Radical Kinship: Interspecies Ontologies Beyond Productivity / NeMLA's 55th Annual Convention March 7-10, 2024 Boston, MA - Abstracts are due by September 30  https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/20387 

It has been challenging to maintain healthy enrollments in Japanese language courses at all college levels in the U.S. Although this problem is more serious in small liberal-arts colleges, state universities also have the same problem especially in their advanced Japanese courses. If we think about the prevalence of Japanese popular cultural products such as anime, manga, music, games, V-tubers, and traditional artifacts among college students in the United States, we cannot easily understand why the number of students who learn Japanese has been decreasing in many institutions.

Through stories, knowledge and culture within and between communities is passed from generation to generation. Oral narratives were used and are still used to share rituals, customs, and traditions of a community. The truths within Indigenous communities are reflected and grounded within their stories and Elders play a key role in passing knowledge. They “mentor and provide support and have systematically gathered wisdom, histories, skills, and expertise in cultural knowledge” (Iseke 561). Their stories shape identity and empower Indigenous communities and peoples. Stories indicate beliefs, attitudes, and perceptions of people.

“Make it new.” The rallying cry of modernism supposes something which came earlier which is to be reimagined across the literature and arts of the early twentieth century. Ezra Pound’s maxim represents the bridge between the old and the new, as authors took up the pen to reimagine what life in modernity might look like across literature, the arts more broadly, and political documents including manifestos. The ‘new’ includes many famous and infamous works, but what of the ‘it’? As a response to the alienation of the modern city, the waning of global empires and rotting of the colonial enterprise, and wars beyond previous imagining, authors drew on the old to not only push towards the new, but also recontextualize the present moment using the familiar.

                 Marginalities in South Asian Literature

                           Text, Context and Theory

Call for book chapters

Editors: Dr. Arunima Ray (Lady Shri Ram College for Women, University of Delhi), Dr. Karuna Rajeev (Lady Shri Ram College for Women, University of Delhi) and Dr. Goutam Karmakar (NRF Postdoctoral Fellow, University of the Western Cape, South Africa, Routledge Book Series Editor on South Asian Literature & Visiting Scholar Rachel Carson Centre for Environment and Society LMU München, Germany)

The Politics and Poetics of Community within the Anglophone Left

International Conference

Sorbonne Université / Paris Nanterre University

Paris / Nanterre, France

March 21-23, 2024

Dear colleagues,

It is a pleasure to invite you to submit proposals for the international conference “The Politics and Poetics of Community within the Anglophone Left.” Organized jointly by Sorbonne University and Paris Nanterre University, this three-day conference will take place in Paris and Nanterre, France on March 21-23, 2024.

Presentation

Medievalisms Today: Aspects of the Medieval Past in the 21st-century World (Panel)

Sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Scholarship and Teaching of the Medieval in Popular Culture

Organized by Michael A. Torregrossa, June-Ann Greeley, and Rachael Warmington

Call for Papers - Please Submit Proposals by 30 September 2023

55th Annual Convention of Northeast Modern Language Association

Sheraton Boston Hotel (Boston, MA)

On-site event: 7-10 March 2024

Session Rationale 

Medievalisms Today: Aspects of the Medieval Past in the 21st-century World (Panel)

Destabilizing Trans-Corporealities

This MLA special session invites proposals exploring Brit Pop, 90s musical resurgence/new albums (Blur, The Cure, etc.), or any aspects of contemporary pop music related to genre, lyric poetry, and poetics in 2023 and beyond. Broader interpretations of the theme are certainly welcome.

Kindly submit your abstract (250-350 words) as well as a short bio to:

Ariana Lyriotakis, Trinity College Dublin | lyriotaa@tcd.ie

Please reach out with any further questions or clarifications that might be needed. The presidential theme for MLA 2024 (Philadelphia, PA) is Celebration: Joy and Sorrow.

Speculative Fiction (SF) creators regularly imagine worlds in precipitous decline where the privileged few live in a safe, prosperous, hazard-free enclave from which surplus subaltern populations are excluded. What do these stories of safety for the few while the “surplus” rot outside or join a captive servant class status tell us about our own concepts of borders, citizenship, and expendability? Presenters are invited to engage with one or more texts using cultural studies, postcolonial theory, or other relevant analytic tool to analyze how gated communities function in the SF canon or the real world.

In May 2023, Republican Senator Tommy Tuberville replied, “Well, they call them that. I call them Americans,” when asked by Richard Banks, a radio host for WBHM in Alabama, if he believed white nationalists should be allowed in the U.S. military. Tuberville, who later said “I look at a white nationalists [sic] as a Trump Republican,” also later slightly recanted, stating that, “We agree that we should not be characterizing Trump supporters as white nationalists.” However, Tuberville’s initial comments and impulses create and reinforce a corollary that to be American is to be white.

Call for Book Chapters

 Jayanta Mahapatra: Modern Critical Views

We invite scholars, researchers, and literary enthusiasts to contribute to the upcoming edited book Jayanta Mahapatra: Modern Critical Viewsthat aims to delve into the multifaceted dimensions of the celebrated poet, Jayanta Mahapatra. As one of India's foremost poets, Mahapatra's work has left an indelible mark on the landscape of contemporary Indian poetry. This volume intends to critically explore his poetic corpus, shedding light on its thematic richness, artistic innovations, and its relevance in the larger literary discourse.

Call for papers for a Special Cluster in a/b: Autobiography Studies 

Spaniards across the Americas after the Spanish Civil War: “I am from the Country Called Exile” / Españoles en las Américas después de la Guerra Civil: “Soy del país del exilio”  

Though the Internet has been around since the 1980s, the “Internet novel” as a genre has only really emerged in the last decade or so. We can think of Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts (2021), Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This (2021), and Calvin Kasulke’s Several People Are Typing (2021) as notable recent examples. Each of these novels take as their topic the particular and peculiar confines of the digital world we live in. Lockwood has described this sensation as falling through a “long void that never reaches the bottom,” while Brandon Taylor claims that “the Internet Novel captures some of the weird Gothic horror that white people have come, by way of their new digital Calvinism, to accept as being inherent to digital life.”