Editors Brittany C. Slatton (Texas Southern University) and Carla Brailey (Texas Southern University) are introducing a new anthology that examines the continued barriers faced by diverse women in contemporary society.

This panel welcomes papers exploring how creative writers and other cultural actors understood racial identity in light of twentieth-century political revolutions. How, for example, did the Afro-diaspora conceive of "blackness" or "Négritude" in the wake of communist upheavals in the Soviet Union (and later Asia, Latin America, and Africa)? How did Marxist revolutionary regimes make space for or undermine cultural expressions that privileged race ahead of social class? What new aesthetic forms (in poetry, fiction, film, theater, visual art, and music) emerged out of contact between racialized subject positions and revolutionary contexts?

Possible topics include (but are hardly limited to):

Deadline: April 30, 2015
Submit to: Submissions.mpcaaca.org

Papers can explore any topic relating to heroes and/or prevailing notions of heroism as they present themselves in popular culture. Topics may include, but are not limited to:

-Superheroes and action stars as heroic icons
-Video games and the experience of vicarious/learned heroism
-Connections between violence and heroism
-The gendering of heroism
-Heroines in young adult fiction
-Anti-heroes in media
-Pop culture heroes and religion/mythology
-Hero worship
-Real world heroes in the news and biographies

This special session panel is devoted to exploring recent trends in Gertrude Stein studies, a particularly timely focus given the recent profusion of Stein scholarship. Scholarly and popular interest in Gertrude Stein has exploded in recent years, and in the past five years alone Stein studies has generated two successful international museum exhibits, several book-length scholarly studies, numerous scholarly articles, a forthcoming work devoted to teaching Stein, and several new editions of her work.

This session explores the relationship between recent sociological discussions on networks and U.S. literature by writers of color. In The Rise of the Network Society, Manuell Castells argues that the last quarter of the twentieth century has seen a social evolution based on developments in computer-mediated communication. While network is certainly not a new term and different kinds of networks have been important in many societies over time, Castells sees networks enabled by micro-electronics based digital communication as playing a central role in social organization and social relations in the network society.

BAKEA Symposium is open to all participants from the fields of English Language and Literature, American Culture and Literature, French and German Language and Literary Studies, Comparative Literature, Translation Studies.

2015 Midwest Popular Culture/American Culture Association Conference

October 1-4, 2015, Cincinnati, Ohio

Hilton Cincinnati Netherland Plaza
35 West Fifth Street, Cincinnati, OH 45202
Phone: (513) 421-9100

The Television area of the Midwest Popular Culture Association/Midwest American Culture Association is now accepting proposals for its 2015 conference in Cincinnati, Ohio. We are looking for papers that examine any aspect of television, from any time period, and using any number of methods. Potential topics for paper or panel proposals include, but are not limited to: