“Whenever we try to envision a world without war, without violence, without prisons, without capitalism,” writes Walidah Imarisha, “we are engaging in speculative fiction. All organizing is science fiction.” This panel seeks to bring together critics probing historical, present, and possible future relationships between speculative fiction and social justice. The emergent concept of “visionary fiction,” developed by Imarisha and adrienne maree brown, articulates radical and generative connections between speculation and social movement work.

Call for Papers: Small Screen Supers: Essays on Superhero Television 

As superhero films have proliferated, so too has superhero television. But as scholarship on superhero films has similarly proliferated, scholarship on superhero television has not. When superhero television is discussed by scholars, it is often as an offshoot of filmic franchises rather than as a phenomenon in its own right, with its own histories and contexts of production, its own approaches to adaptation, and its own dynamics of reception. 

CALL FOR PAPERS: American Studies Association (ASA)

In-person, Le Centre Sheraton,

Montreal, Canada, Nov 2nd-5th, 2023

Session Title: “Black Feminist Intimacies at the Limits of Legibility”

Session Organizer: Dr. Carmel Ohman, Brandeis University

Due Date: Please send 200-word abstracts to carmelohman@brandeis.edu by January 15, 2023 

Call for Papers

 The Iranian Yearbook of Phenomenology2024

3rd Issue

Phenomenology: The Basic Concepts

New technologies have often been viewed with strong skepticism for instance the advent of photography transformed painting, the introduction of vehicles substituted horse-carriages and the emergence of cinema replaced books. Plato’s horror over the destruction of ‘memory’ with the invention of ‘writing’ is perhaps synonymous to the inherent connection between ‘literature’ and ‘film’. In the preface of The Nigger of the Narcissus, Conrad states, “My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel-it is, before all, to make you see” (1897). Griffith declares that the task of a filmmaker is the same as the novelist’s, to make people see through cinema.

Literary theory has contributed towards the recovery of marginalised narratives and discourses in literature during the last three decades. The word, ‘minor’ has acquired a resonance of its own in the context of ‘national’ literature which tends to be part of a ‘great tradition’. Against such a background, the recovery of diverse indigenous traditions has become an important task of comparative studies of literature. Nations emerged as ‘imagined’ communities. However, nation-states were not ‘imagined’ in the crucible of prolonged struggles of anti-colonial resistance in Asia, Africa and Latin America, but were born of the political exigencies of imperial powers.

Since the dawn of the Cold War, U.S. popular culture has been saturated with narratives that pit a morally-righteous United States against a sinister, duplicitous Russia–a binary foundational to postwar American Studies. In the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine–and the attacks on democracy and human rights that it entails–the image of a menacing Russian presence is once again salient. Rather than redeploying a Cold War logic designed to disavow the sordid histories of the United States, this panel asks how we might approach the intertwined histories of Russia and the U.S. as a way of strengthening our critique of the oppression and exploitation perpetuated by both nations.