Proposed Special Session for MLA 2020 in Seattle (Jan. 9-12)

The upcoming 2020 MLA Conference is being held in Seattle, Jimi Hendrix's hometown, 50 years after his death in 1970.

To mark this meeting, we welcomes proposals about the significance of Hendrix and his music to cultural and literary studies, including how his legacy continues to infuse and inspire artists, writers, and scholars. We are especially interested in papers that tie his music to larger movements of black expression, such as blues traditions, black radical aesthetics, or the Black Arts Movement, as well as other innovative analyses inspired by affect theory and performance studies. 

The coexistence in practice though not always in name of sometimes very different knowledges is both an ancient and modern concern. The Middle Ages saw the development of the concept of translatio studii alongside a growing interest in translation from other languages and cultures, both ancient and contemporary. At its core, translatio studii is the absorption of knowledge or practice from one culture into another, resulting in a text or practice that presents itself as part of the dominant culture, but retains something of its origins as well.

Since the arrival of the first European colonists on the North American continent, frontiers have served as powerful forces within the public imagination. Often characterized as lawless hinterlands, frontiers call boundaries into question and operate largely independently of,  yet in juxtaposition with, larger units--imperial, national, cultural, racial--in which they are classified. For this proposed panel to the Charles Brockden Brown Society Annual Conference in Lexington, Kentucky from October 3-5, 2019, we invite proposals exploring any facet of the utility of frontiers, or borderlands, to protest or revise social or cultural ideas from the colonial period to the present.

Duality and Manuscript Evidence

at the Midwest Modern Language Association Conference

14-17 November 2019 in Chicago

“Nourishment: Sustaining Resistance” is an inter- and trans-disciplinary graduate student conference at the University of Cincinnati focusing on ways that texts or writing practices nourish and sustain us through times of upheaval and uncertainty. Nourishing can take many forms—from eating a good meal to reading an apt sentence—but all acts of nourishment engage our senses and encourage us to continue working, either as opposers to troubling trends or supporters of positive change.

In 2019, Romania celebrates 30 years since the Revolution. This landmark date compels us to reflect on the radical changes that have occurred in Romanian society and culture since 1989. How have freedom of expression, efforts to reinstate a democratic society, and the country’s accession to the European Union impacted cultural production (literature, cinema, art)? How is Romanian cultural identity negotiated in the national, supranational (European), and global marketplaces? Despite being considered “small” or “minor,” Romanian culture has acquired great visibility in Europe, while it still requires faster dissemination outside Europe (e.g. in the United States). How should cultural institutions ensure its translation and promotion more effectively?

From abolitionist literature to antiwar painting, from documentary photography to committed filmmaking, the arts have been tools of resistance to dominant ideologies. Artistic practices provide people with a means of dissent in democratic and/or authoritarian societies. Under the cover of visual or poetic metaphors, artists imagine alternative realities that can be read as arts of resistance. The world has witnessed in the postwar era a proliferation of artistic trends, a constant re-evaluation of what constitutes a work of art, a multiplicity of experimentations and explorations, not to mention an ever-increasing diversity of media available to express the artist’s ideas.