Calling for proposals for a new monograph series with Edinburgh University Press:

Modern American Literature and the New Twentieth Century

Series Editors: Martin Halliwell (University of Leicester) and Mark Whalan (University of Oregon)

EUP Commissioning Editor for Literary Studies: Michelle Houston

The concept of ‘newness’ was central to early modernist attempts to differentiate their writing from literary predecessors of the nineteenth century. Often incorporated into manifestoes and slogans, newness was not just a major aspect of modernist fiction, poetry and drama, but runs through American literature of the twentieth century. Focusing on perspectives that help to better understand the shifting aesthetic, historical, geographical and ideological values of the terms ‘new’ and ‘modern’, this series takes a revisionist approach to twentieth-century literary production in the United States. Its focus on technique looks both inwards to the craft and form of writing, and outwards to interdisciplinary approaches to literary production within a matrix of cultural practices. The editors welcome proposals for theoretically innovative and historically revisionist monographs that illuminate change and continuity within literary practice and that interrogate received literary-critical categories. This series of quality monographs critically questions boundaries and concepts that have come to define the production, reception and appropriation of modern American literature.

Current contracted titles:

Writing Nature in Cold War American Literature
Sarah Daw

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Short Fiction and American Popular Culture: From Ragtime to Swing Time
Jade Broughton Adams

The Big Red Little Magazine: New Masses: 1926-1948
Susan Currell

The Literature of Suburban Change in Late Twentieth-Century America
Martin Dines

US Modernism at Continents End: Carmel, Provincetown, Taos
Geneva Gano

The Reproductive Politics of American Literature and Film, 1959-1973
Sophie Jones

Ordinary Pursuits in American Writing after Modernism
Rachel Malkin

Sensing Willa Cather: The Writer and the Body in Transition
Guy Reynolds

The Plastic Theatre of Tennessee Williams: Expressionist Drama and the Visual Arts
Henry I. Schvey

The Labour of Laziness in Twentieth Century American Literature
Zuzanna Ladyga

Contact Details:

Michelle Houston: Michelle.Houston@eup.ed.ac.uk

Martin Halliwell: mrh17@leicester.ac.uk

Mark Whalan: whalan@uoregon.edu

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/.

Iperstoria, Monographic Section, Spring/Summer 2018, edited by Serena Fusco (University of Naples “L’Orientale”, sfusco@unior.it) and Mauro Pala (University of Cagliari, pala@unica.it)

Concezioni americane della fotografia / Concezioni fotografiche dell’America

Iperstoria, Sezione Monografica, Spring/Summer 2018, a cura di Serena Fusco (Università degli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale”, sfusco@unior.it) e Mauro Pala (Università degli Studi di Cagliari, pala@unica.it)

Iperstoria is a multilingual, international, blind peer-reviewed biannual journal (ISSN 2281-4582) with a focus on English and American Studies.

www.iperstoria.it

CALL FOR PAPERS

The history of the relationship between “America” and photography is one of mutual reference and construction. From Poe and Hawthorne’s interest for the new medium in its stylistic as well as social, even political implications, to Henry James’s photography-informed speculations on the flattening, almost indistinct quality of the (democratic) American scene when contrasted with the European one, to Susan Sontag’s definition of America as the “quintessential Surrealist” and hence most “photographic” country – the way we perceive and define “America” has been substantially informed not only by photographs themselves, but also by what we consider – while the medium inevitably undergoes technical transformations, and photographic style and products change over time – as intrinsically or quintessentially photographic. The obverse of this statement is also valid: the history of photography is informed by “America”, to the extent that conceptual items and material practices often associated with “America”– such as, for instance, the idea of a democratic vision and encompassing representativeness – have also influenced the way we conceive of photography.

We invite contributions on how photography – in/by itself or (re)mediated by other codes and media such as literature, cinema, comics, and more – accompanies or creates various ways of conceiving of “America”; and/or on how the way we regard photography is (paraphrasing Bourdieu while turning him on his head) validated by “American” categories. Within this framework, “America” oscillates between a real entity (which can be captured by the camera) and a floating signifier (orienting the camera in its relationship to its referents).

Related (sub)topics may include, while not being limited to:

America and the history of photography

American literature and photography

Photo-informed representations of America in other literatures / cultures

Photography, modernism, and postmodernism

Photography, reality, and realism

Photography, class, and democracy

Photography and cultural identity

Intermediality and photography

Deadline for proposals to editors (title and abstract, max. 250 words, accompanied by a short author biographical note): February 15, 2018

Notification of acceptance: February 20, 2018

Essay due to editors: April 5, 2018

Submitted essays will undergo a peer-review process.

Contributions (max. 35.000 characters, spaces included) can be in English or Italian. Please refer to the Iperstoria website for stylesheet: http://www.iperstoria.it/joomla/contributi.

La storia del legame tra l'”America” e la fotografia è fatta di influenze e riferimenti reciproci. Si va dall’interesse di Poe e Hawthorne per il nuovo medium, con le sue implicazioni stilistiche, sociali e persino politiche; alle riflessioni di Henry James, influenzate dalla fotografia, sulla qualità piatta, quasi indistinta, della scena americana (democratica) in contrasto con quella Europea; alla definizione di Susan Sontag dell’America come il paese “surrealista per antonomasia”, e quindi il più fotografico. In sintesi, il modo in cui percepiamo e definiamo l'”America” è ed è stato considerevolmente plasmato non solo dalle immagini fotografiche vere e proprie, ma anche da ciò che consideriamo come intrinsecamente o tipicamente fotografico, mentre in parallelo la tecnologia si evolve e lo stile e dei diversi prodotti fotografici inevitabilmente si trasforma. Specularmente, si può osservare che la storia della fotografia è a sua volta plasmata dall'”America”, nella misura in cui sia concetti che pratiche materiali spesso associati all'”America” – ad esempio, l’idea di una visione democratica e di una vasta rappresentatività – hanno a loro volta influenzato il modo in cui concepiamo la fotografia.

All’interno di questo quadro, sollecitiamo contributi su: da un lato, il modo in cui la fotografia – in sé e per sé, oppure (ri)mediata da altri codici quali la letteratura, il cinema, il fumetto, o altro – accompagna e/o crea diversi modi di concettualizzare l'”America”; dall’altro, il modo in cui la teoria e la pratica fotografica sono (parafrasando e allo stesso tempo rovesciando Bourdieu) a loro volta validate da “categorie” americane. In questa cornice, l'”America” oscilla tra entità reale, che può essere catturata dall’apparecchio fotografico, e significante fluido che orienta il rapporto tra l’apparecchio fotografico e i suoi referenti.

Qui di seguito una lista di possibili (sotto)tematiche (da non intendersi in senso esclusivo):

America e storia della fotografia

Letteratura americana e fotografia

Rappresentazioni, influenzate dalla fotografia, dell’America in altre letterature / culture

Fotografia, modernismo e postmodernismo

Fotografia, realtà e realismo

Fotografia, classe sociale e democrazia

Fotografia e identità culturale

Fotografia e intermedialità

Scadenza per l’invio della proposta ai curatori (titolo dell’intervento e abstract, max. 250 parole, accompagnati da una breve nota biografica dell’autrice/autore): 15 febbraio 2018

Notifica di accettazione: 20 febbraio 2018

Scadenza per l’invio del saggio ai curatori: 5 aprile 2018

I saggi inviati saranno sottoposti a peer-review.

I contributi (max. 35.000 caratteri, spazi inclusi) possono essere in inglese oppure in italiano. Lo stylesheet è reperibile sul sito di Iperstoria: http://www.iperstoria.it/joomla/contributi.

Deadline for submissions: April 30, 2018
Full name/name of organization: RSA Journal
Contact email: mariagiovanna.fusco@univaq.it

RSA Journal, the journal of the Italian Association for North American Studies (AISNA), invites submissions for its 2018 issue on “Post-racial America Exploded: #BlackLivesMatter Between Social Activism, Academic Discourse, and Cultural Representation.”

Barack Obama’s first election was hailed by many as signaling the advent of post-racial United States. By the end of his second term, however, the issue of race had come back with a vengeance at the center of both public debate and social interaction. The election of Donald J. Trump amid his open flirtations with alt-right groups and the KKK marked a backlash against the symbolic import of Obama’s presidency, and further proved how social injustice, color-based discrimination, and violence still powerfully shape black life in the U.S.

Despite Obama’s call during the first campaign for “a more perfect union” to heal the wounds caused by racism to the nation, his presidency worked as a catalyst for racial tensions, with vociferous sections of white America questioning his legitimacy both as an American and as a representative of the nation, doubting his wife’s and his own loyalty to the country, and leveling charges of bias and incompetence against his acts. These attacks against the commander-in-chief, as unprecedented as openly racist, disproved the earlier celebrations of American postraciality, and highlighted how far race is from being an obsolete category to be dismissed as genetically inconsistent and visually flimsy. Indeed race has lately (re)emerged as a powerful and crucial tool of inquiry in a number of critical approaches which investigate our present as the “afterlife of slavery” (Saidiya Hartman) and claim the historical and ontological specificity of anti-blackness as a matrix of all forms of racism. While images of black, mostly young citizens killed at the hands of policemen and vigilantes inundate the social media on a daily basis, showing that black bodies are as vulnerable today as they were under plantation slavery, the progressive, redemptive narrative of American racial history that seemed legitimated by the election of a black president has been exposed as at best untenable. The daily spectacle of the expendability of black bodies has led to a new political visibility of the black community in the urban space.

Among the most powerful responses to this new cultural climate is the emergence of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, a grassroots effort fostered by the use of social media that ambitiously brings together community organizing strategies, justice reform campaigns, academiainformed discourses on gender and race, and aims at spreading its impact well beyond the geopolitical borders of the U.S., understanding both blackness and social injustice as transnational phenomena to be fought in solidarity among people of color. In the four years since its founding, the movement has called attention to the alarming number of black victims of police brutality as the result not merely of racial profiling, but of the unwritten, often unacknowledged, but still powerfully operating rules of systemic white privilege, and made the latter the ultimate target of its campaigns and wider action. Marked by horizontal, group-based forms of leadership that foreground the voices of long-marginalized identities (women and queers of color especially), the #BlackLivesMatter has predictably triggered controversial responses, from being awarded the Sydney Peace Prize in 2017 to being listed as “Black identity extremists” by the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division in the same year, quickly becoming a major actor in the current debate about race (and gender) within and outside the American academia and politics.

The present issue of RSA seeks contributions that explore the movement, its complexity and fluidity, from different perspectives and across a range of disciplines. Topics may include but are not limited to:

• BLM and antiblackness/Afro-pessimism

• BLM and global Black activism

• BLM and the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement

• BLM and the media

• BLM and/in pop culture

• The visuality of BLM activism

• BLM and African American literature

• Fiction, poetry, music addressing the BLM movement

• BLM and gender theory

Submissions and a short cv should be sent by April 30, 2018 to the editors, Gianna Fusco (mariagiovanna.fusco@univaq.it) and Anna Scacchi (ascacchi@alfanet.it).

Acceptance will be emailed by May 15, 2018.

Deadline for submissions: January 29, 2018
Full name/name of organization: American Studies Association (ASA, November 8-11, 2018)
Contact email: alex.moskowitz@bc.edu

ASA Annual Meeting 2018

November 8-11, 2018 – Atlanta, Georgia

Fredrick Jackson Turner’s proclaiming the frontier closed in 1893 precipitated an emergency for the foundations of American ideology. According to Turner, the loss of the frontier would amount to the loss of the myth that could sustain a nation—it would be the loss of the vital force that sustains democracy and the individualism that underpins the American national identity. Of course, for Turner, the closing of the frontier was dependent on the frontier as a geographical space that finds its end at the shores of the Pacific. But, as the American frontier has since moved past the coasts of North America and far beyond the borders of the nation, in this panel we are interested in how the idea of a clear-cut frontier has been problematic from the beginning. This panel, then, seeks to investigate the perennial ideology of the frontier in American culture, politics, and economics.

While the frontier seemed to depend on a physical western border, we want to investigate other ways in which the frontier has figured as central element in the creation and sustaining of American ideology. How might, for example, the frontier be tied up with capitalist expansion, both abroad and within its own borders in the rise of the city? Given recent emphasis on hemispheric studies and the transnational turn, can we now begin to talk of something like an Eastern or Atlantic frontier, across which flows wealth, immigrants, and slaves? How might have the frontier – as a borderland and cultural contact zone – been central to conceptions of American cosmopolitanism and nationalism? How might this frontier ethos have problematized U.S. racial politics? To answer these and other questions related to the persistent influence of the frontier in American culture, this panel seeks papers that investigates these issues in literature, political and cultural history, environmental history, art, and architecture throughout American history.

Please submit 300 word abstracts for a traditional 20-25 minute presentation and a brief bio including institutional affiliation, position, and academic interests by January 29th, 2018 to Alex Moskowitz (alex.moskowitz@bc.edu) and Megan LeBarron (mjleb@bu.edu).