This CFP is for a guaranteed session organized by the American Association of Australasian Literary Studies (AAALS) for the 2026 Modern Language Association convention in Toronto (8-11 January 2026).

In 2015 the Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature published an essay by Paul Giles on “Transnationalism and National Literatures: The Case of Australia.” Giles argued that “Australian literature can productively be understood as both a nexus within, and a resistance to, larger orbits of globalisation” (1), and stressed how “local wisdom should also be informed by global theory, and it is precisely such openness to wider planetary orbits that Australian literature, as the subject institutionalised itself in the modern academy, has sometimes lacked” (5).

A decade after Giles’s exhortation to think of transnationalism as a method and to situate Australian literature within the wider ambit of Global Literatures or World Literatures, we wish to revisit and rethink the idea of transnationalism as both method and topic in literature from or about Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand.

We welcome paper proposals that rigorously discuss literary, cultural, and media narratives (generously considered) in relation to transnationalism. Papers may consider, but are not limited to, the following questions.

- How have transnational social and cultural movements shaped and critiqued or have the potential to shape and critique Australasian literatures?

- How have the local wisdom and national consciousness of Australasian literatures, including Indigenous writings and knowledges, critiqued or informed transnational and global discourses, and vice versa?

- How do comparative literature and comparative analysis open up transnational or global understandings of Australasian literatures?

- What changes or developments in Australasian literary and cultural studies enable scholars to place the local-national and the transnational-global in productive dialogues with each other?

Papers on other aspects of Australasian literary, cultural, and media narratives are also welcome.

Submit 250-word abstracts and 100-word bio by 14 March 2025 to aaals.antipodes@gmail.com with the subject line “MLA 2026 Proposal.” Please note that speakers whose papers are accepted for this session will need to become members of the Modern Language Association in early April 2025 in order to participate in the conference itself.