This panel aims to explore the possibilities presented in immanent, paralinguistic expressions which evade or function parallel to and beyond the realm of structured grammar and logics of exchange. Edouard Glissant, in Caribbean Discourse, teaches us that in the beginning was not the word, but sound. He writes, “the spoken imposes on the slave its particular syntax. For Caribbean man, the word is First and foremost sound. Noise is essential to speech . . .

2024 CONFERENCE THEME: BUILDING ALLIANCES
 

(A)rchival endeavors should not be about documenting the past, nor even about imagining the future…but about building a liberatory now. 

-Michelle Caswell, Urgent Archives: Enacting Liberatory Memory Work (2021, 13)

Northeast Modern Language Association 55th Annual Convention (March 7-10, 2024)

Enhancing Language Learning through AI: Practical Strategies for Teachers in the Age of ChatGPT (Roundtable)

(If interested, please submit your abstract here through the NeMLA portal: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/20556)

The College English Association, a gathering of scholar-teachers in English studies, welcomes proposals for presentations on 19th-century American literature for our 53rd annual conference in Atlanta, March 21-23, 2024.

For this area, we are particularly interested in proposals that relate 19th-century American literature to the conference theme of “Transformations” from academics from a wide range of areas across literary studies, creative writing, rhetoric, composition, technical communication, linguistics, and film.

2024 Advanced Writing Symposium
Uncharted Territories: Genre, Audience & Innovation in Advanced Writing Contexts

University of Southern California

Event Date: February 2, 2024
Event Location: Online

The USC Writing Program’s Upper Division Curriculum Committee welcomes proposals for
“Uncharted Territories: Genre, Audience and Innovation in Advanced Writing Contexts.”

Sophia A. McClennen and Joseph R. Slaughter in “Introducing Human Rights and Literary Forms” warn: “Human rights are under threat everywhere, especially when the language of human rights is used to justify their violation” (Comparative Literature Studies 2009). They notice that through double-speak the states exercise violence to advance their jingoist agenda in the name of protecting the rights of the children and women, as George Bush did while invading Afghanistan in 2001.

In keeping with NeMLA's theme on “Surplus,” this roundtable will interrogate the works of Richard Wright and Ann Petry and how they have been interpreted as “excessive.”   It seeks to examine how their work has been understood as excessively: masculine, feminist, violent, Communist, leftist, assimilationist, naturalist, realist, etc.  This roundtable seeks to look at two major African American authors of the twentieth century whose boundary pushing were seen as "excessive."

Abstract:

International conference: Streaming in the Global South

Institute of Asian and Transcultural Studies, Vilnius University, Lithuania

 Vilnius, 18-20 January 2024

The Institute of Asian and Transcultural Studies (Vilnius University) and the Centre for Creative and Cultural Practice (University of East London) invite proposals for conference papers on streaming and video online distribution in the Global South.

What can be said about epic today? Although M.M. Bakhtin famously declared the impossibility of epic in a modern, polyphonic world in 1941, the category has remained a dynamic source of artistic and critical interest. The works considered in studies like Franco Moretti’s Modern Epic (1994), Sneharika Roy’s Postcolonial Epic (2018), or Václav Paris’s Evolutions of Modernist Epic (2021) re-evaluate epic as a multifarious category capable of shedding light on the global, postcolonial, and postmodern condition of contemporary literature—either as a site of resistance or as a form of cultural domination. Yet even in its new, polyphonic forms, the idea of epic is rarely severed completely from its classical roots.

We would like to invite proposals for chapters for a forthcoming edited collection on animals, fashion, and colonialism. Our project investigates the way that colonialism was inscribed on the female body through animal fashions in the long nineteenth century and beyond. Contributions are welcome from a wide variety of fields, with interdisciplinary approaches preferred. 

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:  

This session highlights interdisciplinary scholarship on contemporary Black satire from roughly 2013 to the present, such as how the TV series Atlanta and related texts serve as microcosmic exemplars for Black satirists’ commentary on life in the United States after Obama.

Abstracts are encouraged to take an interdisciplinary approach to their engagement with literary and cultural works that speak to the state of Black satire and American society since 2011. Please submit a 200-300 word abstract and a brief bio (50-100 words) by October 15, 2023. All abstracts must be submitted via https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/20616.

As the concept of plasticity has travelled across feminist science studies and new materialisms to Black, queer, and trans studies, its meaning has itself become unstable—or plastic. Jules Gill-Peterson and Kyla Schuller offer an appropriately plastic definition: “plasticity refers to the capacity of a given body or system to generate new form” (1). Many feminist and queer theorists have sung the praises of plasticity, which promises to destabilize fixed forms of power relations, across the registers of gender/sex, race, and (neuro)biology (from Catherine Malabou to Karen Barad to Judith Butler).

This year, the Annual Meeting of the South Central Society for Eighteenth Century Studies will be held in one of the most thought-provoking cities in contemporary America: Portland, Oregon. The meeting will be held on Friday, March 1, and Saturday, March 2, 2024. While papers on all aspects of the long eighteenth century are welcome, the theme of the conference will be "The Book and the City."

Call For Chapters 

Songlines and Lifelines: Women and Muslim Vernacular Cultures on the Malabar Coast