This proposed special session seeks critical assessments of recent representations of slavery in the American cultural imagination. What are we to make of the treatment of racial bondage in recent films such as Lincoln and Django Unchained, and in novels such as Toni Morrison's A Mercy? How do these representations of slavery resonate with, revise, and reimagine the nineteenth-century texts and tropes on which they draw? What are the broader aesthetic, political, and narrative implications of these and other manifestations of the recent interest in racial slavery? Papers focusing on various texts—filmic or literary—and deploying diverse approaches are welcome.

The increasing pervasiveness of narratives in the everyday life of today's global mediated world has been explored extensively in literary theory and criticism, linguistics, critical discourse analysis, and policy making. Narratives are associated with traditional genres such as the novel and the short story, but also with the stories we live by, with the idea of story and storytelling as reflected in newspaper articles, websites, blogs, forums, visual narratives, oral stories, testimonies. Yet, very few studies address tales of women's permanent or temporary transnational relocation.

This conference will consider the interrelationship between formal structures of knowledge and literary writing / discourse. It will interrogate the deep discursive interplay between non-fictive and fictive forms and address critical issues associated with this historical division.

How are paradigms for the collection and transmission of knowledge about the natural world informed, transmitted, and transmuted by literary means? How might literary criticism play a role in the interrogation of epistemological genres associated with the categorization of the human, including but not limited to philosophy, jurisprudence, anthropology and biology?

Topics might include (but are not limited to):

PAMLA 2013 Conference (Nov. 1-3): The Other Detective (deadline April 15)

The detective has nearly always been seen as an Other, a figure that occupies some other space, between law and criminality, between society and its fringes. This panel will expand on this understanding to include the overtly Other Detective, the one that exists as a racial, ethnic, class, gendered or any Other.

Please submit proposals via the PAMLA website:
http://www.pamla.org/2013/

Rights are entitlements or justifiable claims; human rights are a special kind of claim that one is entitled to by virtue of being human. In her recent study _Inventing Human Rights_ (2008), Lynn Hunt argues that rights were imagined as natural, inalienable, and universal in eighteenth-century sentimental literature, prior to their promulgation in the revolutionary Declarations. Specifically, for Hunt, it is by extensively documenting the flagrant wrongs suffered by various disenfranchised groups—women, slaves, prisoners, the insane— in the form of rape, enslavement, and carceral torture that sentimental fiction implicitly underscored their rights to bodily integrity and self-possession.

The Zionist imagination in global literatures and cultures. Potential topics: pre- or proto-Zionist texts, Christian Zionism, post-Zionism, Israel and its others. Abstract, 250 words maximum by 10 March 2013; Garrett Eisler (gbe2@nyu.edu).