ethnicity and national identity

Glasgow International Fantasy Conversations

Beyond the Anglocentric Fantastic

28th – 30th April 2021

Gender, Race, and Beyond in Contemporary Superhero Cinema 

This special issue of The Projector, edited by guest editor Jamie Ann Rogers, seeks submissions focused on contemporary community media as activist and aesthetic practices. In 2005, Kevin Howley described community media as “popular and strategic interventions into contemporary media culture committed to the democratization of media structures, forms, and practices.”[1] In revisiting this definition 15 years later, the holistic aim of this special issue is to interrogate shifts in various community media making environments brought about in the past decade.

Contemporary Fictions of Migration and Exile:Writing Diaspora in the 21st Century

Guest editors:

María Alonso Alonso (University of Vigo)

Bárbara Fernández Melleda (University of Hong Kong)

Deadline for abstract submissions: March 31, 2021

Notification of acceptance: May 31, 2021

Submission of full articles: May 31, 2022

Tentative publication date: early 2023

April 2-3, 2021
Conference Date/Location: April 2nd-3rd, 2021 **Online**
Deadline for Proposals: December 30, 2020
Theme: “Third Space”

The 29th annual Midwestern Conference on Literature, Language and Media at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Illinois, is currently accepting proposals for 20-minute presentations from individuals and panels.

CFP: Approaching Race and Ethnicity in Nordic Film Culture

In 2017, the head of the Swedish Film Institute (SFI), Anna Serner, highlighted the distinct lack of ethnic diversity in Swedish film culture and signalled ambitions to ‘broaden representation, both behind and in front of the cameras’ (2017: 4). Echoing these sentiments, the Danish Film Institute (DFI) and the Norwegian Ministry of Culture (NFI) have outlined targets for ‘increasing cultural diversity and reaching new audiences’ (NFI 2018). These statements reflect the Nordic film industries’ aspiration to address the significant underrepresentation of black, Asian and minority ethnic voices in the creative sectors across the Nordic region.

Children’s literature as a field is not bounded by geography, and so critical discussions of the children’s literary tradition outside of a US context appear frequently in journals ranging from The New England Reading Association, to The Lion and the Unicorn, and The Reading Teacher. In fact, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly dedicated the Winter 2018 issue to “Migration, Refugees, and Diaspora in Children's Literature.” Despite the abundance of critical work, pedagogical resources such as Evelyn B. Freeman and Barbara A.

We invite a broad, imaginative and interdisciplinary interpretation on the topic of ‘Victorian Inclusion and Exclusion’ and its relation to any aspect of Victorian popular literature and culture that addresses literal or metaphorical representations of the theme. Inter- and multidisciplinary approaches are welcome, as are papers that address poetry, drama, global literature, non-fiction, visual arts, journalism, historical and social contexts. Papers addressing works from the ‘long Victorian period’ (i.e. before 1837 and after 1901) and on neo-Victorian texts/media are also welcome.

This panel aims to examine fictional texts which represent an alternate past or future in order to resist dominant narratives. Papers which address the following questions (and others) are welcome:

How does speculative fiction which presents an alternate past or future allow us to critique the present?

How does imagining "what if" prompt us to question "what next?"

How do we use possible worlds theory to understand what is possible in the world, or unnatural narratology to interrogate what is "natural"?

How do Afro-, Indigenous, and/or Latinx futurisms, in particular, work as part of larger movements of social action? 

Journal of American Studies of Turkey (JAST): Special Issue on Asian American StudiesGuest edited by Nina Ha, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia In Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, Cathy Park Hong writes: “In the popular imagination, Asian Americans inhabit a vague purgatorial status: not white enough nor black enough; distrusted by African Americans, ignored by whites, unless we’re being used by whites to keep the black man down. … We have a content problem.

Updated Call for Papers: Situations International Conference 2021

(Hybrid Online/Offline Conference)

Between Asia and Europe: 

Whither Comparative Cultural Studies?

University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia May 21-22, 2021

From Nebraska to Pittsburgh and New York, Willa Cather’s career as a writer was—and has been, even since her death in 1947—inextricably intertwined with various popular print forms. This conference will focus on the intersections of Cather’s life and writings with newspapers and magazines. Cather sometimes disparaged periodicals by hinting to friends and colleagues that she reluctantly published her work in them only to support her more serious writing, yet she understood very well their importance to a writer’s standing in American culture during her lifetime.

This seminar centers the contemporary phenomenon of colorblindness to query how in times marked by police killings, Black Lives Matter activism, and the mass maiming of detained migrants, it is critical race theory that the Trump administration calls “divisive” and “un-American.” As critical race theorists Ian Haney López and Neil Gotanda respectively assert, legal colorblindness in a post-Civil Rights era renders racism “any and every use of race.” This colorblind stance “legitimates racial inequality and domination” by perpetuating a deadly contradiction between racist violence and race-free discourse.

Contemporary regimes of protest in South Asia are informed and injuncted by its ever shifting geopolitical modalities. With the rise of globalisation, neoliberalism and multiculturalism, South Asian geopolitics comprise a quest for redefinition of biopower and subjectivity formations. As hegemonies of Western  dominance are toppled, South Asian geopolitics are evolving as a complex assemblage of biopolitics, citizenship ethics and human rights concerns. In this evolving engagement with global politics, South Asia is fast emerging as a contending power itself with competent human and capital resources. An important consequence of this is the appearance of newer axes of fault lines in terms of polity, economy, religion, culture, art, and gender.