african-american

Please consider submitting abstracts for a guaranteed stream of panels on Early American Environments to be held at next year’s Society of Early Americanists conference (March 18-20, 2027, Chicago; https://www.societyofearlyamericanists.org/conferences/upcoming). We are interested in scholarship that considers questions of environment and ecology in the early Americas, broadly defined to include the transatlantic, Caribbean, and Pacific worlds. How are concerns such as climate change, extractivism, and environmental justice or methodologies such as ecocriticism shaping our reading of early American texts and materials?

Call for - Literary Musings Online - 2584-1459 - July 2026

Academic Journal

Research Academy

Meditations on The Black Garden

Special Issue of African American Review, 2027

Guest-edited by Brandy Underwood (California State University, Northridge); Mia Alafaireet (The University of Texas at Austin); Samantha Pinto (The University of Texas at Austin)

Abstracts due to AARBlackgardensSI@gmail.com by May 1, 2026.

Call for Abstracts:

Concept Note

Research Scholar’s National Conference CFP – 22nd and 23rd April 2026

New Paradigms, New Epistemes: Literature and Criticality in the 21st Century

Recent archival initiatives have made accessible significant bodies of media work by writers associated with the Black Arts Movement, including projects in film, radio, and television. These rediscoveries invite renewed attention to the movement’s engagement with broadcast and screen media and challenge the longstanding emphasis on poetry, theater, and print culture in scholarship on the period.

In the light of girl-centric third-wave feminism and critical regionalism, contemporary American and Canadian literary and cultural texts present innovative girlhoods enabling expansive and emancipatory processes. Please submit an abstract (250 words) and a short bionote.

Deadline for submissions: Friday, March 20, 2026

Mercedes Albert-Llacer, Universitat Jaume I (mllacer@uji.es)

https://mla.confex.com/mla/2027/webprogrampreliminary/Paper33899.html

How might Black fatherhood be understood as an improvisational practice? Across histories of racial capitalism, displacement, surveillance, and social constraint, Black paternal life has often unfolded beyond the frames of patriarchal authority and normative domesticity. In these conditions, fatherhood may be enacted through adaptive, creative, and relational practices that exceed dominant frameworks of masculinity and family.

What does it mean to do Black queer/trans studies now? Amidst intensifying state violence both in and outside of the academy, this graduate conference is an invitation to explore the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and power through a global lens. The conference will be a space for inter- and cross-disciplinary dialogue amongst scholars of Black queer and trans life and politics, capaciously defined. 

The Louisiana Creole Research Association (LA Creole, http://www.lacreole.org) invites submissions for its 2026 journal, La Créole, on subjects relevant to its mission of advancing family research, providing education, and celebrating Creole history and culture. There is evidence that both French and Spanish colonial Louisiana identified all its people (white, black, and mixed), both free and enslaved, who were born in the new world of old world stock, as Créole.  That included the offspring of Europeans (predominantly French and Spanish), Africans, and a mixture of both that could also include Native Americans.  Therefore, the descendants of all these people

Across the African continent and its global diasporas, trauma reverberates through histories of slavery, colonialism, racial capitalism, gendered violence, war, migration, and displacement. However, African and Afrodiasporic writers and artists have not only transformed experiences of pain into sites of creativity, survival, and healing but also reflected in their works the use of African approaches to restoration. This edited volume seeks to explore the ways in which trauma is reconstituted, managed, borne, and cured in African and Afrodiasporic literature and cultural expressions.

While Los Angeles has regularly been called the “City of Angels,” historian Kelly Lytle Hernández has argued that a more appropriate epithet would be the “City of Inmates,” as Los Angeles has historically been a site for innovations in imprisonment, surveilling, policing, and oppressing various communities for their race, ethnicity, class status, sexuality, and other out-group identifications. Literature and cinema have long been fertile sites for examining the ramifications of police- and prison-centric ideologies within American society and culture, particularly for a city that defined itself by cinema.

Questions in Black sound and sonic geographies

American Association of Geography

Panel Presentation

What are the spatial contours of black sound? What are some iterations, notes, scripts, or possibilities within the emerging field of black sonic ecologies and black sonic geographies? How can one detect or follow a “black sense of place” (McKittrick 2011)? What is being listened to and what is being heard? What have you been taught or teaching yourself to hear? 

What do you consider noise? Who and what hears black sound as a nuisance? What does noise, nuisance generate? 

James Baldwin ends his “Open Letter to My Sister, Angela Y. Davis” about her imprisonment, the health of the country, and the responsibility of intellectuals, with the assertion that: 

If we know, and do nothing, we are worse than the murderers hired in our name. If we know, then we must fight for your life as though it were our own—which it is—and render impassable with our bodies the corridor to the gas chamber. For, if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.

How might scholarship today render such corridors impassable? What is our responsibility, and what are we willing to risk? 

“Meaning emerges in the encounter — in the relations between bodies, images, and the world,” wrote Vivian Sobchack in her Carnal Thoughts (68); and it is precisely these shifting relations that shape contemporary — digital — American identity. In the digital environment, such relations do not stabilise; they reconfigure themselves, recalibrate, and adjust across platforms, archives, sensors, and interfaces.