african-american

Jesmyn Ward is a two-time winner of the National Book Award, winner of the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award, and a recipient of the MacArthur “genius grant.” Known for her critically acclaimed fiction and non-fiction, Ward’s lyrical narratives of Black life, home, and family in Louisanna’s Gulf Coast are visceral and evocative. Moreover, while her work is often set in the same geographical region, the concerns explored within it stretch beyond the shores of the Gulf Coast, extending if not physically then cosmologically toward the Caribbean and the African continent. Yet, despite the critical celebration and geopolitical breadth of her work, Ward remains remarkably under-studied, particularly outside the United States.

Dear all,

The graduate students in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Georgetown University would like to invite graduate students to send abstracts for the Graduate Portuguese and Hispanic Symposium 2021 (GRAPHSY). The conference will be held on February 18 and 19, 2021 through Georgetown University’s online platform. Paper and poster presentations are welcome on a wide range of topics within the fields of Hispanic linguistics and literatures. This year our goal is to promote a dialogue on the effects of the current global crisis on linguistics and literature, focusing our attention on how to overcome this impact.

15–17 March 2021 in Turku

29–31 March 2021 in Paris

In collaboration with The George and Irina Schaeffer Center for the Study of Genocide, Human Rights, and Conflict Prevention at the American University of Paris, we invite scholars, students, practitioners, and activists from all fields to take part in the Winter Symposium of the Nordic Summer University Study Circle Narrative and Violence.

Hip-hop is one of the most successful forms of global cultural production today. Since its emergence in the Bronx neighborhood of New York City, it has spread around the world and exerted a considerable impact not only on pop culture, but also on social debates around race, class, language, nationality, gender, and a range of other issues. One topic that is rarely discussed, however, is the relationship between hip-hop and the environment.

Below is an updated list of texts available for review in The Journal for the Study of Radicalism. Reviewers must be professors, independent scholars, or professionals who hold a PhD or terminal degree in their field. Advanced graduate students are also encouraged to reply.

Email the Book Review Editor at jsrbookreview@gmail.com in order to review a text listed below. We also welcome and encourage ideas on other texts related to radicalism.

This panel aims to examine fictional texts which represent an alternate past or future in order to resist dominant narratives. Papers which address the following questions (and others) are welcome:

How does speculative fiction which presents an alternate past or future allow us to critique the present?

How does imagining "what if" prompt us to question "what next?"

How do we use possible worlds theory to understand what is possible in the world, or unnatural narratology to interrogate what is "natural"?

How do Afro-, Indigenous, and/or Latinx futurisms, in particular, work as part of larger movements of social action? 

The Pauline Hopkins Society (http://www.paulinehopkinssociety.org) is pleased to announce its fourth bi-annual competition. The society will award the best scholarly publication – book, essay, or book chapter on Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins published between January 1, 2016 and December 31, 2020. If you have published an essay or chapter that discusses Hopkins and/or her work, we invite you to consider entering before the March 15, 2021 deadline.

Because entries will be judged through a system of blind reviewing we recommend that any self-citation, either in the body or in notes, be reworked to the third person. 

CFP: Letters from Black Faculty

This collection seeks unfiltered, unedited letters from Black academics, intellectuals, and faculty activists that address structural racism and individual experience in the academy, and the tenuous divide between the professional, the political, and the personal. What we are looking for are those letters sent to department heads, college administrators, fellow faculty and trustees that have as their goal holding institutions to their words when they say that “Black Lives Matter”.

This seminar centers the contemporary phenomenon of colorblindness to query how in times marked by police killings, Black Lives Matter activism, and the mass maiming of detained migrants, it is critical race theory that the Trump administration calls “divisive” and “un-American.” As critical race theorists Ian Haney López and Neil Gotanda respectively assert, legal colorblindness in a post-Civil Rights era renders racism “any and every use of race.” This colorblind stance “legitimates racial inequality and domination” by perpetuating a deadly contradiction between racist violence and race-free discourse.

“Memory believes before knowing remembers, believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.” In this passage from Light in August, Faulkner articulates memory’s persistence. His recognition that emotionally charged memories linger even as details fade is why, for Faulkner, “the past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

This CFP is for a seminar session at the 2021 NeMLA Convention. The deadline has been extended to October 19.

Literature and film that bear witness to injustice can create space for voices that have been silenced. They can lead to the recognition of people subjected to human rights violations and produce shared national and transnational identities. They can draw readers’ attention back onto the politics and power of reading audiences. 

March 18-20, 2021
University of Vienna

Seeking papers for a seminar for this year's virtual ACLA--to be held on April 8-11 2021--entitled "Theorize Yourself: Autotheory and Psychoanalysis."  Submissions can be made on the ACLA portal through October 31.  Description below.

Conversations about autotheory circle around psychoanalysis as a conceptual touchstone, with the understanding that analytic theory, more than serving as one of the fields that autotheoretical writers engage, is itself a parallel discourse. “Freud’s dream” of the theory of the Oedipus complex appears, in one moment, to be an autotheory avant la lettre; in the next, it seems that the birth of psychoanalysis takes place in the sublation of Freud’s self-analysis.

James Baldwin Review Volume 7 (2021) CFP

James Baldwin Review (JBR), an annual peer-reviewed journal, is seeking submissions for its seventh volume. An online, open access publication, James Baldwin Review brings together a wide array of peer-reviewed critical and creative non-fiction on the life, writings, and legacy of James Baldwin. JBR publishes essays that invigorate scholarship on James Baldwin, catalyse explorations of the literary, political, and cultural influence of Baldwin’s writing and political activism, and deepen our understanding and appreciation of this complex and luminary figure.