This panel seeks to explore representations of transnational space and transcultural memory in literature of French expression. Whether through exile, immigration, travel, migritude, errance, or the meanderings of the flâneur/flâneuse, francophones have traversed a wide global terrain. Just as authors integrate place into their creations, they in turn leave their stamp on the memories and associations that accrue to any geographical location. Cultural production then reflects and inflects shifting identitarian configurations.

The Adolescence in Film and Television Area invites paper proposals for presentation at the annual Popular Culture Association Conference, to be held April 17-20, 2019 in Washington, D.C. The official deadline for online submission of presentation abstracts (see below for additional information) is October 1, 2018.

Submissions that explore noteworthy coverage patterns, representations, and themes pertaining to the portrayal of adolescence/adolescents in film and television, during any historical era, are desired from scholars, educators, and students at all levels. 

Race and Versification in Anglophone Poetry

Studies of versification tend to be silent on race, and with some exceptions (such as Anthony Reed’s 2014 Freedom Time), studies of race and poetic form tend to turn away from the mechanics of versification. As Dorothy Wang argues in Thinking its Presence: Race and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry (2014), most accounts of poetic form revolve around the technical accomplishments of white poets, while minority figures are seen as more valuable for their poetry’s social or thematic content. What would happen if nonwhite poets were read for their proficiency with poetic forms, and were made the center of conversations about poetic technique? 

This roundtable will evaluate the relevance of the philosophical field of phenomenology—the rigorous study of the structures of consciousness and bodily experience—to twentieth and twenty-first century American poetry through a series of short paper presentations. “[W]ords … are,” Maurice Merleau-Ponty argues in Phenomenology of Perception, “ways of singing the world, and … they are destined to represent objects, not through an objective resemblance … but because they are extracted from them, and literally represent their emotional essence” (193).