In his 1903 The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois poses a question at the heart of the African-American literary tradition: “How does it feel to be a problem?” We see the question’s precursors in Walker’s Appeal, Douglass’ address on the Fourth of July, and Harper’s anti-slavery poetry. It reverberates in Hurston’s “How It Feels To Be Colored Me,” Ellison’s “black and blue,” Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, and Rankine’s Citizen. Taking up the affective relationship between race and national belonging, these texts ask us to contend with what it feels like to be black in a nation founded on anti-blackness. Indeed, as Baldwin and Coates make clear, the problem lies ever “between the world and me.”

This call is for roundtable proposals for NEMLA's 2020 conference taking place in Boston.

http://fift.ugal.ro/30years/

A joint project of the Faculty of History, Philosophy and Theology, the Faculty of Letters, and the Cross-border Faculty of “Dunărea de Jos” University of Galati, the conference is intended as a cultural forum for imparting knowledge and research on the textuality and representation of recent, lived history, from different yet interrelated angles:

One of the biggest challenges for LGBTQiA students is the fact that there’s a constant question about regarding their need to “come out” and how to determine who is “safe” (a term with many definitions) to do that with on college campuses today. This panel will look at pedagogy approaches to fostering an inclusive environment and what to do when a student needs guidance and services due to their orientation. Participants are encouraged to present pedagogy methods for educating audiences (questioning, out, ally, and general) and fostering safer spaces. Papers can address approaches/lesson plans in the classroom, as well as resources for instructors in their service activities to the campus.  

In the 1960s, long before there was Julie & Julia, an aspiring writer named Nora Ephron cooked her way through the holy trinity of cookbooks: Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Michael Field’s Cooking School, and Craig Claiborne’s New York Times Cook Book. In a New Yorker column from 2006, titled “Serial Monogamy: My Cookbook Crushes,” Ephron describes her relationship with the authors of these books: “as I cooked, I had imaginary conversation with them both [Claiborne fell out of favor early on]. Julia was nicer and more forgiving. … Field was sterner and more meticulous; he was almost fascistic.

There is a gathering consensus that television began to undergo a marked transformation at the end of the twentieth century. Two decades into the twenty-first century, an ever-increasing number of cable and streaming series imaginatively conjure the emergence of a world liquidated of normative authority, saturated with media-technological developments, and struggling to find its bearings in the fray. In New Television: The Aesthetics and Politics of a Genre, Martin Shuster refers to this still-unfolding genre as “new television” on account of both its relatively new narrative coordinates and its efforts to think through the bewildering contours of a rapidly changing world.