In his 1962 essay, “The Creative Process,” James Baldwin writes, “A society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven. . .The artist cannot and must not take anything for granted, but must drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides.” The link between artist and activist illustrates the import of black public voices that challenge institutions of white supremacy, gender oppression, and systemic dehumanization. Historically, artists have critiqued, documented, and contextualized racial violence to ensure that the past is not forgotten and to reshape the nation’s consciousness.

As Anis Bawarshi and Mary Jo Reiff argue in Genre: An Introduction to History, Theory, Research, and Pedagogy, genres are not mere “text types,” buckets that writers fill with familiar conventions, but dynamic “social actions” that exist in activity systems (3, 78). And as suggested by contemporary texts across modes and media, for instance Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (which blends features of comics, autobiography, comedy, and tragedy) or Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (which merges conventions of horror movies and westerns), contemporary authors and artists appear to be increasingly invested in the work of challenging genre conventions and meshing genres.

Call for Papers

Title: Peer Review and the Pandemic
Deadline: 1 September 2021

Heroes, Rebels and Outlaws: Escapism and 19thC Literature

International Seminar
1st & 4th Sunday (July,August,September 2021)

Course Facilitator: Olga Akroyd , Ph.D 

Although academia’s interest in disability studies emerged in the late 1980s, an ever-growing body of research has emerged since then, mainly from Anglo-Saxon and Nordic countries.

Laverne Cox’s debut role in Orange Is The New Black seemed to usher in a new era for trans representation. In 2014, TIME decreed that the “Trans Tipping Point” had arrived and heralded a path to trans acceptance through visibility on the screen. Yet this increase in visibility has not formed an antidote to rampant transphobia. In 2021, thirty-three states have introduced 117 bills to limit and curtail the rights of trans people across the United States. Public incidents of transphobia are on the rise. In this panel, we consider the effects of hypervisibility in a time of public transphobia across media, and critically consider what the task of representation entails.