world literatures and indigenous studies

ARIEL Special Issue Call for Papers:
Literature & Postcolonial Capitalism

Since Karen Barber theorized the notion of “African popular arts” nearly thirty years ago (1987), a rich field of scholarship has developed around the term, exploring forms of local African expression by the people, for the people, and most often, about the people. The concept of African popular culture has been applied to a vast array of cultural forms in Africa ranging from Onitsha pamphlet literature to Kenyan matatu minibus inscriptions, Ghanaian Concert party theatre, Angolan hip-hop, Nollywood video films, Cameroonian detective fiction, Congolese Sapeur fashion, South African cartooning, trans-continental TV shows like Big Brother Africa, and much more.  

Envisioning asylum / engendering crisis  http://explore.tandfonline.com/cfp/ed/crde-call-for-papers

Co-editors: Dr Emma Cox (Royal Holloway, University of London) and Dr Caroline Wake (University of New South Wales, Sydney)

The “LLC – International Journal of Linguistics, Literature and Culture” is a peer reviewed journal which accepts high quality research articles. It is a quarterly published international journal and is available to all researchers who are interested in publishing their scientific achievements. We welcome submissions focusing on theories, methods and applications in Linguistics, Literature and Culture, both articles and book reviews. All articles must be in English.

http://ijllc.eu/

We are inviting submissions for a forthcoming edited volume that analyse and survey folk narratives from India’s Northeast. The eight north-eastern states—Meghalaya, Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Mizoram, Tripura, Assam, Manipur and Sikkim—have a wealth of narratives that are likely to function as alternative history beyond the generic cultural and geographical assumptions of the history of the Northeast as part of a ‘greater’ Indian history. The polyphonic potential of these narratives can be explored in multiple ways including historical, literary, sociological and political, but not exclusively such.

Since its emergence, cinema has been preoccupied with the relationship between film and politics, and across its long history filmmakers have explored the relationship between film and social change. This history seemed to reach its apogee in the 1960s with the global explosion of radical filmmakers intent on exploring cinema’s revolutionary capacities. Of these movements, Godard’s political modernist cinema and Latin American third cinema are the most well-known and have since come to stand as both the height and limit of a politically committed film practice.

13–15 December 2016
Daejeon Convention Center, Daejeon, Korea

The world has entered into the age of universal economic crisis. In this second decade of the twenty-first century, the long shadow of economic downturn and instability looms over not only traditionally underdeveloped countries and regions, but the superpowers of global economy, such as the US, the EU, and China. At the time when economy is at once a global priority and the source of worldwide anxiety, fear, and uncertainty, and when economic crisis seems to accelerate the crisis of humanities and higher education, the ELLAK will organize an international forum to reconfigure the interface of literature and economy and redefine the social parameters of literary studies.

Poetry After Europe: Geopolitical Poetics in the 21st Century [or does the subtitle dilute the force of “Poetry After Europe?”]

Organizers:

• Walt Hunter (Clemson University)
• Shirley Lau Wong (Westfield State University)

Pocahontas and after: historical culture and transatlantic encounters, 1617-2017

The British Library and the Institute for Historical Research, London

March 16-18, 2017

A major international conference to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Pocahontas’ death.  Co-hosted by the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library and the Institute for Historical Research.

Additional support has been provided by the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture and The University of Warwick.

Erich Auerbach’s "Mimesis"—The Representation of Reality in Western Literature—was published in 1945 and had a tremendous influence in the middle part of the 20th century. Using a method of textual analysis to establish continuities from Homer to Virginia Woolf, Auerbach has been read by virtually every serious student of literature for seventy years now. Because of the scope and density of the book it is somewhat difficult to ready examine and evaluate Mimesis. This panel will examine Mimesis from two angles. First, we will study and reflect the overarching themes of this magisterial book. Second, we will look at his individual textual analyses to probe their validity and relevance in 2016.

In his lifetime, Nietzsche referred to over 150 nineteenth-century writers in both his published writings and Nachlaß. Nietzsche’s use of nineteenth-century fiction and poetry ranges from somewhat nonchalant to extremely systematic. Indeed, the cornerstone of his “Advent of European Nihilism” in the late 1880s is the decline or decadence of literature during Nietzsche’s lifetime.

The panel attempts to focus on passages, individual novels or poems, and complete bodies of work in order to assess Nietzsche’s use of these texts in his philosophical project.

Since 1945, Berlin has become a cultural Weltstadt in many ways; this panel would like to focus on three of them. First, the contemporary situation of Berlin in reunified Germany serves as a lens for the flow of people, ideas, rinfluences between Europe and the rest of the world. Second, from 1945-1989, most of the tensions of the Cold War converged in Berlin. Third, for both of these reasons, today a large number of films, novels, and TV programs are set in Berlin, thus making it a privileged place of cultural representation. The purpose of this panel is to study all three of these situations from an international and comparative point of view.

The aim of this roundtable is to present possible guidelines and book selections for a hypothetical undergraduate course in “Novels of the Holocaust.” The panel will be resolutely international and open to books originally published in any language. As this roundtable is sponsored by NeMLA’s comparative literature director, participants are not obliged to use or refer to English translations if they wish to use original texts. The course that might be called the “target course” may be for any undergraduate level and for any country.

While this is roundtable is meant to follow the interests of its participants and not impose any institutional rigidities, seven particular themes or questions seem especially important.

Inter-imperiality
Guest Editor: Laura Doyle
Deadline for Submissions: 1 June 2017

The editors of MFS seek essays that engage with the concept of inter-imperiality, as developed in the recent PMLA “Theories and Methodologies” cluster (March 2015) and elsewhere. The global turn in literary and cultural studies, although productive, sometimes elides the post/colonial, economic, and other historical or geopolitical conditions of literary-cultural production. We solicit essays that offset this tendency by reading literary-cultural texts within an inter-imperial framework.