“Rivers and Journeys: Discovering New Selves and New Tropes”, edited volume.
Deadline for submission of proposals: 1 November 1, 2023.
Volume edited by Dr. Doaa Omran
Volume theme presentation
Heraclitus said, “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river, and he is not the same man.” This perhaps epitomizes the concept of my forthcoming edited book on “Rivers and Journeys: Discovering New Selves and New Tropes.” This project explores literary works that depict how we embark on such journeys to lose ourselves, to find ourselves, and sometimes, maybe, to be transformed into someone else somewhere else for a while. We travel across these liminal spaces to nourish our souls and, in some bleaker instances, to cross to the other world. A river forms a calmer, less-stormy frontier than a sea, a zone where one has the leisure to speculate and reflect on oneself even when stepping out of one’s comfort zone. If on a riverboat, the journey is relatively slow as river waters are shallow, and the ship needs to maintain a specific speed limit. Because the land is visible on both sides, one feels secure looking at the banks even when temporally not treading on them. This sense of assurance makes journeying across rivers a convenient trope for self-discovery. The physical and psychological liminalities experienced along rivers have inspired authors from multiple cultures.
I have received some abstracts, but am looking for a few more contributions. I am looking for essays that cover riverine journeys on almost every continent. I am particularly interested in abstracts that read riverine works on the Seine, the Volga, Rhein, Danube, etc. A paper on Olivia Laing’s To the River: A Journey Beneath the Surface would also interest me. In addition to drawing upon canonical works journeying along rivers, I am also looking for less-known works exploring traveling along these waterways. I want to invite scholars to engage in comparative analyses of different river journeys across the globe––an essential literary trope that has been ignored.
Timeline
- The Abstract submission deadline is November 1st, 2023.
- Submit Book Proposal to Publisher by December 31st, 2023.
- Chapters are expected by May/June 2024.
Website
Contact details
Lingvisticae Investigationes: Fuzziness, vagueness and underdetermination in reference.
Deadline for submission of proposals: 10 November 2023.
Issue edited by
Laure Gardelle & Frédéric Landrangin
Presentation
The act of reference links a linguistic expression, called a referring expression, to one or more entities that belong to the extralinguistic world or to a mental representation of a possible world. Most referring expressions, in their context of use, allow for the precise identification of a referent. But in a number of cases – which will be the focus of the present issue – it is not clear which referent(s) are really involved in the act of reference. This concerns, among others, the phenomena sometimes described as a case of fuzzy, vague or underdetermined reference, such as plural referents, evolving referents, human impersonal pronouns.
With these examples, the very nature of fuzzy reference challenges the principle of an absolute search for the exact referent. Why can we say ‘the Gauls invented many Celtic cosmetic instruments and products’, when it was not the same Gauls who invented each of the instruments or cosmetic products? Why choose ‘it’, not ‘them’, even though the referent is clearly in several pieces, and why is it that some languages, such as French, do not license a personal pronoun in an exact translation? Why does the language offer so many possibilities to switch from singular to plural (‘Paul bought a Toyota because they are sturdy’, Kleiber 2001), from part to whole (‘Brussels’… ‘the European Commission’), from a given referent to a near-identical one (Recasens et al. 2010), from several referents to resumptive anaphora capable of regrouping and recategorizing? Above all, why do these cases of vagueness and imprecision pose no problem at all for the recipient (Sanford et al. 2008), who interprets the message without wondering whether he/she has identified the referent(s) precisely and accurately?
Timeline
- Deadline for submission: 10 November 2023
- Notifications to authors: 20 December 2023
- Submission of final versions: 10 February 2024
- Publication: the second half of 2024
Website
https://www.lingvisticae-investigationes.org/
Contact details
laure.gardelle@univ-grenoble-alpes.fr
CFP
call_for_papers_LI_vague_reference(Posted 12 March 2023)
European Journal of English Studies (EJES), Volume 29 (to be published in 2025): “Wasted Lives in Contemporary Fiction: Bodies That Do Not Matter”.
Deadline for proposals: 30 November 2023.
Guest editors: Maria Isabel Romero-Ruiz (University of Málaga, Spain) and Simonetta Falchi (University of Sassari, Italy)
In one of his seminal works, Wasted Lives: Modernity and its Outcasts (2004), Zygmunt Bauman defines the idea of “wasted lives” as a ripple of modernity creating the figure of “the outcast.” According to him, the production of “human waste” – or more precisely, wasted lives, the “superfluous” populations of migrants, refugees, and other outcasts – is an inevitable outcome of modernisation. The concept of wasted lives deconstructs the impact of this transformation. Coping with “human waste” provides a key to comprehending otherwise incomprehensible aspects of our shared life, from the strategies of global dominance to the most intimate human relationships. Contemporary and past societies believe themselves to be paragons of civilisation and progress. Yet a growing population of “undesirable people” has invaded public life and culture and represents a threat to class values. This situation is reflected in numerous literary and visual works created during the last few decades.
On the other hand, stigma has become a prominent indicator of contemporary and historical populations that have been subjected to discrimination for social and political reasons. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, stigma can be defined as “a mark of disgrace or infamy; a sign of severe censure or condemnation, regarded as impressed on a person or thing; a ‘brand.’” In light of this concept, Imogen Tyler reflects on how stigma changes the ways in which people think about themselves and others in Stigma: The Machinery of Inequality (2020): this concept represents an assault on human dignity through its technologies of division and dehumanisation. Compassion, hope, and solidarity are destroyed, since stigma, as a form of power, is embedded in social relations linked to colonialism and patriarchy, as well as to inequalities of class, race, gender, and sexuality written on the body of “the other.” Stigma always happens in historical contexts where violence, discipline, and punishment coalesce to produce devastating effects on people’s health and well-being. Social organisations frequently portray the disenfranchisement and distress of people living in poverty as the result of their poor behaviour, lack of discipline, and shamelessness.
There are many instances of contemporary literature and culture whose aim is to recover the voices of stigmatised people whose lives are considered wasted. Their bodies have stigma inscribed onto them because of their alleged lack of humanity. However, stigma can also be viewed as a mark of resistance in both historical and contemporary societies, and this is reflected in a number of these literary and cultural works that represent an attempt to reconstruct the lives of marginalised people.
We welcome proposals that deal with cultural and literary productions that are concerned with stigma, wasted lives, and bodies that do not matter in the context of past and contemporary societies. Essays can cover a range of approaches and methodologies, including linguistic, stylistic, and philological ones, as well as theoretical-critical and translational elements of contemporary literary texts and their audio-visual re-mediations. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
- The disposable bodies of the poor, refugees, and migrants as superfluous populations in cultural productions
- The lives of outcasts, criminals, “deviants,” and prostitutes as carriers of stigma in literature and visual culture
- Disabled and sick bodies and the lack of humanity attributed to them in past and contemporary societies
- The role of disease and contagion in the spread of social evils in literary and visual representations of marginalised individuals
- The idea of modernity as a false mirror of civilisation and progress in the face of “undesirable people”
- The portrayal of poverty and fate as resulting from a lack of discipline and shamelessness and the violent stigmatization of populations in contemporary and past contexts
Detailed proposals (up to 1,000 words) for full essays (7,500 words), as well as a short biography (max.100 words) should be sent to both editors by 30 November 2023: Maria Isabel Romero-Ruiz, mirr@uma.es and Simonetta Falchi, sfalchi@uniss.it
EJES operates in a two-stage review process.
- Contributors are invited to submit proposals for essays on the topic in question by 30 November 2023.
- Following review of the proposals by the editorial board panel, informed by external specialists as appropriate, the guest editors will invite the authors of short-listed proposals to submit full-length essays for review with a late spring 2024 deadline.
- The full-length essays undergo a second round of review, and a final selection for publication is made. Selected essays are revised and then resubmitted to the guest editors in late 2024 for publication in 2025.
EJES employs Chicago Style (T&F Chicago AD) and British English conventions for spelling. For more information about EJES, see: http://www.essenglish.org/ejes.html and https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/neje20/current
CFPs for Vol. 29
(Posted 8 April 2023, Updated 18 April 2023)
European Journal of English Studies (EJES), Volume 29 (to be published in 2025): “The Poetics and Politics of Gender, Mobility and Migration in the New Anglophone Literatures”.
Deadline for proposals: 30 November 2023.
Guest Editors: Nadia Butt (University of Giessen), Radhika Mohanram (Cardiff University) and Michelle Stork (University of Frankfurt)
This special issue sets out to address the poetics and politics of gender in the New Anglophone literatures of mobility and migration. Considering the “mobilities turn” in the humanities (Sheller and Urry 2006, 207-226; Aguiar et al. 2019, 4) and its connection to migration, this issue aims to investigate how Anglophone literature by writers of diverse cultural backgrounds provides new perspectives on gender. The major objectives of the special issue are to examine both gender and the literary interrogations of Europe’s cultural encounters, as protagonists travel, move and migrate between cultures and continents, both literally and metaphorically.
Focusing on writers working in English, the special issue interrogates how mobility and migration not only shape and transform the genre of the novel, prone to generic overlaps with travel literature, the epistolary novel, the memoir, the Bildungsroman, narratives of displacement or exile, journey or quest narratives and refugee narratives, but also facilitate our understanding of culture, nation, gender and identity in relation to various forms of movement. According to Aguiar et al., mobility “operates at multiple scales of meaning, any and all of which constitutes society’s mobile culture” (2019, 2). Likewise, migration is a “continual” and “multidirectional” (Ahmad 2019, xxvii) experience. Not only may gender propel movement in the first place, but “[e]ach journey takes the unmistakeable imprint of gender” (Siegel 2004, 9).
In light of current research, we seek approaches to mobility and migration in the New Anglophone literatures from feminist, queer and transgender perspectives showing how gender shapes the experience of movement “across the lines” (Cronin 2000; Klooß 1998). We are very much interested in representations of gender with reference to mobility and migration as perceived by writers of the ‘Global South’, whose works are deeply engaged with global cultural entanglements.
We are keen to address the following questions in this issue:
- Why is it important to investigate the poetics and politics of gender, mobility and migration in the New Anglophone Literatures?
- How can we grapple with the poetics and politics of gender in narratives of mobility and migration in the face of global modernity?
- How do the New Anglophone Literatures bring out the dynamics of gender, mobility, and migration in relation to the Global South and the Global North? How useful is it to speak of “gendered racism” to allude to the racist oppression of migrant women “as structured by racist and ethnicist perceptions of gender roles” (Castles et al. 2014, 62; Essed 1991, 31)?
- What is the role of transcultural and transnational relations in examining the nexus of gender, mobility and migration?
- What is the role of diaspora, nomadism, exile and forced migration in shaping the poetics and politics of gender in a literary work?
Detailed proposals (up to 1,000 words) for full essays (7,500 words), as well as a short biography (max. 100 words) should be sent to both editors by 30 November 2023: Nadia Butt, Nadia.Butt@anglistik.uni-giessen.de, Radhika Mohanram, MohanramR1@cardiff.ac.uk, and Michelle Stork, m.stork@em.uni-frankfurt.de.
EJES operates in a two-stage review process:
- Contributors are invited to submit proposals for essays on the topic in question by 30 November 2023.
- Following review of the proposals by the editorial board panel, informed by external specialists as appropriate, the guest editors will invite the authors of short-listed proposals to submit full-length essays for review with a late spring 2024 deadline.
- The full-length essays undergo a second round of review, and a final selection for publication is made. Selected essays are revised and then resubmitted to the guest editors in late 2024 for publication in 2025.
EJES employs Chicago Style (T&F Chicago AD) and British English conventions for spelling. For more information about EJES, see: http://www.essenglish.org/ejes.html and https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/neje20/current.
CFPs for Vol. 29
(Posted 18 April 2023)
“The Politics of Home” – A Special Issue of Coils of the Serpent: Journal for the Study of Contemporary Power.
Deadline for abstracts: 30 November 2023.
Guest Editors: Kristin Aubel and Sarah Heinz (Wien)
The notion of home, while often associated with warmth, security, and personal sanctuary, is inherently intertwined with broader socio-political dynamics. It therefore encompasses more than a physical space, and it is never neutral, private, or simply ‘ours’. It is where inside and outside, private and public, as well as built forms, affective ties, and cultural imaginaries intersect in a politics of home. At their core, such politics of home encapsulate the intricate interplay between individuals, communities, and the broader structures and institutions of power that shape our lived experiences. This special issue seeks to explore the various ways in which ideas and ideals of homes are constructed, contested, and negotiated within the complex tapestry of society, highlighting the pivotal role played by political, cultural, artistic, and historical contexts. It therefore seeks to cover the multiple forms and functions that a politics of home can have, as well as the multiple forms in which literatures, the arts, media, activism, or concrete home-making practices negotiate and grapple with the diverse manifestations of such politics of home and their impact on individuals and communities.
Understanding home through the politics attached to it opens up a discussion about practices, selves, and relationships within, through, and beyond the home. Via objects put into specific places and their use, through activities like decorating, cooking, or playing, as well as through the social relations that these practices create or inhibit, the feelings they elicit, and the memories they amass, home is created, lived, and imagined, enabling the person performing these activities to experience, ‘feel,’ and remember home as a place, as social relations, and as a site for individuality and selfhood. This process can have positive and negative outcomes, it can be liberating and constricting, but it is never static, whole, or fixed. It is related to and produced by the interplay between public and private processes as well as chosen and imposed social relations. In effect, home is always already shaped by the power structures of a given community, because it is produced and re-produced within what Doreen Massey calls the flows of the power geometry between homes and other places (1991: 25).
Accordingly, transdisciplinary research of home has outlined that home is a multidimensional term that may refer to physical structures like a house, social units like a family, a place of origins, concrete practices, or affective ties. It is assessed as a place, a practice, an imaginary, a feeling, or a sense of self, sometimes all at the same time (Mallett 2004: 62-89). Home is also a scalable concept that may start with the mind or body as home, a house as home, and end with a nation or even the globe as home (Marston 2000; Marston 2004). These multiple scales and dimensions of home can explain the terminological and conceptual vagueness of the term, but they can also account for the relative effortlessness with which common-sense understandings of home as well as political rhetorics often conflate house and home, home and homeland, or home, family, and forms of (national) identity.
In consequence, the notion of home is a kaleidoscope of dimensions, scales, and meanings. Nevertheless, what many associations and definitions share is their seeming stability and boundedness and their sense of home as a positive place of belonging or becoming (Fox 2016: 2-4). In these understandings, home is the centre of the self and a place where meaning is made. It is thus seen as an essential setting for the grounding of one’s identity. In this perspective, home enables the grounded self to extend its selfhood into the outside world, as claimed by Heidegger and Bachelard in their respective phenomenologies of home (Heidegger 1993; Bachelard 1994). As Bachelard famously writes: “[…] by remembering ‘houses’ and ‘rooms,’ we learn to ‘abide’ within ourselves” (Bachelard 1994: xxxvii). The logical flipside of such organic notions of home is, however, that “all forms of mobility, which ‘disembed’ individuals from their local communities, have been seen to undermine social cohesion” and have been associated with danger, pollution, and destruction (Morley 2017: 59). In this logic, modernity and modern forms of building are seen as a threat to organic forms of dwelling. Modernity is thus judged as leaving the human subject existentially homeless (Dovey 1985).
Such conceptualisations of home as integrating one’s life into an existential whole have not remained unchallenged, most crucially due to their lack of attention to the implicit power politics attached to home. They have been criticised for their romanticisation (especially of gender roles and unpaid labour within the home), their static and masculinist underpinnings (Young 1997), and for their lack of understanding of how experiences of dwelling cannot be separated from social structures and often discriminatory institutions that make and shape our experiences of home. Seeing both individual and communal experiences of home as entangled with issues of power outlines how home can be threatening rather than integrating for some groups, e.g. for women, asylum seekers, or people with disabilities (Blunt and Dowling 2006: 14). Home has therefore been explored as indeed central “for the construction and reconstruction of one’s self” (Young 1997: 153), but the focus on home as a positive, integrative site for (implicitly white, male, middle-class, able-bodied, or heterosexual) identity formation has been amended by the study of home as a site of potentially violent, constricting identifications, e.g. of gender, sexuality, or ‘race’, to name but a few (see for example Back et al. 2007; Gorman-Murray 2006; Pink 2004). These explorations have included more recent phenomena like the Covid-19 lockdowns and the governmental imperative to ‘stay at home’, more established analyses of the logics of imperialism and colonialism, as well as assessments of the securitisation of nation-states along the lines of a home in need of defense in what William Walters has termed “domopolitics” (2004).
In effect, a focus on politics of home and home-making makes visible that “[h]ome does not simply exist, but is made” (Blunt and Dowling 2006: 23). A look at concrete imaginaries, practices, and forms of home can make explicit different, concrete uses made of such politics of home and outline how artists, activists, and other practitioners across different fields have made visible how politics of home shape how people and communities can or cannot co-exist.
In this special issue of Coils of the Serpent, we want to address the variety of forms and functions of politics of home and the different engagements with these politics across the arts, disciplines, and historical contexts. We welcome contributions that engage with politics of home and their representation and contestation in the areas of cultural and literary studies, (human) geography, urban studies, anthropology, or sociology, to name but a few. We are inviting contributions on topics that include (but are not limited to)
- narrating and representing politics of home across periods, genres, and media,
- forms of community and social relationships enabled or restricted within the home,
- home as a site of inclusion and/or exclusion,
- the politics and political rhetorics of home and homeland,
- home and home-making practices as sites of resistance,
- domestic violence and the home as a site of threat,
- the home as a prison,
- the politics of homelessness and its regulation, management, and representation,
- economies of home and the role of paid/unpaid labour,
- diaspora, migration, transnational mobility and their re-assessments of politics of home,
- planetary and environmental perspectives on politics of home,
- politics of home in urban planning and gentrification,
- the politics of specific sites of home, e.g. the suburb or the owner-occupied house-as-home,
- the body politics of home and bodyless homes (e.g. in cyberspace).
Please send an abstract of approximately 500 words and a short bio to the editors Kristin Aubel and Sarah Heinz (kristin.aubel@univie.ac.at & sarah.heinz@univie.ac.at) by 30 November 2023. Abstracts should include a title, topic outline, and information on the kind of text (essay, statement, scholarly article) as well as the approximate length of the planned text. Submissions can be in the form of a traditional journal article, but this is not a requirement. Submissions can also be more creative, of a personal nature, and/or experimental. The editors will get back to you by 22 December 2023. Full articles will be due 31 May 2024. The special issue is scheduled to be released in winter 2024. Please read the journal’s submission guidelines: https://coilsoftheserpent.org/submissions/
Works Cited (see the attached CFP)
CFP
(Posted 14 July 2023)