CFP: PCA 2011--San Antonio, TX. April 20-23, 2011

We're soliciting proposals for the Romance Area for the Popular Culture Association conference. This year it's in San Antonio, TX. As always, it's the Wednesday-Saturday of Easter/Passover weekend, April 20-23, 2011.

PCA is an amazing conference to go to to experience the community of Popular Romance Studies. It's a VERY inviting conference for new scholars, and for interested non-scholars. We've had undergraduates and brand new graduate students very successfully present papers at PCA. We're welcoming, friendly, fun, a little bawdy, and very very interesting.

The body remains a preeminent place of reading in feminist theory, past and present. But, we wish to complete a feminist examination of those areas of research that speak of movements beyond the physical body. This project seeks papers that examine feminist literary characters that negotiate multiple borders and identities. What borders exist to be transgressed? What are the consequences (mental, physical, social) of transgressing these borders? What is specifically feminist in the act of crossing a border, any border that exists?

We are looking to put together 10-12 essays (which we will edit, introduce, and conclude) with the following sub-categories:

Food and the Arts

The panel of Food and the Arts welcomes submissions of descriptions of food and meals that are illustrative of misfortune, economic decline, and natural or unnatural catastrophes. Discussion may be based on literature, painting, and film.

Submission: August 15 - November 1, 2010
Please see the submission instructions at http://cea-web.org/

This panel will examine the role played by Paris and Montreal in the evolution of francophone identities. While some writers have depicted the alienation experienced by their protagonists, others have explored the emergence of interlope cities. How do these divergent approaches shape the evolving image of the two cities in francophone literatures? How do protagonists negociate the emergence of multiple migrant voices? Are Paris and Montreal changing from failed melting pots to diffracted mosaics? Pascale de Souza, GMU, pdesouza@gmu.edu
Submitted for the NEMLA conference, Rutgers, New Brunswick, NJ, April 7-10th 2011

Over the last two decades, cinematic privileging of the postcolonial other has evolved a new, significant wedge against the plethora of hegemonic films. From Avatar to Slumdog Millionaire to The Secret of Roan Inish, the popular role of the postcolonial other in film has yielded a new transnational awareness as well as place in contemporary cinema. Additionally, these film depictions have alternately problematized and/or privileged themes of gender, migration, displacement and adaptation. This roundtable will examine through theoretical lenses how and why the postcolonial other has been positioned in privileged and colonized cultures by today's film industry.

This two-day event marks the fifth anniversary of the publication of Only Revolutions, Mark Z. Danielewski's second novel. Danielewski was already hailed as one the most innovative and exciting writers of experimental fiction after his debut House of Leaves was published in 2000, and Only Revolutions - as well as his 2005 novella The Fifty Year Sword - impressively confirmed this assessment. Danielewski is a favourite of literary critics as well as of very devoted fans around the globe, but so far no academic conference has yet been devoted exclusively to his works.