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  

French and Francophone Theater Panel

Contact email: imacdona@bowdoin.edu

Comparative Drama Conference

Orlando, FL, April 4-6, 2024

Deadline: October 12, 2023

This panel welcomes submissions on the broad theme of "French and Francophone Theater." The intention of this panel is to create a space at the Comparative Drama Conference for the presentation of current research on French and Francophone theater by both rising and established scholars. All time periods of French and Francophone dramatic literature and performance are welcome.

Topics might include, but are not limited to, the following:

‘Music, Domesticity, and British Identity’ – Call for Articles (deadline 20 October 2023), Nineteenth-Century Music Review

Dear all,

I am delighted to announce the call for articles for ‘Music, Domesticity, and British Identity’, a special issue of Nineteenth-Century Music Review<https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/nineteenth-century-music-review> (General Editor: Prof. Bennett Zon).

The call is available here: <https://musicdomesticbritain19.hcommons.org/sample-page/>

Nature in Contemporary African American Literature 

The New York Metro American Studies Association (NYMASA) invites applications for a week-long summer institute June 24-27, 2024, exploring the multiple manifestations of abolition and abolitionism in the United States.  

Higher education faculty at all levels (including adjuncts and contingent faculty), graduate students, K-12 teachers, independent scholars, artists, activists and community organizers, journalists, librarians, archivists, and other cultural workers are highly encouraged to apply. 

This collection aims to continue the work of diversifying the 19th-century British literary canon. Many authors who were revolutionary and popular during their time are now underrepresented in the current scholarly field. The essays in the collection will touch on underread texts and authors as well as underappreciated characters in more traditionally canonical works. We welcome essays using lenses such as disability studies, trauma theory, critical race theory, queer theory, postcolonial studies, and more.

Chapter proposals can include but are not limited to:

• Underread 19th-century British authors

• 19th-century diaries or letters that have been critically ignored