world literatures and indigenous studies

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.

How do we understand dispossession and subjections that result from imposed demarcations, displacements, and deprivations? How do we see the dispossessed or subjugated as re-articulated in literary works, and what functions can those re-articulations of present/spectral absences play in the literary analysis of the dispossessed territories or bodies, and beyond?

In the Arcades Project, Benjamin wrote that it is from the gates of the imagination that lovers and friends draw their energies. Over the past few decades, scholarship has been ever more inclined to treat the imagination not as false or unreal, but as an embodied, affective, and fluid mode of creating meaning and experiencing the world. The concept of bodily imaginaries in queer and feminist studies, for instance, seeks to overcome the strict duality between imagination and the body: as Maggie Nelson points out in The Argonauts, “in the field of gender, there is no charting where the external and the internal begin and end.”

CFP Panel for IATIS 2021 Conference in Barcelona

Announcement & Call: https://www.iatis.org/index.php/7th-conference-barcelona-2021

The sudden arrival of COVID-19 and its profound impact on nearly all aspects of daily life for people across the globe will undoubtedly produce a substantive re-examination of the canon of ‘plague writing’ that has, historically, been dominated by European voices. While the predominant influence of European authors in the genre of plague writing can, to a certain extent, be explained historically by the Black Death being the most deadly pandemic in human history, more recent and more global pandemics provide the opportunity to re-examine the situation of these canonical texts and to consider the stakes of plague writing on a broader international stage.

Peripheral Literatures and the History of Capitalism

Guest Editors: Ericka Beckman, Oded Nir, and Emilio Sauri

Deadline for Submissions: 1 August 2020

This heuristic panel seeks to examine the lived reality and creative representation of the political and ecological crisis in Kashmir. Spotlighting the voices of Kashmiri writers will continue the long and delicate process of shedding light on the current human rights crisis happening in Kashmir, as well as its global significance. This panel, therefore, solicits academic research that brings the persecuted voices of Kashmiri writers out of isolation (respecting anonymity on an individual basis) and into humanist discussions. The purpose of this panel involves both understanding the description of the Kashmiri lived reality, as well as providing space for hearing the specific tenants of their calls for change.

Collaborative Research in Theatre and Performance Studies

Joint Issue of Global Performance Studies and the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 

To be published Fall 2021 (GPS issue 4.2 & JDTC issue 36.1)

Issue Editors

Kevin Brown, University of Missouri

Felipe Cervera, LASALLE College of the Arts

Kyoko Iwaki, Waseda University and University of Antwerp

Eero Laine, University of Buffalo, State University of New York

Kristof van Baarle, University of Antwerp

Modernism/modernity Print Plus cluster on Whiteness

Contacts:  Jennifer Nesbitt (jpn12@psu.edu) and Sonita Sarker (sarker@macalester.edu)

 Timeline:

The convergence of critical masculinity studies with postcolonial theory aims, at its core, to interrogate discourses that created hegemonic and binary categories that in turn became eventual grounds for the historical racialization of gender and sexuality, as well as the gendering and sexualization of race. Taking the image of “palimpsest” as its semantic inspiration, this session seeks to problematize the layerings and shifting stratigraphies of power that obscure, erase, or overwrite the specific historical, cultural, and political experiences that underpin notions of Asian masculinity and male identity as represented in various forms of literature and media.

This edited collection will be published by Cambridge Scholars in late 2020. The volume invites essays that focus on literary or other cultural texts that use the graveyard as a liminal space within which received narratives and social values can be challenged, and new and empowering perspectives on the present articulated.  Essays in the volume will examine the use of liminality as a vehicle for social critique, paying particular attention to the ways in which liminal spaces facilitate the construction of alternative perspectives.

A Chapter should be no longer than 6000 words, and should be original and previously unpublished.

Networks, broadly defined, share tasks and information between nodes through a unique spatial constellation which allows them to distribute power evenly and, in the process, eliminates the need for a concentrated source of directives. For this reason, they have been looked at within various disciplinary communities as harbingers of negative and positive possibilities in the 21st Century. What are networks capable of, and how does literature address the significance of networks, both locally and globally? Are authors working to alter, exploit, or combat modes of power through their portrayal of various networks? This standing session invites papers from all fields, but has a particular interest in papers that address the local and global.

Although Utopia literally means no-place, in some utopias the location definitely has some cultural significance. If utopia is in the sun or under the earth, it is probably not the case. Thomas More put his Utopia in the South Atlantic, but the imaginary geography of the island does not seem to have any importance for social construction. More’s Utopia does not seem to have anything South American. However, the geographical and temporal orientation of Chinese and European utopias seem to be different in many aspects, which carry a politico-cultural significance. The special issue of World Literature Studies will explore two questions about the location of utopias:

Call for Proposals Asian Film and Media Session at PAMLA 2020 PAMLA’s 118th Annual Conference Thursday, November 12 through Sunday, November 15, 2020 Sahara Las Vegas Hotel http://www.pamla.org/2020  The Asian Film and Media Session at PAMLA 2020 will feature papers that look at Asian film and media produced in a variety of geopolitical settings, across a wide range of historical periods. Presenters are encouraged to bring forth their analyses of various works of film and television, live-action and animated, silent and with sound—or any other work that they feel fit into the conversation of "film and media".