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

Call For Papers: Anonymous Thought

Postmodern Culture

deadline for proposals: January 1, 2021 to pomoculture@gmail.com

https://www.press.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern-culture

From arborescence to the rhizome, plants have long served as models for thinking in philosophy, biology, and the arts. In recent years, scholars including Michael Marder, Catriona Sandilands, and Jeffrey Nealon have brought renewed attention to the agency and dynamism of the vegetal, at the same time that the future of plant life has come to be at risk in the wake of climate change and the impending collapse of ecosystems. This panel invites papers that explore ways of thinking about and with plants in the shadow of the Anthropocene. How do writers and visual artists, past and present, help us renegotiate our relationship to the vegetal today?

This is a call for papers for a panel to run at NeMLA 2021, which will be conducted virtually March 11-14, 2021. Submit an abstract by October 19, 2020 [deadline extended] here: https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/18807

This panel seeks to convene a conversation that theorizes the relationship between the detective novel, the art novel as it has been understood since modernism, and professional literary study—and in doing so move the critical study of detective fiction beyond the impulse to validate the genre as an object of study or redeem it from the stigma of genre.

Violent Affects: Imperialist/Racist Texts and Decolonial Praxis

Seminar Co-Organizers: Soumitree Gupta and Tanushree Ghosh

Deadline for submission of paper abstract: October 31, 2020 by 11.59 p.m. EST

ACLA Annual Meeting (Virtual), April 8-11, 2021

Seminar Description

This panel will examine literary, cultural, and legal texts to investigate the space and the concept of home seen queerly. It will focus primarily on an Anglo-American context, though papers from the broader Anglophone world will be considered.

Dear Colleagues,

We are glad to share with you the final CFP for the II International Conference From Manuscript to Digital: World Wide English Literature and World Wide Literatures in English, organized by University of Lincoln, Universidade de Lisboa, and Universidad de Jaén. The conference will be held in Jaén (Spain), 1-3 December / 2020. Please note that we have decided to organize the conference in an online format due to the extraordinary situation we are living.

Thematic panels

5-6 November 2020 - ONLINE

Organizers / Scientific Committee:

InMind Support (Poland)

Professor Wojciech Owczarski - University of Gdańsk (Poland)

Professor Polina Golovátina-Mora - Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana (Colombia)

CFP: Migration, Adaptation and Memory