EXTENDED CALL FOR PAPERS

Pocahontas and After:

historical culture and transatlantic encounters, 1617-2017

 

The British Library and the Institute of Historical Research, London

March 16-18, 2017

 

A major international interdisciplinary conference to commemorate the 400^th anniversary of Pocahontas’ death.

 

In 2017 the Anglo-American world will mark the 400th anniversary of the death of Pocahontas.  Her story has been romanticised at many points over the centuries, and multiple representations of Pocahontas (as Noble Savage, Mother of a Nation, propaganda icon, seductive temptress) have materialised in historical accounts, in literature, and in visual, and material culture, and performance art.  From a range of historical and literary perspectives, and for a variety of social and political purposes, Pocahontas has left an enduring legacy among Indigenous, local, national, and international communities.

 

This conference will explore the continued interest in Pocahontas as a subject of study.  It will examine the academic challenges posed by the multiple versions and the contemporary appropriations of this Powhatan/Pamunkey woman variously known as Amonute, Matoaka, Pocahontas, and Rebecca.  In exploring the life and afterlives of Pocahontas, it aims to open new interdisciplinary discussions.

 

Papers are thus welcomed from all disciplinary perspectives, including (but not limited to) literary studies; film and media studies; cultural studies; gender and indigenous studies; art history; transatlantic and early modern studies; and particularly, from Native American perspectives.  Comparative work is also encouraged, as are contributions from early career researchers.  We additionally encourage contributions that shed new light on the British Library and the Institute of Historical Research’s collections related to Pocahontas.

 

Suggested themes include:

• Indigenous feminism
• Pocahontas’ literary afterlife
• Pocahontas on film
• Pocahontas and political resistance
• Pocahontas in material culture
• The commodification of Pocahontas
• Comparative approaches to Pocahontas (eg. La Malinche)
• Pocahontas and Bloomsbury
• Teaching Pocahontas, and Pocahontas as subject of academic enquiry.

 

Confirmed plenary speakers:

Professor Mishuana Goeman (UCLA)

Professor Karen Kupperman (NYU)

Professor Camilla Townsend (Rutgers)

Dr Karenne Wood (Virginia Indian Heritage Programme)

 

The Satuday 18^th will host a range of cultural activities, including:

• A special session: ‘Historic Jamestown and new perspectives on Pocahontas’ with Jim Horn and Bill Kelso.
• A panel debate on the iconography of Pocahontas and its relationship to contemporary indigenous women’s political and social issues. Confirmed speakers: Joanne Prince of Rainmaker Gallery, Bristol; Shelley Niro, Mohawk film-maker and artist; Dr Max Carocci, Chelsea College of Art; Dr David Stirrup, Reader in Indigenous and Settler Literatures of the Americas at the University of Kent; and Dr Buck Woodard, Colonial Williamsburg, American Indian Initiative.
• Screening of Reel Injun and Indigenous London with director Q&A’s
• A musical performance by singer-songwriter ElizaBeth Hill

 

250-word abstracts together with a short biography should be submitted to eccles-centre@bl.uk (please include subject line: Pocahontas and After conference) by Midnight (GMT) Wednesday 14^th December.  We aim to offer a number of bursaries for postgraduates and early career researchers to offset costs.

 

Deadline for submissions: December 19, 2016

Full name / name of organization: Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE)
Contact email: info@asle.org
Deadline for Sumbission Extended to December 19, 2016

Rust/Resistance: Works of Recovery

Call for Papers, Association for the Study of Literature and Environment
(ASLE) Twelfth Biennial Conference
June 20 – 24, 2017

Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan

http://asle2017.clas.wayne.edu

In Rust: The Longest War, Jonathan Waldman claims that, for those who “yield to rust, find beauty in rust, capitalize on rust, raise awareness of rust, and teach about rust, work is riddled with scams, lawsuits, turf battles, and unwelcome oversight. Explosions, collisions, arrests, threats, and insults abound.” Rust is the underside of cosmopolis. Rust belts follow industry and its corrosions; the parasitic Rust fungi are enemies of agriculture. And yet there is an irenic side to rust: it inspires contemplation, the search for beauty, and the effort to defend what is threatened. As an agent of time, rust sponsors stories of collapse-and-recovery, evolution-and-extinction, but it also questions them. Narratives of progress that see rust as the enemy are not universal. In Japanese aesthetics, for instance, sabi is the beauty of natural aging and aged materials; what is new is not as lovely as what has weathered. In a time obsessed by environmental apocalypse, rust may reveal other trajectories for cultures of recovery. Resurget Cineribus, “It Will Rise from the Ashes,” is the motto of Detroit—our host city.

Long associated with steel, car culture, and the music of Motown, Detroit is also a site of struggle for racial and environmental justice, against depopulation and “ruin porn,” and for the preservation of artistic heritage. A nexus of encounters between indigenous nations and the French fur trade, it became a locus of the Great Migration, “white flight,” and gentrification. Water-rich on the strait between Lake Huron and Lake Erie, Detroit and its neighbors struggle against corroded infrastructure and government corruption. For all those reasons, Detroit is an ideal place to confer about rust, resistance, and recovery. We invite participants to interpret the conference theme as broadly as possible and to imagine their work in terms of content and form. We particularly encourage non-traditional modes of presentation, including hybrid, performative and collaborative works; panels that minimize formal presentation in favor of engaged emergent discussion; interdisciplinary approaches; environmentally inflected readings of fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, film, theatre and other media; and proposals from outside the academic humanities, including submissions from artists, writers, teachers, practitioners, activists and colleagues in the social and natural sciences. Topics may include, but are certainly not limited to:

The literatures, arts, and cultures of the Rust Belt, the Great Lakes, and Appalachia.
Transnational rust
Elemental rust
Labor and rust
Aeons of rust
The arts and sciences of resistance
Methods of resistance
Genres of resistance
Recovering ecological citizenship
Recovering lost lands
Recovering past and future

Keynote Speakers/Panelists:

Our list of keynote speakers includes scholars, activists and writers working on/in different forms of resistance and recovery: humor and the new American nature writing; the Transcendentalist and Humboldtian lineages in the environmental humanities; poetry and urban gardening; indigenous rights, climate fiction, and climate change; the history of slavery and the Detroit River; and cultural sustainability through the Digital Humanities. Confirmed speakers include Michael Branch, Ross Gay, Tiya Miles, Siobhan Senier, Laura Dassow Walls, and Kyle Powys Whyte.

Panel and Paper Submission:

For additional information and to submit a pre-formed panel or individual presentation, please visit the conference website at http://asle2017.clas.wayne.edu. All conference sessions will be 90-minutes long. ASLE strongly encourages presenters to create pre-formed panels and to experiment with alternative forms of presentation, discussion and engagement. Both scholarly and creative submissions are welcome. We expect to receive more proposals than we can accommodate; therefore, not all proposals will be accepted. Proposals for fully constituted panels will be given priority over individual paper proposals; please note that there are separate tabs for panel proposal submission and individual paper submission on the submissions website.

Only one proposal submission is allowed per person; participants can present only once during the conference (pre-conference seminars/workshops and chairing a panel not included).
Proposals must be submitted online at https://asle.submittable.com/submit; in cases in which this requirement poses a significant difficulty, please contact Christoph Irmscher and Anthony Lioi, as above.
ASLE policy is currently to discourage virtual participation at our biennial conferences except in extraordinary circumstances.
Deadline Extended: All proposals must be submitted by December 19, 2016.

We will evaluate your proposal carefully and notify you of its final status by February 15, 2017. If you are a panel organizer and would like a panel CFP posted to the ASLE website, or if you are an individual interested in submitting to a panel call for papers, please use our Panel Call for Papers page: http://www.asle.org/panel-calls-for-papers/.

Note: you must be or become a member of ASLE by the time of registration to present at the conference. Join or check your membership status at http://www.asle.org/. For questions, please contact 2017 ASLE Presidents Christoph Irmscher and Anthony Lioi at asle2017@indiana.edu.

Conference Events and Activities:

Banquet and dance at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History
Special panel on water + activism in Detroit
Field trip options, including the Underground Railroad Living Museum, Arab American National Museum, an urban garden tour, cycling, running, and volunteering for a local group
Progressive evening in Midtown Detroit, including a radical poetry reading at Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD)
Special movie screening of Watermark at the Detroit Film Theater in the Detroit Institute of Arts

Deadline for submissions: January 30, 2017

Full name / name of organization: Tel Aviv University
Contact email: meyravko@post.tau.ac.il
REMINDER: Jewish-American Fiction and Magical Realism: Narrative Strategies

The editors are seeking contributors for a volume focused on narratological analysis of the magical realism genre in Jewish-American fiction.

Magical Realism – a mode of narration in which the fantastic is organically presented within the fabric of a realistic settings – has long been used in literature to explore issues of a mutable and conflicting nature. Consequently, Jewish-American magical realism was pioneered in the early stages of the 20th century by authors such as Bernard Malamud and Isaac Bashevis Singer, who depicted the possible conflict between ancient Jewish tradition and the American consumer culture. The tension between these two inherently different traditions has risen again, and is aptly depicted by an increasing number of young Jewish-American writers who often interject postmodern sensitivity into their narratives in the form of magical realism. These postmodern tendencies are evident in such narratological ploys as the unreliability of the narrator, the subversion of time and space and the creation of gaps in the text. In fact, contemporary Jewish-American magical realism often involves an intentional attempt to create a subversive reading experience as structural indication of the chasm evoked by the hyphenated identity. In the search to represent a sense of a split self, these authors often resort to the reconfiguration of the temporal-spatial axis of the narrative (displaced objects or subjects that reappear in different places and or times), the subversion of the narrative voice (dead or unreliable narrators) and the collapse of the continuity of the narrative (gaps in the sequence of events). The proposals, for chapters of approximately 6000 words (MLA Style), should focus on the topic of Jewish-American identity through narrative analysis of magical realism in short stories, novels, graphic novels and plays/drama.

We are particularly interested in chapters that engage the following authors, and we strongly encourage comparative essays based on several works by the same author:

Isaac Bashevis Singer
Bernard Malamud
Cynthia Ozick (The Messiah of Stockholm, The Puttermesser Papers)
Avram Davidson
Nicole Krauss (The History of Love, Great House)
Dara Horn (In the Image, The World to Come)
Alice Hoffman (The Museum of Extraordinary Things, Incantation)
Michael Chabon (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay)
Jonathan Safran-Foer (Everything Is Illuminated)
Steve Stern (“The Tale of a Kite”, “Bruno’s Metamorphosis”, The Frozen Rabbi)
Joseph Skibell (A Blessing on the Moon)
Ben Marcus (The Flame Alphabet)
Mayla Goldberg (Bee Season)
Nathan Englander (“The Gilgul of Park Avenue”)
Art Spiegelman (Maus)
Tony Kushner (Angels in America)
The editors are pursuing a tier 1 academic publication venue. The selection process will therefore be a two-stage review process – an invitation to submit an essay based on your proposal and a final selection of chapters once the completed essays have been submitted.

THE DEADLINE FOR PROPOSALS IS 30 JANUARY 2017, WITH DELIVERY OF COMPLETED ESSAYS BY 31 AUGUST 2017.

Please send the following by 30th January 2017:

A detailed 500-1000 words proposal for an original contribution (adding a preliminary outline to your proposal would be an advantage)
A 100 word bio (including selected publications)
Notifications will be sent to potential contributors by 28th February 2017

Please e-mail both editors:

Inbar Kaminsky, Ph.D. Tel Aviv University: inbar.kaminsky@gmail.com

Meyrav Koren-Kuik, Tel Aviv University: meyravko@post.tau.ac.il

Deadline for submissions: January 16, 2017
Full name / name of organization: Jacqueline Foertsch / U North Texas
Contact email: foertsch@unt.edu

Postwar Geographies: Discussions of literature, 1945-1975, wherein mapping, locating, traveling, place-making, or turf-marking has a significant role: the Iron Curtain, the color line, “the women’s room(s),” Model Cities, etc. Abstracts to foertsch@unt.edu by 16 January 2017.

Deadline for submissions: January 16, 2017

Full name / name of organization: Jacqueline Foertsch / U North Texas
Contact email: foertsch@unt.edu
Postwar Iconicities: Discussions of literature, 1945-1975, treating iconic persons or milestone events historical or fictionalized. Postwar literature regarding fame, celebrity, infamous crime or court cases, quintessential Americanness. Abstracts to foertsch@unt.edu by 16 January 2017.

Deadline for submissions: January 15, 2017
Full name / name of organization: Christine Danelski / Cinema Television Literature Association
Contact email: Christine.Danelski4@calstatela.edu
The Cinema Televison Literature Society welcomes proposals for two panels to be held at the 2017 ALA Conference in Boston, May 25-28, 2017.

The first panel, “Recent Critical Work on Film and Television Adaptations of Literary Narratives” seeks four presentations based on American literary works adapted for feature film or long format episodic series.

The second panel “Film and Literary Texts” seeks four presentations on the use of literary texts in feature films or long format episodic series or the use of film or long format episodic series in literary works.

Proposals (for presentations no longer than twenty minutes) should include the title of the panel, the title of your presentation, your name and affiliation, and a 200-400 word abstract. Send submissions for both panels to Christine Danelski at Christine.Danelski4@calstatela.edu by January 15, 2017.

Deadline for submissions: November 30, 2017
Full name / name of organization: Frontiers of Narrative Studies (De Gruyter)
Contact email: biwushang@sjtu.edu.cn
Call for Special Issue Proposals

The journal Frontiers of Narrative Studies (De Gruyter) is seeking proposals for special issues on subjects including but not limited to:

Transnational narrative

Postcolonial narrative

Fictional and factual narrative

Cosmopolitanism and narrative theory

Classical narratology revisited

A peer-reviewed journal of international scope, Frontiers of Narrative Studies under the auspice of De Gruyter features articles reporting results of research in all branches of narrative studies, in-depth reviews of selected current literature in the field, and occasional guest editorials and reports. Its broad range of scholarship includes narratives across a variety of media, including literary writing, film and television, journalism, and graphic narratives. It welcomes theoretically sophisticated essays that examine narratives of all kinds from a host of critical, interdisciplinary, or cross-cultural perspectives. Particular emphasis is placed upon state-of-the-art research in the field of interdisciplinary narrative inquiries. The journal publishes original articles, interviews as well as book reviews. Every year, there will be a special issue devoted to topics of particular interest.

We accept special issue proposals year-round. The specific volume and issue will be determined later, depending on the editors’ schedule.

Prospective guest-editors should submit current CVs and researched proposals of approximately 500 words describing the argument and rationale behind the special issue. If the guest-editor(s) decide to solicit contributions prior to the submission of the proposal, abstracts of articles and biographies of authors should be included with the proposal.

Proposals and supporting materials should be sent to the Editor at biwushang@sjtu.edu.cn as Word or PDF attachments. The subject line of the email should read “Special Issue Proposal.”

If a proposal is accepted, the guest-editor(s) will be responsible for soliciting contributions, appointing outside reviewers, and establishing submission deadlines.

Please note that our typical issue is 200 print pages. We strongly recommend that a special issue include 2 book reviews related to the topic, in addition to articles.

The journal follows the style of Mouton de Gruyter journal, which is available upon request.

We look forward to hearing from you.

Warm regards

Shang Biwu

Editor, Frontiers of Narrative Studies.

Deadline for submissions: January 20, 2017
Full name / name of organization: Historical Society of Palm Beach County
Contact email: Rgualtieri@hspbc.org
The Historical Society of Palm Beach County invites you to submit your articles for the upcoming 2017 Tustenegee issue. Attached you will find the flyer with additional information. Please distribute this flyer to organizations and colleagues that would be interested in submitting an abstract. Thank you.

Please sumbit abstracts in PDF format by email to rgualtieri@hspbc.org and provide author’s full name, and contact information. Abstracts are due by January 20, 2017. Once the abstract has been reviewed, the author(s) will be notified by email whether it has been accepted for publication. Additional information can be found at www.pbchistoryonline.org/page/history-online-journal.

Deadline for submissions: January 13, 2017

Full name / name of organization: American Literature Association
Contact email: nmerola@risd.edu
The Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE) seeks proposals for the panel “Speculative Fictions and Socio-Ecologies of the Americas” to be held at the Annual Conference of the American Literature Association in Boston, Massachusetts on 25-28 May 2017.

This panel seeks submissions that examine the ways in which North American, Caribbean, Central American, and South American authors have used the conventions and techniques of speculative fiction (including science fiction and magical realism) to represent and respond to socio-ecological circumstances, events, and issues.

By 13 January 2017, please send 300-500 word abstracts and one-page CVs to Nicole Merola at nmerola@risd.edu. Please include your contact information, academic affiliation, and any A/V requests.

This ALA panel is sponsored by ASLE. While you do not need to be a member of ASLE to submit a proposed abstract for an ALA panel, presenters must be or become ASLE members before the ALA conference in order to participate in an ASLE-sponsored panel.