world literatures and indigenous studies

Until not very long ago, support for the independence and self-determination of nations was an indication of a progressive politics and a generous spirit. Not only did Americans celebrate their own independence on the Fourth of July each year with fireworks and music, and parades. As late as the middle of the twentieth century, the independence of other national states, from Greece to India, Ethiopia and Algeria, was widely regarded as an expression of historical justice and redemption.

This CFP is for a seminar session at the 2020 NeMLA Convention. The convention will be held March 5-8, 2020, at the Marriott Copley Place, Boston.

The Power and Limits of Narrative in Opposing Injustice

Literature, film, and other forums for bearing 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. As such, narratives of witness have the power to connect people across divisions of nation, culture, and experience. They may contribute to shared national and even transnational identities.

The University of Alabama Languages Conference

January 31-February 1, 2020

The organizing committee of the tenth annual University of Alabama Languages Conference is pleased to welcome abstract submissions for this year’s conference entitled “Empowering Languages and Cultures” to be held January 31-February 1, 2020 at Hotel Capstone.

Strands

We invite abstracts about all languages and all areas of Literature and Linguistics, including, but not limited to:

NeMLA 2020 Seminar

Boston, March 5-8, 2020

This seminar seeks to explore the current engagements with "New Sincerity" in literature from Central and Eastern Europe. It expands the geographic borders of discourses on "New Sincerity" by moving beyond the North American and post-Soviet contexts. It also aims to examine the changes to the "New Sincerity" aesthetic in an age of "post-truth" and more than two decades after David Foster Wallace’s call for writers who are "too sincere."

Biofiction (literature that takes a real biography as its point of departure) is powered by what Colm Tóibín has recently called “the anchored imagination”, which grants the fictional narrative a certain ambiguous (almost duplicitous) credibility. But what do biographical novels mean as world-making vehicles? Is the recent boom in stories that rely on the real past, yet project contemporary visions upon it, only a sign that we are trying to build a coherent world-image of centuries past, or is it also an attempt to bring into being a new way of seeing and/or being in the present?