Please consider submitting an abstract for the NeMLA session "Reassessing Resource Narratives: Ecocritical Perspectives on the Illusion of Surplus" (55th Annual NeMLA Convention March 7th in Boston, MA). The deadline for submissions is September 30, 2023. You can submit an abstract for this session here- https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/20666

“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:

The Center for Medieval-Renaissance Studies at the University of Virginia's College at Wise announces the Thirty-Sixth Medieval-Renaissance Conference, September 21-23, 2023

Keynote Address

 Matthew Gabriele

Virginia Tech University

 Oathbreakers: The Long Shadow of Fontenoy (841 CE)

in the European Middle Ages

Our conference aims to encourage studies that explore an emerging paradigm in intermediality studies centred on "affective intermediality", and we hope to initiate a friendly, scholarly debate regarding the relevance and productivity of this approach. The necessity of such an “affective turn” of intermediality studies arises from viewing intermediality as an intricate and highly performative process of communication between humans within a particular context of material reality and historical time, not just as a “transfer”, a “combination” or “reference” of media characteristics or representations, i.e.

This panel invites papers that explore literary representations of populations—immigrants, migrant workers, the racially or sexually marginalized, disabled persons, etc.—that are rendered ‘surplus’ by American society. This might be through economic, political, or interpersonal forces. This panel is especially interested in the ways these populations resist this dehumanization and forge their own communities. The label ‘surplus’ pushes these populations to the margins of society, deeply isolating them. Isolation is one of the most crippling afflictions that an individual can encounter, leaving them with no support system when forces like prejudices, poverty, or oppression affect them so deeply.

This roundtable invites critics and writers to rethink cities (or neighborhoods/areas within cities) that are essential to understanding “American writing,” yet still seem to remain outside or “extraneous” to discussions of “American literature.”  What historical cities, lost neighborhoods, or even ruins/necropoli are critical to enduring issues explored within American writing?  What stories seem lost within locales trimmed of their histories?  How does re-centered dialogue around these locations remap American literary production?  What trajectories or points of transit are central to discussions of “canonical texts” in the present moment?  How do these questions reframe concepts of diaspora or a “literature of the Americas?” 

CFP: paper proposals for session at NeMLA (March 7-10, 2024, Boston, MA)

Please consider submitting an abstract for the 2024 NeMLA Convention:

This panel aims to examine how elective, therapeutic, spontaneous abortions, and stillbirths are represented in work of literature and cinema from an interdisciplinary and transnational perspective at the intersection of gender studies and the medical humanities. We welcome papers that engage with novels, graphic novels, memoirs, cross-genre texts, poems, films, and documentaries, that address experiences of pregnancy loss in contemporary societies, cultures, and languages, by using different methodologies. 

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.