Deadline for submissions: August 1, 2017
Full name/name of organization: Donavan Ramon, Kentucky State University
Contact email: donavanramon@gmail.com
Nella Larsen’s Passing at Ninety

Guest Editor: Donavan L. Ramon, PhD

Assistant Professor of Liberal Studies, Kentucky State University

When Nella Larsen published her second novel Passing in April 1929, the critical reception was mixed. Writing for local papers in New York, some critics found the novel’s conclusion abrupt, ambiguous, and unconvincing. However, Alice Dunbar-Nelson noted that the novel “delights,” while W.E.B. DuBois praised it as a novel “of great moral import.” In his review, DuBois hoped that Passing would one day emerge as a “a petty, silly matter of no real importance which another generation will comprehend with great difficulty.”

In the ninety years since the publication of Larsen’s most famous work, Passing is still of “importance” – both as a concept and as a novel. The term “passing” is now used to categorize anyone who jumps social boundaries, which proves that those boundaries were not as rigid as they originally appeared to be. For instance, many critics derided Rachel Dolezal over her claim to be a black woman even though she was born white. Moreover, Colson Whitehead employed this concept in The Underground Railroad, his critically acclaimed novel from 2016. The main characters pass as free during their extended escape from enslavement. Perhaps it is only fitting that “passing” now has a more expansive definition; Nella Larsen’s Passing is not just about race, since the main characters also pass via class and sexuality. As a result, Passing has influenced a variety of scholarly areas since its first publication; most notably, queer theorist Judith Butler referenced it in her examination of intersectionality.

This special edition of SAMLA’s Journal – South Atlantic Review – will commemorate the ninetieth anniversary of Larsen’s Passing by examining the influence it has had over a variety of areas, including American Literature, African American Literature, pop culture, and queer theory. Moreover, it will examine the relevance of the novel today, in light of a post-Obama America. Potential topics can include (but not limited to):

• How has Passing influenced the ways in which we discuss the phenomenon of “passing?”
• How has Passing influenced global literary traditions (I.E. World literatures, American Literature, African-American Literature, Literature by women?)
• How is this novel still relevant today (I.E. in literature, culture and/or the media?)
• How do critical theories employ this novel (I.E. queer theorists, critical race theorists, psychoanalytic theorists, social class theorists, etc…?)
• How can we teach this text and make it relevant for twenty-first century students?
• What new analyses can we make of this novel, which has been well tilled but still elicits generative conversation?

Please email me ASAP at donavanramon@gmail.com if you are interested. Put “Larsen” in the subject line. Right now, I’ll just need your name, affiliation, and potential topic.

I’ll ask for abstracts by August 1st 2017, and our goal is have this published in 2019.

Deadline for submissions: May 31, 2017
Full name/name of organization: American Studies Institute at Seoul National University, South Korea
Contact email: jan@snu.ac.kr
CALL FOR PAPERS

The Task of Ecocriticism in the Age of American Empire

American Studies Institute, Seoul National University

Date of Conference: 25 – 26 August 2017

Location: Seoul National University, South Korea

Call for Papers Deadline: May 31, 2017

Since the 1990s, ecocriticism has grown into an interdisciplinary field of human sciences that moves beyond its earlier focus on natural habitat and nature writing to include ecofeminism, postcolonial ecocriticism, queer ecology, and urban/global ecology. In the age of the Anthropocene, in which humans are transforming the Earth’s life support systems, scholars working within and beyond ecocriticism are now facing a new double task: to understand human planetary impact on the one hand, and the ecological changes as a result of but also beyond the human on the other hand.

The American Studies Institute at Seoul National University invites papers that explore multiple intersections of ecological and global changes and human and non-human responses to them. What are the old and new questions and critical concerns that generate and sustain ecocriticism and globalism? What kind of impact can the ends of human ecologies and the problematic of the Anthropocene have in our globalized neoliberal capitalist world? How might we consider different spatial and temporal scales—i.e. local and global, center and periphery, urban and rural, present and future—in terms of the much longer history of the human exploitation of other humans and non-humans?

We invite submissions of abstracts (up to 300 words) and request a brief biography. Please send them to Jee Hyun An (jan@snu.ac.kr) by May 31, 2017.

Deadline for submissions: June 1, 2017
Full name/name of organization: SAMLA / South Atlantic Modern Language Association
Contact email: mahwashshoaib@hotmail.com
This panel intends to examine the works of Muslim American poets, novelists, jazz musicians, punks, hip hop artists, mipsters, filmmakers, and visual artists. Muslims are woven into the American fabric, from the generations of Moorish slaves accompanying the conquistadors in the Southwest, enslaved West Africans such as those in the coastal Gullah communities, Arab laborers in the Midwest factories in the late 1800s, twentieth-century immigrants fueling the medical and technology sectors, to those currently displaced by wars and natural disasters.

Papers are invited that explore the diverse compositions of Muslim American identities in literary and cultural texts. With the theme of SAMLA 89, High Art/Low Art: Borders and Boundaries in Popular Culture (held in Atlanta, GA, Nov. 3-5, 2017), panelists are asked to consider how these writers and artists engage with popular culture in their articulation of assimilation, alterity, dissent, and transgression as Muslim Americans.

Please submit a 300-word abstract, with a short biography and A/V requirements, to Mahwash Shoaib (mahwashshoaib@hotmail.com) by June 1, 2017.

Deadline for submissions: May 10, 2017
Full name/name of organization: Rothemere American Institute, University of Oxford
Contact email: poetrysince2000@gmail.com

Registration is now open for Special Relationships: Poetry Across the Atlantic Since 2000, to be held at the Rothemere American Institute on May 19. It can be accessed via the symposium website, www.poetrysince2000.wordpress.com. The £15 registration fee includes lunch, refreshments, and a wine reception, and will close on May 10. A provisional programme is also available on the symposium website.

The symposium aims to consider some of the ways in which poets’ ideas of relatedness in the region complicate the idea of straight lines of influence. In Claudia Rankine’s 2015 Citizen, for example, Rankine recounts an incident at the home of a British novelist shortly after the 2011 London Riots, sparked by the death of Mark Duggan at the hands of the Metropolitan Police. When asked if she will write about Duggan’s death, Rankine responds ‘why don’t you?’. Yet Rankine does write about Duggan: she includes him in her litany of black people killed at the hands of the state. For Rankine, then, the African diaspora becomes one social formation in tension with the national, a common experience of racism creates a community that does not map on to national borders. Even so, Rankine’s long poem’s subtitle is ‘an American Lyric’.By exploring the way that poetry’s various concepts of relationships simultaneously transgress borders, operate within them, and even reveal hidden borders across societies, the symposium aims to produce new insights into the multifariousness of poetic production since the year 2000. How have poets from the U.S.A., the U.K., Ireland, the Caribbean, and West Africa conceived of their relationships in a time of ever-greater connection, and how has this changed how they think about differences too?

Confirmed speakers include Sarah Howe (winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize), Oli Hazzard, and Sandeep Parmar. More information and updates can be found at the conference website, www.poetrysince2000.wordpress.com.

Please don’t hesitate to get in touch with the conference organizers, Hugh Foley and Kristin Grogan, at poetrysince2000@gmail.com if you have any questions.