Children’s literature and material cultures of childhood have always enjoyed a long-standing relationship. In Anglocentric contexts, it is well studied how toymakers and children’s book editors worked hand-in-hand during the “Golden age of children’s literature” to construct a joint children’s market for books and toys (Masaki 2016; Field 2019). However, even though playing, with its various aesthetic, pedagogic, material and cultural meanings, constitutes an important element of South Asian children’s book cultures as well, this phenomenon has remained rather understudied in the academy. 

CALL FOR PAPERS

FOR PUBLICATION IN MEJO (MELOW Journal) 2022

ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF T.S. ELIOT’S THE WASTE LAND

Call for Papers--DEADLINE EXTENDED!

Mystery/Detective Fiction Area

Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)

44th Annual Conference, February 22-25, 2023

Marriott Albuquerque

Albuquerque, New Mexico

http://www.southwestpca.org

EXTENDED Proposal submission deadline: November 14, 2022

Writers, filmmakers, musicians, and other arts performers have taken a leading role in protesting governmental failure and corporate responsibility for environmental destruction and disaster across the Caribbean. In the 2000s, Caribbean writers, filmmakers, visual and other artists have spoken truth to power in Puerto Rico and Dominica after the tragedy of Hurricane Maria, in the struggle to preserve Jamaica’s Cockpit country from bauxite mining, and against extractive industries, tourism, and other environmentally destructive forms of development. In fact, writers and artists have been documenting, illuminating, and protesting environmental destruction since Caribbean cultural traditions emerged.

CFP: Spatial Innovations in Rhetoric and Writing (edited collection)

This panel brings together diverse readings of the hotel as a peculiarly evocative transfer point in narratives of modernity and postmodernity. It examines the uncanny power of the hotel to symbolize many of the key attributes of modern and contemporary writing, cinema, art, and, indeed, subjectivity: freedom, mobility, anonymity, alienation, limitless self-recreation (to name a few).

To confront literary institutions means to confront paradoxes at every level. Institutionalization is the enemy of “real” literature and art, avant-gardists and critical theorists will tell you. Institutions standardize, constrain, and exclude while they assign value and invite critique. Conversely, there is no literature without institutionalization: it is only through institutional frameworks that we can communicate about literature as an observable phenomenon at all. And often, the fiercest critics of institutions are in turn the savviest institution-builders.