african-american

Children’s literature in English has long been a tool for literacy instruction and acculturation to English language, used both as a tool for learning and as a force for homogenization within histories of Anglophone colonialism and imperialism. As scholars and professors dedicated to exploring the ways in which texts for young people make meaning, we know that language functions as both a tool of empowerment and one of imprisonment. Amiri Baraka writes that “users”—or dominant cultures—“have words. And it is the users that establish the world’s realities.” Language, then, inevitably divides as it shapes such realities by sorting people into groups of “users” and non-users.

Call for submissions to the Journal of Black Mountain College Studies (Spring 2021)

The Journal of Black Mountain College Studies is a peer-reviewed open-access digital publication of the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center (BMCM+AC). 

We solicit and welcome your submissions of academic articles, essays, reviews, poetry, images and forms of artistic expression. As an interdisciplinary journal, we aim to represent authors and creators from diverse backgrounds, disciplines, and perspectives, and we are open to any format that can be expressed online. 

Seeking discussants for the roundtable “Theory and Scholarship” on Diversity and Inclusion at the Nineteenth-Century Studies Association (NCSA) virtual conference on March 13, 2021 from 1:30-3:00 p.m. Pacific Standard Time. The panel co-chairs invite discussants from a wide variety of fields working on nineteenth-century research that speaks to issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion or “undisciplining” Victorian studies. The co-chairs will ask discussants to answer a series of four questions (included below). The discussants will have 10 minutes to chat amongst themselves for each question. We will then open it up so the audience can discuss these topics or the participants and audience could converse together in an inclusive conversation. 

Comparative Racisms: Special issue of The Comparatist:

ATDS and MLA
Washington DC
6-9 January 2022

How does the category of race allow for new understandings of  20th-century and contemporary psychoanalysis? This panel, sponsored by the MLA’s Forum on Psychology, Psychoanalysis, and Literature, seeks to broaden discussion of race’s necessary impact on contemporary understandings of psychoanalysis. We invite work from scholars, theorists, and practitioners addressing topics such as: 

• Clinical relationships that make race salient for psychoanalysis

• Under-recognized BIPOC clinicians and theorists

• Antiracism and racism in psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic institutions

Call for Papers

International Review of Literary Studies-IRLS Vol. 3, Issue 2

LAST DATE: 15 MAY 2021

ISSN: Online (2709-7021), Print (2709-7013)

International Review of Literary Studies (IRLS) is an International peer-review journal of literary studies that publishes original research articles, review papers, and book reviews, and cutting-edge research informed by Literary and Cultural Theory. Acceptable themes include, but are not limited to, the following:

Columbia University Press today announced a new ongoing scholarly book series in the field of Black studies called Black Lives in the Diaspora: Past / Present / Future, to be published in partnership with Howard University’s College of Arts and Sciences and Columbia University’s African American and African Diaspora Studies Department.

Circuitous Channels: The Communications Circuit at 40

Robert Darnton’s “communications circuit,” proposed in his field-defining 1982 essay “What Is the History of Books?”, has become one of book history’s foundational paradigms. Since 1982, the “communications circuit” has been endlessly reprinted, debated, revised, and amended; it has become a touchstone heuristic for more articles, books, and papers than it is possible to list.

From Alice Walker’s womanism to bell hooks’ oppositional gaze, Black girls’ rebellion inspires concepts and theoretical approaches that aid in understanding the lives of girls and women.  These theorizations—and Black girls’ actions—counter dominant narratives and distortions of Black girlhood. Despite censoring, surveilling, and policing, Black girls find creative ways to assert and insert  themselves in spaces where their behavior may be considered “deviant,” “rebellious,” or “womanish. ”They often engage in what Aimee Meredith Cox calls shapeshifting to “ confront, challenge, invert, unsettle, and expose the material impact of systemic oppression”(7).

The Message Is? is an edited volume dedicated to exploring the expressed and sometimes hidden gems of black spirituality found in the creativity of the award-winning artist and filmmaker Arthur Jafa. Nathanael J. Homewood and Isis Pickens are co-editing this volume.

We are inviting chapter proposals. Please consider submitting a 250-word abstract briefly outlining your potential chapter contribution.  We kindly ask that these be submitted by March 15, 2021, and be emailed to nathanaelhomewood@depauw.edu.

In view of recent and current global events, the phone camera has emerged as an important and effective political apparatus. The centrality, proliferation, and prominence of phone footage across contemporary screen media and media platforms suggests that the phone camera is no longer just an indulgent phone fixture, but rather, an invaluable truth-telling tool. Practical, accessible, and autonomously used, the phone camera has been an essential technology to the present-day exposures of injustice, violence, and corruption around the world.

Call for Papers: Black Popular Culture-Special Topics (Deadline has been extended to February 28!)

PCA 2021 National Conference, June 2-5 (Virtual)

Popular Culture Association (PCA)

How do race, racism, and anti-racism operate among US transcendentalists? What alternative vocabularies and theoretical models have their Black contemporaries and later Black thinkers created? We invite proposals that challenge or reform the legacies of transcendentalism. Potential topics (others are welcome):

-     constructions of race

-     systemic racism

-     Black intellectual/aesthetic traditions

-     Black writers/speakers

-     epistemologies

-     gender(s)

-     queer/trans of color critiques

-     disidentification

-     intersectionality

-     conversation as method

-     languages

-     critiques and revisionist readings of "transcendentalism"