This panel considers Wynter’s letter as a call to challenge present truths of biocentrism, classifications of humanness, and the condemnation of “the speech of the street” to cultivate new modes of knowing/feeling. 250 word abstract. Contact: Amari Mitchell (amari.mitchell@rutgers.edu) or Diana Molina (diana.molina@rutgers.edu). 

• If you are invited to participate in a 2023 session, you must be an MLA member by 7 April 2022. 

• All session participants must register for the convention.

Topics may include but not limited to:

How can critical comedy studies of popular and/or experimental media help us revive political theories of hope amid material conditions characterized by climate apocalypse, obscene inequality, and rising authoritarianism? We invite a range of approaches.

Please send 250-word abstracts and a brief bio to Sam Chesters at samantha.chesters@gmail.com and Maggie Hennefeld at mhennefe@umn.edu.

Call for Papers: Reimagining Rebecca: a symposium on du Maurier’s novel & its legacy

A symposium at the University of Sussex on 27th May 2022

Deadline for abstract submissions: 7th March 2022

DEADLINE FOR ABSTRACT SUBMISSION EXTENDED: 18th March 2022

Jewish Los Angeles "Jewish Literature and Culture" panel at the Pacific Modern Languages AssociationNovember 11-13, 2022 From Boyle Heights to Hollywood, and from Santa Monica to the Valley, Los Angeles has been a site for fantastic projections, colonial encounters, and organized struggles for Jews “moving West” since the late 19th century. This panel explores how L.A. as the other “promised land” is figured in the writings, films, artworks, and music of Jewish Californians and immigrants.  From its settlement as a supposedly empty “virgin territory” to its more recent description as a city that has no memory of itself, Los Angeles is often stylized as a place without identity, history, or borders (Baudrillard, Mike Davis, Thom Andersen, Vanessa Place).

"make, unmake, remake"

November 9th-13th, 2022
Society for Utopian Studies
Embassy Suites Charleston Historic District
Charleston, SC
#SUS2022

We invite creative and scholarly responses to our conference theme--"make, unmake, remake"-- with a particular interest in panels that offer interdisciplinary approaches to shared questions in utopian studies, including those that speak to post-pandemic life and renewal. Topics might include:

--"tinkering towards utopia" vs. large scale utopian plans

--arts and crafts, "craftivism," and sustainability

--reparations for slavery and other historical atrocities

--utopian labor; labor in dystopian times

DEADLINE EXTENDED -- CFP: Performing Medievalism: Tricks, Tips and Tropes from Early Artistic Practice for the Modern-Day Performer 

Considering texts broadly as documentary, artistic, visual, aural, textile, performed, or inhabited, what new kinds and uses of evidence are recovering histories through texts? We especially invite underrepresented or interdisciplinary scholarship.

The panel will seek to develop our concept of editing for new kinds of evidence and build bridges between the ADE and MLA communities. Our aim is to foster conversation between people interested in traditional and non-traditional forms of editing and researchers who are making use of new or innovative editions and collections.

The Negro Motorist Green Book, a guide for Black travelers published from 1936 to 1967, has enjoyed recent popular and scholarly interest. Podcasts and documentaries, articles and essays, and full-length books have been devoted to educating readers about the history of the Green Book and the businesses once listed within it. 

How might medieval dissent, rebellion, and class conflict shed new light on modern insurrectionism? What new historiographic questions might we ask, or positions might we take, on Middle English literature in view of contemporary events?

What understandings of Persianate or Islamicate texts, societies, or cultures do Middle English texts show? How do their engagements with those traditions inflect their views of their own political, aesthetic, and cultural investments?

In Death of a Discipline, Gayatri Spivak mentions the problematic identification of “literature” with the novel form in comparative literature (2005: 123). Her concern with our general blindness to non-hegemonic forms recalls the consternation frequently shown in short fiction criticism toward the enduring novel-centrism of literary studies. This conference aims to bring together scholars with an interest in examining this tension and the different ways in which it may extend to the field of world literature. But our goal is not to look at the short form once again in stark opposition to the novel.

Panel on the cultivation of antiracist reading practices. Topics may include the race novel, social scientific uses of Black literature, antiracist reading lists, book clubs, “common text” programs, cross-racial readerships, sensitivity readers. Send abstract.

https://mla.confex.com/mla/2023/webprogrampreliminary/Paper19649.html

This panel examines literary and cultural urbanisms in the Global South in the context of reframing repair. Until recently, cities in the Global South have been examined mainly as models of crisis, dysfunction, and brokenness. The urgent work of repairing their imperfect conditions has, in turn, been perceived solely in terms of rapid and uneven development in official discourse. Scholars such as Ann Laura Stoler, Filip de Boeck, Ananya Roy, Achille Mbembe, and others, have instead urged us to rethink ruins, lacks, lags, and gaps as origin sites for emergent forms and practices that alter conditions of the possible.

119th Annual Pacific Ancient and Modern Languages Association Conference

Friday, November 11, 2022 to Sunday, November 13, 2022
UCLA Luskin Conference Center and Hotel in Los Angeles, California
Hosted by the University of California, Los Angeles

PAMLA’s Autobiography panel is currently accepting submissions for in-person sessions!

“Autobiography creates a self as the right instrument to seek meaning.”

-Patricia Hampl