Text in Context: A Graduate Student Journal

DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSION EXTENDED TO OCTOBER 15, 2014

From the major urban parks of the 19th Century—like Central Park in New York and City Park in New Orleans—to today's plethora of urban gardens, American city planners and residents have attempted to introduce "nature" into the "artificial" space of major cities. But what about those living creatures often ignored in such idyllic visions: rats, bugs, pigeons, and others "pests"? What about the weeds growing from cracks in the sidewalk and in vacant lots? Why privilege the former kind of nature and not the latter? Furthermore, how has this distinction between two kinds of nature been used to justify the pollution of animal, plant, and human communities in urban settings with dangerous chemicals?

Since the turn of the twenty-first century, American writers have begun to return to the political and aesthetic moment of the late 1960s and 1970s. This turn has taken both a domestic and a global perspective: from the recent revival of interest in the Weather Underground as the United States' own stillborn revolutionary moment—we can think of Bill Siegel's 2002 documentary, new novels from Russell Banks and Jay Cantor, and the recent memoirs of David Gilbert, Bill Ayers and Cathy Wilkerson, to name just a few—to a revisiting of 1970s global insurgencies in places such as Italy, India, and South Africa as in Rachel Kushner's The Flamethrowers, Jhumpa Lahiri's The Lowlands, and Chris Abani's The Secret History of Las Vegas respectively.

*All Submissions must be made through the ACLA website by October 15 for consideration*

http://www.acla.org/government-literature-0

Chiasma: A Site for Thought is an annual, doubly-anonymous, peer-reviewed journal for the generation and dispersion of theory, and invites submissions for its second issue.

One of the enduring themes of 20th century critical thought is that the question of being, far from being too abstract or general to warrant serious consideration, is rather 'the most basic and at the same time most concrete question'. For our second issue, we are looking for perspectives on the status of this questioning, particularly in the form of teaching, professing, lecturing, researching, and/or publishing in the academic institution. Topics for papers could be related, though not limited, to the following themes:

Beyond the Binary
(See HERA's website for an expanded description.)
www.h-e-r-a.org/