This panel welcomes papers that explore how contemporary literary genres attempt to think through the traditionally raced and class divided formulations (and representations) of the neoliberal city-scape. We particularly invite presenters to consider creative works that destabilize the city as the ultimate signifier of minority cultures and reimagine the spatial expanse of minority resistance. Other themes that panelists might address in their work include, but are not limited to:

ideology and effect of 'urban renewal' /gentrification/displacements and dispossessions
urban discourse of raced deviance
new immigrant destinations

This proposed panel seeks to present new and challenging perspectives on the history of the slave narrative genre. Recent studies have sought to recontextualize and/or reconsider the generic contours of the Anglo-American slave narrative. For example, Daphne Brooks has suggested the development of a "sonic slave narrative"; Nicole Aljoe and Ian Finseth have drawn attention to the "journeys" of the form in the early Americas; Deborah Jenson has highlighted popular sources from the Haitian Revolutionary period; John MacKay has written comparatively about the autobiographical writings of American slaves and Russian serfs.

Key Note Speakers:

Craig Baldwin [filmmaker, lecturer @ UC Davis]
Dr. Denah Johnston [filmmaker, author of No Future Now: A Nomdadology of Resistance and Subversion, lecturer at California College of the Arts, executive director of Canyon Cinema]

There has been a significant shift in the boundaries between the private and public realm in recent years. The increasing indistinction between the two spheres has multiple causes, among them the rise of identity politics and the popularity of the confessional mode. The former might be said to underwrite the latter: the feminist rallying cry, 'the personal is the political' providing a substantial justification for radical autobiography. The motto continues as a cornerstone of feminist consciousness, as well as other forms of identity politics, but the ongoing consequences for public discourse are unclear.

Ordinary Chronicles of the End of the World

As the prophet of magic realism and an extraordinary satirist of political dictatorship, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's literary horizons are incomprehensibly vast, and the rigorous intensity of his writings is inexplicably multidimensional. Marquez challenges the luminal line between 'story' and 'history', and interrogates the public and private domain with an uncommon and effortless ease and clarity. He fuses the chaotic and the cosmic, the materialistic and the mystical, and invites us to participate in a magico-historical narrative of which he is an undisputed craftsman.

Embodied Difference: Monstrosity, Disability, and the Posthuman in the Medieval and Early Modern World, edited by Richard H. Godden and Asa Simon Mittman

Call for Papers (Initial deadline, September 1)

Volume Description
Medieval and Early Modern art and literatures are replete with images of non­normative bodies. Saints lives valorize physical challenges, fabliaux render them metaphorical, medical texts pathologize them, and marginal images make them subjects of amusement. Divergent bodies are viewed as gifts from God, markers of sin, or manifestations of medical imbalances. In many cases throughout Western history, a figure marked by what Rosemarie Garland­Thomson has termed "the extraordinary body" is labeled a "monster."