In the four hundred years since its invention in Renaissance Florence, opera has become synonymous with the grandiose, the excessive, and the melodramatic, yet it has only gained a foothold in the academy as an object of serious academic study within the past fifty years. Since then, however, an abundance of scholarship has yielded everything from formal musicological readings of operatic works to theoretical inquiries inspired by psychoanalysis into voice and performance. And topics like the relationship between opera and sovereignty in seventeenth century Italy and the appropriation of Wagner by the Third Reich underscore how opera has never been far from the political sphere in the Western world.

This panel is being organized as part of NeMLA 2025, centered around the theme of (R)Evolution.

Description:

In dialogue with theorists of (post)humanism, this panel seeks to examine how science fiction has historically been used to bolster erroneous and destructive "scientific" discourses, such as social Darwinism, and, conversely, how science fiction has been used toward revolutionary ends to imagine alternative formations of (post)humanity that defy socially constructed taxonomies and hierarchies.

Abstract: 

Call for Papers: NeMLA’s 56th annual Convention

Dates: March 6-9, 2024

Location: La Salle University, Philadelphia, PA

Abstract Submission Deadline: October 16th, 2024

Panel Title: Literature of Impact- Literary (R)evolutions of the Oppressed

Panel Description: 

JOURNAL OF BODIES, SEXUALITIES, AND MASCULINITIES 
Call for Papers: Global Debates around Circumcision and Anti-Circumcision 

This Special Issue of JBSM is guest edited by: 
Atilla Barutçu, Zonguldak Bülent Ecevit University, Türkiye 
Lauren Sardi, Quinnipiac University, CT, USA 
Jonathan A. Allan, Brandon University, MB, Canada 

From Aura’s surreal rabbit to rather unsettling Birds in the Mouth, animals have surfaced as important figures throughout Latin American literature, serving as powerful symbols, metaphors, and subjects of moral consideration. They have been depicted as divine beings, companions, victims, and agents of resistance, often challenging anthropocentric worldviews and inviting us to reconsider our place in the more-than-human world. This panel aims to explore the aesthetic, ethical, and political dimensions of animal representations in Latin American thought and culture.

We invite papers that engage with the philosophical and literary treatment of animals in Latin America. Topics may include:

As today we see Western countries enacting various immigration laws and borders are being mined to prevent “intruders” from accessing those countries. Faced with (in)security in sub-Saharan Africa the African woman has become that monster of abjection residing in that marginal geography, dwelling in the gates of difference in unfamiliar spaces. The African woman faced with (im)migration goes through a strong feeling of revulsion, fear, or aversion, she is treated as something that is a threat to one's boundaries and undermines one's sense of identity and security, exemplifying Kristeva’s idea of abjection.

“Rooted as it is by feminism, cyberfeminism is an imperfect umbrella term,” Mindy Seu frames her archival project Cyberfeminism Index. Though it traces the same exclusions and western biases of feminist history, she writes, the Web 1.0 term “cyberfeminism” also provides a quick shorthand for the much broader expanse of art, activism, community, and scholarship of its many branches, including “Cyberfeminism 2.0, black cyberfeminism, xenofeminism, post-cyber feminism, glitch feminism, Afrofuturism, and hackfeministas, transhackfeminism, 넷페미 (netfemi), 女权之声 (feminist voices), among others" (https://cyberfeminismindex.com/about).