african-american

Over the past several decades, scholarship in a variety of disciplines has challenged the “wave” model of feminism. Inspired by the 2020 centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment, this special issue seeks to rethink “first wave” feminisms in a heterogeneous and expansive way—by pushing geographic, chronological, and ideological boundaries and by broadening the definition of whom we usually think of as early feminists. While contributions on the Nineteenth Amendment in the United States, and the suffrage movement worldwide, are welcome, we also encourage submissions that consider early manifestations of feminism and feminist movements in broad and global terms. Scholars from all disciplines are encouraged to submit their work.

The Ralph Waldo Emerson Society will sponsor two panels at the annual meeting of the American Literature Association, to be held May 21-24, 2020, San Diego, USA.

‘Emerson and Resistance’*

The Emerson Society invites proposals on the topic of ‘Emerson and Resistance’. Papers might like to consider the idea of resistance in Emerson in his own time, in subsequent periods, or in contemporary contexts. Emersonian resistance may also be considered in relation to other writers, political thinkers and philosopher’s.

‘Emerson’s Society and Solitude at 150’*

46TH ANNUAL MEETING OF SEASECS
FEBRUARY 20-22, 2020
MACON, GA

http://www.seasecs.org/2020-conference

SEASECS will hold its 46th annual meeting at the Macon Marriott City Center. The theme for this year's meeting is "Encounters in the 18th Century: Maps, Materials, and Media." In addition to panels and plenary sessions, special events include tours to historic sites including the Ocmulgee Indian Mounds National Historic Park, the 1869 Hay House, the Tubman Museum, historic Rose Hill Cemetery, and the Allman Brothers’ “Big House.” Host institutions include Georgia College & State University, Middle Georgia State University, and Wesleyan College.

In the midst of the election of the Trump administration, the growing racial tensions that coalesced into the violent protests in Charlottesville, and the rising rates of hate crimes committed against black and brown individuals, there has been a slew of young adult novels published by writers of color that tackle the ways in which young people within these communities must simultaneously navigate the complexities of childhood while also confronting racism, xenophobia, homophobia, and police brutality.

In recent years Jesmyn Ward’s workhas received significant critical attention for its stark depiction of race, class, and gender dynamics through Bois Sauvage, microcosm of a rural South typically marginalized in the US imaginary. However, her most recent novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing, while still deeply invested in a specific, southern time and place, engages with peripheries in which these categories are constructed. Where does life intersect with death, sickness clash with health, or freedom meet incarceration?

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War narratives are subject to emphases, orientations and points of view that give a particular flavour to wars fought by populations (anonymously, individually and/or hidden in an organisation, secret or not)  and by the military (from high command to the ‘unknown soldier’). Such accounts evolve with the benefit of hindsight, the writing of history textbooks and the constant (re)interpretations of archives (new or not) and the official version a country wishes to put forward according to its political agendas and visions of patriotism, citizenship and human rights, or its diplomatic or international policy objectives.

The Amiri Baraka Society invites abstracts (of no more than 250 words) for presentations at the annual conference of the ALA (http://www.americanliteratureassociation.org/).

Call for Papers
American Literature Association Symposium “American Poetry”
February 20-22, 2020 Keynote Speaker:
Aldon Lynn Nielsen
Pennsylvania State University

ALA symposia provide opportunities for scholars to meet in pleasant settings, present papers, and share ideas and resources.  The February 2020 symposium will focus on American poetry. While we welcome individual proposals, panels and roundtable discussions are also encouraged.

In his 1903 The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois poses a question at the heart of the African-American literary tradition: “How does it feel to be a problem?” We see the question’s precursors in Walker’s Appeal, Douglass’ address on the Fourth of July, and Harper’s anti-slavery poetry. It reverberates in Hurston’s “How It Feels To Be Colored Me,” Ellison’s “black and blue,” Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, and Rankine’s Citizen. Taking up the affective relationship between race and national belonging, these texts ask us to contend with what it feels like to be black in a nation founded on anti-blackness. Indeed, as Baldwin and Coates make clear, the problem lies ever “between the world and me.”

NeMLA 2020: Boston, MA

http://www.buffalo.edu/nemla/convention.html

In his 1961 essay “The New Lost Generation,” James Baldwin argues that Europe gave the “new” African American expats of the late 1940s and the 1950s “the sanction, if one can accept it, to become oneself. No artist can survive without this acceptance. But rare indeed is the American artist who achieved this without first becoming a wanderer, and then, upon his return to his own country, the loneliest and most blackly distrusted of men.” Indeed, Baldwin asserts that African American expats in Paris gained a kind of liberation through their experience with a culture wholly unlike their own.

NEW DEADLINE.

Our Round Table at the 2020 Northeast Modern Language Association Convention in Boston assembles elements of these literary dialogues and brings them into conversation with cultural conversations that emerged as a new decade began a half-century ago, in 1970.

CFP: "Narrative Hysterics: Feeling and Form in Women's Experimental Fiction"

Panel: Afro-diasporic Futures Before Afrofuturism

Northeast Modern Language Association Annual Conference

March 5-8, 2020 

Boston, MA

Seeking papers on the politics of futurity in Afro-diasporic writing from before the mid-twentieth century for the following guaranteed session at NeMLA 2020. Abstracts due by September 30 on NeMLA's website. Visit https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/17890 to submit.