The First International Conference of the Association for Literary Urban Studies

23–24 August 2017

University of Tampere, Finland 

In the wake of two successful international conferences under the auspices of the Helsinki Literature and the City Network, we are welcoming scholars interested in urban writing to the first international conference of the Association for Literary Urban Studies (ALUS), to be organized at the University of Tampere, Finland. 

This inaugural conference will be devoted to the theme of possible and impossible cities, the links between them, and the complex relationships between city imaginaries and real-world cities. This topic acknowledges the debt that literary cities owe to real-life city plans, and the similar debt that visions of urban development owe to the imaginary scenarios put forth in fictional narratives. The conference theme straddles a variety of fields, including literary urban studies, urban planning theory, cultural geography, and future studies. The two keynote speakers of the conference are Ayona Datta (King’s College London) and Eric Prieto (University of California, Santa Barbara). 

In the sense that cities are sites for envisioning the future, questions of possibility and potentiality have always been prominent in urban theory. In the last sixty years, such queries have often taken the form of re-imagined political geographies and approaches to what constitutes ‘the good city’, including Henri Lefebvre’s conceptions of the ‘right to the city’ and ‘the urban revolution’, David Harvey’s ‘spaces of hope’, and Jane Jacobs’s call for cities to build on their community assets. But utopian features in imaginations of the city (from Plato onwards), as well as fantastic elements in even the most realistic city literature (in Victor Hugo’s Paris, for example) have not only drawn attention to what life can learn from literature, they have also problematized the relationship between imagined cities and their real-life counterparts. 

In literary history, a long continuum of cities that stretch the limits of the possible runs through the work of writers from Thomas More, Alexander Pushkin, and Italo Calvino to contemporary speculative fiction, including twenty-first-century dystopias and urban climate fiction. Like Calvino’s no-longer-possible miniature versions of the city of Fedora, displayed in crystal globes in a section of Invisible Cities, some fictitious cities represent alternative futures conceivable at a specific moment in time. Other literary cities, such as the London of Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, are impossible from the outset but draw attention to everyday urban potentialities in ways that demand attention. Yet others would seem to represent something akin to real-life cities but cannot – due to their very identity as linguistic, imagined constructions – avoid engaging with the (im)possible. The examination of literary cities as impossible (imaginary, non-existent) or possible (future, alternative, desirable) thus also encourages reflections concerning the referentiality of literary cities. The conference ‘(Im)Possible Cities’ seeks new approaches to these intertwinings of possibility and impossibility in cities and texts. 

We invite papers on subjects including, but certainly not limited to, the following themes: 

• literary expressions of urban utopianism
• urban utopias and dystopias
• theories of (im)possibility and cities
• visionary thinking and literary cities
• ideal literary cities
• future studies and literary urban studies
• (im)possible cities and postcolonialism
• referentiality and the literary city
• city imaginaries and urban branding and/or urban planning
• readerly experiences of (im)possible cities
• enactivism and the literary city
• links between literature and the conceptual/imagined cities of architecture and film
• modernist and postmodernist cities
• literary cities and the surreal 

The deadline for paper proposals is 31 March 2017. Please submit proposals (approximately 300 words) via the online form at https://www.lyyti.in/impossiblecities2017_callforpapers. 

Further information will be posted on the conference website at www.uta.fi/conference/impossiblecities2017. 

The language of the conference will be English, but papers focusing on literature in any language in any part of the world are welcome. In addition to literary scholars, it is very much hoped that researchers from other disciplines will be interested in taking part. These could include, but would not be limited to, the following: cultural and historical geographers; urban sociologists, historians and planners; workers in visual studies, cultural studies and art and architecture studies. The conference will take place in Tampere back to back, and in collaboration, with another urban studies conference, Re-City 2017, with a focus on architecture and planning.

The first HLCN conference resulted in the collection of essays Literature and the Peripheral City (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), and a comparable volume premised on the theme of the second conference, literary second cities, is in preparation. For more on the previous two conferences, see http://blogs.helsinki.fi/hlc-n/conference/ and http://www.abo.fi/fakultet/hlcn2. The first ALUS conference ‘(Im)Possible Cities’ will continue to develop literary urban studies in a way that crosses borders and challenges traditional divisions within the academy. 

For more information contact:

Markku Salmela, University of Tampere (markku.salmela@uta.fi)

Lieven Ameel, University of Tampere (lieven.ameel@uta.fi)

Jason Finch, Åbo Akademi University (jfinch@abo.fi)

On September 14-16, 2017 the Western Lands & People Initiative at Montana State University in Bozeman, with the College of Letters & Science and the MSU Library, will host the symposium to celebrate the work of Ivan Doig and the acquisition of his papers by the university. The organizers invite proposals for papers and presentations that address the literature, history and geography of Montana and the West that Doig explored in his memoirs and fiction. Work need not directly address Doig’s writings, but should allow participants to enter into a broad discussion  of the connections between landscape and human experience, history and fiction, or what close observation and attention to place contribute to the various disciplines that engage us as scholars and as readers.

Further information can be found at http://ivandoig.montana.edu/symposium-2017/

CFP for a Special Issue of Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities

“Imagining Alternatives”

From Afrofuturism to dystopian, apocalyptic fiction to alternate history to ecofeminism and cli-fi, authors of speculative fictions have been interrogating alternative worlds in literature, film, television, comic books, and video games. These visions give us access to alien planets as well as alternative perspectives on our own pasts, presents, and possible futures. They reflect our hopes and fears; they offer new narratives of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nationality; they suggest the magic and the horror embedded in our own realities.

This special issue of Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities invites authors to interrogate imagined alternatives to existing systems of knowledge and distributions of power. We are interested in submissions engaging with a wide variety of subjects, genres, mediums, time periods, and national origins: from cyberpunk to steampunk, and from Gothic fiction to fan fiction. We also want to encourage authors to imagine alternative formats for their own work. In addition to traditional essays, we will also consider roundtables, interviews, photo essays, web comics, YouTube videos, Flash animations, web-based games, and other creative works.

To be considered for inclusion in the special issue, submit your work via the Resilience website (http://www.resiliencejournal.org/publishing-in-resilience/submission-form/) by June 1, 2017 for publication in the fall of 2017. Be certain to indicate in the abstract that you are submitting a piece for the “Imagining Alternatives” special issue.

Please direct any questions about the special issue to Megan Condis via email at megancondis.gmail.com or on Twitter @MeganCondis.

Proposals are invited for the thirty-eighth American Indian Workshop, to be held at Goldsmiths, University of London from July 4-6, 2017. Papers are welcome from all fields and on any topic, though priority will be given to those that speak to the conference’s key theme.

This year’s conference will focus on the art of resistance and resurgence in the broadest terms. This includes manifestations of activism, political insurgency, conservation work, language and cultural revitalization, cultural resurgence and historical and anthropological analysis alongside more literal literary and visual representations and occasions of resistance. Resistance, similarly, may be interpreted broadly (to settler colonialism, extra-national imposition, and so on) or more specifically (to pipelines, cultural appropriation, and more).

A number of analyses focusing on the cultural and political concerns of Native American artists have been offered in recent times. Accordingly, many scholars working in the field of Native American Literary Studies have become interested in the connection between aesthetics and activism. The theme of the thirty-eighth AIW has been chosen in recognition of this fact, and the increased amount of attention that is being paid to the intersection between indigenous arts and contemporary tribal contexts. Papers will examine the complexity of the relationship between various artistic mediums and the day-to-day concerns of the Native artist; the relationship between the arts and community; and the aesthetics of resistance and resurgence. We hope that speakers will examine those points of connection, continue the debate concerning the links between indigenous art and cultures, and suggest that resistance and resurgence are discernible within a broad range of work by indigenous writers, directors, musicians and artists.

Topics to consider may include:

Art and activism
The art of Idle No More
Visual and literary responses to NoDAPL (No Dakota Access Pipelines)
Language revitalization
Cultural conservation programmes
Visual sovereignty
Digital arts
Mixed media responses to mineral extraction
Literature and the art of rhetorical sovereignty
Indigenous performance art
Honoring the treaties
Gameplay and tribal arts and languages
Exhibiting indigenous art
Anticolonial/Decolonial art practices
Cultural engagement work
Visual cultures of protest
Indigenising new media
Graphic novels

We may be in a position to exhibit a small number of artworks and therefore invite submissions from visual artists and filmmakers as well as writers and scholars.

Please send proposals of no more than 400 words + brief CV to Padraig Kirwan (p.kirwan@gold.ac.uk) and David Stirrup (d.f.stirrup@kent.ac.uk) by December 15th 2016. Speakers will be notified by January 15th 2017.

University of Warwick, 19th May 2017

Confirmed Speaker: Warren Pleece, comic artist and graphic novelist (more to be announced)

Abstracts are invited for a one-day interdisciplinary conference at the University of Warwick, supported by the Department of History and the Humanities Research Centre. Hardboiled History seeks to bring together scholars interested in the ways contemporary media represents and reinterprets history, by exploring how and why “noir” resurfaces in depictions of America’s past across a variety of mediums.

Since the 1940s, when critics began to recognise Hollywood was producing a new “cycle” of films distinct in their visual style and cynical worldview, a wealth of scholarship has explored film noir as a genre (or “mood”, “phenomenon”), its ties to hardboiled literature, the industrial conditions that fostered it, and the tropes it codified. With their inherent darkness and existentialist explorations, the film noirs of this ‘classic’ period have come to be popularly understood as the productions that best explored and represented contemporary social anxieties in America around gender, race, wartime demobilisation, modernisation, and urbanisation.

Numerous successful films and television series continue to this day to be described according to their noir-like qualities. Yet, with noir novels, videogames, radio dramas, and graphic novels, noir needs to be conceptualised as a much wider phenomenon. This conference seeks to bring together scholars and practitioners interested in exploring the ways contemporary visual media and literature – in all its forms – continues to utilise, reshape or subvert preconceived notions of noir, often as a method for exploring and/or representing both the ‘classic’ noir period in America’s past, as well as more recent historical moments.

Proposals are welcomed from a variety of cross-disciplinary methodological perspectives. Papers can explore texts across mediums (e.g. film, television, videogames, graphic novels/literature, art, theatre, etc.). Industry practitioners or practice-based researchers who can offer reflections on these themes are actively welcomed. We also encourage papers that seek to challenge the delineation of noir – and its engagement with history – as a purely American phenomenon, offering international perspectives.

Please submit abstracts of around 250 words and a short biographical statement to hardboiled.history@warwick.ac.uk, by 16 January, 2017. Suggested themes include, but are not limited to:

• How noir codified its association with particular historical moments and worldviews
• How artists use “noir” to explore the past and/or challenge history
• Space and place; alternate settings; international perspectives
• Noir codes/conventions used in other forms/genres; new sub-genres
• Character archetypes (subversions to or recreations of)
• Technical or production perspectives
• Notable actors/directors/writers/artists
• Reception/audience/fan studies

www.hardboiledhistory.wordpress.com
#HardboiledHistory

Esther Wright and Hannah Graves
Department of History
University of Warwick