Deadline for submissions: September 30, 2017
Full name/name of organization: Betina Entzminger
Contact email: bentzmin@bloomu.edu
Joyce Carol Oates is one of America’s most prolific and celebrated living writers. Her short fiction and novels frequently explore spaces and the borders surrounding them: for example, the physical spaces of the home in “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” or a car sinking in Black Water, the border between reality and the imagined in Blonde, the psychic and ideological spaces that separate individuals in A Book of American Martyrs. What forces create and maintain these spaces? What are the costs and benefits of blurring or crossing these borders? How do these different types of spaces–physical, social, psychic, and imaginary—constrain or intensify one another? This panel at the 2018 NeMLA Conference will include essays that explore these questions in Oates’s fictional works, along with the larger question of how Oates’s oeuvre records and analyzes the complex physical, social, imagined, and psychic space of American life. Abstracts must be submitted on the NEMLA website https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/login by September 30. The 2018 NEMLA convention will take place in Pittsburgh on April 12-15.

Deadline for submissions: June 15, 2017
Full name/name of organization: Culture, Theory and Critique
Contact email: culturetheoryandcritique@gmail.com

Call for Papers

Culture, Theory and Critique

Special Issue:

“The Social Life of Corruption in Latin America”

Issue Editors:

Donna M. Goldstein and Kristen Drybread

Introduction

The aim of this special issue of Culture, Theory, and Critique is to examine the social meanings and effects of corruption in Latin America. While remaining attentive to the enduring and pronounced forms of corruption in the region, we seek to explore how recent political, financial, and media events signal the emergence of novel forms of white collar crime and corruption, which require us to rethink the operation of state (or state-like) power in Latin America (Aretxaga 2003).

For more than a century, large-scale corruption has flourished throughout the continent in forms including patronage, cronyism, nepotism, and coronelismo. In his now famous travel journal from the 1830s, Charles Darwin commented on the plague of corruption in South America, speaking to its debilitating effects on democratic principles (Darwin 1959[original 1839]). Corruption also features prominently in the Latin American literary canon, and the iconography of upper class corruption that writers such as José Hernandéz, Euclides da Cunha, Mario Vargas Llosa, Carmen Naranjo, and Carlos Fuentes have established continues to be substantiated in contemporary political narratives, which affirm that forms of white-collar corruption are rarely met with punishment.

While recognizing the continued validity of this established notion of corruption in the region, here we suggest that in recent years a new narrative has begun to emerge: In 2014, for example, Brazilian authorities began an investigation of the construction firm Odebrecht; it has brought to light evidence implicating high-level government officials from ten Latin American countries in a complex scheme of bribery and kickbacks that helped the Brazilian firm secure lucrative building contracts across the continent. Thus far, the investigation has led to the arrest of high-level officials in Colombia, Peru, and Brazil; indictments elsewhere are likely to follow. Since 2015, charges of corruption have spurred the resignation of Guatemalan President Otto Perez Molina, the indictment of Former Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, and the impeachment of Brazilian President Dilma Rouseff. In December of 2016, Kirchener was indicted on charges of corruption in a case involving funds earmarked for public works; she claims she is being targeted by Argentina’s current president, her political rival, Mauricio Macri. That same month, Dilma Rousseff was impeached in a process that extended from 2015. Depending on who is speaking in Brazil, corruption either explains the downfall of Dilma’s government and her Workers’ Party, or it is the driving force of those who led the “coup” (and within that, either a true interest or an opportunistic use of these cases) and are currently in control of the government—or both. In another 2016 scandal, the Panama Papers case, 11.5 million leaked documents obtained from a Panamanian law firm exposed associations between scores of Latin American politicians, business leaders and members of organized criminal networks, and a shadowy and secretive off-shore industry that is believed to facilitate corruption, money laundering, tax evasion, and other illegal activities on a global scale.

To some, the sudden emergence of so many high profile corruption scandals in Latin America indicates the intractability of dishonesty, thievery, and graft in the continent’s politics. To others, this proliferation of scandal heralds significant shifts in the ways that corruption is perceived, exposed, tolerated, and punished.

Of course, both emergent and embedded forms of corruption produce real effects on local communities. In Latin America, effects have included variations of drug, military, and gang violence that in turn are entangled with state power. Do emergent forms of corruption highlight the fragility of democratic citizenship in the young, and tenuously stable, democracies of Latin America (Drybread 2009)? Has neoliberalism—or the threat of neoliberal collapse—produced new intersections of class and corruption (Goldstein 2012)? We seek papers that will illuminate these intersections.

Starting with the sense that corruption is at once a conceptual category and a set of historically embedded and particular practices that take shape in a “creative” manner at local, national, and global scales, this special issue of Culture, Theory and Critique will ask: In what ways do emergent forms of corruption in Latin America require new ways of understanding relationships between authority, morality, transparency, and (il)legality in putatively democratic regimes or lead us to rethink the relationship between democracy and capitalism more broadly?

Topics

Questions of interest include, but are not limited to the following:

-General consensus holds that corruption runs counter to the principles of democracy. Yet, within Latin America’s young democratic states, charges of corruption can be strategically leveled to promote—or to thwart—ideological and social projects that further equality. How do accusations of corruption reveal tensions between the democratic promise of equality and the realities of pervasive social and economic hierarchy in particular Latin American contexts?
-In what ways do millennial and post-millennial forms of capitalism and the culture of neoliberalism (Comaroff and Comaroff 2001) intersect with old and new, left and right, individual and party forms of corruption in the Latin American region?
-How do racial categories and stereotypes configure the multiple facets of “crime” and “corruption” and the ways in which they are framed in particular local and national contexts? In what ways are practices of corruption and its exposure gendered?
-How have recent political events opened a space for new forms of academic activism, or for more politically engaged instantiations of disciplinary praxis? By the same token, how are anthropologists and other scholars of diverse identities and positions working in Latin America constrained in their representations of corruption at local, national, and global levels?
-How is white-collar corruption framed in this newest iteration? Does white-collar crime and corruption in Latin America share characteristics with white-collar crime and corruption in other developing, or developed, democracies?
Potential Contributors

With humility and sympathy given our own ongoing and current North American instantiations of corruption, we call on scholars of Latin America—from the region and beyond—to contribute to this special issue with ethnographic case studies, theoretical insights, and analyses of the social life of corruption in the region. At this time, the journal is only able to accept papers written in the English language.

Works Cited

Aretxaga, Begoña. 2003. “Maddening States.” Annual Review of Anthropology 32(2003), pp. 393-410.

Comaroff, Jean and John Comaroff, eds. Millenial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism. Durham: Duke University Press, pp. 1-56.

Darwin, Charles. 1959. The Voyage of the Beagle. Everyman’s Library. London: Dent, original 1839.

Drybread, Kristen. 2009. “Rights‐Bearing Street Kids: Icons of Hope and Despair in Brazil’s Burgeoning Neoliberal State.” Law & Policy 31(3): 330-350.

Goldstein, Donna M. 2012. How Corruption Kills: Pharmaceutical Crime, Mediated Representations, and Middle Class Anxiety in Argentina. City and Society 24(2): 218-239.

Important Dates

Submit 500-word abstracts to Donna Goldstein (donna.goldstein@colorado.edu) and Kristen Drybread (kdrybread@gmail.com) by June 15, 2017. Special issue editors will make initial acceptance decisions. Once a decision made based on the merits of the abstract, authors will be invited to submit full papers of 8000 words or less by the deadline of November 15, 2017 for publication in the journal Culture, Theory and Critique (CTC) in the late Fall of 2018.

Submission Guidelines

CTC uses the Scholar One website and will be uploaded to that system once accepted for review: ScholarOne http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/rctc. All paper submissions will be subject to the normal double blind peer review processes at Culture, Theory and Critique. Essays should be no more than 8000 words, including notes and bibliography. Style guidelines can be found here:

http://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorSubmission?journalCode=rctc20&page=instructions#.U7Dq_mSx8E

Deadline for submissions: June 2, 2017
Full name/name of organization: Andrea Krafft
Contact email: akrafft3@gatech.edu
This CFP invites papers dealing with fictional representations of outer space, intergalactic travel, and other worlds. This panel is particularly interested in discussing why some texts about outer space remain central within scholarly and popular discourse while others fade into obscurity. Does the value of intergalactic fiction derive from its scientific and technological realism and its ability to, according to Hugo Gernsback, inspire “scientific fact and prophetic vision”? Or, does the staying power of these speculative fictions come from their complex worldmaking and engagement with empire and colonization (as in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series)? What determines whether we return to someone’s vision of life beyond the boundaries of Earth? We will consider space travel narratives from various decades and types of media including novels, short fiction, film, television, games, and music. By June 2, please submit a 250-word abstract, brief bio, and AV requirements to Andrea Krafft, Georgia Institute of Technology, at akrafft3@gatech.edu.

The SAMLA 2017 Conference will be held at the Westin Peachtree Plaza in Atlanta, Georgia from Friday, November 3 to Sunday, November 5. More information on the conference may be found at https://samla.memberclicks.net/.

Deadline for submissions: June 10, 2017
Full name/name of organization: American Literature Association
Contact email: skosiba@troy.edu

Call for Papers

American Literature Association Symposium

“Regionalism and Place in American Literature”

September 7-9, 2017

Hotel Monteleone, New Orleans, Louisiana

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 June 10th, 2017.

Deadline for submissions: May 15, 2018
Full name/name of organization: Timothy Robbins / Rebus Community
Contact email: timothy.robbins@graceland.edu
We are currently seeking writers, editors, and contributors of all kinds to The Open Anthology of Earlier American Literature, an Open Educational Resource (OER) textbook under development with the Rebus Community. Rebus is a non-profit organization that works with faculty, librarians, students, and staff to build tools and resources in support of free and open textbook publishing.

Expanding on Robin DeRosa’s pioneering work at Plymouth State University, where the anthology began as a collaborative project to save her American literature students some money, several instructors have since worked with their own students to collect and edit public domain texts and to create accompanying introductions and other materials. This model of a shared and open pedagogy formed the beginnings of what we hope will become the definitive OER anthology of Early American Literature.

Our ultimate aim is to create a genuine alternative to costly traditional anthologies and a resource that will allow faculty and students the freedom to engage with Early American literature in new and dynamic ways. Now that we have generated a prospective table of contents for the anthology, we need more contributors to help curate texts, write introductions, and, finally, get the “book” looking good and ready to meet the needs of Early Americanist students and instructors.

To all of you working or teaching in the field, we welcome your energy and expertise! If interested, feel free to peruse the following spreadsheet, which lays out our needs in terms of authors and texts, and digitally pencil in your name along with any thoughts or suggestions. All contributions are accredited. If you have questions or comments about the project, please email me at timothy.robbins@graceland.edu or reply to the project post in the Rebus Community forum. I am eager to talk and work with you to get this exciting project off of the ground!

Sincerely,

Timothy D. Robbins, Assistant Professor of English

Graceland University, 1 University Place, Lamoni, IA 50140
timothy.robbins@graceland.eduhttps://timothydrobbins.net/.

Deadline for submissions: June 15, 2017
Full name/name of organization: American Conference for Irish Studies–western region
Contact email: donnal.potts@gmail.com
Ireland, Irish America, and Work is the theme of the 33rd annual meeting of the American Conference for Irish Studies-Western Regional [ACIS-West] for Oct. 19-22, 2017 at the Davenport Hotel in Spokane, Washington. Many prominent members of the American Labor Movement were Irish and Irish-American. Jim Larkin and James Connolly worked for the I.W.W in both Ireland and the United States, where, in 1917, the I.W.W. began to face vicious repression. By July 1917, federal troops began to be used to suppress industrial conflicts, to raid I.W.W. halls, to break up meetings, and to arrest Wobblies. In Spokane, Irish I.W.W. leader James Rowan was arrested and sent to Leavenworth.

Featuring

*Moya Cannon, author of Carrying the Songs (Carcanet 2007);

*David Brundage, Professor, University of California, Santa Cruz, and author of Irish Nationalists in America: The Politics of Exile, 1798-1998 (Oxford University Press, 2016)

*Erin Wecker, University of Montana, author of “Reclaiming Magdalenism or Washing Away Sin: Magdalen Laundries and the Rhetorics of Feminine Silence”

This is an interdisciplinary conference that welcomes papers from all disciplines, including literature, theatre, film, dance, history, economics, sociology, music, religion, politics, language, culture, diaspora, conflict and border studies, the material and visual arts, and comparative studies. Particularly welcome are papers that deal with:

Irish Labor in the United States, Irish/Irish-Americans in the labor movement, Representations of work and the refusal of work, The Unpaid Labor of Women, The Magdalen Laundries, The writer or artist as worker, Irish/Irish-American Literature and work, Work and play, Gender and class related aspects of work, New professions and professionalization, Intellectual vs. physical labor, The Empire at work, Disability and work, American Capitalism and the Irish Economy

The annual meeting of ACIS-West will also feature the Donald E. Jordan, Jr. – Willard C. Potts, Jr. Award, which recognizes exceptional work by emerging scholars in Irish Studies. It is awarded annually to the ACIS-West member judged the most meritorious emerging scholar (current graduate students and scholars within three years of having received a PhD). The recipient is chosen by a committee of ACIS- West members appointed by the President, and the award will be presented at the conference’s closing banquet. The award is accompanied by a $500 honorarium. For more information about the award and the generous donors who have made it possible, see https://aciswest.wordpress.com/awards/.

Please submit your proposal by June 1 to http://acisweb.org/regionals/western/submissions/. Individual paper and panel submissions (3-4 participants) are welcome, as are proposals for live performances, dramatic readings, poster presentations, or exhibits. Individual proposals should be 250- 500 words in length and include a brief biographical statement for the submitter (50 words). In the case of panel proposals, live performances, dramatic readings, posters, or exhibits, please submit a rationale (250-500 words), as well as biographical statements for each of the presenters. To recognize undergraduate research in Irish Studies, we will also organize a special undergraduate panel at the conference, and we encourage exceptional undergraduate students to submit individual paper proposals.

Deadline for submissions: June 5, 2017
Full name/name of organization: Carson McCullers Society
Contact email: alison.bertolini@ndsu.edu
CFP

SAMLA 89th Annual Conference:

High Art / Low Art: Borders and Boundaries in Popular Culture

Westin Peachtree Plaza, Atlanta GA

November 3-5, 2017

Panel Title: Carson McCullers’ High/Low Artistic Influences and Successors

The Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians (Columbus State University) in conjunction with The Carson McCullers Society invite papers relating to the work of Carson McCullers and the theme of High/Low Art: Borders and Boundaries in Popular Culture. Although we welcome papers that interpret the theme broadly, we especially encourage papers that focus on where, when, and how Carson McCullers references aspects of “high” or “low” art in her writing; or alternately, how contemporary writers and artists have transformed or elaborated on the ideas of Carson McCullers.

Presentations about McCullers and her work that are not directly related to the conference theme are also welcome.

By June 5, 2017, please submit a 300-word abstract, brief bio, and A/V requirements to Alison Bertolini, Assistant Professor of English Literature, North Dakota State University, at

alison.bertolini@ndsu.edu.