Speculative -- The Ohio State University Press

Edited by Julian C. Chambliss, Ritesh Khandelwal, and Harry M. Foster (Michigan State University)

ABSTRACT DEADLINE: October 15, 2026
Send abstracts (300-500 words) and a bio (approx. 100 words) to greenlanternbookproject@gmail.com with the subject line "Lanterns CFP -- [your surname]."

OVERVIEW

The idea of hospitality as a simple, symmetrical exchange of welcome becomes fraught in the context of travel to the various places associated with the African Diaspora. For example, in Lose Your Mother, Sadiya Hartman considers the symbolic loss of a homeland and the sense of relation between her and the people of Ghana. Like many other African Americans, she questions whether a connection to Africa is real or just a necessary fiction. Her narrative marks the loss of identifiable origins or homeland as the primal loss for African Americans. The loss of this connection creates issues of subjectivity for the African diasporic community in general and for individuals who intimately feel this loss.

Call for papers, international conference, University of Nantes, 24 and 25 March 2027

The Subversive Work of Gayl Jones Beyond Borders: Rediscovering a “Liberating Voice” of the Black Atlantic World

Call fort submissions

"Conversations with the Dead: Excavation as Re-vision"

Chair: Edvige Giunta, Kean University
The session invites presentations of prose, poetry, and/or hybrid writing that “turn” to the dead—not for the purpose of elegiac reminiscence but to unsettle or dismantle notions of chronology, inheritance, and other forms of linear, unidirectional connection between the living and the dead. Writers who turn to the dead find that that past transforms the present through the very process of excavation: communities are remade in the turning. This session will examine what that practice looks like across genres such as intergenerational memoir, speculative memoir, investigative essays, and personal rewritings of myths.

                                                           Call for Chapters

            The Routledge Handbook of Hip Hop and Sport, Culture, and Activism

Poetic Responses to Prisons and Policing (SAMLA Panel #19707) - DEADLINE EXTENDED 

2026 marks multiple milestones for the legacy of legendary Afrofuturist author Octavia E. Butler: fifty years since the publication of her first novel, Patternmaster (1976), and the twentieth anniversary of her passing, on February 24, 2006. It also marks the announcement of a film version of one of her most famous and most prophetic works, Parable of the Sower (1993), as well as the surprise republishing of her disavowed novel, Survivor (1978), for the first time since the 1980s. These anniversaries arrive at a moment when Butler’s work continues to gain public attention for its prescience and political relevance, and as she continues to amass scholarly attention across scholarly disciplines.

In the summer of 2026, Elizabeth and Ines Soto were sentenced to fifty years in prison for their participation in the anti-ICE protests at Prairieland, including a charge of “providing material support to terrorists.” In the trial that led to these exorbitant sentences, the Sotos’ production and distribution of zines, including literature on protest strategy, anti-ICE arguments, gay and trans issues, and plant propagation, were used as evidence in their conviction. Their printing press (a home office printer) was confiscated by the FBI. At the same time, Daniel Sanchez Estrada, who was not present at the protest, was sentenced to thirty years for “concealing documents,” including zines labeled as “political literature.”