Call for Papers

The Latina/o/x Literature & Culture Society 

of the American Literature Association

32nd Annual Conference: May 27-30, 2021 

Westin Copley Place, Boston, MA 

Deadline: January 31, 2020

This essay collection explores how contemporary British authors engage in their fiction with the theme of crisis (as apparent in novels and short stories by Kazuo Ishiguro, Julian Barnes, A S Byatt, Ian McEwan, Graham Swift, Hilary Mantel, Zadie Smith, Colm Toibin, Pat Barker, Martin Amis, etc.) Crisis can be investigated as informing any aspect of fiction involving not only individual, sociopolitical, cultural systems but also as a mode of challenge to established power structures and modes of representation across narrative traditions.

The Life and Legacy of Sterling A. Brown, the Dean of Afro-American Literary Studies
A Special Issue of The Langston Hughes Review

In today’s world, the function of the English classroom has fundamentally shifted. Instead of teaching the fully paper-based curriculum of the past, instructors of English now must incorporate genres that encompass anything from videos to website creation. 

In the study of literature, rhetoric, and composition, too, the field is beginning to recognize new and more multimodal forms of scholarship. Think of Kairos, the online only rhet/comp journal. Think of the work of scholars like Kristen Arola, Cynthia Selfe, and Qwo Li Driskill—work that asks us to think outside the box of the academic paper. 

In their chilling study “Listening to Black Women and Girls: Lived Experiences of Adultification Bias,” Jamilia J. Blake and Rebecca Epstein conclude “that adults perceive Black girls as less innocent than white girls as young as 5-9 years old.” While Blake and Epstein centralize Black girlhood, this adultification bias similarly affects Black boys and other children of color. Children of color’s perception as ‘more adult’ than their white peers does not imbue them with any agency or power, rather, it divests them of childhood, at least within childhood’s contemporary definitions. Yet, these contemporary definitions of childhood are grounded in whiteness and white privilege.

Crisis, Catastrophe, and Contagion in the Works of Langston Hughes and His Contemporaries
A Special Session for the Langston Hughes Society at the 32nd ALA Convention

May 27-30, 2021
Westin Copley Place | Boston, Massachusetts

Is drag separable from gender? A preponderance of self-described "drag things" (versus drag kings and queens) specializing in performances of non-human entities and appearing everywhere from stages in local gay bars to digital platforms like Instagram and YouTube would suggest so; however, when we speak of drag in academic literature, we hew closely to notions of drag as demonstrating gender performativity above all else. This collection therefore seeks to theorize a previously underrepresented form of drag performance that does not necessarily play with gender so much as it plays with humanness:We call this "posthuman drag."