NeMLA 2023 Panel: "The (Dis)Information Society: An Online Ecosystem in Peril"
NeMLA 2023: Niagara Falls, NY. March 23-26, 2023.
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NeMLA 2023: Niagara Falls, NY. March 23-26, 2023.
We have always lived with trauma, but how do we embrace trauma into our lives and create a meaningful life in the world we live in?
In recent years, critical considerations of aesthetics or beauty have been de-emphasized in literary criticism. There is a certain taboo about the notion of beauty, as Elaine Scarry has neatly pointed out: “many people have either actively advocated a taboo on beauty or passively omitted it from their vocabulary, even when thinking and writing about beautiful objects such as painting and poems” (117). There has been many talks about how aesthetics demeans a work’s values—serving as Bourgeois distractions from the real social issues we face, which rightfully remains as an important critical consideration.
CALL FOR PAPERS:
LIFE WRITING AS WORLD LITERATURE (book)
Deadline for abstracts: July 1, 2022Deadline for final essays: January 1, 2023
The series Literatures as World Literature by Bloomsbury Publishing aims to “take a novel approach to world literature by analyzing specific constellations — according to language, nation, form, or theme — of literary texts and authors in their own world-literary dimensions.” https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/series/literatures-as-world-literature/
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.
Disruption and Its Discontents: Ethics, Politics, and Epistemology of Disruptive Technology
A two-day symposium hosted by Academic Writing Lab (AWL) and Dept. Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH), IIIT- Delhi
August 19-20, 2022
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.
I am recruiting contributors for a collection of scholarly essays with the working title Starcrossed Century: Astrology in Global Society from World War One to Covid. The book is designed to address the identification of the history of astrology with "premodern" history. The historiography of astrology is very active and intellectually exciting, but it focuses almost entirely on the period before 1800. Yet never have there been more astrological believers and practitioners than today.
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.
In her most recent book, Posthuman Feminism, Rosi Braidotti calls on posthumanist educators to develop “an affirmative ethics that acknowledges the shared desire of all entities to persevere in their collaborative interdependence and to increase it for the common good” (118). She advocates for pedagogical praxis as a methodological innovation (and challenge) that draws on new materialism as a foundational theory and carnal empiricism as a method.
We hope to consider the following questions with a collaborative group of participants:
*What are concrete, shareable ways to put posthumanist/feminist/new materialist theory into practice (praxis) in the everyday higher ed classroom?
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).”
The Soul of Cinema: Essays on Arts & Faith’s Top 100 Spiritually Significant Films
Since 2004, readers and writers at the Art & Faith website have created six lists of “spiritually significant” films, culminating in its 2020 iteration of the group’s Top 100 films. (To see this list visit http://artsandfaith.com) To celebrate the most recent list, the editors will be hosting a session at the 2022 South Atlantic Modern Language Association meeting in Jacksonville, Florida. The conference will be held November 11-13, 2022.
CFP – Roundtable
Creativity and Innovation in French and Francophone Curricula
54th Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) Convention
Niagara Falls, NY
March 23-26, 2023
Deadline for abstracts: September 30, 2022
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.
Strategies of Speculation in Post-Apocalyptic Fiction (panel)
NeMLA Annual Convention (Niagara Falls, NY; 23-26 March 2023)
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?
Medical sociologist Arthur Frank argues in his foundational The Wounded Storyteller that an ideal illness narrative accepts contingency and acknowledges that “the human body, for all its resilience, is fragile” (49). About her own illness experience, Audre Lorde famously argues that our greatest strength stems - paradoxically, perhaps - from our greatest vulnerability (Cancer Journals 14). Both of these perspectives suggest that resilience is finite, and that recognizing as much can be itself empowering. This panel therefore wonders: what potential does fragility have in a world rife with environmental disasters, personal and structural traumas and other catastrophes that all seem to demand resilience?
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.
While the phenomenon of warming may be global, the effects of it are not. Evidence is clear that many populations in the Global South are more vulnerable to the harm of rising seas, increasing droughts, and more frequent super storms. We are also increasingly aware that in areas of the Global North, political, economic, and social inequities contribute in significant ways to unequal climate vulnerability and resilience. As a result, calls for climate justice are becoming more urgent. But what does such justice look like from different social and geo-historical locations? Whose voices carry in these urgent conversations about what climate justice means, and whose do not?
Over the past twenty years, refugee studies has turned toward a critical encounter with the legal studies framework that had previously dominated it. Scholars such as those in the Critical Refugee Studies Collective have emphasized the position of refugee as one that creates new forms of relationship across spaces and times unbound (but not unmarked) by the state.
Narratives of Pregnancy, Birth, and Postpartum - NeMLA Conference 2023
COVID showed us what we already knew, how fragile global capitalist societies are and how unresilient they become when the structures get shocked. Some of those structures deserve to be destroyed (authoritarianism, nationalism, racism, colonialism, labor exploitation, e.g.); others need to be shored up or replaced with even better institutions and practices (healthcare, the planetary ecosystem, wealth equity, social justice, e.g.). When these fragile structures fail, their failures disproportionately affect those least able to bear the harm. And, around the world, the harmful effects of exploitative structures are repeatedly discriminatorily directed.
Adaptation studies has contended with the question of hierarchies since it first emerged. Adaptation as a process similarly so: the problem of the source and the ‘original’ has established certain values and positions of texts. This has been challenged most notably through the debate in the field around fidelity, wherein the question of being ‘true’ to the source has been variously deemed fallacious, unhelpful, or both. Despite some recent proponents for it, what emerges from this is the challenging of the hierarchies that the fidelity debate espouses. Broadly, this has been main way in which these hierarchies have been challenged in adaptations, primarily due to the seemingly inescapable status fidelity has in the field.
The seminar is interested in looking at papers that deal with the life of Dalits from a phenomenological perspective. The Dalit identity is not frigid. The politics of othering, the notion of subjectivity, the internationalization of caste, caste and cinema, music, art, and other mediums are areas that researchers can explore. Papers that are rooted in the local understanding of caste as a Global/ Indian problem are welcome. Responses that deal with ways to adapt the young generation to the thought of Ambedkar and propose ethical ways to deal with the question of caste are expected. Scholars from literature, political science, media studies, cultural studies, and aesthetics are welcome to make submissions.
We are pleased to announce we are accepting abstracts for chapters for our tentatively titled book, Teaching Black American Speculative Fiction & Beyond: Equity, Justice, and Antiracism. This proposed collection is based on our popular 2021 NCTE Assembly on American Literature (AAL) session, which focused on American speculative fiction and issues of social justice. The collection will focus on equity, justice, and antiracism within different genres/modes of speculative fiction (e.g., science fiction, fantasy, horror) and various formats (e.g., short and long fiction, film, graphic novels, comics, and plays).
philosophia naturalis
Making Sense of Relations and Realities
I am in need of ONE essay for a collection called Outlander as Crime Fiction, pre-approved to be published by McFarland. A Ph.D. is preferred but please feel free to send your proposal even if you are a doctoral student. Email me if you would like to discuss an idea before submitting a proposal. At this point, I only need one paragraph describing your general topic/idea. The completed essay due date is flexible but I'm looking at probably Sept/Oct. 2022 at the latest. Most of the collection has already been written.
Topic: Crimes of the British Empire in Diana Gabaldon's Lord John (and Outlander) Series
What is certain is that change is a perennial feature of our human experiences. Yet, both imposed changes (aging, catastrophes, geopolitical change) and changes initiated by the individual for personal reasons (career, educational, family-based, among others). Is there a generalization of the notion of change? In which ways is it possible to address the diversity of changes taking place in the immediacy of transformation? This panel invites participants to engage in the concept of change applicable to diverse situations.
What are the benefits and risks of change?
Archives of Indian Cinema: Methodologies, Creativities and Urgencies
De Montfort University (UK), Savitribai Phule Pune University (India), Loughborough University (UK),
21st and 22nd October 2022
Savitribai Phule Pune University, Pune