The ISSN and the South Asian and South Asian Diasporic forum at the MLA invite 300 word abstracts for a collaborative panel examining the cultural politics of South Asian narrative studies and literary criticism given their imbrication in financialized academic markets by March 15. 

Literary endeavors have long been deeply imbricated with commercialization.  Drama for the stage, poetry for patrons, and fiction for mass readership ensured that the production of literature was always connected to market imperatives. Today, authors and literary works are embedded in a global profit-oriented publishing matrix.

Writers have long used revision as a creative tool, well before writing classrooms institutionalized it as such. Think of Pound ruthlessly cutting Eliot’s Waste Land, Moore slashing most of “Poetry,” and Robert Lowell turning stories and letters into cinquains, sonnets, and blank verse--and then revising some of those poems again, into other forms. To many, such acts of revision are the markers of a serious writer, one who pursues perfection in multiple drafts.

We seek papers on the following topics 1)"Historical Women Interpreting Scripture through Music and the Arts." Through the ages, countless women interpreted scripture through their creation of hymns, poetry, literature, painting, textiles, and other artistic works. We invite papers on historical women (active prior to World War I) who interpreted the Bible through artistic activity. Papers should include significant attention to the historical figures’ work as biblical interpreters, with attention to specific works created by these artists and writers from Jewish, Christian, and other religious traditions.

CFP: Nathaniel Hawthorne Society Conference

“Hawthorne and Friends, Enemies, Frenemies”

Crowne Plaza Hotel Downtown Union Station—Indianapolis, USA

The Nathaniel Hawthorne Society invites paper and session proposals for its triennial summer conference to be held in Indianapolis on June 18-20, 2021.

For people of color, the future has never been a given. Whether through the policies and practices of state-sanctioned genocide, enslavement, internment, or forced relocation and migration, racialized communities have survived their worlds ending, over and over. To cite the opening lines of Sun Ra’s 1974 Afrofuturist film Space Is the Place, “It’s after the end of the world, don’t you know that yet?” This special issue critically interrogates the supposed universal notions of a shared planet, ecological demise, and what it means to be human in an era of climate change. The collection aims to center the perspectives of people of color historically and in our contemporary moment on how they envision(ed) “surviving” apocalypse.

Interplay of past and present, nostalgia and melancholia, classical and contemporary, in literature, philosophy or film of the Mediterranean region. 250-word abstracts due March 1stto 

Practices of Reading in the Pre-Modern Arabic Tradition: How were premodern Arabic texts read, conceived of, commented on, organized, and classified by their authors, contemporaries, and the inheritors of the tradition? How might this inform our own readings of them today? 250-word abstractsdue March 15th