The long-term goal of USACLALS is to study postcolonial literatures (including those of Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Canada, New Zealand and Australia) in relationship to the varied and vital cultural contexts of the Americas. We encourage studies which reach beyond the literatures of the British Commonwealth to use comparative frameworks in relation to francophone literatures, ethnic American literatures, and African-American literature. This website is interactive, and we encourage outside comments and contributions to the site. Thank you for your support.

CFP: 2012 MELUS and USACLALS JOINT CONFERENCE, 19-22 April, 2012, Santa Clara, CA

Submitted by adamore on Fri, 2011-09-23 02:05. Conferences

Deadline Extended: The response to our Call for Papers has been terrific, but some have asked for an extension. We are therefore accepting abstracts till the end of this month: November 30. If you've been busy about many things, but want to join us: now's the time to spend a few hours putting together an abstract, and sending it in. Thanks--this promises to be a large and very interesting conference.

2012 MELUS and USACLALS JOINT CONFERENCE CALL FOR PAPERS

(26th Annual MELUS Conference and 6th Conference of the United States Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies)

April 19-22, 2012
Santa Clara University, California

THEME: Ethnic Literatures and Transnationalism

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS: Bill Ashcroft, Wlad Godzich, Francisco Jimenez, David Marriott

As an ongoing and vital process through which societies and cultures have become integrated through a globe-spanning network of communications, economics, and politics, globalization addresses the transnational circulation of ideas and languages. Its impact on literature is manifold, with both positive and negative associations, wherein cultures receiving outside influences ignore some, adopt others as they are, and then immediately start to transform others. Certain aspects of globalization – such as hybridity and multi-rootedness – are increasingly present in literary texts as we witness ways in which they shape new literary forms, interrogate existing canons, and explore the emergence of ethnic canons.

We invite paper abstracts and complete panels, workshops, and roundtable proposals on all aspects of the multi-ethnic literatures of the United States and elsewhere. We are particularly interested in proposals that explore globalization in terms of its influence on ethnic canons, and vice versa, and encourage presentations on all global frameworks of analysis, such as Atlantic studies, global feminisms, pan-Africanism, postcolonialism, transnationalism, global indigenous studies, etc. Submissions should detail requests for specific audiovisual equipment, if needed. We also ask that a proposal for a complete panel, roundtable, or workshop include a short description of the central topic, supplemented by brief abstracts of individual speakers’ contributions.

Deadline for abstracts and proposals (250 words in Word or rtf format): November 30, 2011.

Please e-mail abstracts to:

Prof. John Hawley
jhawley@scu.edu

Hotel rooms ($139) have been set aside at the Fairmont Hotel, San Jose, where the conference will be held.

170 South Market Street
San Jose, California
TEL (408) 998-1900
http://www.fairmont.com/sanjose

All presenters, chairs, and respondents must be members of USACLALS or MELUS. Membership information can be found on the USACLALS website http://www.usaclals.org/ or the MELUS website at http://www.melus.org/membership.htm. All payments of membership dues must be mailed directly to USACLALS or MELUS, not to the conference organizers.

The long-term goal of USACLALS is to study postcolonial literatures (including those of Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Canada, New Zealand and Australia) in relationship to the varied and vital cultural contexts of the Americas. We encourage studies which reach beyond the literatures of the British Commonwealth to use comparative frameworks in relation to francophone literatures, ethnic American literatures, and African-American literature.

To see Past MELUS conferences, go to http://webspace.ship.edu/kmlong/melus/confarchive.htm .

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USACLALS & MELUS, Boca Raton, FL

Submitted by adamore on Fri, 2011-09-23 01:26. Conferences


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CFP: Culture of Terror in South-East Asian Lit and Film, ESSE Conference, Istanbul, 4-8 September 2012

Submitted by adamore on Fri, 2011-09-23 00:10. Conferences

ESSE Conference, Istanbul 4-8 September 2012

Post-9/11 Cultures of Terror in South-East Asian Literature and Film

The shockwave of 9/11 has generated a wealth of critical literature as well as its own literary canon with the emergence of the subgenre of terror fiction – Liter(r)ature – as writers recreated or reconstructed the terrorist attacks directly or obliquely in their fiction.

However, the first edition of our conference held at the University of Turin, established that Terror is asymmetrical and complex, not monolithic as the GWOT implies with its Manichean binaries. The United States does not have a monopoly of Terror and the US and Euro-centric debates about 9/11 which predominantly focus on security and international relations issues tend to overlook the abuses of State Terror in connection with the legacies of colonialism, decolonization and the Cold War.

The second edition of Cultures of Terror to be held within ESSE 2012 a the Bogazici University of Istanbul from 4th to 8th September 2012 seeks to explore the fictional representation of State oppression and brutalization of the most vulnerable, whether in the name of national security or as a result of collateral damage to domestic or foreign military operations. We welcome papers that think through and beyond the predominant rhetorics and narratives of Terror and which address violent forms of postcolonial sovereignty, or ethnically-motivated, religion-based or caste-related violence in modern South Asia.

We invite 15-minute long contributions focusing on film and fiction that responds to the conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan’s tribal areas, Kashmir, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.

We are also convening a round table on the same issues and invite/welcome guest speakers to participate in a wide-ranging debate.

Procedure for submitting paper proposals:

Colleagues wishing to participate in the Seminar or round table are invited to submit a 250- 300-word abstract and a brief bio to the three convenors before 11th February 2012. We will notify the participants of acceptance of their proposals by 29th February 2012.

Dr Stephen Morton, University of Southampton: S.C.Morton@soton.ac.uk

Dr Veronica Thompson, Athabasca University: thompson@athabascau.ca

Dr Pascal Zinck, University of Lille: cap.zinck@wanadoo.fr

All the information concerning the ESSE-11 Conference in Istanbul can be found on the Conference website http://www.esse2012.org

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Assistant Profesor of Post-WWII British Literature, Ohio University

Submitted by adamore on Fri, 2011-09-23 00:10. President's Message

Assistant Professor of Post-WWII British Literature

The Department of English at Ohio University seeks to appoint a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Post-WWII British Literature. A secondary interest in Postcolonial Literature is strongly desired. Requirements: PhD in English at the time of appointment, evidence of research excellence or potential, experience teaching a range of courses effectively, and a commitment to teaching students from diverse backgrounds. Candidates should expect to participate in departmental/university governance.

Applicants should apply online http://www.ohiouniversityjobs.com/postings/1550. Upload a cover letter, CV, 25-page writing sample, and three contact names and e-mails for letters of reference. Review of applications will begin January 16. Questions should be directed to snyderc3@ohio.edu. Ohio University is an equal access/equal opportunity and affirmative action employer with a strong commitment to building and maintaining a diverse workforce. Women, persons of color, persons with disabilities, and veterans are encouraged to apply.

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CFP: Dalit Literatures - In, Out and Beyond, Horizons anglophones, 31 May 2012

Submitted by adamore on Fri, 2011-09-23 00:00. Conferences

Dalit Literatures - In, Out and Beyond
Call for Contributions
Series PoCoPages, Coll. « Horizons anglophones »
Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée
http://www.pulm.fr/index.php/collections/horizons-anglophones/pocopages.html

The history of Dalit literature can be traced back to centuries. But Dalit literary/cultural expressions were never taken into consideration due to the hegemonic nature of the field of literary production. The emergence of Dalit as a political category and identity coincide with the emergence of Dalit literature. Current researches by scholars reveal the widespread character of Dalit writings in various parts of India. Research also shows that Dalit literature had long before acquired a distinct language through its heterogeneous and plurivocal character which challenged dominant literary canons. Dalit literature acquired a recognizable identity towards the middle of the twentieth century. The term ‘Dalit literature’ – 'Dalit' meaning oppressed, broken and downtrodden — came into use officially in 1958 at the first conference on Dalit literature in Mumbai. The emergence of the Dalit Panthers (a political organisation formed in 1972 in Mahrastra) is a significant moment in the history of Dalit literature which was furthered by various political/literary movements across India.

Dalit literature for a long time was disregarded and not taken seriously in the literary circles. The publication of translations from modern Marathi literature entitled Poisoned Bread edited by Arjun Dangle with a prefatory note by Gail Omvedt had already sparked debates in the literary circles. Under the impulsion of such academics as Arun Prabha Mukherjee (York University, Toronto) who translated Omprakash Valmiki's Joothan (1997) into English in 2003 and wrote an introduction to it, the initial reluctance to accept new literary genres by the dominant literary discourses, has, over time, given way to wider acceptance and circulation of Dalit literature in and outside India. The recent volume on Dalit writings from two south Indian states No Alphabet in Sight edited by Susie Tharu and K. Satyanarayana, opens up a new debate on the long history of Dalit literature and its current prominence in the contemporary scene of literature and politics. It also shows how Dalit literature moves beyond the usual discourses of literary modernity.

The debate between Gandhi and Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891-1956), one of India’s foremost revolutionaries, an untouchable and a fierce critic of Gandhi, is a major event in Indian history. Ambedkar famously said ‘Mahatma, I have no country’. Fictionists like Avinash Dolas and others have explored the depth of this theme. This discussion between Ambedkar and Gandhi has provoked debates on nationhood and Hindu religion. The well-known book by D.R. Nagaraj, The Flaming Feet, is a case in point. Although untouchability was abolished with the 1950 Constitution of India (drafted by Ambedkar), Ambedkar’s experiences continue to be the lot of India’s 170 million Dalits today.

Dalit literature in its initial stages (and in a broader sense, even today) was identified as specific protests directed against everyday humiliations that individual dalits and Dalits as a community face. In this context, contradictions between Marxism and progressive literary movements (which works on larger abstractions) with Dalit literature (and Dalit movements) have to be taken into serious consideration. Most of the debates around/about Dalit Literature have failed to adequately acknowledge the new vocabulary of imagination and aesthetical sensibility produced by these literatures. Dalit literature cannot be reduced to an engagement with victimhood. In the hands of poets like S. Joseph, it has spawned new literary cannons by disturbing the usual language available in the pre-existing canonical literary circles. Dalit Literature today has established itself as a new mode of literary/aesthetic imagination and writing.

The fact that John Berger, Arundhati Roy and Joe Sacco saluted the publication of the graphic novel Bhimayana : Experiences of Untouchability (Delhi: Navayana, 2011), may be the sign that something is changing in the context of Dalit literatures. The visual, the literary and the political dimensions closely intertwine in this graphic biography of Ambedkar. The artists Durgabai Vyam and Subhash Vyam, together with Srividya Natarajan and S. Anand for the story, crafted a book that has broken new ground, not least because it did so in a controversial way. The publication of Bhimayana could be a signal that Dalit cultures are edging out of the restricted areas where they were formerly circumscribed. This could also be an opportunity to examine Dalit expression and literatures in a renewed way and from different perspectives.
Far from concentrating on the historical, social and economic circumstances of the untouchable communities that are described by Dalit writers or non-Dalit writers (such as Raja Rao, Arundhati Roy or Rohinton Mistry), the editors of the projected volume of PoCoPages encourage contributions that will foreground the following issues:

- the linguistic questions linked to translation from regional Indian languages into English and other international languages; more generally the question of accessibility; questions linked to sub-Indian and international distribution; magazines, books and the web;

- the attention Dalit literatures are getting outside the limited circles of activists in India and outside India; more generally the question of reception; Dalit literature and its readership; who writes for whom;

- the generic questions linked to the literary choices made by the writers : poetry, short story, novel, autobiography, biography, graphic novels, photo-journalism, recorded oral narratives, theatre, etc; the poetics and politics involved in such literary choices;

- the gender question: male and female writers; male and female readers; the relationship between caste and gender, in the specific context of the Dalits;

- the relationship between Dalit literature and Dalit politics, including the impact of literature on the social situations faced by the untouchables; the transformative value of such literature and on what grounds;

- the contact zones between Adivasi literature and Dalit literature;

- the marginalisation of minority Dalit literature (Christian, Muslim, Sikh Dalit literature for instance);

- the resistance that Dalit literature is facing from dominant literary groups and the legitimacy it is slowly being granted, or not;

- the pitfalls of literary fashion and stereotypes;

- Dalit literatures and the film industry (film adaptations, documentaries, etc);

- the relationship between Dalit literatures and the Indian literary canon; the relationship between Dalit literatures and other literatures (postcolonial, African-American, subaltern and trauma literatures, etc); intertextuality within Dalit literatures;

- the relationship between Marxism and Dalit literature, specifically in terms of how the questions of class and caste overlap and conflict; the perspective of Indian Marxists;

- Dalit self-writings and their specificities; narrative voice and perspective;

- last but not least, the problematics of inside and outside: writing on or from a Dalit perspective; the academic perspective and the non-academic perspective; the perspective of Indians, and Indian writers, of the diaspora; the Indian and the non-Indian perspective; bridging the western and the eastern perspective on Dalit writing.

PoCoPages is a peer-reviewed series in the collection "Horizons anglophones" published by the Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée (Pulm). India and the Diasporic Imagination is the latest volume (2011).

http://www.pulm.fr/index.php/collections/horizons-anglophones/pocopages.html

General Editor : Dr Judith Misrahi-Barak (Paul-Valéry University – Montpellier 3, France).
This volume, to be published in 2013, will be co-edited with Joshil K. Abraham (Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi). Please submit a 300-word abstract with a short bio (200 words maximum) by January 31, 2012 to Joshil K. Abraham and to Dr Judith Misrahi-Barak .

If the preliminary proposal is accepted, final essays (33,000 characters, spaces and footnotes included, bibliography on top) will be due by May 31, 2012.

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CFP: Diasporas and Race, Wake Forest University, NC, 25-27 October, 2012

Submitted by adamore on Thu, 2011-06-23 02:04. Conferences

CALL FOR PAPERS: International Conference

Title: “DIASPORAS AND ‘RACE’”

Conference dates: October 25-27, 2012

DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSION OF ABSTRACTS: February 1, 2012

Place: Wake Forest University (North Carolina, USA)

In the wake of the 2011 conference on “Diasporas and Cultures of
Migration” that was held at Montpellier, University Paul Valéry, the
convenors of this conference wish to extend and expand the reflection
on the concept of diaspora, its uses, its limits, or even its outright
rejection as a useful concept, by focusing on the links between
diasporas and “race.”

Diasporas have always had to negotiate new articulations of ethnic/
racial identities while individuals had to make do with contexts
already defined by certain types of racial relations and the
evolutions of racial transnational references. The emergence of new
racisms and of new racialized identities reconfigures class
hierarchies, which often results in violence against migrants.

Does the prism of diaspora allow for a clearer conceptualization of
the concept of “race” as a socio-historical construction and a surface
of projection that depends on context? Does diasporic belonging
constitute a response to racism and imposed ethno-racial identities?
How have populations appropriated it to foster local and global
socialities and practices?

The terms creolization, transnationalism and cosmopolitanism, which
certain scholars prefer to diaspora, entertain certain specific
relations to “race”: do these new concepts help or create blind spots
when it comes to racial identity, racialization, multiracialism or the
erasure of “race”?

What happens when we also address these issues in terms of gender and
class? What role does the mediation of art and literature play in
these evolutions? Are there specific artistic creations that emerge
from/at this juncture? Is there an aesthetics that simultaneously
addresses issues of race and diaspora? Can one point to the
appropriation, the creation and the circulation of images that
translate diasporic sensitivity? Is race a component of this
aesthetics or is it left out as irrelevant?

If diaspora moves “beyond race”, how does diaspora intersect with
gender relations, religious identities and concepts of geography and
space? Can we address the link between the environment and the
migrations linked to diasporic movement? Can we speak of a
postcolonial ecology? Can these issues ultimately be thought within
the wider frame of the human and the natural?

DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSION OF ABSTRACTS (maximum 250 words): February 1,
2012
Please submit a short bio-bibliographical notice as well (maximum 200
words) and copy the five co-convenors of the conference in your email.

“Diasporas, Cultures of Mobilities, ‘Race’” Conference series
This will be the second meeting in the series organized by the
research center EMMA (University Paul-Valéry, Montpellier 3, France)
over 2011-13 which gathers leading scholars in the field to identify
and assess the joint evolutions of “Diaspora Studies” and “Race
studies” to better understand: 1) how these approaches can be cross-
fertilising; 2) how socio-economic and political changes have affected
race relations and diasporic communities; 3) how literature and the
arts, the social sciences and cultural studies have seized that
question. This project entails a redefinition of terms and concepts
and the confrontation of different, but not necessarily divergent,
perspectives.

A preparatory symposium, “Diasporas and Cultures of Migration” was
held at University Paul-Valéry, Montpellier 3 in June 2011, in
partnership with CAAR (Collegium for African-American Research), the
Centre de Recherches Littéraires et Historiques de l’Océan Indien
(CRLHOI, University of La Réunion), the Centre of South Asian Studies
(CSAS, University of Edinburgh, UK), the Department for Continuing
Education (University of Oxford), the Institut de Recherche Intersite
Etudes Culturelles (IRIEC, University Paul-Valéry, Montpellier 3), the
International Institute of Migration (IMI, University of Oxford), the
MSH-Montpellier (Maison des Sciences de l’Homme-Montpellier), Wake
Forest University (North Carolina, USA), Wesleyan University (USA).
Leading scholars assessed the state of the debate in preparation for
this second event. The third conference, “African-Americans, ‘Race’
and Diaspora”, scheduled for June 13-15, 2013 at University Paul-
Valéry, Montpellier 3, will be specifically dedicated to the
interlocking issues of “race” and the Black Diaspora. The concluding
symposium, scheduled for October 25-26, 2013, at the University of
Oxford, UK, will allow for final reflections.

Partners for the conference at Wake Forest University:
CAAR (Collegium for African American Research) (to be confirmed)
Department for Continuing Education (University of Oxford, UK)
IRIEC (Institut de Recherche Intersite Etudes Culturelles, Université
Paul-Valéry, Montpellier 3, France)
EMMA (Etudes Montpelliéraines du Monde Anglophone, Université Paul-
Valéry, Montpellier 3, France)
MIGRINTER (CNRS, Université de Poitiers, France)
Wake Forest University (North Carolina, USA)

Co-convenors:
Dr Sally Barbour (Wake Forest University, USA) barbour@wfu.edu
Dr David Howard (University of Oxford, UK) david.howard@conted.ox.ac.uk
Dr Thomas Lacroix (IMI, Univ. of Oxford, UK; MIGRINTER, Université de
Poitiers, France) thomas.lacroix@univ-poitiers.fr
Dr Judith Misrahi-Barak (EMMA, Université Paul-Valéry - Montpellier 3,
France) judith.misrahi-barak@univ-montp3.fr
Pr Claudine Raynaud (EMMA, Université Paul-Valéry - Montpellier 3,
France) claudine.raynaud@univ-montp3.fr

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CFP: Negative Cosmopolitanisms: Abjection, Power, and Biopolitics, Univ. of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada, 11-13 October 2012

Submitted by adamore on Thu, 2011-06-23 02:04. Conferences

Negative Cosmopolitanisms: Abjection, Power, and Biopolitics, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada, 11-13 October 2012
Keynote Speakers: Timothy Brennan (University of Minnesota); Pheng Cheah (University of California, Berkeley); Sneja Gunew (University of British Columbia); Peter Nyers (McMaster University)

This interdisciplinary conference seeks to explore the array of negative cosmopolitanisms operating today—all those ways in which cosmopolitan subjects are still stigmatized, disempowered, excluded, and denied. Against the superficial liberal celebration of cosmopolitan diversity in the world today, negative cosmopolitanism instead reveals experiences of rupture, exile, oppression, and imperialism. The conference will bring researchers together to explore the histories and constitution of cosmopolitanism past and present, with the aim of better understanding the complex experience of power today.

Themes you may wish to consider include:

*The history /representations of cosmopolitanism
*Slum- or ghetto-based cosmopolitanisms
*Imperial cosmopolitanism (e.g. the military complex, the War on Terror)
*Labor and Internationalism
*Community or the Commons
*Piracy
*Trafficking, dislocation, border-crossing
*State sovereignty/state vulnerability
*Communication & information technologies, new media
*Biopolitics
*Religious movements
*Feminism

Proposals shall consist of an abstract of 350-500 words and a one-page CV. Please send applications to Dr. Terri Tomsky by 21 October 2011.

Terri Tomsky
3-5 Humanities Centre
University of Alberta
Edmonton, AB
Canada T6G 2E5

Email: tomsky@ualberta.ca

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CFP: 2012 Special Topic Issue of SAR: The Literature and Culture of South Asian Modernism

Submitted by adamore on Mon, 2011-04-04 23:24. Conferences

CALL FOR PAPERS

The 2012 Special Topic Issue of SAR
The Literature and Culture of South Asian Modernism

South Asian Review, the refereed journal of the South Asian Literary Association, invites scholarly submissions for the 2012 Special Topic issue, Volume 33, Number 1, on The Literature and Culture of South Asian Modernism. By revamping all prior conventions of the arts such as idealism, realism, and naturalism, European modernism rewrote the artistic-literary project, and, from providing a fixed point of reference for a culture conceived in homogeneous terms, literature became a domain of active experimentation in which writers and artists exploded notions of unity, objectivity, and self-coherence. How did modernism impact South Asian colonial and postcolonial writers and artists? It is clear that, while three generations of westernized South Asian writers and artists have reproduced, in some ways, the elitist nature of the modernist movement itself (“high modernism”), this elitism has not neutralized modernism’s inherent tendency to fragment and destabilize any unitary claims to truth, including the Truth of Empire. Accordingly, South Asian modernism need not be viewed as an apolitical aesthetic. It is the articulation of a difference—racial, ethnic, cultural, historical, gendered—that may reside at the very foundation of the colonial experience. Contributors may consider the following broad topics as they formulate their own specific topics:

• Modernism and Modernity
• Modernism and Postcoloniality
• Modernism and Postmodernism
• Modernism and Historicism
• Modernism and Feminism.

Contributors may also wish to address underrepresented authors and authors working in languages other than English.

Critical articles of 15-25 pages, prepared in accordance with the MLA style, along with an abstract of 8-10 lines and a biographical note of 50 words, should be sent electronically by 10 January 2012 to Alpana Sharma at alpana.sharma@wright.edu.

Inquiries regarding book reviews should be addressed to Professor P. S. Chauhan at chauhanp@arcadia.edu. For further information about the South Asian Review, please refer to the SAR website at: http://www.upj.pitt.edu/southasianreview.

Alpana Sharma
Guesteditor
Associate Professor and Director of Honors Program in English
Department of English
Wright State University
Dayton, OH 45435
Phone: 937-775-2070
Fax: 937-775-2707

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CFP: Journal of Postcolonial Theory and Theology

Submitted by adamore on Wed, 2010-09-15 04:17. News

The Journal of Postcolonial Theory and Theology welcomes all scholarly interrogations of postcolonial theories and theologies, without restriction to any particular political/cultural ideology or to specific critical practices. JPTT seeks to encourage the broadest possible variety of approaches and viewpoints, and the generation of wide-ranging, productive debates. Submitted articles will be evaluated for quality of their argument rather than personal agreement with the results or method.

We are seeking contributions from scholars dealing with all aspects of religion and representing the realities of local communities throughout the world, including experiences of diaspora or hybridity. We invite essays dealing with colonial and postcolonial histories of religion, current expressions of religiosity, theoretical interventions in religious discourse, applications to postcolonial theory to religious situations, theological critiques of postcolonial innovations, and theologies beyond empire. JPTT intends to open broad discourse among new voices, emerging scholars, and established voices in multiple sites throughout the world, and so we welcome intentionally scholars who have not published before and who are at the beginnings of their investigations and careers, at the same time we invite those whose insights have already shaped the field.

Papers and inquiries should be sent to Joseph Duggan, at nyclaman@googlemail.com.

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2011 MELUS & USACLALS JOINT CONFERENCE PROGRAM, 7-10 APRIL

Submitted by adamore on Tue, 2011-04-05 04:34. Conferences

2011 MELUS & USACLALS JOINT CONFERENCE PROGRAM April 7–10, 2011

CONFERENCE SCHEDULE (SEE ATTACHMENT)

Thursday, April 7

Registration: 1:00-6:00 pm

Session I: Thursday, 2:00-3:20 pm

1. Italian-American Politics (Sandpiper Room)
Moderator: Mary Jo Bona, Stony Brook University

“John Dos Passos’s Three Soldiers as Critique of the American Dream”
Neva Pontoriero, Monmouth University

“Rethinking ‘Italian’ Identity in Buffalo: Provincialism, Fascism, and the Battle for Italian-American
Identity during the Interwar Years”
Matthew R. Giorgio, University of Massachusetts, Boston

“Not just a ‘badante’: Poetry by the Moldavian Poet Eugenia Bulat, in Venice, Italy”
Ilaria Serra, Florida Atlantic University

2. Seizing History through the Power of Memory (Pompano Room)
Moderator: Patrick Lawrence, Assistant Editor of MELUS

“Documentary Theatre: Pedagogue and Healer Health Stories of Hiroshima and Pearl Harbor Survivors”
Katy Morris, Florida Atlantic University

“Singing for their life: finding new interpretations for old Sephardic ballads”
Inbal Mazar, Florida Atlantic University

“A Renewed Sense of ‘Latinidad’ in the Works of Pedro Pietri and Yareli Arizmendi”
Elizabeth Marie Petersen, Florida Atlantic University

“Re-membering the Past: Investigating the Textual Memories of an Anarchist”
Angela Martín, Florida Atlantic University

3. Re-reading Latino/a Identity in U.S. Contexts (Sea Grape Room)
Moderator: Nora Erro-Peralta, Florida Atlantic University

“Transcending the Cuba Divide: Latino/a Identity in Novelita Rosa”
Yvette Fuentes, Nova Southeastern University

“Passive Aggressive Cainism in U.S. Latino Literature”
Edwin Murillo, Penn State University-Berks

“From Cubanazo to Latino: A Rereading of José Kozer’s Poetry”
Nicolas Mansito, III, Independent Scholar

“Exile: Unimaginable Conditions in Ernesto Mestre-Reed’s The Second Death of Unica Aveyano”
Richard Perez, John Jay College, City University of New York

4. African American Masculinity, Trauma, and Spatiality (Alamanda Room)
Moderator: Samantha Messinger, Florida Atlantic University

“African-American Literary Masculinity: A Transnational Construct”
Carolina Villalba, University of Miami

“Beyond the ‘Battlefield’: Post-Traumatic Stress and Walter Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress”
Kate Boundy, Florida Atlantic University

“‘Oh, man, I’m nowhere’: Beyond Marginality in Ralph Ellison’s ‘Harlem is nowhere’”
Walter Bosse, University of Cincinnati

Session II: Thursday, 3:30-4:50pm

5. Transnational Journeys and Racial Crossroads (Sandpiper Room)
Moderator: Keith Cartwright, University of North Florida

“Vestiges of West African Cosmology: The Ogun Trope in Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow”
Robin Brooks, University of Florida

“A Transnational Apocalypse: Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic Orange”
Anastasia Wright Turner, Gainesville State College

“Transnational American Dream Denied: An Impossible Diasporic Journey in Gish Jen’s Typical American”
Xiao Di “Janice” Tong, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

6. Indigenous Echoes (Pompano Room)
Moderator: Michael Horswell, Florida Atlantic University

“No Longer a Pakeha, but a Global World: Indigenous Modernities Challenging Established Categories of Gender, Race and Ethnicity in Recent Maori Narratives”
Michaela Moura-Kocoglu, Florida International University

“Beyond 2012: The Mayan Codices and Prophecy in Leslie Marmom Silko’s Almanac of the Dead”
Mannoulin Brassaw, Seattle University

“Silko’s The Turquoise Ledge and Sacred Water: Memoir Revised and Revisited in Native Contexts”
Maureen Salzer, Pima Community College West

“Oral Literature as Literary Canon: Global Contexts”
Chandra Mohan, University of Jammu

7. Re-Presenting Cuba’s Past (Alamanda Room)
Moderator: David Fife, Brigham Young University

“Negotiating Collective Cultural Memory in Cristina Garcia’s The Agüero Sisters”
David Fife, Brigham Young University

“Power by Possession: The Function of Collecting in The Agüero Sisters”
Ashley Walton, Brigham Young University

“Food Consumption, and Nostalgia in Cristina Garcia’s The Agüero Sisters”
Elise Silva, Brigham Young University

Session III: Thursday, 5:00-6:20pm

8. Chicana and Latina Feminisms (Sandpiper Room)
Moderator: Nora Erro-Peralta, Florida Atlantic University

“Decolonial Ethics: An Implied Discourse of Latina American Survival and Life”
Juan D. Mah y Busch, Loyola Marymount University

“‘Undesirable Women’: Afro-Puerto Rican Women, Mother-Daughter Relationships, and Puerto Rican History in Dahlma Llano-Figueroa’s Daughters of the Stone”
Cristina Herrera, California State University, Fresno

“A Border-Crossing Marriage and Some Cold Coupling: Garcia’s Monkey Hunting and The Lady Matador’s Hotel”
Barbara Frey Waxman, University of North Carolina Wilmington

9. Food, Myth, Magic, and Performance (Pompano Room)
Moderator: Wenying Xu, Florida Atlantic University

“Moving from Filth and Food to Soil and Soul in Richard Wright’s Writing”
Carla Elana Erdheim, Sacred Heart University

“DIY-Ethnicity: The Practices of Recipes and Memoir in Diana Abu-Jaber’s The Language of Baklava”
Maya Socolovsky, University of North Carolina, Charlotte

“Evolving the Canon: The Emergence of a New Magical Realism in U.S. Ethnic Literature”
Anne Mai Yee Jansen, The Ohio State University

10. Interethnic Conversations on (En)gendering Community (Sea Grape Room)
Moderator: Elizabeth Marie Petersen, Florida Atlantic University

“Homegirl or Hermanita?: Blurring the Boundaries of African-American Latina/o Literatures and Communities”
E. Gale Greenlee, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

“U.S. History in Global Contexts: Critical Connections Between Asian American and Latino/a Literary Canons”
Susan Thananopavarn, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

“Environmental Crisis and the Male Culture in Marie Arana’s Cellophane”
Amrita Das, University of North Carolina, Wilmington

“Theory at Work: African-American/African Text, History and Culture”
Jayshree Singh, B.N.P.G. Girls’ College (Affiliated to Mohanlal Sukhadia University) Udaipur

11. Time and European-American Migratory Aesthetics (Alamanda Room)
Moderator: Alan Berger, Florida Atlantic University

“Novelty and Nostalgia: Queer Temporality in Abraham Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky”
Alexander Eastwood, University of Toronto

“Education as Validation in the Fiction of Anzia Yezierska”
Dan Shiffman, Shippensburg University

“Louis MacNeice in America”
Sam Robertson, Suffolk County Community Collge

“A Legacy of Loss: Narrative and Photography in Aleksandar Hemon's The Lazarus Project”
Sonia Weiner, Tel Aviv University

Reception at Renaissance Courtyard: 6:30-8:30pm

Friday, April 8

Free Breakfast: 7:30am-9:30am
Registration: 8:30-5:00pm
Book Exhibit: 9:00-5:00pm

MELUS Graduate Students Breakfast: 7:30-9:00am (Executive 3 Room)

Session IV: Friday, 8:30-9:50am

12. Hybridity and Place in Louise Erdrich (Sandpiper Room)
Moderator: Quentin Youngberg, Florida Atlantic University

“Cultural Hybridity in Louise Erdrich’s Tracks”
Bojana Comprone, Virginia Commonwealth University

“A Phenomenological Interpretation of the Role of Place, Memory, and Cultural Hybridity in Louise Erdrich’s Plague of Doves”
Raphael Comprone, Saint Paul's College

“‘This Ain’t Real Estate’: Decolonization through Interspecies Community in Louise Erdrich’s The Bingo Palace”
Riki Meier, Tufts University

13. Whiteness and Multicultural Identity from Hawaii to Africa (Pompano Room)
Moderator: Veronica Makowsky, University of Connecticut

“Fighting for Whiteness—Settler Colonialism in Hawaii and the Internalization of Institutionalized Racism in Shelley Ota’s Upon Their Shoulders”
Amanda Adams-Handy, University of Hawaii at Manoa

“Hawai'i No Kai Oi: Identity and Canonicity in the Cultural Expression of Hawaiian Women Authors”
Stefanie Shea-Akers, University of Nevada, Reno

“Edward Said’s Concept of Identity of Doubleness under the Influence of Imaginary and Objective Space in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Nostromo and Lord Jim”
Farnaz Ahmadi Sepehri, Azad University of Tabriz, Iran

“Writing Back to the Empire from the Center of Whiteness: Colonial Legacy, Messy Identities and Geographical Spaces in David Dabydeen’s The Intended and Disappearance”
Savena Budhu, Broward College

14. The Motherland: Challenging National and Gendered Boundaries (Sea Grape Room)
Moderator: Michael Linder, Florida Atlantic University

“The Cane Fields: A Site of Transnational Trauma in the Work of Edwidge Danticat and Junot Díaz”
Amara Graf, Marquette University

“Dislocated Migrant: The Challenge of Being a Conduit of Change in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory”
Tosha Sampson-Choma, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

“Functions of Multiperspective Narrative in Writing Haitian Diasporic Community: Confessions, Histories, Radios, Rehabilitations, Fractures, and ‘Night Talkers’ in Edwidge Danticat's The Dew Breaker”
Ami M. Regier, Bethel College

“Going Back to the Motherland: The Globalization of the Neo-Slave Narrative and The Influence of an African American Genre on African Writer Sembene Ousmane, in His Short Story ‘La Noire de …’”
Jessica Reeves, University of Louisiana

15. Race and Adoption in Documentary Film (Alamanda Room)
Moderator: Cynthia Callahan, Ohio State University—Mansfield

“Outsiders Looking In: The Vietnam Babylift and its Aftermath in Recent Documentary Film and Literature”
Lori Askeland, Wittenberg University

“Adoption in Real Time: International and Transracial Adoptee Experiences in Documentary Film”
Cynthia Callahan, Ohio State University—Mansfield

“‘Come from under the water’: Finding Christa and the Trauma Narrative”
Emily Hipchen, University of West Georgia

Session V: Friday, 10-11:20am

16. Spatiality, Territory and the Ethnic Body (Executive 4 Room)
Moderator: Rafe Dalleo, Florida Atlantic University

“‘Persecuted in the drawl of the persecuted’: Overcoming Suicidal Chauvinism in John Okada’s No-No Boy”
Oliver Baker, University of Missouri-Kansas City

“In ‘the skins of wild beasts’: Savage Clothing, Racial Difference, and Christian Conversion in A Narrative of the Lord’s Wonderful Dealings with John Marrant (1785)”
Keith Green, Rutgers University

“Constellation, Not Colony: From Imperialism to Empire in the Works of Winsome Pinnock”
Paul Ardoin, Florida State University

“Commodified Bodies and Local/Global Exploitation of Labor in Lawrence Chua’s Gold By the Inch” Youngsuk Chae, University of North Carolina, Pembroke

17. Globalism in the African Imaginary (Sandpiper Room)
Moderator: Dinah Itumeleng, Florida Atlantic University

“In Praise of Obama: Ethnic Pan-Africanism and the Global Imaginary in Selected Popular Ohangla Songs from Kenya”
Chris Wasike, Wits University

“Historiography of Imagination? The Documentation of the Traditional Luo and Oromo Cultural Memory in Kenyan Fiction”
Alex Wanjala, University of Nairobi

“Ngugi, Kenya, and the Romance with Tribalism”
Godwin Siundu, University of Nairobi

“Nationalitarian Culture, Transnationality and the Authenticity of Values: Chris Abani’s GraceLand and the Multicultural”
Madhu Krishnan, University of Nottingham

18. Palestinian American Women’s Literature (Pompano Room)
Moderator: Carla Calargé, Florida Atlantic University

“The Inheritance of Exile: Assimilation and Individuality”
Melanie Kachadoorian, California State University, Fresno

“A Common Thread: Connecting Across Boundaries in the Work of Naomi Shihab Nye”
Chris Souza, California State University, Fresno

“Structure and Smallness in Naomi Shihab Nye’s Poetry”
Kristen Freberg, California State University, Fresno

“Water as Fragmentation: Suheir Hammad’s Drops of This Story”
Lena Zaghmouri, California State University, Fresno

19. Mexico-U.S. Borderlands (Sea Grape Room)
Moderator: Martha Mendoza, Florida Atlantic University

“‘Blocking Brown Bodies’: Arizona’s Immigration Law (Senate Bill 1070), Richard Rodriguez and the Epistemology of Penetration”
Christopher Rivera, Bilkent University

“Where Disaster Trips Headlong Into Catastrophe: Narrative Empathy in Reading Ana Castillo’s So Far From God as Textual Telenovela”
Theresa N. Rojas, Ohio State University

“Mexicans, Indians and Americans: Ethnic Intertexts in Fray Angelico Chavez’s Guitars and Adobes”
Esther Lopez, Georgia College

“Recovering a Decolonized Alternative: Land, Myth, and Subjectivity in Tomás Rivera’s ‘La cosecha’/‘The Harvest’”
Alma Granado, University of California at Berkeley

20. Roundtable: Publishing Books: A Workshop for Newcomers/ Up and Coming Scholars
(Alamanda Room)

Amritjit Singh, Ohio University
John Hawley, University of California, Santa Clara
Taylor Hagood, Florida Atlantic University

LUNCH ON YOUR OWN: 11:30am-1:00pm

Session VI: Friday, 1:10-2:30pm

21. Butterfly, Chameleon, and the Ivory Tower: Third World Subjectivity (Sandpiper Room)
Chair: Chingyen Y. Mayer, Siena College

“The Restless Chameleon in Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine”
Chingyen Y. Mayer, Siena College

“Butterfly as Feminist Postcolonial Subject: Tradition and Modernity in Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s Joss and Gold”
Huining Ouyang, Edgewood College

“Sweat and Laughter in the Ivory Tower: Identity and Academic Politics in Ha Jin’s ‘An English Professor.’”
Wenxin Li, Suffolk Community College

22. Documenting the Undocumented: Genre and History in Hispanic/Latino Writing
Moderator: Elena Machado, Florida Atlantic University (Pompano Room)

“John Rollin Ridge’s The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit: U.S. National Identity, Hispanicism, Imperialism, and Cosmopolitanism”
John C. Havard, University of Rochester

“Undocumented Testimony: Life Writing and the Narration of Unbelonging”
Marta Caminero-Santangelo, University of Kansas

“Days of Orientialism: A Said approach to Richard Rodriguez”
Jorge Santos, University of Connecticut

“Expanding the Literary Canon: U.S. Latino Literature and the American Tradition of Self-writing”
Norma Mouton, Sam Houston State University

23. Luso-American Literature: A Roundtable of Writers (Sea Grape Room)
Amy Sayre-Roberts; Kurt José Ayau, Johnny Lorenz

24. Historiography and Native American Culture (Alamanda Room)
Moderator: Quentin Youngberg, Florida Atlantic University

“Multiculturalism and the Alternative Regional Histories of Zitkala-Ša and Charles Ives”
Nathaniel Cadle, Florida International University

“Gerald Vizenor’s Hiroshima Bugi: Rashomon, Kabuki, and Dynamic Remembrance”
Linda Lizut Helstern, North Dakota State University

“Diné Cowboys and Cowgirls in the Works of Luci Tapahonso and Laura Tohe”
Kirstin L. Squint, High Point University

Session VII: Friday, 2:40-4:00pm

25. USACLALS Open Organizational Meeting (Executive 4 Room)

26. Canonical Adaptation in Global Ethnic Context (Sandpiper Room)
Moderator: Amina Gautier, DePaul University

“Black Bucks and Don Juans: Violent Romances of Race and Sex in Jane Campion’s In the Cut”
Tiel Lundy, University of Colorado, Denver

“The Renaissance of Chivalry: Charles Chestnutt’s New Black Heroes and Ivanhoe”
Amina Guatier, DePaul University

“‘She fell from his grasp, a lifeless corpse!’: Lucy’s Death in J.W. Orderson’s Creoleana”
Fiona McWilliam, Florida State University

“Towards the Harnessing of Evil: Yeats, Achebe, and Adiche in Comparative Perspective”
Karen King-Aribisala, University of Lagos

27. Roundtable: Native Southern Multicultures: Atlantic and Caribbean Currents (Pompano Room)

Gina M. Caison, University of California, Davis
Keith Cartwright, University of North Florida
Melinda Maxwell-Gibb, University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras
Kirstin L. Squint, High Point University
Eric Gary Anderson, George Mason University

28. Policing Latinidad (Sea Grape Room)
Moderator: Julie Minich, Miami University of Ohio

“Joe Arpaio, the Prison Entertainment Industry and the Biopolitics of Punishment”
John D. Riofrio, The College of William and Mary

“Parodic Disruptions of State Recognition: Queer Contestations of Citizenship in Jaime Cortez’s Sexile”
José de la Garza-Valenzuela, Miami University of Ohio

“Identity Taxes: Richard Rodriguez and George Lopez’s Status Strategies”
Elda Maria Roman, Stanford University

“So Much Life in the Still Water: Alex Espinoza and Border Violence”
Julie Minich, Miami University of Ohio

29. Disrupting Boundaries: Masks, "Basterds," and the Politics of Badassery (Alamanda Room)
Moderator/Respondent: Sterling Bland, Associate Professor of English and Chair of the Afro-American Studies Department at Rutgers University

“Claudia Rankine’s Refusal of the Mask: Post-9/11 Poetics and the Anti-Persona”
Joanna Penn Cooper, Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in English at Fordham University

“Saint Luchador as Transnational Superhero”
Tracy Floreani, Associate Professor of English at Oklahoma City University

“Who Gets to Shoot Hitler? Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds and Speculations toward a Theory of the Ethnic Gaze”
Joseph Kraus, Associate Professor of English at Scranton University

Session VIII: Friday, 4:10-5:30pm

30. Moving beyond Empire: Human Desire, Love, and Faith in Modern World Literature
(Executive 4 Room)
Chair: Marissa Ramirez, Alamo Colleges, St. Phillips College

“The Role of Sacrifice in José Saramago’s Blindness and Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner”
Armando Castañeda, St. Phillips College

“Examining Atheism in José Saramago’s Blindness”
Chris Mares, St. Phillips College

“Human Desires in Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner and Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory: A Journey for Achievement, Acceptance and Love”
Eric Perez, St. Phillips College

31. Other Latinidades: Pushing the Limits of the Canon (Sandpiper Room)
Moderator: Ana Patricia Rodríguez, University of Maryland, College Park

“Creating Queer Latina/o Spaces in Fiction and Film from ‘City of Night’ to ‘La Mission’ and Back Again”
Jason Barties, University of Maryland

“Pinay Latinidades in Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters”
Laura Quijano, University of Maryland

“A Comparative Analysis of Parallel Revisionisms in Mayan and Chicano Theatre”
Chris Lewis, University of Maryland

“Internal Fractures: Examining Sexuality and Solidarity in The Blimdfold’s Eyes by Sister Diana Ortiz” María Vargas, University of Maryland

32. Cuban Literature Past and Present (Pompano Room)
Moderator: Joanna Marshall, University of Puerto Rico, Cayey

“Cuba and Cyberspace: Intersections and Dimensions of Emerging Caribbean Literatures”
Katherine Miranda, University of Puerto Rico-Río Piedras

“Crossing El Charco: Contemporary Cuban Literature”
Wendy McMahon, University of East Anglia

“Martín Morúa Delgado and Cuba’s Adulterous Future”
Carmen Lamas, University of Pennsylvania

“Doctoras, lobas y guerreras: Cross-gender and Cross-culture Heroínas Invade the Hospital, the Ship, and the Army”
Raquel Gonzales Rivas, Independent Scholar

33. USACLALS Roundtable Discussion: “Ethnic Literatures and Transnationalism.” (Sea Grape Room)

John Hawley, Santa Clara University
Mary Jo Bona, Stony Brook University
Amrit Singh, Ohio University
Kirpal Singh, Singapore Management University
Makarand Paranjape, National University of Singapore and Jawaharlal Nehru University

34. Re-Placing Race and Identity in Narratives of Displacement (Alamanda Room)
Moderator: Jessica Maucione, Gonzaga University

“Reconfiguring Southern Communities: Displacement and Reparation in William Melvin Kelley’s A Different Drummer”
Angela Mullis, Mount Olive College

“Violated Innocence: Love Laws and The Outdoors in The Bluest Eye and The God of Small Things”
Keya Mitra, Gonzaga University

“Displacing Modernism: Re-Imagining Neighborhood in Faith Ringgold’s French Collection”
JoAnne Ruvoli, University of Illinois, Chicago

“Neighborhood as the New Lost World in Edward P. Jones’s Lost in the City”
Jessica Maucione, Gonzaga University

DINNER ON YOUR OWN

Friday, 7:30pm-9:00pm: Keynote Literary Readings (Coral Ballroom)

Welcome remarks by Dean Pendakur, Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters, Florida Atlantic University

Gary Shteyngart, Columbia University, “A Super Sad True Reading”

Shirley Lim, University of California, Santa Barbara, “Walking Backwards with Shirley Geok-lin Lim”

Saturday, April 9
Free Breakfast: 7:30am-9:30am
Registration: 8:30am-5:00pm
Book Exhibit: 9:00am-5:00pm

MELUS Executive Committee Meeting: 8:30 -10 AM

Session IX: Saturday, 8:30-9:50am

35. Hunting, the Body, and Vengeance Asian Writing (Sandpiper Room)
Moderator: Shirley Lim, University of California, Santa Barbara

“The Broken Tongue and Speaking Body: Racial Hegemony, Colonization, and Torture in Vyvyane Loh’s Breaking the Tongue”
Donna T. Tong, Fu Jen Catholic University

“Geopolitics of Memory in Vietnamese American Women’s Writings”
Yu-yen Liu, NCYU, Taiwan

“Hunting and the Challenge of British Imperialism: South Asian Hunters in Colonial India”
Fiona Mani, American Military University

“The Revenge of the Subaltern: Uday Prakash’s ‘Warren Hastings’ Bull’”
Vijaya Singh, Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, India

36. Jamaica Kincaid (Pompano Room)
Moderator: Sheryl Gifford, Florida Atlantic University

“Reviewing and Responsibility: Representations of the Caribbean in American Middlebrow Culture”
Schuyler K. Esprit, University of Maryland, College Park

“Memories Don’t Leave Like People Do: Historical Trauma, Memory, and Agency in Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy”
Lilleth Trewick, Florida Atlantic University

“Agency and the Inversion of the Gaze in Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy”
Maryam Jamali Ashtiani, California State University, Fresno

37. Contemporary Arab Writers: Resisting or Assimilating into Western Culture? (Sea Grape Room)
Moderator: Carla Calargé, Florida Atlantic University

“Masuda Sultan’s My War at Home: Life Writing as Transnational Cultural Critique and Call for Activism”
Dong Isbister, Ohio State University

“Globalization and the Emergence of an ‘Aerial Perspective’: What Can These Iranian American Multicultural Children Offer?”
Yuemin He, Northern Virginia Community College

“Fantasy, Feminism, Islamism, and Sexuality in the Literature of Saadawi, Rifaat, Al-Shaykh, and Mernisi”
Samaa Gamie, Lincoln University

“Emerging Literature of American Muslim Women”
Filiz Turhan, Suffolk Community College

38. The Harlem Renaissance (Alamanda Room)
Moderator: Johnnie Stover, Florida Atlantic University

“Talking to Bessie: Richard Wrights’ Domestic Servant Interviews”
Julieann Ulin, Florida Atlantic University

“Performing Orientalism: Reading the New Woman and the Harlem Renaissance in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand”
Lai Ying Yu, Tufts University

“Cultural Exchange in the Black Atlantic: The Late Work of Langston Hughes”
Shane Graham, Utah State University

Session X: Saturday, 10:00-11:20am

39. Luso-American Literature: Rethinking Multi-Ethnic Literature in a Global Context (Executive 4 Room)
Moderator: Robert Moser, University of Georgia

“Some Thoughts on the Making of a Luso-American Literature Anthology”
Robert Moser, University of Georgia

“Brazilian-American Literature Within the Scope of Luso-American Literature: An Assessment”
Antonio Luciano Tosta, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

“Cape-Verdean American Literature”
Kurt Ayau, Virginia Military Institute

40. Encoding Identity in Historical Narratives (Pompano Room)
Moderator: Mary-Ann Gosser Esquilin, Florida Atlantic University

“The Motion of Ceaseless Creolization Against Postcolonial Frames”
Ena A. Harris, Montclair State University

“Reconstructing National Genealogies in Contemporary Argentina Historical Novels”
Teresa Ko, Ursinus College, PA

“‘Too Far-fetched and Too Neatly Symmetrical’: History and Fiction in Kamila Shamsie’s Broken Verses”
Gina Gemmel, University of Illinois at Chicago

“Richard Powers’s The Time of Our Singing: Racial Boundaries Revisited through Dialogic Narrative
Christina Oltmann, McGill University

41. Ethnicity, Authenticity, Oppression, and Tricksters in Native American Literature (Sea Grape Room)
Moderator: Georgina Dodge, University of Iowa

“Racism and Casteism—An Interdisciplinary Study of Ethnicity in Sherman Alexie’s The Toughest Indian in the World—An Indian Point of View”
P. R. Karmarkar, Andhra University Campus

“What Authenticity Means in Narrating Identity and Writing ‘Indian’”
Richard Mace, St. John’s University

“From ‘Relic of Our Country’ to Capitalist: Reinventing the Indian Trickster as a White Man”
Jean C. Griffith, Wichita State University

42. South Asian Fiction and Postcolonial Canons (Sandpiper Room)
Moderator: Rafe Dalleo, Florida Atlantic University

“English Literary Canon and its Re-positioning in Diasporic and Global Contexts: An Example of
Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children”
Garima Gupta, SMVD University, Katra

“Ethnic Representation in Rushie’s Global Cornucopia of Fiction”
Meenu Gupta, Panjab University

“Colonial Connections and the Fate of Radical Vision in Attia Hosain’s Fictions”
Bishnu Ghimire, Ohio University

“Looking-glass Borders, Sub-continental Neighborliness in the Diaspora”
Diviani Chaudhuri, Binghamton University

43. Ethiopia, African-American Literature, and Oromo Ethnic Identity (Alamanda Room)
Moderator: Steven W. Thomas, St. John’s University

“Ethiopian History in African-American Literature”
Steven W. Thomas, St. John’s University

“Language and Education in Ethiopia”
Angela Mathis, College of St. Benedict, Minnesota

“The Torturous Development of Written Oromo Literature”
Mohammed Hassen, Georgia State University

“Ethnographic Mystic: The Self in Folkloric Field Research”
Aseffa Tefera Dibaba, Independent Scholar

LUNCH and KEYNOTE SCHOLAR: 11:30-1:20pm (Coral Ballroom)

Welcoming Remarks by President Mary J. Saunders, Florida Atlantic University

Announcement of MELUS Graduate Student Travel Awards

Karla Holloway, Duke University, “Bound by Law: The Literary Consequence of Constitutionally Conferred Equity”

Session XI: Saturday, 1:30-2:50pm

44. Intertextuality of African American Literature (Executive 4 Room)
Moderator: Sika Dagbovie, Florida Atlantic University

“Phillis Wheatley: A New Source for Her Major Poems?”
Will Harris, United Arab Emirates University

“‘A Small Oasis In a Desert of Darkness’: Orientalism in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand”
Crystal S. Anderson, Elon University

“Ethnic Goes Global—Intertextuality and Cultural Interference in African American Modernism: The Poetry of Melvin B. Tolson and Robert Hayden”
Miriam A. Kuroszczyk, Mainz University, Germany

45. New Contexts for Reading Maxine Hong Kingston (Sandpiper Room)
Moderator: Andy Furman, Florida Atlantic University

“Trajectories of Translation: Cold War Contexts for Jade Snow Wong’s No Chinese Stranger and
Maxine Hong Kingston’s Fifth Book of Peace”
Elizabeth Rodrigues, University of Michigan

“Pluralizing China: Reading Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men in 2011”
Aqua Chiu Wai Fong, The University of Hong Kong

“Shi Pingping and Chen Xiaohui: Recent Mainland Chinese Scholarship on Kingston’s Gender in The Woman Warrior”
Qingjun Li, Belmont University

“The Book as a Paper Offering in The Woman Warrior”
Abby Hayes, University of Central Oklahoma

46. Dangerous Diasporas: The Fallout of Migration in Hispanic and Italian American Literatures (Pompano Room)
Moderator: Josephine Gattuso Hendin, New York University

“‘Village-Based Proletarian Disaporas’: Adria Bernardi’s Openwork and Italy’s Diasporas”
Mary Jo Bona, Stony Brook University

“‘What Blows About’: Teaching Diaspora in Carrillo’s Loosing My Espanish”
JoAnne Ruvoli, University of Illinois at Chicago

“Globalization and Literary Form: Reviving Naturalism in the Age of Transnationalism”
Josephine Gattuso Hendin, New York University

“Dominican-American Authorship, the Spectacle of Witness, and the Persistence of Trujillismo in the Dominican-American Literary Aesthetic”
Trenton Hickman, Brigham Young University

47. Globalization and Fragmentation of Indian Identity and Culture (Sea Grape Room)
Moderator: Kim Long, Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania

“Flight from South Asia to America: Towards Reconstructing a Multicultural Identity or Reclaiming a Mummified Reality?”
T. Ravichandran, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, India

“Globalization and Literature: Indian Perspectives”
Murari Prasad, D. S. College, Katihar, India

“Outside Global Cities: Reimagining South Asian Diasporic Lives”
Dashini Jeyathurai, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

“‘As if they are new’: North-east Studies in the India of the Post-liberalized Era of Globalization”
Sumanyu Satpathy, Delhi University

48. Culture Shock: Transnational Challenges in Diasporic Narratives (Alamanda Room)
Moderator: Makarand Paranjape, National University of Singapore and Jawaharlal Nehru University

“Falling into America: The Downside of Transnational Identities in Ha Jin’s A Great Fall”
Holly E. Martin, Appalachian State University

“Routes to Roots: Sadia Shepard’s The Girl from Foreign”
Irma Maini, New Jersey City University

“Diasporic Concerns and the Contemporary Global Issues in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss”
Savita Goel, University of Jaipur

“The Autoethnography of Multi-Ethnic Writers: The Study of Onoto Watanna”
Miriam L. Fernandez, California State University, Fresno

Session XII: Saturday, 3:00-4:20pm

49. Eccentricity, Mimicry, and Romanticism and Asian American Literature (Executive 4 Room)
Moderator: Gabrielle Helo, Florida Atlantic University

“The Strange and Sorrowful Postcoloniality in Elizabeth Kim’s Ten Thousand Sorrows and Kany Suk Kyun’s ‘Bam Kwha Yoran’”
Jee H. An, Seoul National University

“To Impersonate Transnationally: Feng Shui and Mimicry in Han Ong's Fixer Chao”
Shu-ching Chen, National Chung Hsing University, Taiwan

“Canon and Carnival: The Poetics of Asian American ‘Eccentricity’”
Beni Zhang, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

“Asian American Romanticism”
Lingyan Yang, Indiana University of Pennsylvania

50. New Writings from the Indian Diaspora: Recalibrating the Canon in an “Uneven World” (Sandpiper Room)
Chair: Kerstin Schmidt, University of Munich, Germany

“Mimic Women and Mirrored Selves: Meena Alexander and Global Modernity”
Parvinder Mehta, Wayne State University

“Alienating Effects: Chetan Bhagat and Popular Otliers in Indian Literature”
Richard Zumkhawala-Cook, Shippensburg University

“Overlapping Canons and Diasporas: M.G. Vassanji’s Literature of Relation”
Kerstin Schmidt, University of Munich, Germany

51. Charles Chesnutt and Passing Tropes in Late Nineteenth-Century African American Literature (Pompano Room)
Moderator: Amritjit Singh, Ohio University

“The Future of American: Racial and Global Crossing in Late Nineteenth-Century Passing Narratives”
Martha J. Cutter, University of Connecticut

“‘W’at yer take fer yo’ neckliss, Dave?’ Transference and Transaction in Charles Chesnutt’s ‘Dave’s Neckliss’”
Christopher Bundrick, University of South Carolina-Lancaster

“Charles Chesnutt’s Signifying Biological Realism”
SallyAnn H. Ferguson, University of North Carolina, Greensboro

52. Cultural Crossings: Islam and the United States (Sea Grape Room)
Moderator: Josephine Beoku-Betts, Florida Atlantic University

“Muslim (American) Insurgent Literature: Islamaphobia, War on Terror, Extraordinary Rendition, and the Migration to Islam in H. M. Nagvi’s Home Boy and Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist”
Maimuna Dali Islam, College of Idaho

“Translating the Rift of the Islamic Sacred Space: The African American Harem in Toni Morrison’s Paradise”
Majda Atieh, Damascus University, Damascus, Syria

“Interrogating Hegemonic Constructions of the Hybrid Identity: Kahf Tells a New Story in The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf”
Mais Qutami, University of Nizwa, Oman

53. The Crisis in the Humanities: A Roundtable Conversation (Alamanda Room)
Moderator: Mary Jo Bona, Stony Brook University

Veronica Makowsky, University of Connecticut
Wenying Xu, Florida Atlantic University
Tracy Floreani, Oklahoma City University
Jessica Maucione, Gonzaga University
Mary Jo Bona, Stony Brook University

Session XIII: Saturday, 4:30-5:50pm

54. Theoretical Problems in Multiculturalism, Global Studies, and Postcolonial Theory (Executive 4 Room)
Moderator: Andy Furman, Florida Atlantic University

“Pass the Post: From Postcolonial to Global Studies”
Jesús Varela-Zapata, University of Santiago de Compostela

“Disciplinary Canons: Subjective Camouflage”
Cameron Bushnell, Clemson University

“Globalism and the Marginalized Geographies of Postcoloniality”
Salah Moukhlis, California State University, San Marcos

“Exploring the Margins of the Postcolonial: Anticolonial Theory”
Abdollah Zahiri, Seneca College, Toronto.

55. Multiculturalism and Pedagogy (Sandpiper Room)
Moderator: Julia Mason, Florida Atlantic University

“Translating Transnationalisms: Pedagogical Strategies in the Multicultural Literature Classroom”
Mayuri Deka, The College of the Bahamas

“Performing Identities in Cyberspace: Imagining the Online Multicultural Learning Community”
Rick Taylor, East Carolina University

“Approaches to Teaching an Ethnic Literature Course”
Linda Krumholz, Denison University

“Between Gaps, Lies and Silences: Teaching Life Writing”
Jennifer C. Rossi, St. John Fisher College

56. The Trujillato: Traces of Violence in Dominican American Literature (Pompano Room)
Moderator: Drew Merrill, Brigham Young University

“Let it Rain Coffee, Merengue, and Cultural Ownership”
Kelsey Mortensen, Brigham Young University

“The Quest for Protoculture in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao”
Clancy Clawson, Brigham Young University

“Problematizing the Concept of ‘Witness’ in Julia Alvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies”
Drew Merrill, Brigham Young University

57. Moved to Silence: The Absence of Caribbean Refugee Texts in Global Canons (Sea Grape Room)
Moderator: Ylce Irizarry, University of South Florida

“Not Dreaming, but Living, in Cuban: Refugees Knocking on the Canons’ Door”
Ylce Irizarry, University of South Florida

“‘You Can’t Go Home Again’: Domestic Violence and Foreign Bodies in Loída Maritza Pérez’s Geographies of Home (1998) and Angie Cruz’s Soledad (2001)”
Marion Rohrleitner, University of Texas at El Paso

“Capturing Refugee Discourse: Language and Social Experience in Danticat’s The Butterfly’s Way (2001)”
Don E. Walicek, University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras

58. MELUS Women of Color Caucus Roundtable: from the Job Market to Third Year Review
(Alamanda Room)

Shirley Lim, University of California, Santa Barbara
Johnnie Stover, Florida Atlantic University
Lingyan Yang, Indiana University of Pennsylvania
Georgina Dodge, University of Iowa

Session XIV: Saturday, 6:00-7:20pm

59. Refiguring Cuban Identity Politics (Executive 4 Room)
Moderator: Joanna Marshall, University of Puerto Rico, Cayey

“To Dream, To Be: The Island of Eternal Love and Mythical Postmemory”
Josune Urbistondo, University of Miami

“Re-appropriation and Objectification in Loving Che”
Sarah Campbell, Brigham Young University

“Anthology is Destiny: Exile Politics and Cuban-American Literature”
Maria del Carmen Martinez, University of Wisconsin Parkside

60. Global Routes of Authenticity and Gender for Asian-American Identity (Sandpiper Room)
Moderator: Wenxin Li, Suffolk County Community College

“Globalization and Asian America”
Lingyan Yang, Indiana University of Pennsylvania

“The Biopolitical and Geopolitical Dimensions of Neoliberal Postfeminism: Shanghai Baby as a Case of the Global Chick Lit”
Eva Chen, National Cheng-Chi University

“‘Amy Tan Phenomenon’: The Limits of Authenticity in the Multicultural World”
Izabela Zięba, University of Miami

“Asian Immigrant Women in Global Labor Market”
Su-ching Wang, University of Washington

61. Deconstructing Theories of Blackness (Pompano Room)
Moderator: Mara Kiffin, Florida Atlantic University

“Metablackness”
Terry Rowden, College of Staten Island/CUNY

“Deconstructing the Color Line in The Quarry”
Rebecca Starr Nisetich, University of Connecticut, Storrs

“Generic Blackness, Generic Queerness: Late 20th-Century Black LGBT Writers and the Critique of Canonization”
Christopher Lewis, The Ohio State University

“The I in the Mirror: Constructing the Multiracial Self in Caucasia”
Bethany L. Lam, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

62. Questions of Bengal, at Home and Abroad (Sea Grape Room)
Moderator: Savena Budhu, Broward College

“Recreating Bengaliness in Diaspora: Jhumpa Lahiri and the Politics of Bengali-American Identity”
Antara Chatterjee, University of Leeds

“Community Theatre and Marginalised Communities: The Case of Bangla Natak Dot Com”
Swati Pal, Janki Devi Memorial College

“‘An Ordinary Emergency’: Arranged Marriages and Love Matches in Jhumpa Lahiri”
Marilyn Squier, Clark University

63. Transnational Markets of Culture and History (Alamanda Room)
Moderator: Jane Caputi, Florida Atlantic University

“Transnational Views: The Antiapartheid Struggle Seen from the Eastern Block”
Monica Popescu, McGill University

“Have another ‘Cosmopolitan’: South African ‘Chick Lit’ and the Literature of Globalization”
Denise Handlarski, York University

“The Writing and Rewriting of Botswana: Ethnic and Global Contexts”
Arpa Ghosh, Vivekananda College for Women, Kolkata

“Bollywoodizing Hollywood: Slumdog Millonaire Q&A, and Transnational Aesthetics”
Jonathan J. Cavallero, University of Arkansas

DINNER ON YOUR OWN

8:45-9:30pm: MELUS Membership Meeting (Coral Ballroom)

Cash Bar and Dance: 9:30pm-12:00am (Coral Ballroom)

Sunday, April 10

Free Breakfast: 8:00am-9:30am

Session XV: Sunday, 9:00-10:20am

64. Navigating Caribbean History and Culture (Executive 4 Room)
Moderator: Lilleth Trewick, Florida Atlantic University

“Andrea Levy’s The Long Song: Echoing Voices of Slave Historiography”
Daphne Grace, University College of the Bahamas

“Representations of Africa in the Writings of the Diaspora: A Francophone and Anglophone Analysis”
Moussa Traore, North Shore Community College

“‘Between my life that is over and my life to come’: Embodying Authorial Ambivalence in Fred D’Aguiar’s Feeding the Ghosts”
Sheryl Gifford, Florida Atlantic University

65. Transatlantic, Tropical, and Corporate Problems in Multiethnicity (Pompano Room)
Moderator: Lisa Swanstrom, Florida Atlantic University

“Redneck Culture, Corporate Colonialism, and Multi-Ethnic Resistance in Denise Giardina’s Storming Heaven”
Anita Rosenblithe, Raritan Valley Community College

“The Paddy Beyond the Pale: A Cultural Theory of Transnational Ethnicity”
James P. Byrne, Emerson College

“For Every Action, a Reaction: Translatlantic Approaches to Nineteenth-Century Women Writers”
Kristin Allukian, University of Florida

66. Disease and Ecocriticism in Toni Morrison and the African Diaspora (Sea Grape Room)
Moderator: Pauline Pearce, Florida Atlantic University

“(Dys)ease in Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions”
Bernadette Russo, Sam Houston State University

“Writing the Text of the Body as Healing Story in Ethiopian Healing Scrolls: Paule Marshall’s
Praisesong for the Widow, and Toni Morrison’s Paradise”
Shawnrece D. Campbell, Stetson University

“Practicing Wildness: Ecocritical Elements in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon”
Michelle Ramlagan, University of Miami

“Rejecting Wildness: An Ecocritical Reading of Toni Morrison’s Sula”
Elizabeth Willbur, Radford University

67. Cultural Translation and Sentiment in Latino/a Writing (Alamanda Room)
Moderator: Johanna Ayala, Florida Atlantic University

“A Haunting Reality: Sentimentality, Identity Formation, and Post-Revolution Mexico in Josefina Niggli's Step Down, Elder Brother (1947)”
Wanalee Romero, Northwestern University

“Finding Aztlan: Cultural Translation in Alex Espinoza’s Still Water Saints”
Erin L. Alvarez, California State University, Fresno

“Glossing in US Ethnic Literature: Craig Santos Perez’s Paratextual Poetics”
Tiffany Salter, The Ohio State University

“Trauma in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao”
Tim Niese, Marquette University

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CFP: 2011 Speical Number of the SAR: South Asian Diasporas

Submitted by adamore on Mon, 2011-04-04 23:27. Conferences

CALL FOR PAPERS

2011 Special Number of the South Asian Review
South Asian Diasporas

South Asian Review, the peer-refereed journal of the South Asian Literary Association, invites submissions for its 2011 special number, Volume 32, Number 3, devoted to South Asian Diasporas. South Asian Review calls for papers that examine the work of diasporic writers, artists, and filmmakers of South Asian origin from around the world. The papers should address individual works or groups of works from a scholarly vantage point. Topics of interest may include diasporic writers from the colonial and postcolonial periods, first-, second- or third-generation diasporic writers, South Asian writers in Africa or the South Pacific, Indo-Caribbean writers, and South Asian writers in North America and Britain. Critical essays that discuss diasporic art, literature, and culture under such rubrics as the diasporic imaginary, diaspora politics, diasporic hybridity, diaspora-homeland relations, diaspora and empire, diaspora and the nation-state, and diaspora and globalization are also welcome.

Articles of 15-25 pages, prepared in accordance with the MLA style, along with an abstract of 8-10 lines and a biographical note of 50 words, should be sent electronically by August 15, 2011 to Dr. B. P. Giri at BP.Giri@Dartmouth.EDU.

Inquiries regarding book reviews should be addressed to Professor P. S. Chauhan at chauhanp@arcadia.edu. For further information about the South Asian Review, please refer to the SAR website at: http://www.upj.pitt.edu/southasianreview.

All inquiries concerning this special number of the South Asian Review should be addressed to:

Dr. B. P. Giri
Guesteditor
Department of English
HB 6032
Dartmouth College
New Hampshire 03755
USA

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CFP: 2011 Special Topic Issue of The South Asian Review, Vol. 32, No. 1

Submitted by adamore on Sat, 2011-02-05 20:12. News

CALL FOR PAPERS

The 2011 Special Topic Issue of
The South Asian Review, Volume 32, Number 1

Transnational Realisms and Post-Realisms in South Asian Literature and Culture

South Asian Review, the refereed journal of the South Asian Literary Association, invites submissions for the 2011 Special Topic issue, Volume 32, Number 1, devoted to South Asian Realisms and Post-realisms that examines the ways in which South Asian realist writers unsettle and rework realist codes. How might we account for the ways in which colonial and post-colonial South Asian writers dismantle the opposition between realism and modernism? Transnational or planetary realisms provide us new paradigms. In the frame of planetary realisms, realism is not cathected to nationalist narratives; the realist writer need not be an apologist for the nation state and is not tied down to strictly mimetic conventions of representation. South Asian Review invites papers on literature, criticism, film, cultural, and social activism that explore any aspect of South Asian realisms within national, vernacular, and diasporic contexts. Papers may explore, but are not restricted to, the following themes: realism’s narrative forms and migratory routes; emergence of realism as a theme in modern South Asian literatures; the progressive realist literary movement; interrogating the nature and contents of reality (whose reality does realism narrate?); queer, gay, lesbian and transsexual debates about pushing the envelope with regard to representational conventions of realist texts; neo-realist film; affect and the realist genre; realism as language-neutral versus realisms specific to vernaculars; ways in which Dalit literature, women’s writing, and queer cultural texts rework the historical significance of realism.

Critical articles of 15-25 pages, prepared in accordance with the MLA style and accompanied by an abstract of 8-10 lines and a biographical note of 50 words, should be sent by April 30, 2011 to:

Rashmi Dube Bhatnagar, Department of English, University of Pittsburgh, rashmi@pitt.edu and rashmidubebhatnagar@gmail.com

Rajender Kaur, Department of English, William Paterson University, kaurr@wpunj.edu

The subject line of your email should contain the words

“SAR 2011 Special Issue”

For information about the South Asian Review, please refer to the SAR website at
http://www.upj.pitt.edu/southasianreview

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CFP: Ethnic Canons in Global Contexts, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL, April 7-10, 2011

Submitted by adamore on Thu, 2010-09-16 06:30. Conferences

2011 CONFERENCE CALL FOR PAPERS

 
25th Annual MELUS/USACLALS Joint Conference 

April 7 – 10, 2011 

Florida Atlantic University
 Boca Raton, FL 


THEME: Ethnic Canons in Global Contexts


As an ongoing and vital process through which societies and cultures have become integrated through a globe-spanning network of communications, economics, and politics, globalization addresses the transnational circulation of ideas and languages. Its impact on literature is manifold, with both positive and negative associations, wherein cultures receiving outside influences ignore some, adopt others as they are, and then immediately start to transform others. Certain aspects of globalization – such as hybridity and multi-rootedness – are increasingly present in literary texts as we witness ways in which they shape new literary forms, interrogate existing canons, and explore the emergence of ethnic canons. 



We invite paper abstracts and complete panels, workshops, and roundtable proposals on all aspects of the multi-ethnic literatures of the United States and elsewhere. We are particularly interested in proposals that explore globalization in terms of its influence on ethnic canons, and vice versa, and encourage presentations on all global frameworks of analysis, such as Atlantic studies, global feminisms, pan-Africanism, postcolonialism, transnationalism, global indigenous studies, etc. Submissions should detail requests for specific audiovisual equipment, if needed. We also ask that a proposal for a complete panel, roundtable, or workshop include a short description of the central topic, supplemented by brief abstracts of individual speakers’ contributions.



Deadline for abstracts and proposals (250 words in Word or rtf format): NOVEMBER 15, 2010 



PLEASE NOTE:

e-mail abstracts to: John Hawley at jhawley@scu.edu AND to Prof. Nora Erro Peralta and Prof. Taylor Hagood at melus2011@gmail.com

Hotel rooms have been set aside at the: 


Renaissance
Boca Raton Hotel
($99/night) 

2000 NW 19th Street Boca Raton, FL 33431

(561) 368-5252

All presenters, chairs, and respondents must be members of a chapter of ACLALS (preferably USACLALS).

Membership information can be found on the USACLALS website at: MEMBERSHIP 

It remains to be determined whether or not participants will also need to become MELUS members at half the regular charge.


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CFP: The 2nd Annual Postcolonial Studies Association/Journal of Postcolonial Writing Postgraduate Essay Prize 2011

Submitted by adamore on Thu, 2010-09-16 06:29. Conferences

The 2nd Annual Postcolonial Studies Association/Journal of Postcolonial Writing Postgraduate Essay Prize 2011

The Postcolonial Studies Association and the Journal of Postcolonial Writing are pleased to announce that entries for the 2011 Postgraduate Essay Prize are now open.

The competition is open to any student registered for a postgraduate degree at any institution in the world on the closing date for submission (30 April 2011).

Essays should not be more than 7500 words long (including bibliographic citations and footnotes), must be presented in accordance with the style guidelines of the MLA and may be on any topic related to postcolonial studies.

Only one submission per person is permissible. All submissions should be made electronically and include two separate attachments:

a completed application form
the essay itself.

The author's identity should not be identifiable from the essay in any way (candidates must ensure that electronic tags such as those generated by MS Word are removed).

Essays or parts of essays that have been published in any form previously are not eligible. Please note that previous entrants are welcome to enter the competition again with a different essay.

Incomplete submissions and submissions which do not meet the above criteria will not be considered.

A prize of £250 will be awarded to the winner, and the winning essay will, subject to editorial approval, be published in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing.

Should the recipient of the prize not be an existing PSA member, a complimentary year-long membership to the PSA will also be awarded. It is not compulsory for candidates to be members to enter the prize.

The winner will be formally notified on 1 July 2011 and the winning essay will be announced at the 2nd PSA conference at Birmingham University on 7-8 July 2011.

Please submit all entries to

psajpw@postcolonialstudiesassociation.co.uk

by 30 April 2011.

All essays will be evaluated anonymously by a panel of academics selected by the PSA Executive and the Journal of Postcolonial Writing. The judges’ decision is final, and no correspondence will be entered into.

Click here to download PSAJPW Postgrad Essay Prize Advert

Click here to download PSAJPW Postgrad Essay Prize Application Form

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CFP: International Golden Jubilee Conference, Cape Town, South Africa, 27-30 September 2011

Submitted by adamore on Thu, 2010-09-16 06:25. Conferences

ENGLISH ACADEMY OF SOUTHERN AFRICA

2011 INTERNATIONAL GOLDEN JUBILEE CONFERENCE

Literature, Literacy and Language

Cape Town

27-30 September 2011

The English Academy of Southern Africa was founded in 1961 and for the past fifty years has dedicated itself to stimulating interest in the English language and its literatures as well as promoting the effective use of English as a national resource in Southern Africa. The English Academy interests itself in English in education, promotes research and debate, organizes lectures, conferences and seasonal schools, makes representations about language matters, rewards excellence and fosters the creative, critical and scholarly talents of users (and would-be users) of English in Southern Africa.

Call for papers

The conference invites established and emerging researchers, teachers and policy makers to engage with challenges and issues in the three areas of English literature, literacy studies, and English language education. While papers are welcome in any of these areas, there is a particular interest in their interrelationship.

• The area of English Literature will include both papers on texts and theoretical analyses, especially in the areas of postcoloniality and global literature.

• The potential that English has in literacy education in a multilingual society, with particular emphasis on reading and critical educational approaches in English teaching, is of pressing concern for contemporary southern Africa. The concept of literacy used here goes far beyond acquiring a set of technical skills for reading and writing, focusing on a capacity to use these skills in making sense of the world. Literacy is at the heart of basic education for all, and is essential for eradicating poverty and ensuring sustainable development, peace and democracy.

• Language education papers will address the wide repertoire of challenges and innovations in a range of educational/work contexts (schools; colleges; universities; workplaces).

Thoroughly researched papers dealing with topics and issues related to any of these areas are invited from colleagues throughout the world. There will be a 20 minute time slot for each paper with associated discussion. Presentations should not exceed 20 minutes. Selected papers will be published in the English Academy of Southern Africa’s accredited and peer-reviewed journal, The English Academy Review. The first deadline for the submission of abstracts, which will be reviewed by an advisory committee, is 30 November 2010. An abstract should not exceed 300 words. Colleagues are encouraged to send their abstracts early as the conference can accommodate only a limited number of papers.

The conference will be organised around themes and issue-centred concerns, and there will be a core of invited contributions on these topics. We invite papers on the following or related themes:

• Literacy and work/community/diversity;
• Inequalities and epistemologies: exploring knowledges, oracies and literacies;
• Literacy in schools and higher education;
• Multi-modal literacies;
• Postcolonial and global writings;
• Literature in schools and universities;
• English language education; and
• English and Englishes.

Several outstanding speakers of international stature will deliver plenary addresses at the conference. The programme consists of three days of plenary presentations and a diverse range of concurrent workshops and parallel sessions for paper presentations.
The academic programme will be complemented by social activities including a welcome reception, a poetry reading festival and a closing gala dinner to celebrate the jubilee of the English Academy of South Africa.

This conference will be one of the most significant events on the education calendar for 2011.

Timeline:

1st announcement and call for papers: 20 August 2010
2nd announcement and further call for papers: 30 September 2010
Deadline for abstract submission: 30 November 2010
Extended deadline: 15 January 2011
Notification of acceptance of abstract: 15 February 2011
Draft programme design: 30 March 2011

Conference Convenor: Prof. Rajendra Chetty
Conference co-convenor: Ms Marie-Anne Ogle
Conference Secretariat: Ms Naomi Nkealah
Conference committee: Dr Barbara Basel, Prof. Rajendra Chetty, Dr Janet Condy, Ms Anne Hill, Ms Naomi Nkealah, Ms Marie-Anne Ogle, Prof. Mastin Prinsloo, Prof. Stanley Ridge and Mr Philip Thraves.

Conference Fees: Delegates from Southern Africa
Early registration (before 30 April 2011)
– ZAR1500
Late registration – ZAR1750

Delegates from overseas and outside Southern Africa
Early registration – $250 (US)
Late registration – $300 (US)
Currency converter website - www.xe.com.

Venue: District Six campus, Cape Peninsula University of Technology

District Six is in the 'city bowl' of Cape Town and at the foothill of Table Mountain, so the campus is close to most of Cape Town’s main attractions. It is a fascinating area, known not only for its historic significance (forced removals during apartheid) and the District Six Museum, but also for its artistic vibrancy in terms of the arts, literature, music and culture. Artists from District Six include Alex la Guma, Richard Rive and Abdullah Ibrahim.

ABSTRACT SUBMISSION:

Email 300-word abstracts together with full contact details by 30 November 2010 to Ms Naomi Nkealah at englishacademy@societies.wits.ac.za

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CFP: Crossing the Borders: Reflections on Indian Diaspora and Transnationalism

Submitted by adamore on Wed, 2010-09-15 20:10. Conferences

Call for Papers
Crossing the Borders: Reflections on Indian Diaspora and Transnationalism

What does it mean to be multinational? Who in the 21st Century is on the brink of melting into the pot, and who is clamoring to ensure that their culture is left unmarred? Now more than ever, multiculturalism in an era of “clashing civilizations” may be the answer to preservation. On the other hand, it may mean the permanent isolation of transnational groups. What are your thoughts and findings on the cultural dislocation of first and subsequent generations of continental Indians in the Americas, Europe, Africa or Australia? We are looking for a wide variety of responses from first-hand accounts to in-depth analysis of how the displacement of Indians has affected their culture in their new country and what affect this has had on the surrounding cultures.

We invite your submission of both scholarly papers and personal experiences of the transnational Indian. Please submit a 250-word proposal in MS Word, or RTF format by December 15, 2010. MLA is preferred, but APA is accepted to deenas@ecu.edu

Dr. Seodial Frank Deena, Professor of Multicultural & Transnational Literature, Criticism, and Culture
Department of English, Bate 2201
East Carolina University, NC 27858 USA

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CFP: The Journal of Empire Studies, November 15, 2010 and March 15, 2011

Submitted by adamore on Wed, 2010-09-15 04:12. News

The Journal of Empire Studies

Deadline for Spring 2011 submissions: November 15, 2010
Deadline for Summer 2011 submissions: March 15, 2011

A new scholarly journal on global studies, The Journal of Empire Studies, is looking for articles on topics within the broad range of empire studies. Of particular interest are examinations of specific subjects comparing eastern and western empires.
For specifics, we welcome you to visit the beta web site:

http://www.iflair.biz/jes/

Please direct inquiries to Tom Durwood, Valley Forge Military College, tbird3080@aol.com

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Future Postcolonialisms: Comparing, Converting, Queering, Greening/ Le postcolonial-en-devenir, Paris, 27-28 May, 2011

Submitted by adamore on Wed, 2010-09-15 01:38. Conferences

In the wake of the twentieth Anniversary of the publication of The Empire Writes Back/
Dans la foulée du vingtième anniversaire de la publication du livre The Empire Writes Back, we proudly announce the following event/ nous organisons un colloque international:

Future Postcolonialisms: Comparing, Converting, Queering, Greening/
Le postcolonial-en-devenir

on Friday and Saturday 27 & 28 May 2011
A Paris, les vendredi et samedi 27 et 28 mai 2011
Salle Dussane, Ecole Normale Supérieure, 45, rue d’Ulm, Paris

Conveners/ Organisateurs: Chantal ZABUS, IUF [Institut universitaire de France] Chair of Comparative Postcolonial Literatures and Gender Studies, CREF/G – EA 4400 – UParis3-Sorbonne Nouvelle; & Dominique COMBE, Théorie de la littérature, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris; CREF/G-EA4400-UParis3-Sorbonne Nouvelle
Tentative Programme/ Programme provisoire:

Friday 27 May 2011/
Le vendredi 27 mai 2011:

9:45: Welcoming Speech/ Allocution de bienvenue: TBA
10:00: Keynote Address: Bill ASHCROFT & Gareth GRIFFITHS: “On The Empire Writes Back and Beyond”

10:15
Comparing/
Etat des lieux sur le Postcolonial en France

Dominique COMBE (Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris): confirmé- titre à venir

Jean-Marc MOURA (UParis Ouest-La Défense): "Les études postcoloniales de l'aire francophone: entre France, francophonie et monde."

Xavier GARNIER (Paris3-Sorbonne Nouvelle): "Ecrire avec l'Apocalypse: littératures postcoloniales au Congo."

11:00: Pause-café/ Coffee Break

11:20
Greening/ Ecocritique postcoloniale

With the participation of Helen TIFFIN (UWollongong): "What is Indigeneity?"

Graham HUGGAN (ULeeds, U.K.): “Attenborough, Colonialism, and the British Tradition of Nature Documentary”;

Cheryl STOBIE ( UKwaZulu Natal, South Africa): “Dystopian Dreams from South Africa: Lauren Beukes’s Moxyland and Zoo City”;

Ferial GHAZOUL (American University Cairo, Egypt): “Greening in Contemporary Arabic Literature: The Transformation of Mythic Motifs into Postcolonial Discourse.”

LUNCH/ Repas de midi

2:30

Queering and Browning/ Nouvelles sexualités dissidentes

John HAWLEY (Santa Clara University, California, USA): “Late to the (Political) Party: Who’s Gay when Everyone’s Queer?”

William SPURLIN (University of Sussex, U.K.): “Postcolonially Queer: Comparative Representations of Same-Sex Desires in the Maghreb and Southern Africa”;

Unoma AZUAH (Lane College, Tennessee, USA/ Nigeria): “The Video Closet: Nollywood’s Gay Stories”

Evening Free/ Soirée libre

Saturday 28 May 2011/ Le Samedi 28 mai 2011

10:00

Religion et identités/Converting

Gareth GRIFFITHS (University of Western Australia): “Transacting Identity: Religion and Identity in Postcolonial Spaces”;

Srilata RAVI (University of Alberta, Canada): “Representing Afro-Asian Identities in Indian Ocean Literatures”;

Klaus STIERSTORFER (University of Muenster, Germany): “Fundamentalism and the Postcolonial: Limitation or Creative Stimulus?”

Coffee break/Pause-café

11:20
Round Table/Round Table: Janet WILSON (Northampton U, U.K.): “Speaking from Experience: The Journal for Postcolonial Writing and EACLALS”, Marta DVORAK (UParis 3, to be confirmed) & Chantal ZABUS on Commonwealth.

Repas de midi/ LUNCH

2:30

Le postcolonial-en-devenir/Futures

Elleke BOEHMER (Oxford University, UK), “The Empire in the World”;

Mike HILL (State University of New York at Albany, USA): “Ecologies of War: Racial Complexity in an Age of Failed States”;

Bill ASHCROFT (University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia): “Future Thinking: Postcolonial Utopianism”.

Dinner at/ Banquet au Le Train Bleu (Gare de Lyon) (for those who have registered)

Registration details will be available in the course of December 2010.

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CFP: 11th Annual South Asian Literary Association (SALA) Conference, Los Angeles, January 2011

Submitted by adamore on Sun, 2010-07-25 16:32. Conferences

CALL FOR PAPERS

11th Annual South Asian Literary Association (SALA) Conference
Los Angeles, January 2011

Transnational Realisms and Post Realisms in South Asian Literature and Culture

This conference examines ways in which South Asian realist and postrealist writers unsettle and rework realist codes. South Asian cultural and narrative forms are erased or occluded in the realism/anti-realism debate. The normative account in literary histories posits realism as the precursor to modernism. South Asian literary realisms diverge from, and are discontinuous with, the long history of debate about Platonic and neo-Platonic art as copying a copy of the real. Neither the philosophic-scientific development of the doctrine of the real, nor 19th century realism as the objective expression of the world view of the European bourgeoisie, can be fully claimed by South Asian realisms except in indirect, synoptic, and belated ways as the travel of ideas through Empire. How might we account for the ways in which colonial and post-colonial South Asian writers dismantle the opposition between realism and modernism? Categories troubled by the South Asian writer include conventional oppositions between realism and myth: realist versus non-realist art: written realisms as distinct from realism in oral storytelling: novel versus petit récit (short tale): realism in frame narratives in relation to realism in episodic or cyclic narratives: social realism as a contrast to magical realism.

Once these binaries are exploded, new paradigms are made available to us: planetary and transnational realisms. Space, time and identity in South Asian realisms are not always situated within the frameworks of nationalism. Transnational, or planetary realisms, suggest that the South Asian writer need not be an apologist for the nation state and he/she does not have to be tied to or encumbered by strictly mimetic conventions of representation. We invite papers on literature, criticism, film, cultural, and social activism that explore any aspect of South Asian realisms and/or post(-)realisms within both national and diasporic contexts. Papers may explore, but are not restricted to, the following ideas and questions:

Realism’s narrative forms and migratory routes. How can we theorize verbal,
discursive, characterological, digressive, as well as truth telling realist conventions in South Asian narrative forms (such as the qissa, dastaan, kathasagar, Puranic tale, folktale, or epic recitation)?

Whose reality does realism narrate? Which classes, communities, genders and
castes constitute the privileged subject of South Asian literary realisms? In what ways have new reading publics among South Asian, diaspora, and non-South Asian communities generated local and global markets for writers of fresh and unexpected South Asian literary realisms?

Affective Realisms. Realism seduces by producing an essential reality and unity
of affect. How might new wave or neo-realist literature, music, and film construct an essentialism of affect? How is the local and the global imagined in such constructions?

The Language of Realism. Is realism language-neutral or are there distinct
formations of realisms in each South Asian vernacular literature? Is it possible to trace a non-Western history of metaphysics that attends to the material, the social, and the everyday, and moves fluidly between realist registers and the unseen?

Activist Realisms. The author/playwright/filmmaker-activist who deploys realist and neo-realist modes often aims to make social and physical reality the basis for consciousness raising. How might Dalit literature, women’s writing, and queer cultural texts re-read and rework the historical significance of realism, or speak to current political issues requiring activism? What are the narrative modes for representing the empirical realities of violence and/or movements for social change?

Socialist or Liberal Realisms. New narratives and narrative technologies in Bollywood essay global neo-realisms, such as the investigative documentary, films themed around terrorism and/or police brutality, and films that document the immigrant’s return home. In post-liberalized India, can we speak of right wing statist appropriations and co-opting of literary and cinematic realisms?

Subaltern Realisms. Subaltern realisms emerge from lower classes and castes that critique dominant religious practices and modes of domination. For example, how has Bhakti realism invented and reinvented itself in the cinematic and literary-cultural consciousness of South Asian cultural production?

Realism and Reality: reassessments, influences, updates

Please send, in an email, a 250-word abstract of your paper and a 5-6 line bio-note listing your institutional affiliation and current email address to the conference co-chairs at the email addresses given below. The subject line of your email should contain the words “SALA 2011.”

Deadline for submission of abstracts: 25 August 2010

Co-chairs and Email addresses:

Rashmi Dube Bhatnagar, University of Pittsburgh, rashmi@pitt.edu

Rajender Kaur, William Paterson University, kaurr@wpunj.edu

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CFP: Postcolonialism and Labour, EACLALS Postgraduate Conference, Chemnitz University of Technology, Germany, 26-27 March 2011

Submitted by adamore on Sun, 2010-06-06 23:18. Conferences

Postcolonialism and Labour

EACLALS Postgraduate Conference
Chemnitz University of Technology, Germany

26 - 27 March 2011

Keynote by Professor Frank Schulze-Engler (Goethe University, Frankfurt)

The conference is mainly for those who are currently working on their postgraduate/doctoral thesis. However, early career researchers (who are usually defined as up to five years after obtaining a PhD) are invited to present as well.

This inaugural postgraduate conference aims to provide a space for debate and discussion on reconfiguring the category of ‘Labour’ within Postcolonial Studies. Historically speaking, given its Marxist affiliations and the tropes of eurocentrism in universalising ‘Labour’ as a normative category against the local and particular, Postcolonial Studies has not engaged critically with the notion of ‘Labour’. However, the concept is now gaining purchase in the field owing largely to globalisation, international division of labour, immigration and the radical restructuring of work and professions both within and outside the West. Yet, despite these recent developments, Postcolonial Studies can be criticised for effectively abandoning the economic essence of cultures by ceaselessly reworking ‘difference’, ‘hybridity’ and ‘disjunctures’ as the cultural markers of historical and persisting inequalities. In the last twenty-five years we have witnessed the emergence of a wide range of literary and filmic productions that reconfigure the notion of ‘Labour’, including Hanif Kureishi’s My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999), Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003), Stephen Frears’s Dirty Pretty Things (2003), Hari Kunzru’s Transmission (2004), Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) and Aravind Adiga’s White Tiger (2008).

This conference seeks papers that address, but are not limited to, the following questions:

How, and in what ways, can the concept of ‘Labour’ be redressed from a culturally contingent perspective (as opposed to totalising Marxist approaches)?
How does the recent surge of immigrant and diasporic literature and film reflect the workings of ‘Labour’ in their narratives?
In light of globalisation – the increasing global division of labour, shifts and uncertainties of financial markets – is there a need for Postcolonial Studies to embrace the Marxist concepts of labour without categorically abandoning its culturalist project?

We invite papers from postgraduates working in the disciplines of literature, history, cultural studies, sociology, film and media studies, human geography, linguistics, politics, religious studies and communication among others. Proposals reflecting an interdisciplinary approach are particularly welcome. Some suggested themes are:

Labour and its Cultural Constructions
The aesthetics of writing labour
The visual aesthetics of labour

Labour and Power Relations
Restructuring labour in the Post-Imperial era
Neo-imperialism and labour

Labour and Globalisation
New technologies and new forms of labour
New technologies and old forms of labour

Labour and Capitalism
Revisiting Marx in the global economic crisis
Transformations in the working class

Labour and Gender
New Feminism in the age of globalisation
Deconstructing the gender divide in the job market

Labour and Identity
New Ethnicities for a new labour market
Crossing national identities

Labour and Exploitation
Legitimising the exploitation of illegal immigrants
Illegal exploitation of immigrants

Labour and Exile
Reflections on exile as survival
Refugees, migrant workers and exile

We also welcome presentations in the form of workshops where postgraduate students can share and discuss their work in progress. In addition to the paper presentations, postgraduate students are encouraged to present early findings of their research in the form of posters.

Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words for individual presentations (20 minutes), workshop presentations or poster presentations to eaclals.pg.conference@googlemail.com. Include your name, affiliation, email address, a brief biography and indicate whether you will present in a PANEL, WORKSHOP or with a POSTER.

Abstracts: Deadline for abstracts is: 01 November 2010

For further information about the conference, please see the website at www.eaclals.ulg.ac.be/pg-conference

Participants must be EACLALS members. Please see the EACLALS website at http://www.eaclals.org for subscription rates and further information.

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CFP: Beyond Geography: Literature, Politics and Violence in Pakistan, JPW 47.2 special issue

Submitted by adamore on Sun, 2010-06-06 23:16. News

A special issue of JPW on Pakistan is being edited by Muneeza Shamsie, This will be issue JPW 47.2 which will be published in April 2011 (copy due at publishers in February 2011).

The theme is 'Beyond Geography: Literature, Politics and Violence in Pakistan" and the issue will look at the the thin dividing line between diaspora and non-diaspora in Pakistani English writing, as well as the literary response to the current events - and other aspect of politics and turmoil in Pakistan. She would like to make the issue as comprehensive as possible by including other dimensions of Pakistani English Literature - identity, nation, gender, social disparity etc. Her aim is to compile an issue which will examine the dynamics of current event sin Pakistan, and in particular the literary response

Muneeza Shamsie would also like to include an article discussing the works of both Mohsin Hamid and Mohammed Hanif (on a comparative basis). This should be no longer than 7000 words and should follow the JPW style-guide (which is essentially the same as MLA) . Alternatively she would also consider TWO separate articles one on each author, if you were able to write on only one of them.

If you are interested in contributing to this special issue an article which covers the work of both or alternatively one of these authors please contact her on mshamsie@gmail.com.

The deadline for abstracts and expressions of interest is 15th June and for final submission to her is 30th November.

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CFP: Biopolitics and Postcolonial Literature: A Special Issue of Australian Literary Studies, February 1, 2011

Submitted by adamore on Wed, 2010-04-21 17:47. Conferences

Biopolitics and Postcolonial Literature: a Special Issue of Australian Literary Studies.

In The History of Sexuality Michel Foucault describes the emergence of a modern form of power-knowledge, built around the administration of bodies and the management of life, and distinguishes it from an older form of sovereign power: “the ancient right to take life or let live was replaced by a power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death.” It is a formula that has subsequently informed work on everything from health care to genocide. Partly through the influence of Giorgio Agamben’s work on “bare life” and Achille Mbembe’s work on “necropolitics,” it also plays an increasingly important role in redescriptions of colonialism and its legacies, even as the relationship between sovereignty and biopolitics has been sharply debated.

What is the historical relationship between literary discourse and biopolitical practice? How useful is the notion of biopolitics for a general sense of literary history, and for work in specific colonial and postcolonial contexts? How might it change our sense of the archive, or question prevailing modes of periodization? How might it help us connect the colonial past to the global present?

Topics might include (but certainly aren’t limited to) narratives of invasion and extinction, regimes of protection and assimilation, fictions of hybridity and miscegenation, the relationship between sexuality and sovereignty, the nation as a biopolitical category, and broader discourses on race, citizenship, public health, immigration, security and border control.

Final submissions would be due by February 1, 2011. Please send papers and inquiries to Andrew McCann at Andrew.McCann@Dartmouth.Edu

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Conference: South Asians Making Britian, 1870-1950, Bharat Britain, September 13-14, 2010

Submitted by adamore on Mon, 2010-04-12 20:22. Conferences

*REGISTRATION NOW OPEN*

Bharat Britain: South Asians Making Britain, 1870-1950
13-14 September 2010
British Library Conference Centre, St Pancras, London

Invited keynote speakers include:
Humayun Ansari
Elleke Boehmer
Antoinette Burton
Mukti Jain Campion
Dominiek Dendooven
Hanif Kureishi
Chandani Lokuge
Susheila Nasta
Nayantara Sahgal
Rozina Visram

Held in partnership with the British Library, this major international conference marks the culmination of the AHRC-funded research project ‘Making Britain: South Asian Visions of Home and Abroad, 1870-1950’, led by the Open University in collaboration with the University of Oxford and King’s College, London. Inter-disciplinary in approach, the project explores the manifold ways in which South Asians impacted on the formation of Britain’s cultural and political life prior to Independence and Partition in 1947. It adds historical depth and breadth to our present-day readings of ‘diaspora’ and ‘migration’, and counters the common perception that a British monoculture only began to diversify after the Second World War.

Showcasing new research from an impressive range of distinguished scholars, curators and writers worldwide, ‘Bharat Britain’ will map the various networks and affiliations South Asians and Britons formed across boundaries of ‘race’, ‘nation’, ‘culture’ and ‘class’, setting up connections which were to anticipate the shapes of things to come. These are evident in different areas of British cultural and political life, from the elitist literary and artistic circles of Bloomsbury where friendships were forged between poets and painters; to the anticolonial organisations which brought South Asian and British activists together in the lead up to Independence; to the battlefields of the two world wars where Indian sepoys and volunteers fought alongside British soldiers. Yet these interactions were also, at times, marked by hierarchies and dissent. Whether through riot, strike or petition, South Asians struggled for their rights as imperial citizens, shifting ideas of ‘Britishness’ in the process.

The conference will open the project exhibition ‘South Asians Making Britain: 1858-1950’ which will then tour across the UK. It will also launch and make available for the first time a unique interactive database comprising several hundred entries on South Asians in Britain.

To register and for further details, please go to: www.open.ac.uk/arts/south-asians-making-britain/conference.htm

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CFP: Empire and Me: Personal Recollections of Imperalism in Reality and Imagination, June 16-18, 2010

Submitted by adamore on Mon, 2010-04-12 20:13. Conferences

Empire and Me: Personal Recollections of
Imperialism in Reality and Imagination
16th - 18th June 2010

Is imperialism really dead? What did people close up to colonialism or affected by its immediate aftermath make of it in their personal writings and remembrances?

This conference marks the Centenary of The Round Table, which came in to being to promote the British Empire but which has evolved into a forward-looking organisation facilitating robust discussion of international affairs, especially as they pertain to the modern Commonwealth. In Empire and Me Cumberland Lodge and the Round Table combine to talk about imperialism in literature. There will be a particular focus on colonial and post-colonial diaries, memoirs, autobiographies, blogs and other kinds of recollections conceived or written against a colonial or post-colonial background. The conference brings together writers, scholars and enthusiastic readers to ask whether imperialism is truly a thing of the past or alive and kicking in today's world, but expressing itself in a different vocabulary and in other circumstances.

Click here for registration information:

http://www.cumberlandlodge.ac.uk/our_conferences/forthcoming_conference_pages/Empire+and+Me

Amongst others, speakers include:

For all registration enquiries please contact Janis Reeves on 01784 497794 or

janis@cumberlandlodge.ac.uk

Cumberland Lodge | The Great Park | Windsor | Berkshire | SL4 2HP | United Kingdom

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CFP: 2011 EACLALS Conference, Istanbul, Turkey, April 26-30, 2011

Submitted by adamore on Fri, 2010-04-09 22:16. Conferences

The call for papers for the 2011 EACLALS conference in Istanbul closed on 31 March and received an enthusiastic response, but several colleagues have recently contacted us to enquire whether it was still possible to submit an abstract. In agreement with conference convenor Isil Bas and her team, we have decided to extend the deadline for the submission of proposals until 31 May 2010.
 
Please submit abstracts of about 200 words for individual presentations (20 minutes) or panel proposals for three speakers (90 minutes) to EACLALS2011@googlemail.com. Include your name, affiliation, email address and a brief biography (for attachments include your name as part of the file name). Add 5-6 key words and an indication of the most appropriate subtheme for your paper.
-------------

CALL FOR PAPERS: EACLALS TRIENNIAL CONFERENCE 2011

AT: Bogazici (Bosphorus) University, Istanbul, Turkey, from 26 to 30 April 2011

THEME: ‘Under Construction: Gateways and Walls’

This conference proposes to examine the state of postcolonial studies using the concepts of (re)building, transition and change, process and construction, in order to discuss the social and political crises and dilemmas of the contemporary moment which urgently need addressing.

The Gateway, the Wall: these conceptual figures suggest the practical and piecemeal yet also provisional nature of our discipline and scholarly explorations, and the way that knowledge may be constructed to function as both barrier and pathway to further modes of enquiry. Delegates might like to reflect on the current state of postcolonial theory, which is increasingly used alongside new models taken from migration studies or globalisation theory. This expansion offers a ‘gateway’ to new discourses and disciplines, but correspondingly traditional postcolonial frameworks are also inevitably in danger of losing their critical purchase. Questions to be posed might include: Can postcolonial studies act as ‘gateways’ to the understanding of the contemporary world by intersecting with other theoretical models? Or do postcolonial models act as ‘walls’ that block perspectives currently only available if used in conjunction with other discourses and disciplines? Can earlier postcolonial discourses still be confidently applied to current economic and political conditions (e.g. the rise of the BRIC countries, especially China and India)? What new challenges do postcolonial modes of thought face today (the Middle East, for instance, is one amongst other complex areas of inquiry)? Such questions can be explored either from a theoretical angle or through particular case studies in the fields of literature, language, cinema and visual arts.

The theme ‘Under Construction’ also reflects the conference location in Istanbul, a city of ‘border-zones’ that straddles East and West, Europe and Asia, but which historically has also been a gateway between North and South, between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, between ‘wild Scythia’ and the ‘civilised’ Roman Empire, between orthodox Russia and the Byzantine metropolis of Constantinople. It hints at the layered political status of Turkey, a complex multicultural nation which was once the centre of an empire and currently seeks a ‘gateway’ into a larger community of nations through entry into the European Union. Turkey also images the geopolitical shifts currently occurring due to globalisation, and suggests that remappings of older notions of how the world is divided up, such as empires, colonies, nation-states and regions, are now required. How adequate in the global/glocal third millennium are current conceptual frameworks constructed around terms like cosmopolitanism, the transnational and the transcultural? What new terms and frameworks can we use to address the provisionality of contemporary life: terrorism, global warming, migration, multilingualism, diasporic subjects and groups who lack a definitive homeland?

Subthemes offering pathways towards and around the theme of ‘Under Construction’, and images of gateways, walls and border-zones:

Interactions with the Orient as the ‘Other’
Revisiting Edward Said’s Orientalism and Eric Auerbach’s Mimesis
Worlding the Text and the Critic

Interdisciplinarity and Postcolonial Studies
The ‘post-postcolonial’ and the globalised world
Is world literature postcolonial?
Postcolonialism and transnationalism

Nation-states and Nationalisms
The nation’s gateways and walls
Global networks versus the nation-state?
Governmentality and its discontents
Global English and language choices
Geopolitics of East and West
Revisiting empires, colonies, and commonwealths
Dying and reviving states
China, the new empire

History and Memory
After Gallipoli: reconstructions and representations
National myths and identity
Trauma, mourning and memory

Postcolonial Aesthetics
To write life or not to write life
Is there a postcolonial genre?
Electronic gateways: the death of the book?

Bosphorus – Interfaces under Four Winds
North-South/East-West ambiguities and divergences
Myths of ‘wilderness’ and ‘civilisation’
Postcolonial romanticisms

Minority Subjects and Communities
Debating the ‘Other’ inside
Minority versus majority identitarian discourses

Ocean Flows and Networks
The Black Aegean, the African Mediterranean
Islands, archipelagos, and isthmuses
The sea as history

Postcolonial Migration and Cosmopolitanism
The neo-liberal subject and globalisation
Constructing utopias, the ‘shock of the new’
Where is the new cosmo/polis?
Diasporas, exile and migration as crossings

Ethics as Boundary and Marker
An environmental ethics under construction
Terrorism, the subject and globalisation
What is a postcolonial ethics?

Gender as Threshold and Border
Geographies of gender
Trans/gendering the subject
Globalising the queer

Abstracts: Deadline for abstracts is 31 May 2010.

Please submit abstracts of about 200 words for individual presentations (20 minutes) or panel proposals for three speakers (90 minutes) to "EACLALS2011@googlemail.com". Include your name, affiliation, email address and a brief biography (for attachments include your name as part of the file name). Add 5-6 key words and an indication of the most appropriate subtheme for your paper.

Delegates must be members of an ACLALS chapter. To renew your subscription to the US chapter, follow this link: http://www.usaclals.org

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CFP: DEADLINE APPROACHING! International Conference on Multiculturalism and Global Community, 24-27 July, Tehran, Iran

Submitted by adamore on Fri, 2010-04-02 23:29. Conferences

International Conference on Multiculturalism and Global Community, 24-27 July 2010, Tehran, Iran

The deadline for submission of abstracts is April 10th.

For more information please visit: http://www.icmgi.info/

For queries please contact: conference@mcgc.ir

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The 2010 Creative Writing Issue of the South Asian Review - "Pakistani Creative Writing in English: Tracing the Tradition"

Submitted by adamore on Thu, 2010-04-01 23:32.

The 2010 Creative Writing Issue of the South Asian Review 

"Pakistani Creative Writing in English:  Tracing the Tradition"



South Asian Review, the referred journal of the South Asian Literary Association, invites submissions for the 2010 Creative Writing Issue, Volume 31, Number 3.  The issue will foreground original creative writing in English in all genres by well-established and emerging Pakistani writers, with a focus on contemporary living writers, including those of the Pakistani Diaspora.  The overall goal of this issue is to trace the tradition of Pakistani creative writing in English that represents diversity through connectivity in terms of such themes and concerns as:  authorship, language and identity, dis/location, formal innovation, ethnic/national (un)belonging, sexual politics, desire and sexuality, gender and religion, intergenerational conflicts, the country and the city, and globalization.
All submissions must be received by July 31, 2010.  A completed manuscript prepared either in Microsoft Word in 12 point Helvetica or in Rich Text Format (RTF) and not exceeding 6,000 words should be transmitted electronically.  Manuscripts should be personally edited and polished before submitting.  The submission should be accompanied by:  (1) a statement that the work has not appeared elsewhere in parts or as a whole (or if it has, permission to reprint must accompany the submission); (2) a biographical note of about 50 words; and (3) a complete mailing address.  Manuscripts, in any form, will not be returned.
 
Please send inquiries and manuscripts to:


Dr. Fawzia Afzal-Khan and Dr. Waseem Anwar, Co-Guest Editors

Dr.Fawzia Afzal-Khan
Director, Women and Gender Studies
Room 121, Dickson Hall
Montclair State University
Upper Montclair, NJ  07043
USA
khanf@mail.montclair.edu

Dr. Waseem Anwar
Dean, Faculty of Humanities
Professor and Chairperson, Department of English
Forman Christian College (A Chartered University)
Ferozepur Road, Lahore 54600, Pakistan
miaaon@hotmail.com 

-----

The 2010 Regular Issue of SAR
South Asian Review, the refereed journal of the South Asian Literary Association, invites submissions for the 2010 issue, Volume 31, Number 2 (October/November). SAR  is a representative scholarly forum for the examination of South Asian languages and literatures in a broad cultural context. The journal invites healthy and constructive dialog on issues pertaining to South Asia, but the thrust of the dialog must be literature and the sister arts. The journal welcomes critical and analytical essays on any aspect or period of South Asian literature (ancient, precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial). SAR is open to all ideas, positions, and critical and theoretical approaches. Recognizing the linguistic and cultural diversity of the subcontinent, the journal particularly welcomes essays in intercultural, comparative, and interdisciplinary studies in the humanities. The journal is also interested in essays on music, painting, sculpture, architecture, and other related fields. The following areas are of special interest to the journal:

 South Asian Literatures                 Cultural Studies
 South Asian Languages     Colonial Studies
 South Asian Studies     Postcolonial Studies
 South Asian Culture    Comparative Literature
 South Asian Diaspora    Women’s Studies
 Comparative Aesthetic     Film Studies
 Literary Theory     Transcultural Studies


Critical articles of 15–25 pages, prepared in accordance with the MLA style and accompanied by an abstract of 8–10 lines and a biographical note, must be received by June 30, 2010. Articles can be sent by mail or transmitted electronically. All correspondence pertaining to the 2010 issue should be addressed to:

K. D. Verma, Editor, South Asian Review
Department of English

University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown

Johnstown, PA 15904

Phone: 814-269-7143

Fax: 814-269-7196

kverma@pitt.edu

Inquiries regarding book reviews should be addressed directly to:

Professor P. S. Chauhan

Department of English

Arcadia University

450 South Easton Road

Glenside, PA 19038-3295

Phone: 215-572-2106

chauhanp@arcadia.edu

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CFP: Local Knowledge - Global Translations, Bhasha and ACLALS, Vadodara, India, September 11-16, 2010

Submitted by adamore on Tue, 2010-03-02 02:50. Conferences

CHOTRO THREE
Local Knowledge - Global Translations

The Imagination & the Images of Indigenous Communities in the Twenty-First Century 

Bhasha Research and Publications Centre,
Vadodara, India in association with Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (ACLALS) announces a conference to be held from 11 to 16 September 2010
 at Delhi & Shimla

This conference, as the Bhili tribal term ‘chotro’ implies, aims to ‘bring toghether’ writers, artists and scholars from all over the world interested in languages, literatures, cultures, histories and movements of the indigenous peoples of the post-colonial world. Two Chotro Conferences were held in India in 2008 and 2009, respectively, and the conference being announced will be the third and the final conference in the series.

Chotro-Three will be held for the first two days, 11-12 September, at Delhi, which is the capital of India, and for the next two days, 13.14 at Shimla, which was the summer capital during the colonial era. A special Symposium on ‘The Indigenous and the Visual Culture’ will be held on the 16th September at Keylang, situated at an altitude of 12000 feet in the Himalayas. A number of eminent Indian writers, artists and media persons will address the conference.

The Bhasha Research and Publication Centre has since its inception worked specifically with and on behalf of the Adivasi or tribal people of India, recognized in India as janajatis, whose cultural expression remains little known both in India and abroad. Bhasha has undertaken to document the linguistic, literary and artistic heritge of these communities. It has collaborated with national academies of art and literature and research institutes to encourage research in culture studies. It has pioneered the publication of literary and educational materials in tribal languages and has set up the Adivasi Academy at Tejgadh (Gujarat) as an institute of formal education for the promotion of tribal languages, literature, arts and culture. In recent years, Bhasha has initiated setting up of another institution for Himalayan Studies under the name ‘Himlok: Institute of Himalayan Studies’.
Together with its co-sponsors, Bhasha now seeks to initiate discussion of the experience of indigenous people on a global scale and in a comparative, cross-cultural perspective. The proposed conference will provide an opportunity for an international exchange of ideas between indigenous people and those interested in their cultural expression, for there are indeed close parallels between, for example, the Aborigines of Australia, the First Nations of Canada and the Adivasis of India. It is hoped that the conference will explore the existence and the future of the knowledge traditions of the indigenous communities in the rapidly changing context of economies and expressions. It is hoped that in drawing attention to the cultural traditions and the response of indigenous people to their marginalization the world over, the conference will at the same time provide new orientation and inspiration for post-colonial studies.

Contributions are sought on the following topics:

Oral traditions; Orature /  indigenous world-views; knowledge systems/ storytelling; folk tales; poetry; drama and performance/ aesthetics / threatened languages / language death; language development / scripts/ subaltern history/ cultural and human rights/ publishing in aboriginal languages/ translation from aboriginal languages/ marginalization of aboriginal / tribal cultural expression/ imagery of the indigenous in theatre, cinema, media.

Bhasha would be happy to receive audio visual material, slides, photographs, calligraphy, handwritten and illustrated poetry, stories and samples of literature poetry, stories and samples of calligraphy by, for, and, on indigenous communities, in order to set up a display and an exhibition, as a backdrop to the proposed gathering, to enlarge its archive, and, to further fortify and spread awareness about the indigenous knowledge system and their modern transformations.
 

PRACTICAL ARRANGEMENTS
Registration: The registration form can be downloaded from
http://www.bhasharesearch.org.in or www.aclals.ulg.ac.be and
should be returned as an attachment by email to
Ganesh Devy (Bhasha) at ganesh.devy@gmail.com

Conference Fee: 

There will be several categories of conference fee:

A) For the participants who wish to participate in the conference for the first two days in Delhi, that is the 11-12 September:
Overseas participants from Australia, Western Europe and North America –
GBP 80/ EUR100 / USD 120
Participants from African and Eastern European Countries –
USD 60
Participants from India
INR 2000

B) For the participants who wish to participate in the conference for the first four days in Delhi and Shimla, that is from the 11th to the 14th September
Overseas participants from Australia, Western Europe and North America –
GBP 130/ EUR160 / USD 200
Participants from African and Eastern European Countries –
USD 100
Participants from India
INR 3500

C) For the participants who wish to participate in the Conference as well as the Special Symposium, from the 11th to the 16th September.
Overseas participants from Australia, Western Europe and North America –
GBP 180/ EUR200 / USD 250
Participants from African and Eastern European Countries –
USD 120
Participants from India
INR 5000
Registration fee will be accepted not before 1st April 2010, and not after 30 June 2010
There will be no further charge for accommodation, meals and local transport nor the transport for Delhi-Shimla-Keylang and Keylang-Shimla-Delhi / or Delhi-Shimla and Shimla-Delhi, as the case may be.
The organizers will not be able to provide travel support to Indian participants for their travel between their home-town and Delhi. Similarly, no travel support will be available to any overseas participants for the international travel.

Abstracts:

Abstracts of presentations in approximately 200 words should be sent by email before the 31st November 2009 to Professor Geoffrey V. Davis, University of Aachen, Germany. Abstracts should not be sent directly to Bhasha Research Centre, India.  
email Address: davis@anglistik.rwth-aachen.de
Acceptance of contributions:
Notification of acceptance of papers will be sent to the participants by Prof. Geoffrey Davis by 31st January 2010.

A formal letter of acceptance of paper will be sent by Prof. G. N. Devy, Bhasha Research and Publication Centre, India, by 15th February 2010 at the latest. A second letter confirming a scholar’s participation in the conference will be sent to the Indian Embassy/Consulate in the participant’s country on receiving the registration fee between April and June 2010.

Visa Requirements:

Foreign nationals requiring visas can download Indian visa forms from the website of the Indian embassy in their country of residence.

Publication:

One volume of the proceedings of the Chotro Conference- 2008 was published in January 2009 by Orient BlackSwan under the title Indigeneity: Culture and Representation, ed. G.N. Devy, Geoffrey V. Davis and K. K. Chakravarty. The second volume Ethnographies: Society and Interpretation will be published in early 2010 (Orient BlackSwan). The proceedings of the Chotro-2009 conference are getting ready for publication.

The organizers will be keen on having a selection of papers presented in Chotro-2010 published. The conference proceedings will be published jointly by Rodopi, Amsterdam & New York in their Cross/Cultures: Readings in the Post/Colonial Literatures in English series and by an Indian publisher.

Submission of finalized papers for publication: 

Participants interested in having their papers considered for publication will be expected to submit the final text by 10th December 2010 at the latest.

CHOTRO
Local Knowledge - Global Translations

The Imagination and Images of Indigenous Communities in the twenty-first Century
=======================================================================
Bhasha Research and Publications Centre,
Vadodara, India
in association with
the Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (ACLALS)
announces a conference to be held from 11 to 16 September 2010
at Delhi & Shimla
========================================================
REGISTRATION FORM

Name:
Institutional Affiliation:
Institutional Contact details ( Fax/ E-mail/ Telephone/ Address) :
Dates on which You wish to Participate:
11-12 September
11-14 September
11-16 September

Country Category:

Australia, western Europe, America, Africa, Eastern Europe, India

Title of Presentation:

Synopsis in approximately 200 words:

Special Medical Needs ( particularly for high altitude travel) :

Date on which Registration Form is submitted:

Additional person(s) accompanying you:

NOTE: Registration form containing the synopsis of your presentation is to be submitted through e-mail to Prof. Geoffrey V Davis, Aachen, at: davis@anglistik.rwth-aachen.de

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CFP: TEXTING OBAMA: politics/poetics/popular culture, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK September 7-10, 2010

Submitted by adamore on Wed, 2010-02-24 16:51. Conferences

Call for Papers

An Interdisciplinary Humanities and Social Sciences Conference

TEXTING OBAMA: politics/poetics/popular culture

7-10 September 2010
Manchester Metropolitan University, UK.

Hosted by English Research Institute, the MMU Writing School and
The Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences Research

Confirmed keynote speakers:
Simon Gikandi, David Theo Goldberg, Bonnie Greer, Ato Quayson.
Readings from Carol Ann Duffy, Jackie Kay and others

Barack Obama’s presidency is widely seen as the beginning of a new era, not only in world politics but also in global culture, with the present increasingly glossed as the ‘Age of Obama’. Our conference will ask what the terms of this naming might mean by addressing the diverse range of representational forms attached to Obama in contemporary world culture – as a person, icon and phenomenon. The conference will map and explore the specific historical, political and cultural climates in which Obama(’s) texts operate. It will interrogate the signifiers, signs and processes that circulate around Barack Obama, and explore his own contributions and interventions across diverse media.

Proposals are invited for papers or panels that engage with these diverse textualities. Questions might include: In what ways do Obama texts ‘travel’ and under what conditions? How might travelling theory or diaspora theory engage with Obama texts? In what ways might attention to Obama texts interrogate or develop extant or emerging frameworks at work in postcolonial, globalisation, media and cultural studies? How might a focus on transnational Obamas include or obscure local or national politics and expressions of black activism? How ought we to theorise pronouncements of a ‘post-racial’ America or/and a ‘post-Katrina’ America?

Possible streams might include: Postcolonial Obama: Kenya and Indonesia, Globalisation and Cosmopolitanism, Aloha Obama! Negotiating Hawaii, Obama and African-America, Rhetoric/Orature /Life writing, The Obama Families, Screening Obama, Obama and Hospitality, Black and Bi-Racial Masculinities, Race & Racial Politics, Obama in Europe, Publishing/Merchandising Obama, Ghosting Kennedy, Race and Fatherhood, Obama’s 100 days, Obama in the Academy, Law and Civil Rights, Black Activism, Obama’s Blackberry: New Technologies/Media and Race, Obama and Popular Culture: Watching The Wire, Obama and pedagogy.

Proposals should be emailed to textingobama@mmu.ac.uk by no later than 26 March 2010.

Organising Committee: Dr. Ellie Byrne, Dr. Julie Mullaney, Prof. Berthold Schoene, Department of English, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK.

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CFP: British Asian Culture in the Post-Millenium, University of Turin, 24-28 August, 2010

Submitted by adamore on Sat, 2009-11-07 17:26. Conferences

Call for Papers
10th Conference of the European Society for the Study of English / ESSE 10
24-28 August 2010
University of Turin, Italy

British Asian Culture in the Post-Millennium

Proceeding from the burgeoning interest in various aspects of South Asian cultures in Britain as well as their commodification since the late 1990s and acknowledging that Muslim British Asian identities have increasingly been seen as problematic in the aftermath of the Rushdie affair (1989) and in the post-9/11 and post-7/7 era, this seminar invites contributions that focus on critical negotiations with these processes in British Asian literature, film, music and the performing arts. The seminar particularly welcomes papers that engage with shifts of theoretical paradigms, from Stuart Hall’s “New Ethnicities” and Homi Bhabha’s “Third Space” that helped to shape the critical debate on British minority cultures in the 1990s to more recent conceptualisations of British Asian identity politics and inter- and intra-ethnic encounters and conflicts such as Avtar Brah’s ‘Diaspora Space’ and studies of South Asian popular culture, all of which may be tested against the challenges British Asian cultural productions both face in and pose to the post-millennium, globalized world.

Procedure for submitting proposals for papers:

Those wishing to participate in the Conference are invited to submit 200-word abstracts of their proposed papers directly to both convenors of the seminar before 31 January 2010:

Giovanna Buonanno (University of Modena and Reggio Emilia)
giovanna.buonanno@unimore.it

Christiane Schlote (University of Cambridge)
cs621@cam.ac.uk / schlote@ens.unibe.ch

The convenors will let the proponents know whether their proposals have been accepted no later than 28 February 2010.

Please note that authors of seminar papers will be expected to give an oral presentation of not more than 15 minutes duration, rather than simply reading their papers aloud. Reduced versions of the papers are circulated among all speakers in advance of the seminar.
Please don’t hesitate to contact us for more information. As this seminar is part of the ESSE 10 conference programme, we invite you to visit the ESSE website for more detailed information on ESSE and the Turin conference: www.unito.it/esse2010

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