“Instead, queer means, splendiferously, you.

& you means someone who knows that common flavors for ice cream sandwiches in Singapore include red bean, yam, & honeydew.” – Chen Chen, Summer

Within the genres of science fiction as well as in poetry and drama, scenarios of dystopic presentations are frequently reversed to reveal a more hopeful denouement. The focus of this year’s convention is Resilience which is identified on the NeMLA website as “an anchor term for critical and creative work that explores how we bear up under trauma,” amongst other critical issues in the world. Literature has been utilized as a means of explaining difficult issues and often works through a myriad of complications, revealing resilience as well as offering a glimmer of hope.  How do these writers achieve their encouraging shift from sometimes desolation and seeming hopelessness to a more hopeful viewpoint? Are there parallel constructs?

Critique: Studies in Contemporary Literature

Call for Papers for Special Issue: Insurgent Infrastructures

Edited by Gabriella Friedman, Henry Ivry and Harriet Stilley

Special issue working title: The Cultural Deliberation of Europe 

Intended journal: Continuum. Journal of Media and Cultural Studies

Editors: Jesse van Amelsvoort (University of Amsterdam, NL), Margriet van der Waal (University of Groningen/University of Amsterdam, NL)

Description

We are seeking contributors for an edited collection of scholarly essays on these recent changes in the complexity of time-travel media (film, television, gaming, or literature). Submissions that are interdisciplinary in theory and method are welcome, especially those in popular culture, science fiction, fantasy, genre studies, critical media studies, narratology, etc. Abstracts and papers discussing recent time-travel media, approximately within the last decade, may include but are not limited to research concerning narrative structure, theme, genre, reception, comprehension, and other relevant topics.

NeMLA 2023: Niagara Falls, NY. March 23-26, 2023.

ON-LINE CONFERENCE (via Zoom)

11-11 July 2022

CFP:

It is widely known that ideologies of racism, nationalism, and xenophobia are dangerous and spread all over the world. We want to examine these terms as much as possible, from many perspectives and variable aspects: in politics, society, psychology, culture, and many more. We also want to devote considerable attention to how the phenomena of racism, nationalism and xenophobia are represented in artistic practices: in literature, film, theatre or visual arts.

What does it mean to write and think about nature? Do language, thought, and mimesis ultimately have the capacity to impact (and possibly cultivate) our natural environments, and do these environments in turn have the capacity to impact (and possibly cultivate) our words and ideas? Taking such questions as a starting point, this panel aims to explore how the relationship between the human community and the environment has occupied a central space within literature and thought across various epochs and epistemological arenas. 

Dante Decolonizer: Poet of Justice

Epistemic Plurality and the Ethical Imagination

…ché, per quanti si dice più li ‘nostro’… (Purgatorio, 15.55)

 This NeMLA sponsored seminar is designed to engage Dante’s interrogation of justice as an epistemically rooted, ethical imperative. This year’s speaker’s panel and subsequent roundtable seek to explore Dante’s attention to the centrality of epistemic plurality in the ethical imagination with respect to justice, as exemplified in key passages like: Inferno 3–5, 8, 26, 32–33; Purgatorio 10–11, 13, 15–18, 30–31; and Paradiso 3, 10–12, 17–21. 

Who Was that Masked Woman? Representations of Women Vigilantes and Outlaws in Popular Media from Reconstruction to the Great Depression

We are looking for two chapters to complete a manuscript currently in development with a publisher.  We invite chapter proposals for a collection of critical essays that examine how women vigilantes, anti-heroines, and outlaws were represented in movie serials, radio dramas, films, comics, and pulp fiction in America at the turn of the century.  

“The Art of Losing”: Loss in Literature and Film

Panel Session, NeMLA’s 54th Annual Convention in Niagara Falls, March 23-26

In her iconic poem “One Art,” Elizabeth Bishop writes of “the art of losing.” The poem’s speaker first recounts the loss of small things such as “lost door keys” and “an hour badly spent”; then, the losses grow in import: “my mother’s watch,” “three loved houses,” “two cities,” “two rivers, a continent,” and finally, “even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love).”

Fandom flourishes thanks greatly in part to the contributions made by members of marginalized communities. From fanfictions based on queer readings of the original material, to fan art depicting BIPOC character headcanons, fandom has given people the opportunity to engage with media in ways that are oftentimes more inclusive than the original text itself. 

Conference: 28-29 July 2022 (online - via Zoom)

CFP: 

​In our postmodern world there are a lot of questions that should be re-considered and re-defined. What does it mean to fight against colonialism and racism in the world of migration crisis and xenophobic attitudes towards minorities? What does it mean to be a postcommunist country in the face of the common nostalgia for order and rules? How is it possible to have a national identity being aware of the relative character of every national feature?

This roundtable engages what Dylan Rodríguez coins the “Carceral Dilemma of Asian American Studies,” wherein the discipline and the parallel social formation of the “model minority” figure have expanded anti-Black state violence under the guise of a multicultural civil society.

An interdisciplinary invitation and gathering, this roundtable is a space for diasporic academics to reflect on how abolitionist theory and practice informs their scholarship and pedagogy, and how this political orientation is conducted and constrained within the neoliberal university.