Representing Catastrophe in Contemporary Arts and Letters:

Conceptual and Formal Reevaluation

International Conference, Université Jean Monnet, Saint-Étienne (France), 18-19 May 2021

What do media and technologies mean for the colonized, racialized, and dehumanized? How do we interpret, use, or embody them in ways that go against the grain of colonial logic? How do we rewrite our histories decolonially by taking a close look at their materiality, representation, aesthetic form, and ontological structures? This seminar looks for media and technologies that reverse modern/colonial agencies and explore resistant subjectivity. We think of Leanne Simpson’s keen perception on the maps of “two-dimensional representations”: one is the colonial map that represents the colonial reality; another is the map that records alternative realities of pain, loss, and survival “alongside” the colonial one, embodied by the Nishnaabeg elders.

Sound, Voice, and Language in Decolonial and Planetary Frames

Co-organizers:  Praseeda Gopinath and Monika Mehta

The abstracts are due on October 31, 2020.

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.

The graphic novel’s openness to auto/biographical and historical content and its explicit demotic allegiances enable it to perform a range of political-affective stances including subversion, resistance, solidarity, memorialization, loss, complicity, capitulation, defiant interiority, and cautious hope. Graphic novels are therefore emerging as a powerful tool for mapping the uncertain and liminal spaces that complicate the neat divisions and borders that map out national/sexual/ethnic/religious/caste/personal identities in South Asia. This seminar seeks to address how graphic novels negotiate these borders and boundaries as they imagine the histories--both private and public, personal and collective--of South Asia.

Call for Abstracts for an edited volume on Italian pedagogy:

In parliamentary as in presidential regimes, whether based on formal texts or on customs and traditions, the work of representatives takes place in a specific framework whose legitimacy is accepted by the majority of politicians and the population. Establishing guidelines has been a long-standing concern, as illustrated by A Treatise upon the Law, Privileges, Proceedings and Usage of Parliament of Eskine May for Great Britain in 1844 or the Manual of parliamentary practice for the use of the Senate of the United States of Thomas Jefferson of 1801.

Body Memory and the UnconsciousOnline Conference and Workshop12-13 December 2020London Centre for Interdisciplinary Research

Does the body remember what the mind tries to forget? The psychoanalytic tradition grew out of Sigmund Freud's interest in hysteria, and the body's capacity to record painful events in the guise of psychosomatic symptoms. The painful narrative that becomes 'unspeakable' gains potency as it roams around the body, possessing various parts of us. Instead of a wandering womb (originally believed to be the cause of hysteria), it is the banished signifier that wanders, seeking expression.

Since the sexual abuse allegations against American film producer Harvey Weinstein in Oct 2017, the #metoo movement has received wide attention on social media and in public life. What this movement has reminded us is sexual abuse is deeply implicated in social/hierarchical power structures (forcing survivors to suffer violence and then hide trauma). It has also offered the possibility of speaking against sexual abuse, harassment, and violence in public and “shaming” perpetrators (as “due process” has often been painful, slow, and unfair). The movement has led to public debates on questions of patriarchy, power, nepotism, culture, clothing, ethics, and ideology.

Hello, everyone. I'm editing a series with Rowman & Littlefield/Lexington on a line of academic books critically analyzing elements of Jewish science fiction and fantasy (that's the series title). As such, I’d love some authors with concepts to write about.

At this stage, a paragraph-long proposal emailed to valerie@calithwain.com with a subject of JEWISH SPEC-FIC would be great. Here are some examples:

The Secret Jewish Roots of Star Wars (or some other top franchise)

Batwoman to Felicity: Jewish Characters in the Arrowverse

Rewriting the Narrative: Jewish Fairytale Novels

This seminar aims to identify and investigate privileged genres in literature and film for the articulation and revision of state power in the Global North and South. In the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall, theorists hailing from a variety of disciplines prognosticated a state with significantly diminished powers. Whether despite or because of “governmentality”(Foucault, Brown), “Empire” (Hardt and Negri), “the network society” (Castells), or “regionalism” (Söderbaum, Kai), recent history and current events bear witness to the consolidation of state power, as well as states’ increasing willingness to violently repress perceived threats within and without their own borders. Wherein lies this power? What sanctions the exercise of it?

This seminar invites papers that interrogate the terms under which contemporary interactions between the 'Self' and the 'Other' take place on digital platforms. It deconstructs the binary of the ‘home’ and the ‘world’ and the 'First World' and 'Third World' by analyzing new cultural mobilities and power structures of globalized, outsourced, and work-from-home economies. Can technology produce reciprocal tolerance between different nations and cultures without the need for physical travel? Can it create de-territorialized spaces of desire, friendship, and xenophilia within the very borders of the ‘home’? Does it merely afford an illusion of cohesion and digital cosmopolitanism?

Atelier of Healing: Poetry About Trauma and Recovery, an anthology, is scheduled for publication in 2021. “When I stand before thee at the day’s end,” Rabindranath Tagore said, “thou shalt see my scars and know that I had my wounds and also my healing.” We have all experienced pain of some kind — heartbreak, illness, distress, abuse, violence, disaster, loss, grief. What kind of personal suffering have you endured and weathered? If one were to navigate such trauma, what are some of the coping mechanisms? How, then, will you render your personal experience into lyric and narrative, to transform the pain into something of profound beauty?Poetry has long been known to be one of the great traditional healing arts, alongside dance, music, painting, theatre.

Issue 8: Culture Jam

Guest Editor: Brian Gaines (Virginia Tech)

Due: February 1, 2021