postcolonial

CALL FOR CHAPTER PROPOSALS 

Africana and American and Female in Young Adult Fiction

Edited by Ymitri Mathison

(editor of Growing Up Asian American in Young Adult Fiction, University Press of Mississippi, 2017)

Since 2017, the #metoo movement has been successful for the conviction of Harvey Weinstein, who was at the center of the landmark trial. The same cannot be said in the case of India, which is still coming to terms with the issue of gender-based violence. Our panel will examine the representations of women who have been forgotten or have been rendered invisible in the national and international media discourse. Our panel will examine such representations through the study of South Asian filmic and theatre representations of Dalit (lower-caste), Northeast Indian, and women who were foundational figures in the defining the newly minted nation—India and Pakistan.

This CFP is for a seminar session at the 2021 NeMLA Convention.

Literature and film that bear witness to injustice can create space for voices that have been silenced. They can lead to the recognition of people subjected to human rights violations and produce shared national and transnational identities. They can draw readers’ attention back onto the politics and power of reading audiences. 

Scholastic engagement with genres and texts of science fiction across various regions and cultures around the world has grown significantly over the last decade. In an effort to expand this ongoing study, the MOSF Journal of Science Fiction is accepting submissions for a special issue on Middle Eastern science fiction to be released in the winter of 2020.

With this issue, we aim to become a gathering place of current topics, trends, and themes in the field of Middle Eastern science fiction. We are seeking academic articles of 5,000 to 8,000 words, short reflection pieces of 500 to 1,000 words, and book reviews of 500-750 words by August 22nd, 2020.

José Esteban Muñoz’s ground-breaking work Cruising Utopia has sought to unite scholarship from the disparate fields of queer and utopian studies by contending that “queerness is primarily about futurity and hope” and “queerness is always on the horizon” (Muñoz 11). Aside from this, it has also powerfully contested the academic pessimism toward utopian political idealism that was becoming a dominant feature in queer theory at this time. Drawing on Muñoz’s work, this panel invites paper abstracts about queer utopias and queer utopian possibility demonstrated in literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries.