CFP-Kate Chopin International Society at SSSL Conference, 8-11 April 2010

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Kate Chopin International Society
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Call for Proposals for Kate Chopin Panel for 2010 Society for the Study of Southern Literature Conference

The Kate Chopin International Society seeks submissions for a panel for the 2010 conference of the Society for the Study of Southern Literature, slated for 8-11 April in New Orleans, LA.

The 2010 conference's theme is "Everybody Loves You When You're Down And South: Cultural Capital in Hard Times" – a full description on the theme is available in the SSSL's Spring newsletter available at http://web.wm.edu/english/sssl/newsletters/SSSL-Spring2009.pdf?svr=www. Briefly, the conference theme looks at how "[s]omething called "The South" remains the movie set for a host of familiar fears: about miscegenation, the loss of national identity, economic decline, shifting sexualities, environmental decay, and collapsing infrastructures. But as the rest of the nation catches up, unable to deny being down and out
both at home and abroad, the exceptional status of the South seems less exceptional. What can be learned from the ways that the South has been surviving, enduring, and weathering or even overcoming, transforming, and reinventing hard times? Has the South always been
selling itself up river in order to survive? How has our co-dependent, perpetual otherness created cultural capital, capital culture, and the culture of capitalism for the nation and the world?"

Some of the topics the conference is interested in might bear particular fruit from exploring Kate Chopin's work. These include but are not limited to:
•economics and class disparities
•the cultures of poverty and violence
•miscegenated space and cultural production
•ethnic identity as cultural capital
•Afro-Caribbean cultural interchanges
•climate change, hurricanes and weathering hard times
•industrial cultures: oil, fishing, sugar cane, cotton, rice, indigo, chicken, Wal-Mart
•Hollywood South
•tourist souths: Natchez, Nashville, Charleston, New Orleans
•global exchanges: southern music, food, culture, literature around the world
•sharecroppers and other silenced voices
•archeological souths

Please send 150-250 word abstracts by November 1, 2009 to Christina Bucher at cbucher@berry.edu. This deadline will allow us to send the panel proposal to the SSSL by their deadline of November 15, 2009.