Deadline for submissions: January 15, 2017

Full name / name of organization: Midwest Modern Lanugage Association
Contact email: mmla@luc.edu
In the opening pages of Sherman Alexie’s Reservation Blues (1995), Spokane Indian storyteller Thomas Builds-the-Fire comes into ownership of legendary African American bluesman Robert Johnson’s guitar, a magical object that both furthers his band’s musical aptitude and reopens the scars of historical memory. In Gish Jen’s Mona in the Promised Land (1996), her titular Chinese-American protagonist, newly-relocated to an affluent New York suburb, converts to Judaism, arguing to her mother, “we are a minority, like it or not, and if you want to know how to be a minority, there’s nobody better at it than the Jews.”

Some of the most prominent controversies in literature today have focused on the issue of majority appropriation of minority cultures. In 2015, for example, Alexie himself, as guest editor of Best American Poetry, unwittingly included a poem written by a white writer under a Chinese pseudonym–and defended its continued inclusion once the subterfuge was revealed. More recently, memoirist Yassmin Abdel-Magied scathingly repudiated novelist Lionel Shriver’s “Fiction and Identity Politics” address at the 2016 Brisbane Writers Festival, which defended cultural appropriation as part of the work of fiction. Literature like Reservation Blues or Mona in the Promised Land, however, introduces a different conversation about inter-ethnicity. This conversation may gesture towards horizontal relations, attempt to create inter-ethnic coalitions, reveal new contours to inter-ethnic conflict, or raise questions about the investigation and understanding of literary histories beyond the juxtaposition of white and non-white.

This special issue of the Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association (JMMLA) invites submissions that engage the politics, practices, representations, and meanings of inter-ethnicity, including new parameters for literary studies that arise from inter-ethnic literary histories.

Submissions are due January 15, 2017 to guest editor Emily Lutenski at mmla@luc.edu and should follow MLA guidelines for manuscripts.

Deadline for submissions: January 30, 2017

Full name / name of organization: Edited by Matthew Shipe, Yoav Fromer, and Scott Dill

Contact email: politicalupdike@gmail.com
Recent scholarship on John Updike—especially since his death in 2009 and the subsequent opening up of his personal papers at Houghton Library—has begun to shed light on his still overlooked, albeit extremely fecund, political mindset. A Political Companion to John Updike will seek to establish a new scholarly foundation for this exciting and burgeoning field in Updike studies by inviting scholars to submit essays that employ multiple perspectives and fresh interdisciplinary approaches to better understanding the kinds of political questions Updike’s writing addresses. Like Updike himself, this volume aims to be extremely inclusive and eclectic; conceiving of politics in the broadest manner, we seek works that deal with a variety of issues; from the traditional aspects of power, rights, equality, justice or violence, to more subversive elements that Updike may have preferred to avoid dealing with directly—and that therefore might be of even greater interest—like race, gender, queerness, imperialism, hegemony and technology.

From the inter-generational debates between Connor and Hook in his debut novel The Poorhouse Fair (1959) to the religious violence of Terrorist (2008), Updike in his fiction explicitly and implicitly addressed the pressing political concerns of its era and has much to teach us about American political culture and its problems since WWII. In its attention to the interlocking circles of global, national, local, and domestic power, his fiction consistently affirms Aristotle’s characterization of humans as first and foremost political animals while also highlighting the perennial challenge of reconciling this with the strong individualist ethos entrenched in American culture. A writer rather than a philosopher, Updike in his novels and short fiction deployed uniquely literary ways of framing a variety of political questions. If The Coup (1978) describes the contradictions of American foreign policy, it does so through the stylized sentences of an African dictator’s bemused memories. Likewise, Memories of the Ford Administration (1992) and Buchanan Dying (1974) fill the halls of American power with the comic foibles of intimately rendered private failures that help us understand the intimate relationship between the political and the personal. The list could go on—of scenes of domestic power plays and gender politics, from Cold War fears to cultural tourism, racial tensions and class conflicts, the changing flows of capital and shifts in mass production, evolving religious demographics and the evisceration of urban decay. More than any of his literary peers, Updike found a way to champion the politics of the US’s liberal individualism while laying bare its internal contradictions.

We are particularly interested in engaging Updike’s later (or less explored) works, though welcome proposals about all of his writings (both fiction and non-fiction). Please send 300-400 word abstracts and a 1 page CV to politicalupdike@gmail.com. The deadline for proposals is Monday, January 30th, 2017. Chapters should be 6,000-9,000 words (including endnotes and works cited) and follow the guidelines established by The Chicago Manual of Style, 16th edition. For inquiries about the volume, please contact the coeditors: Scott Dill (sdd46@case.edu), Yoav Fromer (fromy857@newschool.edu), and Matthew Shipe (mashipe@wustl.edu).

Deadline for submissions: May 15, 2017

Full name / name of organization: American Literature Association
contact email: skosiba@troy.edu
Call for Papers

American Literature Association Symposium

September 7-9, 2017

Hotel Monteleone, New Orleans, Louisiana

Regionalism and Place in American Literature

American regional writing, as a literary movement, often has a limited association with a few decades during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. At times, many writers have cringed at being described as “regional,” fearing limiting or marginalizing classification. Other writers have embraced the term. However, more recent research has often argued for a renewed importance in regional scholarship or the scholarship of place and has redefined how we look at canonical definitions of regionalism and place. This symposium seeks to deepen our understanding of the importance of regionalism and place in past and present American literature by continuing to question spatial boundaries and definitions. Are regions confined to big patches of landscape or can cities and neighborhoods be regional? How do we address or define more recent regional concepts like the “Postsouthern” or “Postwestern”? What does regionalism look like in the 21st century and how does it define (or fail to define) our sense of place? What is it to publish or write “regionally”? We welcome paper proposals, panels and roundtable discussions on all aspects of regionalism and place within American literature and particularly encourage interdisciplinary papers and projects.

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Michael Steiner, Emeritus Professor of American Studies, California State University, Fullerton

One page proposals or panel suggestions can be sent to program director Dr. Sara Kosiba at skosiba@troy.edu by May 15th, 2017.

Deadline for submissions: January 4, 2017

Full name / name of organization: Emily Dickinson International Society
Contact email: mkohler@tulane.edu
Calls for Papers

Emily Dickinson International Society: ALA 2017

The Emily Dickinson International Society will sponsor two sessions at the 2017 American Literature Association Annual Conference. ALA conference will be held in Boston, May 25-28, 2017. Please send a 300-word abstract and a brief CV to Michelle Kohler (mkohler@tulane.edu) and Renee Bergland (renee.bergland@simmons.edu) by January 4, 2017.

Panel 1: Dickinson and Violence

We welcome papers that consider the significance of violence within Dickinson’s corpus. For example, papers might offer new approaches to Dickinson’s poetic treatment of war violence, slavery, criminality, natural disaster, violence toward or among animals, theodicy, racial or gendered violence, as well as more metaphorical forms of violence, to language, paper, syntax, decorum, etc.

Panel 2: Emily Dickinson, Open Topic

We invite papers on any aspect of Dickinson’s poems and letters, including multi-disciplinary or multi-author.

Deadline for submissions: December 1, 2016

Full name / name of organization: John Wharton Lowe University of Georgia

contact email: jwlowe@uga.edu
CALL FOR PAPERS

Special Issue of SOUTHERN QUARTERLY on THE U.S. SOUTH AND THE CARIBBEAN
Guest Editor, John Wharton Lowe

Since the earliest days of the contact era, the CircumCaribbean has been the arena for multi-cultural contact and conflict. As the Spanish, English, French, and Dutch competed for new territories and trade routes, Native Americans of the basin were enslaved, infected with disease, and in many cases, exterminated. Early explorers such as De Soto and Ponce de Leon ranged widely through the islands and coastal rims; later, naturalists such as the Bartrams and Humboldt, mapped the region, noticed the affinities between flora and fauna, and saw the sea not as a barrier but a connector; the waters of the basin were increasingly criss-crossed with traders and pirates, as the riches of the new world were shipped to imperial centers in Europe; the mineral wealth was mined by captive Indians, many of whom succumbed to harsh labor regimes and imported diseases. The raw commodities of the CircumCaribbean were produced by millions of enslaved Africans, who brought important knowledge of agricultural production and rich African folkcultures to the islands and coastal rims. Sugar, cotton, coffee, rice, and indigo production brought incredible wealth to planters and created an intricate and cruelly structured plantation economy. As new states were created in the continental United States, ties between them and the Caribbean expanded exponentially, particularly with the advent of steam-driven vessels. French Louisiana and Spanish Florida were closer to cousin cultures in the Caribbean than to those of the adjacent English speaking colonies. Eventually, Louisiana came under Spanish domination and worked within the webbed circuits between Vera Cruz, Havana, and New Orleans.
The Haitian Revolution’s exiles brought new French and African impulses to New Orleans, while the Mexican American war introduced thousands of combat troops drawn from the U.S. South to the Native and Latino culture of Mexico. The addition of new states – most prominently Texas – to the U.S. created an expanded sense of the “South,” a regional concept that took on heft and new meaning as the nation began to grapple with the curse of slavery. Filibuster expeditions, usually departing from Gulf cities such as New Orleans and Mobile, sought to conquer islands and lands South of the South. Cuba in particular was coveted for both its fabled fertility and the prospect of adding it to the Southern contingent of slave-owning states, thereby adding senators and congressmen who could buttress slave economies in Congress.
In the early nineteenth century, and especially after the Civil War and Reconstruction, advances in technology created new business and political ties across national boundaries; the new tourist industry rapidly transformed economies of the islands and coastal rims, while enforced mono-crop agricultural played havoc with traditional patterns of CircumCaribbean rural life. CircumCaribbean writers such as Lorenzo de Zavala, José Teurbe Tolon, and José Martí, often spent time in the U.S., and drew on those experiences in their work. Writers of the nineteenth and twentieth century U.S. South, such as Martin Delany, Constance Fenimore Woolson, Lafcadio Hearn, Katherine Anne Porter, William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, Andrew Lytle, and Evelyn Scott created tales that intersected with more Southern cultures.
Revolutions in Mexico and Cuba spawned radical shifts in relations between the U.S. South and the wider Caribbean, and eventuated in the creation of a new Cuban domain in South Florida, the embargo against Castro’s regime, and the shifting of resources from Cuba to Florida and Puerto Rico. All of these periods and events generated fascinating narratives, both fictional and non-fictional. Many of the texts written in languages other than English have now been translated, enabling us to rethink the CircumCaribbean as a multi-nation construct that annuls national boundaries. As such, we need to reconfigure our notions of U.S. Southern history, the supposed isolation of island cultures, and the antiquated notion of a Confederacy-defined U.S. South.

Possible topics* include but are not limited to:

• Ties between French North America and the CircumCaribbean
• Ties between Spanish North America and the CircumCaribbean
• Foodways of the CircumCaribbean
• CircumCaribbean musical traditions
• African Religions of the U.S. South and the CircumCaribbean
• Southern reactions to the Haitian Revolution
• Haitian migration to Louisiana
• Native diasporas of the CircumCaribbean
• The African diaspora in CircumCaribbean context
• Plantation cultures and economies of the Americas
• Agricultural traditions of the CircumCaribbean (actual) and as reflected in literature
• Material cultures of the CircumCaribbean
• New studies of the U.S. South as part of the CircumCaribbean
• U.S. Southern writers and the Caribbean; Caribbean writers and the U.S. South
• Critical theory and CircumCaribbean literature
• Postcolonial approaches to CircumCaribbean cultures and history
• Asian immigration to the Caribbean
• Cuban American writers of the U.S. South
• Haitian American writers of the U.S. South
• Ecological implications of CircumCaribbean Studies
• The CircumCaribbean and public hygiene; disease; medical histories
• CircumCaribbean photography; journals; letters

*the term CircumCaribbean includes the coastal U.S. South, Caribbean islands, Eastern Mexico, Central America, and the north coast of South America.

Interested authors should send a 500-word chapter proposal to jwlowe@uga.edu by December 1st, 2016. Please note that the accepted abstract does not guarantee inclusion in the volume, which will also consider the quality of the finished chapter.

Deadline for submissions: January 25, 2017

Full name / name of organization: The Philip Roth Society

Contact email: mmckinle@harpercollege.edu
The Philip Roth Society invites papers for a panel entitled “Other People’s Roths” at the American Literature Association conference in Boston, MA from May 25-28, 2017.

In a 2014 article for The Atlantic entitled “Stop Making Film Adaptations of Philip Roth Novels,” Adam Chandler writes, “There is no aside or montage that could faithfully represent the laborious historical and psychological contexts that Roth devotes pages to developing.” Yet filmmakers have not been dissuaded: this past year, the film adaptation of Philip Roth’s 2008 novel Indignation was released to widespread critical acclaim, and in previous years, Hollywood has produced adaptations of Goodbye, Columbus, Portnoy’s Complaint, The Human Stain, The Dying Animal, The Humbling, and the early short story “Expect the Vandals.” In recent years, versions of Roth himself have also surfaced across a wide variety of media: filmmakers have included representations of Roth in movies (e.g. 2014’s Listen Up, Philip); novelists have embedded versions of Roth in their fiction (e.g. David Baddiel’s 2010 novel The Death of Eli Gold); biographers and documentary filmmakers have attempted to capture the “facts” of Roth’s life (e.g. Claudia Roth Pierpoint’s 2013 book Roth Unbound and the 2014 documentary Philip Roth Unleashed); and artists such as R.B.Kitaj and Bryan Zanisnik have produced illustrations of Roth and his work. “Other People’s Roths” (designed to correspond with a similarly focused forthcoming special issue of Philip Roth Studies) aims to address the various ways Philip Roth and his work have been represented by these and other writers, artists, and filmmakers. The Roth Society invites papers that examine how any such representations and translations have enriched, revised, and/or complicated understandings of Roth, his alter egos, and his fiction.

Proposals (not exceeding 300 words) for 15-20 minute papers should be emailed to the Roth Society Program Chair, Maggie McKinley, at mmckinle@harpercollege.edu by January 25, 2017. Please include institutional affiliation and full contact details. To present a paper as a part of a Roth Society panel, participants must be members of the Philip Roth Society in addition to registering for the conference. For membership information, please see the Society’s website at http://rothsociety.org.

Deadline for submissions: October 15, 2016

Full name / name of organization: American Academy of Religion–Western Region (AAR-WR), Religion in America.
Contact email: nfredrickson@umail.ucsb.edu

Scholars of American religion are well familiar with the problem that, in most standard narratives of American history, religion tends to play a minor and neglected role. A similar problem has been noted in the study of American literature. Scholars of American religions have worked to and may continue to help correct both of these problems. Along these lines, we invite paper proposals that think about, among other things, (1) how the history of American literature might be integrated with the history of American religions, not only as a reflection of religious developments, but as a source of American myths and religions (e.g., fictional narratives of America’s discovery, settlement, mission, calling, etc.), (2) how literature might be effectively used to teach about American religions, or (3) how literature is a site of and outlet for the American religious imagination, even for the invention of novel fictional religions (especially in science fiction and fantasy). Given the topic of our other target panel, perhaps also consider (4) fictional depictions of American religions with a Californian emphasis (esp. in Californian literature) or locus or fictional depictions of the racialized body in California-related religion/s. More broadly, given the theme of Religion, Race, and Racism, you might write on (5) how racialized narratives or figures in American literature have been used to sustain or even create racialized religions.
Please submit proposals to Dr. Jason S. Sexton at jsexton@fullerton.edu; Nathan Fredrickson at nfredrickson@umail.ucsb.edu; and Dr. Konden R. Smith at krsmith1@asu.edu.

Deadline for submissions: November 1, 2016.

Full name / name of organization: Southwest Popular / American Culture Association.

Contact email: shiggins@unm.edu
CFP: Poetry and Poetics (Critical)

Abstract/Proposals by 1 November 2016

For the Southwest Popular / American Culture Association’s 38th Annual Conference.

February 15 – 18, 2017

Hyatt Regency Albuquerque

330 Tijeras Ave NW

Albuquerque, NM 87102

1-888-421-1442 / 1-888-421-1442

Fax: (505) 843-2710

We are now forming panels for presentations of American poetry and poetics criticism at our 2017 conference. There are no limits in regard to historical period, topic, or theme, and we welcome panel proposals, especially those that include panelists from multiple institutions. Acceptances will ultimately depend on the availability of compatible presentations to form coherent panels.

If your research does not focus on poetry and poetics criticism but fits within the broad range of areas designated for the upcoming conference on American and Popular culture, we still encourage you to consult the conference website  for a list of Area Chairs and their calls for papers.

Poet-critics who may wish to participate in the readings panels should contact either Jerry Bradley (Area Chair of Creative Writing [Poetry, Fiction]) or Hugh Tribbey (Area Chair of Experimental Writing and Aesthetics), via the website.

Interested graduate students should consider applying for one of the available monetary awards; more information is available at http://southwestpca.org/conference/graduate-student-awards/

We will review proposals on a rolling basis until the 1 November deadline. Interested parties should apply at the conference database:

http:// conference2017.southwestpca.org/

Additionally, please visit http://journaldialogue.org for information about the organization’s new, peer-reviewed journal, Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy.

If you have any questions, email the Area Chair of Poetry and Poetics (Critical), Scarlett Higgins, at shiggins@unm.edu