“Your right to swing your arms ends just where the other man’s nose begins,” is a popular ( Zechariah Chafee, 1919) is a popular aphorism in legal imaginaries that theoretically synthesizes the scope of concepts such as freedom, power, and sovereignty. The reality of globalization, and its inherent movements and interactions of bodies, challenges the radical frame and geographies of the aforementioned concepts. The inevitability of the relation, in its materialisations as contact, conflict, and integration, highlights the thin lines between acknowledging, understanding, and trespassing boundaries in human relations to each other and to the systems that govern their lives.

In classical accounts of Marxism, surpluses seem to be made only by labor power. Perhaps the most important shift in  contemporary Marxist thought has been to uncover how capitalism appropriates surpluses from non-capitalist systems. As Jason W. Moore explains, capitalism lives off what he calls “the Four Cheaps,” labor, food, energy, raw materials. Capitalism’s surpluses don’t just come from exploitation—that is, the use of the wage to extract surplus value from labor. It also comes from appropriation—that is, taking without paying at all.

Book proposal: Edited collection 

Proposed Title: Tree Lines: Arboreal Agency in the Creative Arts

Edited by Dr Stephen O’Neill, Maynooth University, Ireland

Abstracts are invited for chapter proposals for the edited collection, Tree Lines: Arboreal Agency in the Creative Arts.

Description / Rationale:

Proposal Submission Deadline: Wednesday, 05 July 2023

Conference Date: Wednesday, 27 September 2023 

Organised by: Department of English, School of Liberal Arts and Social Science, East Delta University, Chattogram, Bangladesh

Contact Email: osmosiseduconference@gmail.com 

Literary Druid is a journal that destinies to foster research and creative writing in English. It welcomes all nationals to contribute for learning and research purposes. The perspective of Literary Druid is to create a niche platform for academicians and patrons to share their intellect to enrich the English language and Literature. I welcome all to learn and share.

This panel calls for stories exploring contemporary creative works as fluid and diverse moments and their relation to what it means to have an identity as both queer and African. This intersection between queer and African is fraught with conflict in the present political and social understanding of homosexuality as un-African and a Western ideology transported to Africa during colonialism. Therefore, when most African nations have made homosexuality illegal, thus, preventing human rights from queer Africans and making them surplus, this panel calls for short stories, poems, memoirs, and novel extracts about queer African characters.

SAMLA 2023 (9-11 November)

The study of T. S. Eliot is enjoying an unprecedented renaissance, thanks to a wealth of new primary and critical materials. New biographies of Eliot and the key people in his life, the Complete Prose, new editions of his poetry and plays, important new translations, and the publication of thousands of new letters have opened up countless new possibilities for the investigation of Eliot’s life and work. This session invites proposals on any topic reasonably related to T. S. Eliot. Preference will be given to proposals that engage with any of the new materials mentioned above. Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words and a brief bio to Patrick.Query@westpoint.edu by 4 September 2023.

The act of translation is often discussed in terms of possession: what is lost, what is revealed, who can claim ownership of a text, and to what extent. It is possible, however, that a more enlightening conversation around translation theory and practice could be had if we shifted our focus from questions of ownership to questions of surplus and scarcity. In an age of globalization where translation is often maligned as useless and mechanized, the field of translation studies must push itself towards inclusive discussions of its most human aspects. To what extent should the translator's work be visible? How do translators negotiate the complexities of excess and lack, "too-much-ness" and "not-enough-ness," when mediating a text?

This book is an academic-edited volume (to be published by CSMFL Publications under its Academic Collection series) that explores the transformative impact of technology and artificial intelligence on the field of translation studies. This book aims to delve into the evolving landscape of translation in the digital age, highlighting the intersection of technology, AI, and translation practices. By examining the advancements, challenges, and opportunities presented by these emerging technologies, the book seeks to provide a comprehensive understanding of how they are reshaping the field and paving the way for the future of translation.

Broad themes of the volume include the followings:

The terms “community” and “immunity” on both local and global scales have become semantically interdependent with unparalleled currency. They have triggered debates about stopping the propelling cycle of immunization that claims to benefit the community and raised concerns about the pressing need to maintain naturally invulnerable societies. Prominent among the theorists who highlight the close and problematic connection between the two notions is Roberto Esposito (2012), who posits that “community” points to difference and that “immunity” designates relation/contagion.

Call for Papers

Reading for Life in Uncertain Times: Literature and Wellbeing.

Online interdisciplinary Symposium: 13-14 September 2023

Hosted by La Trobe University

"There is always a wild card. And what I had were books. What I had, most of all, was the language that books allowed. A way to talk about complexity. A way to ‘keep the heart awake to love and beauty’ (Coleridge)"

Jeanette Winterson

CFP: Saying Yes to Nope: Cinema, Spectacle, and Race in Jordan Peele’s Nope

Editors: Russell Meeuf, Nancy McGuire Roche, and Eric Gary Anderson

Jordan Peele’s third feature film, Nope, has cemented Peele’s place in contemporary cinema as a visionary auteur concerned with cinema, race, genre, and media spectacle. Building on his work as a writer-director on Get Out and Us, and expanding his oeuvre as a film and television producer across genres, Nope is Peele’s most reflexive work to date, exploring our cultural obsessions with spectacle and media culture’s impact on people of color.     

This issue of Critical Times probes the question of solidarity—its subjects, horizons, difficulties, and limits. In some social-theoretical accounts, solidarity is a force that coheres subjects, holds them together in one community, and coordinates their aspirations, sympathies, or interests in perfect unity. Solidarity, in other words, transcends differences to generate unity; indeed, it converts difference into sameness. And when such differences persist or reappear in new forms, solidarity is said to be in danger or to have failed. Yet this is neither the only archive nor the only horizon of solidarity.