african-american

Special Issue of Multicultural Shakespeare:  Shakespeare, Blackface, and Performance:  A Global Exploration,

Ed. Coen Heijes and Ayanna Thompson.

DEADLINE:  MARCH 1, 2020

PUBLICATION:  AUTUMN 2020

More details here:  https://acmrs.asu.edu/multiculturalshakespeare?fbclid=IwAR2JU0ixuEQhi0MG...

Gavin Jones (Stanford) and Michael Collins (KCL) are seeking contributors for a panel on the "The Short Story's Global Dimensions" at the Annual Meeting of the ACLA in Chicago, 19th - 22nd March 2020. Abstract proposals of around 200 words should be sent to the organisers by August 30th.

https://www.acla.org/short-storys-global-dimensions  

Please consider submitting an abstract for this panel proposal at the 2020 C19 conference in Coral Gables, FL. Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh before the Senate Judiciary Committee in September 2018 helped make “Believe Women” a new rallying cry for the #metoo movement(s). This roundtable will examine the contentious issue of women’s believability during the latter half of the nineteenth century, a time when the credibility of women was also at the forefront of popular consciousness, occasionally heralded but more often interrogated. How did writers and activists push back against the persistent gaslighting of women during the postbellum period?

Following up the 2019 NeMLA Roundtable “White Allies/Co-conspirators:Teaching African American Literature,” Lexington Books has expressed interest in publishing a collection of essays about white faculty teaching texts by persons of color.

Privilege comes in many forms whether race, class, gender, or education. According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, 84% of full time faculty are white, 25% of those professors are women. With these overarching statistics nationally, at many institutions, classes that focus on African American or Latinx literature are taught largely, if not completely, by faculty who are not from that racial or cultural demographic. When white faculty teach these courses, they may need to confront their own privilege and cultural “blind spots.” Proposed case study presentations can address teaching either African American or Latinx texts.

Overview

Please consider submitting an abstract for this proposed panel for the 2020 C19 conference in Coral Gables.

Reforming Women

Women were powerful activists in a range of nineteenth-century reform movements, agitating for abolition, temperance, prison reform, education reform, and women’s suffrage, to name a few. This panel asks how women’s reform work participated in the practices of dissent and consent, exploring the politics and poetics of nineteenth-century women’s activism. The very term “reform” bridges material change and continuity in the act of making: the work of re-forming involves repetition, revision, and return, which present substantial political possibilities as well as distinct limits.  

When: October 9-12, 2019 

Where: Xavier University & The University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH 

Xavier University and the University of Cincinnati are proud to co-sponsor the Universities Studying Slavery (USS) Fall 2019 Symposium, entitled “The Academy’s Original Sin.” USS is a multi-institutional collaborative effort working to address historical and contemporary issues dealing with race and inequality in higher education and university communities, and the complicated legacies of slavery in modern American society.  

Afrofuturism has become increasingly central to critical conversations about Afro-pessimism, race relations, and cultural histories. This proposed panel draws from Benedict Anderson’s conception of “nation” in his pivotal text Imagined Communities as a generative starting point for thinking about black community formations, black futurity, and cultural histories represented in literature. Anderson claims that “since World War II every successful revolution has defined itself in national terms” (2). However, nations are merely “imagined political communities… as both inherently limited and sovereign” (6).

Mapping Rival Geographies: Migrations, Crosscurrents, and Intimacies

From golems to Gollum, ghosts to Ironman, hobbits to succubi, zombies to dopplegangers, the possessed to those who wield the dark arts, the not-human, the almost-human, the was-human, the wants-to-be-human, the beyond-human, and those who use unknown powers to prey on humans have populated human culture and narrative from the beginning. Analysis from any critical perspective, exploring texts drawn from literature, film/TV, graphic novels, manga, comics, visual arts, and elsewhere, is welcome.

Us, Get Out, The Walking Dead, Cthulhu, It, and a wide variety of other texts would be appropriate topics. 

Please submit through the PAMLA.org website directly. 

PAMLA is in San Diego, November 14-17, 2019. 

In a 2009 article in American Literary History, Richard Gray critiqued the production of post-9/11 novels, writing that such literary works “simply assimilate the unfamiliar into familiar structures.” Yet scholarly work on contemporary U.S. fiction seems to return again and again to a focus on literary production in terms of its relationship to the 2001 tragedy. In this panel, we seek to interrogate the way the concept of “post” has come to influence and, perhaps, even define the American literary canon. 

CALL FOR PAPERS

Language, Literature, and Interdisciplinary Studies (LLIDS), an academic journal, invites original and unpublished research papers from scholars on the following:

The Erasure of Subject: Postmodern Reflections

The whole history of social sciences—and even more of natural sciences—could be summed up as the elimination of the concept of the subject. - Alain Tourain

Over a period of about four centuries, many millions of Africans were shipped to the Americas and forced into slavery. Slavery developed in the colonial period, emerged in the age of the American Revolution, and expanded widely in the antebellum South, reaching its heyday between 1830 and 1860.