Books and special issues of journals – Deadlines April-June 2017

Before and after Beat exploded: Essential studies on ruth weiss
Deadline for proopsals: 12 April 2017

ruth weiss has worked for almost seven decades – and at 88 continues to work – with a plurality of artistic forms: she has authored around twenty poetry books, performed and recorded Jazz & Poetry, written more than ten plays, exhibited her water-color haiku paintings, acted in films and even written and directed one. As such, weiss embodies the artistic confluence of the 1950s and 1960s bohemia, breaking down, as Randy Roark writes, “the barriers between word, film, song, painting, and theatre”. Despite her extensive poetry career and very active participation in the West Coast buzzing artistic community since the early 1950s, weiss has remained an essentially overlooked figure in poetry history. This neglect might be representative – or shall we say a consequence – of the overshadowing of female artists within the Beat Generation as “a marginalized group within an always already marginalized bohemia” (Ronna C. Johnson).

Following her re-discovery in the course of Brenda Knight’s Women of the Beat Generation (1996), weiss’s work has benefitted from a boost in Beat-related academic and cultural activities in the last decades. Nevertheless, twenty years after the publication of Knight’s groundbreaking anthology, and despite the rekindled interest in the movement in general and in the work of women in particular, the Beat Generation academic niche is still lacking in terms of monographs and individual studies dealing with the work of female poets. Our book taps directly into this lacuna by providing up- to-date, comprehensive, critical analyses around one of the most prolific members of the so-called “Beat women”: ruth weiss.

The collection of essays aims to include studies on all areas of weiss’s body of work – poetry, film, theater, performance or painting – as well as contrastive or comparative studies between ruth weiss’s poetics and aesthetics and that of other poets and artists, both inside and outside the scope of the Beat Generation. In order to respond to the existing cross-pollination between art forms in weiss’s oeuvre, this collection maintains a multidisciplinary approach that the editors consider not only essential when dealing with weiss’s poetry, but also a methodological necessity in the postmodern 21st century. As the first collection on the every-day trendier ruth weiss, this collection will be one of a kind, becoming a mandatory reading for all of those interested in the Beat

Generation in general and “Beat women” in particular. With this in mind, the scope of this collection addresses:

  • detailed analyses of individual collections of poetry, as well as the position of ruth weiss as a Jazz & Poetry artist. In this regard, we are interested in historical accounts documenting the early years of innovation of Jazz & Poetry and weiss’s involvement in it, as well as her further development of the genre until today.
  • weiss’s personal biography and its effect on her poetic and artistic vision.
  • weiss’s involvement with the visual arts and the visual aspect in her In this regard, the collection explores both weiss’s involvement with visual arts such as painting or film and the influence of visual aesthetics in her poetry.
  • weiss’s use of poetic language in written and oral forms. Attention is paid in this respect to the performance aspect of weiss’s poetry, as well as to the way the poet plays with, bends and re-invents
  • weiss’s involvement in the Underground Film (The Brink, Ron Rice’s Flower Thief and Steven Arnold’s films), other audiovisual projects (ruth weiss meets her Prometheus [2007], Las Cuevas de Albion [2002]) – and the connections between these and weiss’s poetry.
  • weiss and the Beat Generation legacy: aesthetics, vision, and the issue of synchronicity.
  • weiss and literary genre. This includes essays paying attention to the mixture of genres in weiss’s oeuvre (lyric and narrative poem, travel journal, haiku, theatrical play, etc.)
  • adaptations of weiss’s work: Gerhard Samuel’s “Fortieth Day” – composed from weiss’s Desert Journal – and theatrical adaptations of her plays.
  • weiss’s collaborations and artistic network, which includes such diverse artists as novelist Jack Kerouac, poets Madeline Gleason, Philip Lamantia, Bob Kaufman, Anne Waldman, the painters Sutter Marin and Paul Blake, actor Taylor Mead, director Steven Arnold, a number of musicians (e.g., Sonny Wayne k.a. Sonny Nelson, Boo Pleasant, Doug Lynner), legendary stripper and comedian Carol Doda, etc.

Essays will be due December 31, 2017 and should be between 5000 and 6000 words in length. Interested contributors should send an abstract of 250–500 words with a short bio or their CV by April 12, 2017 to one of the editors,
Estíbaliz Encarnación Pinedo: estibaliz.encarnacion@um.es
Thomas Antonic: thomas.antonic@univie.ac.at

(posted 8 March 2017)

Africa’s Informal Transport Workers: Reconfiguring the margins
An edited volume
Deadline for proposals: 10 April 2017

With its micro-level approach towards one of the most pressing urban agenda in Africa today – that of public transport – this collection of field-based studies is a timely and nuanced contribution to a literature preoccupied with the neoliberal urban restructuring of public transport systems in Africa, while maintaining a weird silence on the vested interests, agency, politics, and struggles for survival and respectability of its criminalised workforce. The book tackles the overriding question: What might a micro-level analysis of the politics of informal transport in urbanizing Africa tell us about the precarious existence and social agency of its informal workforce, especially their lifeworlds, fears, and aspirations?

This edited volume is the first full-length study of the micropolitics of informal public transport in contemporary urban Africa, with attention to its dynamic, relational, predatory, and apparently chaotic functioning. By mapping, analysing, and comparing the experiences of informal transport workers across the African continent, this book sheds light on the daily challenges facing marginalised urban groups as they negotiate the contours of city life, expand horizons of possibility, and define hopes for a better future. Such grounded insights into the mobile practice of daily and nightly life in the city open the window for a more informed and effective policy response to Africa’s informal public transport sector, which is changing fundamentally and rapidly in light of neoliberal planning visions.

The book enhances our rather tenuous grasp of the entangled layers of relations between ‘formal’ (state) and ‘informal’ (non-state) urban actors, especially in those marginalised and transgressive public spaces (i.e. motor-parks, bus stops, and junctions) where practices of governance are exercised and contested on a daily basis. In this way, the book critically engages with the overriding theme of the UN Habitat III’s ‘New Urban Agenda,’ which underscores the need for more inclusive cities and urban reformations that leaves no one behind. The book also advances our understanding of public spaces in Africa as essentially a multiplicity of publics and counter-publics, rather than a single public (Weber, 1978) or two opposing publics (Ekeh, 1975). Lastly, the book sheds light on the ramifications of urban renewal or transformation for the livelihoods of informal workers, and, crucially, how those workers are responding to ‘modernizing’ interventions that impinge on their opportunities in, visions of, and rights to, the city.

Theorising city space as a complex social construct (Lefebvre, 1996) and spatial practices as tactical in nature (de Certeau, 1984), the chapters in this edited volume will bring into critical conversation interconnected themes like violence, extortion, poverty and inequality, power, legality, gender, identity, gang culture, unions, patronage politics, and social networks. Foregrounding crisis as context and possibility (Vigh, 2008; Cooper and Pratten, 2015), the book interrogates the interplay between agency and social forces, advancing our understanding of the multiple ways in which informal urban workers navigate precarious urban roads to survive and make the most of their time. In foregrounding the micro-level dynamics and predatory politics of informal public transport, this book challenges much ‘aesthetic’ framing of Africa’s informal sector.

Researchers are invited to submit on or before April 10, 2017 a chapter proposal (1 page) explaining the thematic concerns and approach of proposed contribution to the edited volume. Authors of accepted proposals will be notified by May 15, 2017. Full chapters will be sent out for review by August 15. The edited volume is expected to come out by the end of 2017. We are planning to publish the book either with University of Pennsylvania Press, Cambridge/Oxford University Press, Palgrave Macmillan, or Routledge (Cities and Society Series).

We invite researchers to send chapter proposals to Daniel Agbiboa, University of Pennsylvania: danielagbiboa@gmail.com
Deadline: April 10, 2017
Subject Categories: Urban Sociology; Urban Geography; Urban Politics

(posted 20 February 2017)

Intersemiotic Translation and New Forms of Textuality
Second Issue of Comparatismi
Deadline for the submission of articles: April 15th, 2017

Comparatismi is the digital periodical of the Board of Literary Criticism and Compared Literature.

Intertextuality, interculturality, intermediality, interactivity, intersemiosis: literary theory and media studies have started long ago to explore the more and more wide and labyrinthine continent of relationships between texts, cultures, media, processes of production/reception, complex systems of signs. The new technologies of information (the digital, the net), the economic globalization and the pandemic phenomena of remediation of messages have exponentially accelerated the processes of osmosis between cultures and semiospheres, making more and more urgent a reflection on how substantially the social dimension of every message (inter-) reshapes the structure of the message itself (intra-).
If we are used to take for granted that movies and television series have assimilated forms and contents peculiar to literary narrative, or that literature (poetic or narrative) has takes possession the descriptivity of figurative arts and photography, it is not so obvious that at present literature is unceasingly and deeply remodeled by the new forms of mimesis and by the new imaginary peculiar to audiovisual media and to the internet (in its social version), on a background of irreversible cognitive and epistemological metamorphosis of the contemporary man. While the author becomes virtual and the reader becomes a prosumer, the text more and more looks like an “emergent” system, marked out by difference, organization and connectivity: its general qualities cannot be explained by the laws ruling its single components, but they show new levels of evolution of the system resulting from not-linear interactions between the components themselves (so as in the videogames, the world wide web, the digital markets etc.).
The second issue of “Comparatismi“, the official digital periodical of the Board of Literary Criticism and Compared Literature, aims at hosting contributes : a) representing as widely as possible the current reflection on intersemiotic translation and on the new forms of textuality; b) analyzing actual examples of intersemiotic translation (from the novel to the film, from the videogame to the television series, from the television series to the novel etc.) and of new hybrid texts.
Contributes, in the form of articles ready for publication and inclusive of an abstract, should be submitted within 31st March 2017, following the instructions available on this website (see Online submissions). The texts selected to be submitted to peer review will be notified within 15th May 2017. The articles reviewed should be submitted within 31st July 2017. The articles accepted after reviewing will be published in November 2017. Submissions in languages other than Italian (preferably English, otherwise French) are encouraged and appreciated.
For further information, please write to Francesco Laurenti (francesco.laurenti@iulm.it) or to Stefano Ballerio (stefano.ballerio@unimi.it).
You can read the call for papers and submit your proposals here:
http://www.ledijournals.com/ojs/index.php/comparatismi/announcement/view/26

(posted 18 January 2017)

50 Years + – The Age of New French Theory (1966-1970)
An edited volume
Deadline for proposals: 30 April 2017

Editor: Laurent Milesi (Cardiff University)

In 1966, at Johns Hopkins University, a major international conference brought together for the first time in the United States, and was intended to celebrate, some of the most illustrious representatives of ‘Parisian structuralism’, practitioners of a controversial nouvelle critique (Barthes, Todorov, etc. – cf. Picard’s 1965 Nouvelle critique ou nouvelle imposture) alongside other influential intellectuals such as Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida and René Girard, among others. Published four years later as The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, the colloquium’s original title, the volume of proceedings was reedited in 1972 under a new name: The Structuralist Controversy, with a preface that took stock of ‘The Space Between’, when what was perceived as the ‘turn towards post-structuralism’ had effectively been consummated and landed in America.

Half a century after the first trilogy of books by one of the major protagonists in these ‘original scenes’ was published, Jacques Derrida’s L’Écriture et la diffférence, De la grammatologie and La Voix et le phénomène, this year’s issue of Word and Text invites original contributions to another ‘space between’: the years 1966-1970, when arguably most of the works ‘responsible’ for such a long-lasting intellectual sea-change appeared in quick succession, on either side of the May ’68 events – to name a few others: Lacan’s Écrits (1966), Foucault’s Les Mots et les Choses (1966) and L’Archéologie du savoir (1969), Macherey’s Pour une théorie de la production (1966), Barthes’s ‘The Death of the Author’ (1967) and S/Z (1970), Deleuze’s Différence et répétition (1968) and Logique du sens (1969), Tel Quel’s Théorie d’ensemble (1968), Goux’s Numismatiques (1968), Baudrillard’s Le Système des objets: La consommation des signes (1968), Kristeva’s Séméiôtiké: Recherches pour une sémanalyse (1969), Blanchot’s L’Entretien infini (1969), etc., but also Hélène Cixous’s first novels: Le Prénom de Dieu (1967), Dedans (1969), Le Troisième Corps and Les Commencements (1970).

The following is a non-exhaustive list of possible topics and approaches on which we are seeking submissions:

  • new historical, critical (etc.) perspectives on the ‘turn towards post-structuralism’ or the ‘sense of an ending’ (to appropriate the title of Frank Kermode’s famous 1967 study on the theory of fiction);
  • new evaluations of the impact of these thinkers and novel ideas or concepts on literary studies, criticism, philosophy, psychoanalysis and other humanistic disciplines;
  • the ‘age’ of these books (and others): how they have fared during this half-century and what they can still teach us today;
  • contributions on then notorious figures and works no longer fashionable nowadays or, conversely, revaluations of personalities, books, essays, etc. that became influential later but were relatively unknown or ignored at the time;
  • the resistance of ‘classical’ structuralism to the critical tensions of this ‘nouvelle critique’;
  • the role of the discovery and publication of the ‘other Saussure’ of the anagrams (the Geneva linguist’s Anagram Notebooks was serialized by Jean Starobinski between 1964 and 1971) on the years 1966-1970 and beyond;
  • May ’68 and its immediate or longer-term intellectual legacy;
  • the relation of the afore-mentioned thinkers and works to their contemporaries: Lévi-Strauss (who remained a structuralist anthropologist), Althusser (Marxism), Levinas (phenomenology, ethics), Sartre (existentialism), etc. as well as to then current thinking beyond the French borders; e.g. the Adorno († 1969) of Negative Dialectics (1966) and Aesthetic Theory (1970).

The deadline for abstract submissions is 30 April 2017 and acceptance (or rejection) will be notified around 15 May 2017. Selected contributors are then expected to send their full article by 15 September 2017. All submitted articles will be blind refereed except when invited. Accepted articles will be returned for post-review revisions by 15 October and are expected back in their final version by 30 October.

Please send your abstract to the editor of the volume, Milesi@cardiff.ac.uk, and to the journal’s e-mail address, wordandtext2011@gmail.com.

(posted 30 January 2017)

Global Fantastika
A special edition of Fantastika Journal
Deadline for articles: 30 April 2017

“Fantastika”, coined by John Clute, is an umbrella term which incorporates the genres of fantasy, science fiction, and horror, but can also include alternative histories, steampunk, young adult fiction, or any other imaginative space.

The third annual Fantastika conference focused on productions of Fantastika globally, as well as considering themes of contact across nations and borders within Fantastika. We are now seeking to supplement extended conference papers with other work in order to publish a special edition of Fantastika Journal which represents the diversity of Fantastika publications globally.

We welcome articles on Fantastika as they occur in any medium and form. Some suggested topics are:

  • Fantastika genres that are specific to a nation or culture (e.g. contemporary mythologies, magical realism, anime, etc.)
  • the representation of national or cultural ideologies in Fantastika
  • the production and development of Fantastika in non-English-speaking countries (English translation required for all non-English components)
  • fictional and real empires
  • globalization, industrialization, development and the future
  • global networks, mobilities, migrations
  • borders, defence of borders, crossing borders, and occupations
  • (post)colonial texts and readings
  • notions of the ‘other’

If you would like to submit an article for publication with Fantastika Journal, please send a 5000-7000 word article, with an abstract and a bionote in separate word documents, to editors@fantastikajournal.com. Please use MLA referencing style. All articles will undergo peer review following submission. Articles are due April 30, 2017.

We will also be including reviews of fiction or non-fiction works released in 2016 and 2017. Please contact us under the subject line “reviews” if you are interested in reviewing a film or book that considers any of the above themes.

Visit http://www.fantastikajournal.com for details of the journal and annual conferences.

(posted 21 February 2017)

Shakespeare and Africa
Anniversary Issue (10 Years) of the e-journal Shakespeare en devenir 2017
Deadline for completed articles: late April 2017

http://shakespeare.edel.univ-poitiers.fr

This issue would like to explore the relationship between Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, that of Shakespeare but also his contemporaries, and the representation of Africa, or, from a contextual viewpoint, the perception of the African continent in early modern England. The issue will also discuss 19th-21st c. re-writings, appropriations and adaptations of Shakespeare by African and African-American writers, stage directors and film directors.

Proposals may discuss, among other issues:

  1. The perception of the African continent in early modern England (in history, cartography, or history of ideas); the appropriation, discussion or rejection of foreign texts on/from Africa, as that of Leo Africanus (translated in 1600 as A Geographical Historie of Africa).
  2. Africa and African culture represented in drama by Shakespeare and his contemporaries.
  3. Rewritings of Shakespeare and his contemporaries by black writers: appropriations and distortions of the canonical texts, changes of focus and viewpoints, prequels and sequels, as, for example, Aimé Césaire’s Une Tempête, Djanet’s Sears’ Harlem Duet, Toni Morrison’s Desdemona, etc. Or more sporadic or indirect appropriations of Shakespearean elements by, for example, South-African writers like John M. Coetzee, Geoffrey Haresnape or Nadine Gordimer.
  4. 19th-21st century performances of early modern plays or their later rewritings in Africa, in French-speaking, Arabic-speaking, English-speaking, Portuguese-speaking countries; screen adaptations such as Alexander Abela’s Makifebo or Youssef Chahine’s Alexandria Trilogy.
  5. Performances (outside of Africa) by African-American companies. For example, Orson Welles’ 1936 voodoo Macbeth at the Federal Theatre; Brett Bailey’s transposition of Verdi’s Macbeth to the Congo and the Congolese regime; Toni Morrison’s Desdemona with Malian singer Rokia Traoré; work by the African-American Shakespeare Company in San Francisco, etc.

Completed papers, in English or in French, should be sent by late April 2017 along with an abstract, a contributor’s bio and a list of keywords, to Yan Brailowsky and Pascale Drouet: yan.brailowsky@u-paris10.fr, pascale.drouet@univ-poitiers.fr

Selected References

  • Andrea, Bernadette, “The Ghost of Leo Africanus from the English to the Irish Renaissance”, in P.C. Ingham & M. Warren (eds.), Postcolonial Moves: Medieval through Modern, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, p. 195-215.
  • Banham, Martin, Mooneeram, Roshni, Plastow, Jane, “Shakespeare and Africa”, in S. Wells & S. Stanton (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Stage, Cambridge, CUP, 2002, p. 284-299.
  • Brookes, Kristen, “Inhaling the Alien: Race and Tobacco in Early Modern England”, in B. Sebek & S. Deng, Global Traffic: Discourses and Practices in English Literature and Culture from 1550 to 1700, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, p. 157-178.
  • Cimitile, Anna Maria, “Shakespeare and Literary Africa: Encounters by Dissonance in Coetzee, Soyinka, Gordimer”, Ranam: Recherches Anglaises et Nord-Américaines, 2014, vol. 47, p. 245-264.
  • Darragi, Rafik, “The Tunisian Stage: Shakespeare’s Part in Question”, Critical Survey, 2007, vol. 19 issue 3, p. 95-106.
  • Fensome, Rebecca, “Giving place to Shakespeare in Africa: Geoffrey Haresnape’s African Tales from Shakespeare”, in G. Bradshaw, T. Bishop, L. Wright (eds.), The Shakespearean International Yearbook 9: Special Section, South African Shakespeare in the Twentieth Century, Farnham, Asgathe, 2009, p. 171-191.
  • Gouws, John, “Shakespeare, Webster and the Moriturus Lyric in Renaissance England”, Shakespeare in Southern Africa, 1989, 3, p. 45-57.
  • Guarracino, Serena, “Africa as Voices and Vibes: Musical Routes in Toni Morrison’s Marget Garner and Desdemona”, Research in African Literature, 2015 Winter, vol. 46 (4), p. 56-71.
  • Lebdai, Benaouda, “Traces of Shakespeare’s Tragedies in Africa”, in Eric C. Brown & Estelle Rivier (eds.), Shakespeare in Performance, Newcastle, CSP, 2013, p. 182-193.
  • Mafe, Diana Adesola, “From Ogun to Othello: (Re)Acquainting Yoruba Myth and Shakespeare’s Moor”, Research in African Literatures, Fall 2004, vol. 35, issue 3, p. 46-61.
  • Malère, Kaf, “Un Hamlet africain”, Horizons Maghrébins: Le Droit à la Mémoire, 2005, 53, p. 163-171.
  • Plastow, Jane (ed. And introd.), Shakespeare In and Out of Africa, Woodbridge, Currey, 2013.
  • Roux, Daniel, “Shakespeare and Tragedy in South Africa: From Black Hamlet to A Dream Deferred”, Shakespeare in Southern Africa, 2015, vol. 27, p. 1-14.
  • Seeff, Adele, “Titus Andronicus: South Africa’s Shakespeare”, Borrowers and Lenders, 2008 Fall-2009 Winter, 4 (1), no pagination.
  • Sher, Antony, Doran, Gregory, Woza Shakespeare: Titus Andronicus in South Africa, London, Bloomsbury, 1997.
  • Ungerer, Gustav, “The Presence of Africans in Elizabethan England and the Performance of Titus Andronicus at Burley-on-the-Hill, 1595-96”, Medieval & Renaissance Drama in England, 2008, vol. 21, p. 19-55.
  • Voss, Tony, “South Africa in Shakespeare’s ‘wide and universal theatre’”, Shakespeare in Southern Africa, 2015, vol. 27, p. 61-69.
  • Wilkinson, Jane, Africa: Rivista Trimestrale di Studi e Documentazione dell’Instituto Italo-Africano, 1999 June, 54 (2), p. 193-229, 230.
  • Willan, Brian, “Whose Shakespeare? Early Black South African Engagement with Shakespeare”, Shakespeare in Southern Africa, 2012, vol. 24, p. 3-24.
  • Woods, Peneloppe, “The Two Gentlemen of Zimbabwe & Their Diaspora Audience at Shakespeare’s Globe”, in J. Plastow (ed.), Shakespeare In and Out of Africa, Woodbridge, James Currey, 2013, p. 13-27.

(posted 1 August 2016)

Towards Common European English?
The ESSE Messenger, Summer 2017 issue
Deadline for proposals: 1 May 2017

The ESSE Messenger invites submissions for its Summer 2017 section of professional articles on the topic: Towards Common European English?

In recent decades a surge of studies have focused on English as it appears around the globe, giving rise to a plethora of new terms to describe various “types” of English (Global English, English as an International Language, New Englishes, …). The greatest effort has, however, gone into the description of English as it appears in what Kachru (1985) calls the Outer Circle, i.e. countries where English has an official status without being the mother tongue of the inhabitants. The question that this issue of the Messenger wishes to address is whether similar descriptions are possible for English in Europe. Is there, in other words, something like Euro-English? Does English have or need a special status in the countries of Europe?

The deadline for submissions is 1 May 2017.
The issue is due out on 1 July 2017.

(posted 23 January 2017)

2017 International Poetry Competition
The shortlisted poems will be published in a collected volume
Deadline for submissions: 1 May 2017

This suspense is terrible. I hope it will last.
Oscar Wilde

A competition organised by Interdisciplinary Research Foundation

Life and poetry walk hand in hand. Life is inextricably filled with poetry, while poetry inevitably fills life. Poetry, the textual avalanche of emotions, contains our inner peaks and valleys: joys, elation, sadness and woes. Poetry carries a sparkle – the flicker of hope, the fire of unknown, the textual suspense. It may be disturbing, it may be blissfully euphoric, but it always embraces the world and the self. The thrill of poetic creation. We hope it will last.

We invite submissions of one unpublished poem (max. 2 pages long) by 1 May 2017

Entry fee: 25 EUR
First prize: 250 EUR
Second prize: 100 EUR
Third prize: 50 EUR

All the shortlisted poems will be published in a collected volume.

We are planning to invite the winners to read their poems at the International Conference on Poetry Studies on 27 May 2017 in London

Enquiries email address: poetrylife@irf-network.org

(posted 4 March 2017)

Literary/Dramatic (re)presentation of Widowhood
A thematic collection
Deadline for proposals: 20 May 2017

Editor: Katarzyna Bronk, PhD, Faculty of English, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland
kbronk@wa.amu.edu.pl

“[O]ld Maid and musty Widows are like the plague shun’d of by all men…” So says Doll Pacify from Margaret Cavendish’s Bell in campo (1660). Her fellow servant, Nell Careless, replies: “a man cannot intimately love a Widow, because he will be a Cuckold, as being made one by her dead Husband, and so live in Adultry…” (Bell, V.25).

Cavendish was one of the most outspoken women of her times, nowadays seen as a protons insist writer, yet Bell in campo only offers two options for the state of widowhood. Her husband-less women either suffer severe punishment for reawakened (sexual) desire, as seen in the elderly widow, Madam Passionate, or perpetual mourning (glorifying the memory of the deceased husband) and death as exemplified by Madame Jantil. Whilst the play obviously discourages the former behaviour, it equally, when read carefully, does not condone the latter behaviour either, even though the younger widow presents some form of poetic release, creating the sites of memory dedicated to the husband.

In contrast to Cavendish’s two options of female widowhood, literary and dramatic widowers have enjoyed a much better fate than women, or simply more freedom. In actual life, as Margaret Pelling’s “Finding widowers: Men without women in English towns before 1700” suggests, “’widower’ seems, in spite of its derivation, entirely to lack the burden of attributes attached to ‘widow’: dependency, sexual avidity or availability, sexual experience, isolation, and the kind of malice associated with witchcraft” (Pelling in Cavallo and Warner 1999: 43). One can, however, argue with her attribution of fiery sexual drive to older women only; after all comedies are peopled with widowers who chase after young (and very young) maidens, boasting of their strong sexual libido. The ‘sin’ of giving in to their passions is common to both sexes in literary and dramatic pieces, although indeed there is more stigma attached to the sexually active widow.

What a husband-less woman can and, more importantly, cannot do has been seriously debated on or negotiated in political, social, religious and cultural/literary discourse at least since the early Church Fathers’ writings on postnuptial life. Though not as straightforward as, for example, Catholic and Puritan writers (see conduct texts), lessons on female widowhood became a subtext or leitmotif of many pieces of literature, and this is what the present collection wishes to explore. We invite you to send abstracts on topics related to the proper/expected and improper/rebellious performances and perceptions of widowhood (also comparative papers on widowers) as shown in British literature across all literary and historical periods. While all types of literature are of initial interest, we are particularly inviting propositions on drama and its representations of widows and their fate.

We invite abstracts (max 500 words) on various shades of widowhood. Interested authors are kindly asked to send their abstracts by 20th May 2017 to dr Katarzyna Bronk (kbronk@wa.amu.edu.pl and bbronkk@gmail.com). If accepted by the editors, selected abstracts will be collated into a thematic collection and proposed to a publisher. Upon acceptance by the publisher, the authors will be asked to write full versions of their papers.

(posted 18 April 2017)

Re-writing Women as Victims: From Theory to Practice
Contribution sare invited
Deadine for proposals: 24 May 2017

Eds.: M. J. Gámez Fuentes, S. Núñez Puente and E. Gómez Nicolau

This proposed edited collection of interdisciplinary essays aims to critically analyse scientific approaches, political strategies, civil society initiatives and modes of representation that aim at dismantling the conventional narratives that sustain the present configuration of women in contexts of violence.

It would appear that, in the fight to eradicate violence against women, hegemonic narratives, mediated via institutional proposals and popular discourses, although geared towards gender equality, have succumbed to moral reductionism and legal discourses. Thus the entire problematic of inequality has been reduced to the categories of the victim and the victimiser/criminal. In the current panorama of revising frameworks of political and cultural understanding, it becomes therefore indispensable to search for modes of resignifying the woman-victim scheme in order to update narratives about experienced violence from a new theoretical perspective. This would enable us both to revise current institutional approaches and to explore modes of ascribing political value to the act of spectatorship.

It is on these grounds that we are interested in initiatives and narratives that make new spaces possible in which to name, self-identify, and resignify the female political subject as a social agent in situations of violence.

This area of inquiry requires a critical re-examination of both its foundations and its specialized academic production. A number of novel approaches —including epistemological, methodological, and analytical ones, especially emerging from feminist critical theory— have recently aimed to do so (J. Butler & A. Athanasiou, 2013, Dispossession. The Performative in the Political; J. Butler et al., eds., 2016, Vulnerability in Resistance). Therefore, we are looking for proposals that transcend the pair abuser-victim and explore the complex relations between gender and violence, and individual and collective accountability. In order to do that, the book initially comprehends four areas of enquiry:

  • EPISTEMOLOGIES: new theoretical and methodological approaches
  • POLITICS: innovative proposals from institutional politics and/or social policy
  • ACTIVISM: transformative initiatives from associations and/or civil society
  • CULTURAL PRODUCTION: analysis of case studies deconstructing hegemonic narratives

Proposal topics may include, but are not restricted to:

  • Critical theoretical approaches on victimology and gender
  • Research methodologies tackling women’s agency in contexts of violence
  • Women’s resistances and responses to violence
  • Worldwide public policies challenging the concept of women-victim
  • Critical evaluation of secondary victimization of women as victims through public policies, media and cultural and social discourses
  • Counter-hegemonic media narratives of women as victims
  • Film and television innovative approaches to women as political agents in context of violence
  • On-line activism and Social Network Sites discussing hegemonic recognition of women as victims
  • Feminist and grassroots activism re-writing women as victims
  • Emancipatory social projects and practices of women challenging violence

We will market the book for an international audience (the volume will be in English language). Routledge has indicated interest as part of the Gender & Sexuality series, and we will continue to consider other reputable academic publishers. Please circulate the CFP widely with graduate students, faculty, and independent scholars who work on any transformative aspect of women and violence from Sociology, Film & Media Studies, Politics, Social Policy, Philosophy, Cultural Studies, Social Movement Studies, etc…

Submission guidelines:

  • A 500-600 words abstract in English with 4-5 references should be sent to Drs. María José Gámez Fuentes (Univ. Jaume I, Castellón, Spain) at gamezf@uji.es, Sonia Núñez Puente (Univ. Rey Juan Carlos, Madrid, Spain) at puente@urjc.es, and Emma Gómez Nicolau (Univ. Jaume I) at enicolau@uji.es by May 24th 2017. Please state in which of the four areas (Epistemologies, Politics, Activism or Cultural Production) you envisage your contribution to fit in.
  • Please include a title, name, e-mail address, and affiliation if applicable, plus a two pages CV.

If accepted, the final draft version of your chapter, approximately 6,000 words, would most likely be due by May 10th 2018. Decisions about the final shape of the project will be made once the publisher has reviewed and agreed upon accepted full chapter proposals. Feel free to write to us with any questions you might have. We look forward to reading your submissions.

(posted 3 March 2017)

Reading World War I Literature 100 Years After
A special issue of Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses (2018), No. 31
Deadline for proposals: 26 May 2017

Editors: Nick Milne (University of Ottawa) & Sara Prieto (University of Alicante)

A hundred years after the Armistice of World War I, further review of the literature focused on and emanating from the conflict is needed. This special issue of Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses (http://raei.ua.es) seeks to approach WWI from a multidisciplinary perspective, beyond the traditional canonical voices associated with the literature of the Great War.

The issue will deal with the literature of the war from different literary and cultural angles, with a particular emphasis upon the relationships between memory (however broadly described) and the representation of war. For this reason, we are looking for articles that approach the literary and cultural manifestations of WWI in English dealing with, among others, the following topics:

  • WWI: Other contexts, other voices.
  • WWI: Memory and commemorative space.
  • Drama and WWI: representation and reception.
  • WWI in cinema and television.
  • WWI in contemporary fiction.
  • WWI and the printed press.
  • WWI and revisionist history.
  • WWI and (post)modern literature.
  • Home front vs. fighting front narratives.
  • Combatants vs. objectors.

Submitted abstracts should be between 300 and 500 words in length, and should be sent to raei.wwi.2018@gmail.com by no later than Friday, May 26th. Please also include an additional biographical statement, of no more than 100 words, that lists your educational level, current academic affiliation, and any other details you may feel are pertinent.

Applicants can expect to hear back about their proposals by the end of June. Full articles (8,000 words, MLA style) will be due by the end of November. Notifications about acceptance or required changes will be provided in January of 2018, and final articles will be required in March/April of 2018.

Should you have any further questions, do not hesitate to contact the issue co-editors, Sara Prieto (sara.prieto@ua.es) and Nick Milne (nick.milne@gmail.com).

(posted 27 March 2017)

B(l)ack Futures – Flat Time in Black Performance
Special Issue of Open Cultural Studies
Deadline for proposals: 31 May 2017

Editors: Dr Nicole Hodges Persley, (University of Kansas, Department of Theatre) & Dr Baron Kelly (University of Louisville, Department of Theatre)

This special issue plays against African American theater scholar Harry Elam’s discussion of playing the past in the present in the work of August Wilson (Elam 2005) and current discourses of new materialism and post-humanity to explore the specificity and malleability of time and futurity in Black performance.  Riffing off of the past, imperfect and future tenses of black life captured in transnational and intersectional representations of black performance, the works in this special issue will move back and forth across time to flatten past and present performances and forms of black expression that foreshadow and shape black futures the 21st century. We seek to interrogate the theme of new materialism as it relates to political economy, embodiment, resistance, rage, bio-politics, improvisation, resistance, and post-humanity as manifest in transnational black performance. This volume explores black life in the 21st century in flat-time, or in perpetual suspension, without promise of release or relief, to understand how the present has been materially and psychically shaped by the past. We see flat time as a conditional structure of perpetual present that makes future projections of black performance contingent and vulnerable to perpetual looping of past experiences of anti-black violence and trauma.

Article submissions may speak to the following themes:

  • How do engagements with “new materialism” and “post-humanity” shape our understanding of black performance transnationally?”
  • How do “alternate facts” and the rise of the so called “alt right” affect the past, present, and future of black performance?
  • What does improvised strategies of resistance offer to black artists and scholars as a devise to manipulate time in performance?
  • How do “freedom” and “rage” fuse to become a revised thematic in black performance at this historical conjuncture?
  • How does the rise of the so-called alt-right leadership in the United States impact the legibility and audibility of black life?
  • How do non-binary genders, people of color, and those who self-identify as anything other than heterosexual, able to manifest futures in a present that loops to the past?
  • How does (under)commons democracy shape black performance in the 21st century?
  • What are the ethical and political ramifications of new materialism in the analysis of black performance?
  • In what ways does white cis-het male patriarchy affirm “alt-histories” and “alt-facts” that seek to arrest the expression of black futures?
  • How does blackness become a sanctuary that can cover the trauma of intersectional living and quests for liberation?
  • What role does the media play in underscoring and disseminating arrested perspectives black performance?
  • What possibilities for freedom are imagined and improvised within constraints of perpetual black trauma?
  • How are histories of blackness inherited through intergenerational practice?

The deadline for submission of proposals is 31 May 2017. Please send the proposals to the Managing Editor izabella.penier@degruyteropen.com. The authors of the accepted proposals will be notified by 31 June 2017. The deadline for submitting full articles will be 30 September 2017

(posted 28 February 2017)

Materiality, Objects and Objecthood
A special issue of Open Cultural Studies / De Gruyter Open
Deadline for proposals: 31 May 2017

Editors: Professor Erick Felinto (State University of Rio de Janeiro)

After a comprehensive deconstruction of the central place occupied by human actors in social life, it became necessary not only to investigate the role of things and objects in the social sciences (media, nature, animals, machines etc), but also to highlight the issues that the strong tradition of hermeneutics of the humanities have often obscured. Spurred by the impact of new digital technologies, the field of media studies cleverly learned to appropriate the epistemological principles and major theoretical issues that have come to characterize the contemporary cultural scene. The main goal of this special issue is not only to explore the place of human actors in a world enriched by the life of polymorphic objects, but also to investigate more deeply the role of objecthood and materiality in the development of cultural processes.

Suggested topics include: In what ways does technological materiality inform cultural worlds and determine forms of cognition? ŸWhat new models of historical research of techniques and culture are emerging within the current epistemological paradigms? How are the material dimensions of experience combined with the intangible dimensions of culture? What does it mean to purport an “object-oriented” philosophy, a “materialist feminism” or an “actor-network theory”? In what sense does the category of the human is reconfigured in light of our new relations with objects and nonhuman entities? How important is the legacy of the genealogy and archeology of knowledge (Nietzsche, Foucault) to a perspectivization of the impacts of “new” digital culture?

Complete proposals should be submitted to izabella.penier@degruyteropen.com  by May, 31 2017.

(posted 20 January 2017)

On Uses of Black Camp
A pecial Issue of Open Cultural Studies / De Gruyter Open
Deadline for proposal: 31 May 2017

Editors: Dr Anna Pochmara, Dr Justyna Wierzchowska

Andrew Ross, in his now classic text “Uses of Camp,” points to Prince and Michael Jackson and their polysexual identities as emblematic of camp aesthetics yet completely neglects the significance of the race factor in their campiness. In turn, he fails to consider the connection between camp and race. Moreover, the focus on racial authenticity in black culture has led to the privileging of texts explicitly embedded in historical discourses, such as slave narratives, and to the marginalization of, especially nineteenth-century, fiction, and particularly texts parading non-black, white-looking, or racially indefinite characters (cf. Maria Giulia Fabi, Passing and the Rise of the African American Novel, 2001).  On Uses of Black Camp, a 2017 special issue of Open Cultural Studies, aims to fill in this lack in critical discourses of both camp and black cultures, to help us better understand the reasons for such scarcity of texts on blackness and campiness.

The call for papers encourages essays that address such topics as: Performances of racial passing and excesses of mulatta melodramas; Blues and the politics of non-normativity, or “The race problem had at last been solved through Art plus Gladys Bentley,” to misquote Langston; Black English and “the will to adorn,” to quote from Zora; Superflies and Foxy Browns, or Blaxploitation (and anti-Blaxploitation);  Black dandies, sweetbacks, and processes of citification;  Diva gangstas – to paraphrase A. Ross – and swagger queens, or the glamorous campiness of hip-hop culture;  From Sun Ra to the Electric Lady, or black to the extraterrestrial funkadelic Afrofuture, to signify on Mark Dery;  Signifyin’ and “camping the dirty dozens,” to borrow from M.B. Ross; o Symbolic gayness of camp and symbolic whiteness of homosexuality;  Race perfomativity and race plasticity; Gender performativity, Wilde sexuality, and black camp;  Posthumanism and alleged postraciality.

Please, send complete papers to Izabella.penier@degruyteropen.com by May, 31 2017.

(posted 20 January 2017)

Migration and Translation
A special Issue of Open Cultural Studies / De Gruyter Deadline for proposals: 31 May 2017

Editor: Dr. Hab. Ewa Kołodziejczyk (Institute of Literary Research, Polish Academy of Sciences)

Migration and translation are distant but closely related phenomena that understand migration discursively as mobility of texts, international transfer of knowledge and transformation in the field of cultural literacy.  The migrant’s hybrid status opens up new research areas in relation to: 1). Central European émigré literature before the collapse of communism, 2). writings of post-socialist Central European migrants abroad, 3). literary writings of migrants residing in Central Europe.

This special issue will focus on the ways in which migrant literatures manage to capture and explore new cultural territories through translation. Suggested topics may include: creation of ethnic enclaves and myths, as alternative structures in which literature is both a channel for and a reflection of communication in the diaspora and beyond; re-narrating native cultures in confrontation with the host country; auto-translations and problems they pose; inscriptions of migrant experiences; translations of migrants’ writings, Central European literature abroad and foreign literature in Central Europe;  eco-translatology.

The special issue also wishes to to take a closer look at forced migrants, called by Mary Gallagher “naked migrants,”  and bring research on Central European post-socialist émigré literature with the literary output of arrivals in Central Europe in a common framework of transculturation.

Complete papers should be submitted to izabella.penier@degruyteropen.com by 31 May 2017.

(posted 20 January 2017)

Minority languages and cultures and the politics of disenfranchisement
A special issue of the Open Cultural Studies/ De Gruyter
Deadline for propsals: 31 May 2017

Editor: Prof. Enrique Uribe Jongbloed (Universidad de Bogotá Jorge Tadeo Lozano)

The recent changes in the political leadership of various countries has revealed attitudes ranging from disinterest to downright disenfranchisement towards immigrants. Under the ideas of stronger border controls and a new bout of nationalism, minority cultures and languages seem to be at a higher risk than before. With these discourses sparking up in swaths of the global North, there are a great deal of questions arising for minority groups world-wide. The return of political parties that favour the one-country, one-culture, one-language ideas imply new challenges for minority cultures and languages within their borders. What avenues are there for these minority groups to defy the homogenization and acculturation paradigm that is ensuing?

Topics of interest may address issues such as: political participation of minority cultures and languages after Brexit; media policy for minority cultures and languages; international debates and policy regarding migration, travel requirements and other conditions; effects of the recent political changes to international conventions, agreements and accords (i.e. The European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages); current situation of trans-border cultural minorities and diasporas; political participation and recognition of indigenous, aboriginal, first nations, and ethnic minorities within national/international borders; resistance strategies of minority cultures;  conceptual discussions of the categories “minority” and “minoritised” in regards to language; specific minority language situations after recent political changes (i.e. Spanish-language instruction in the US); counter-hegemonic and post-colonial resistance and critique.

The politics of disenfranchisement work against the many advances to recognize the multicultural nature of most nation-states and the intercultural relationships that stem from the history of colonization and the recent trends of migration and ICTs development. Contrary to a general openness to intercultural dialogue, the new paradigm returns to a monocultural and monolingual conception of the State. It sets itself against international or regional integration and promotes a separatist stance that favours cultural homogeneity and culturalization strategies. This call seeks to reach as many international perspectives and developments that may contrast those examples of the global North by showing that, despite its political and media influence and preponderance, there is a distinct move against such a perspective in various corners of the world. Not only does this call mean to highlight that the global North is not the only point of reference, but also that there is a great diversity of approaches, resistance strategies, and standpoints for the maintenance of minority languages and cultures in the global South.

The deadline for expressions of interest will be 31 May 2017, and for final manuscript submissions 10 July 2017. Please submit your proposals to izabella.penier@degruyteropen.com

(posted 22 March 2017)

The Renewal of the Crime Play on the Contemporary Stage
A special issue of Coup de Théâtre
Deadline for proposals: 31 May 2017

Crime fiction has long enjoyed success with critics and the public. First it was the film industry which turned to crime fiction to provide stories and characters. Then crime drama became a staple of primetime television. Crime fiction seems to have had far less influence on the stage, however. In fact, studies of the crime genre tend to leave the theatre out completely. The term “detective drama” seems a rather awkward label derived from the canonical “detective fiction” genre.

Are we to conclude then that the crime play no longer has its place on the stage? The “whodunit”, the most traditional form of detective fiction, had its heyday in the 1940s and even today continues to attract audiences, as the case of The Mousetrap still running in London since 1952 shows. Is this the only option for crime drama today, the recycling of old forms, leading inevitably to parody?

Nevertheless many contemporary English and American playwrights have set out to renew the genre, using different variations: the metatheatrical (The Real Inspector Hound, 1968, Tom Stoppard), the ethical (Orphans, 2009, Dennis Kelly), the political (Three Kingdoms, 2013, Simon Stephens) or the metaphysical (Suicide in Bflat, 1976, Sam Shepard) to mention just a few.

This issue of Coup de Théâtre welcomes proposals exploring the following areas:

  • The rewriting of canonical forms such as the “whodunit” and “hard-boiled” detective fiction
  • The distinction between high culture and low culture and how crime drama fits into these categories
  • The distinction between crime novels, films and plays in terms of aesthetics and reception.
  • Does the traditional distinction between the specifically American “thriller” and the English “mystery play” remain or are there signs of a blending of styles?
  • The influence of cinema aesthetics. Examples such as that of the English company Punchdrunk or Stephen Daldry’s National Theatre production of An Inspector Calls (1992 and 2016) show the influence on staging of the “film noir”.
  • The influence of new technologies and virtual reality on the renewal of crime drama (for example, Jennifer Haley’s The Nether performed in the US in 2013, revived at the Royal Court in London and then transferring to the West End).
  • Links between crime drama and musical comedy (as in the example of Cy Coleman et David Zippel’s 1989 City of Angels which pays tribute to the 1940s “film noir” .

Please send proposals for articles (500 words max.) and a brief biography to:

Deadline: May 31, 2017Articles (not exceeding 7,500 words) should be ready by September 30

(posted 30 March 2017)

The Life of Others: Narratives of Vulnerability
A special issue of Canada & Beyond: A Journal of Canadian Literary and Cultural Studies (Spring 2018 issue)
Deeadline for submissions: 1 June 2017

Guest Editor: Eva Darias-Beautell

In her Levinasian discussion of the functioning of ethical obligations in the face of global and local forms of precarity, Judith Butler links the production of vulnerability with a situation of “up againstness” or “unwilled adjacency,” of one’s involvement in a relation of proximity that has not been chosen (134). Vulnerability in those cases arises from the realization that “one’s life is also the life of others”, and that “the bounded and living appearance of the body is the condition of being exposed to the other, exposed to solicitation, seduction, passion, injury, exposed in ways that sustain us but also in ways that can destroy us” (141). Itself the site of production of various forms of violence and vulnerability, this adjacency also triggers the affective and creative engagements necessary for action (134).
These seem crucial issues in Canada, where contemporary debates over citizenship and social justice often take place within complex transnational, transcultural, and (post)colonial contexts as well as beside the historical experiences of settlement and migration, with their contested forms of national or cultural belonging. Additionally, Canada’s humanitarian tradition, itself marked by convoluted narratives, is increasingly challenged by new conditions of global violence, environmental threats, social and political unrest. Canadian literatures do not merely reflect on these conditions but engage with them, exploring the aesthetic possibilities of what could be thought of as a reconnection between the text and the world. How does cultural production articulate and propose strategies of resistance to the massive production of vulnerability? Are the examples of resilience offered by Canadian literature, film, performance and visual arts able to reactivate ethical responsibility and political activism?
This special issue invites contributors to offer a critical examination of Canadian cultural production with an emphasis on the discursive modes that deconstruct the hegemonic structures that produce vulnerability. We also wish to invite research articles that interpret the present condition of (un)willed adjacency in its real and metaphoric possibilities as a site of production of violence and vulnerability, but also (potentially) of lucid creativity, exposing, soliciting, seducing “in ways that sustain us but also in ways that can destroy us.”
Possible areas of interest include (but are not limited to): urban poverty, the medicalized body, indigenous activism, colonial violence, migration and war narratives, ecological vulnerability, the posthuman seduction, emotional precarity, sexuality and (trans)narrative desire, gender and agency, technological liquidity, queer creativities, precarious labour, (non)narratives of resistance, narrative ethics and the post-truth moment. Comparatist and interdisciplinary approaches are most welcome.
All submissions to Canada & Beyond must be original, unpublished work. Articles, between 6,000 and 7500 words in length, including endnotes and works cited, should follow current MLA bibliographic format.
Submissions should be uploaded to Canada & Beyond’s online submissions system (OJS) by the deadline of June the 1st, 2017. They will be peer-reviewed for the Spring 2018 issue.

Work Cited: Butler, Judith. 2012. “Precarious Life, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Cohabitation.” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 26.2: 134-151.

(posted 9 February 2017)

The Pre-Raphaelites and Antiquity
Special Issue of Open Cultural Studies
Deadline for proposals: 30 Jun 2017

Editor: Dr Richard Warren (Royal Holloway, University of London).

The focus of this special issue will be on how the British artists of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood received and transformed antiquity. The issue aims to explore the diversity of Pre-Raphaelite receptions of the ancient world particularly, but not limited to, the legacy of the civilisations of ancient Egypt, the Middle East, ancient Greece, ancient Rome and ancient Britain. This special collection of studies will seek to break new ground in elaborating how the Pre-Raphaelites used the ancient to express their ideals and fears, and their reactions to the contemporary Victorian society in which they lived. Building on the many existing studies of the art of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the collection will ideally enrich this literature through a series of case studies on individual artists and on individual themes (such as gender and nationalism).

Suggested topics for articles for the collection could include:

  • John Ruskin’s relationship with antiquity and the impact of this upon the Pre-Raphaelites;
  • studies of individual artists and their relationship with classical antiquity (Possible subjects might include Frederic Leighton, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, John William Waterhouse, and Edward Burne-Jones);
  • the roles of ancient Britain and ancient Rome in defining the Victorian national and imperial ideal;
  • the Pre-Raphaelite uses of antiquity in articulating Victorian ideas about gender;
  • the relationship between the articulation of the ancient in Victorian poetry and Pre-Raphaelite painting, the impact of Pre-Raphaelite receptions of antiquity on later Victorian art and criticism (Possible subjects might include Oscar Wilde’s art criticism and Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrations).

Submission deadline: June 30, 2017 via the online submission system: http://www.editorialmanager.com/culture.

(posted 28 February 2017)

Nationalism  in Contemporary Literature and Culture
A monograph or a special issue at De Gruyter Open
Deadline for proposals: 30 June 2017

Editors: Izabella Penier University of Central Lancashire & Magda Rekść University of Lodz.

A year ago died Benedict Anderson, the author of Imagined Communities, arguably the most influential study of nationalism. Anderson saw nationalism as an integrative imaginative process that allows us to “[conceive] . . . a deep, horizontal comradeship” with unknown people who share the same beliefs and values. On the other hand, however, he was not blind to the uglier underside of nationalism. He was aware of the fact that it can take the pathological form of the hatred of the Other. In the current political climate, we can see a resurgence of the ideology of nationalism all over the world. Since contemporary nationalism spawn intolerance, authoritarianism and religious fundamentalism and give rise to totalizing notions of identity (nationalistic, ethnic, religious or imperial), we think this is the right moment to broach the subject of nationalism and commemorate at the same time the great work of Benedict Anderson.

We welcome papers on contemporary literary and cultural texts that engage in revaluation nationalisms; contemporary notions of citizenship, national identity and belonging; notions of cultural identity, gender, ethnicity, religion and nationhood; concepts of masculinity, sexuality and nationalism, the relationship between sex, violence and the notion of national belonging; the role of literature, culture and art in building/deconstructing national/ethnic identities;  narratives of collective memories and other related topics.

Please submit full papers to Izabella Penier at IPenier@uclan.ac.uk. The deadline for submissions is 30.06.2017. Please use MLA stylesheet.

(posted 30 January 2017)

Popular Mediations of Science – Critical Perspectives on Science and its Contexts
A special issue of Open Cultural Studies / De Gruyter Open
Deadline for proposals: 30 June 2017

Editors: Dr Maureen Burns & Dr Adam Dodd (The University of Queensland)

This issue provides a collection of critical cultural perspectives on popularising science. Many cultural studies scholars use science studies, science and technology studies and feminist science studies in our work. This issue offers critical cultural studies, communication and media studies perspectives specifically on the dissemination of science. Instead of exploring the ways that science is communicated to the general public, this issue will explore how mediation is intrinsic to the core practices of science, and the ways in which popular genres feed back into scientific institutions and disciplines.

Using popular media artefacts and methods from critical cultural studies and associated disciplines, articles will explore issues around scientific disciplines, institutions and publics.

Topics may include, but are not limited to: critiques of classical humanism in the sciences; the construction and maintenance of scientific publics; how the visual mediates scientific practice; aestheticisation within science and of scientific objects of inquiry; science as performative; science experts and celebrities; popular and unpopular science and scientists; science PR and advocacy; depopularising ‘abnormal’ science.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE:  June 30, 2017 Please submit full papers to Izabella Penier at  izabella.penier@degruyteropen.com  

For details and guidelines see the journal website:   https://www.degruyter.com/view/j/culture

(posted 30 January 2017)

Texts and Territories: The Curious History of the Middle Ages
Call for chapters for an edited volume
Deadline for proposals:: 30 June 2017

Contact: Hülya Taflı Düzgün, PhD, Medievalist, Deparment of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Letters, University of Erciyes, Kayseri, Turkey
textsandterritories@gmail.com

The writing of a literary text is as a retrospective explanation of what is happening in the present and such writing is the deliberate re-creation in actual practice. This present includes social, cultural, religious and political events. The impact of immediate contemporary concerns is served to place a literary text at least partly outside the author’s control. The author responds to a given context of historical and cultural incident that limits his freedom to invent or adapt or explain. Of these contemporary concerns, first the literary text has to do with how cultural practices, cultural changes helped to create itself; second with what happens when specific historical events appear to model themselves on narrative structures, how those events can be given a conscious extra boost by narrative authors or patrons to make the parallels even closer. Across all for of those phenomena, there is a turning of history into literary narrative or literary narrative into history; therefore, literature and history live in each other’s pockets. The quantity of medieval texts that straddle the borderland between literature and history, what has been called a medieval fashion for pseudo-history, has been commented on repeatedly over the years. However, the broader implications of this phenomenon for modern understanding of medieval concepts of the past and historiography have been under explored.

This proposal suggests a forum of ideas on the link between literature and history as historicised fiction of fictionalised history has a particular prominent place in the literature of the Middle Ages. This proposal welcomes papers from disciplines with a focus on the Middle Ages or on the impact of medieval thinking in the modern period.

The topics of interest include but not limited to the following titles:

  • From country to state: political ideas of land and the creation of nations
  • Writing journeys: pilgrimages, crusades, travel writing, romances
  • Visualizing the narratives: maps and illuminations
  • National origins: creating identity through myth, chronicles, genealogies
  • Representations of the landscape or nationality in art and music
  • Beyond the Middle Ages: the influence of medieval concepts of territory on modern thought

Researchers are invited to submit on or before 30 June 2017, a brief biography, an abstract of 200 words, 5-6 keywords pertaining the topic, and a chapter proposal of 1,000 to 2,000 words clearly explaining the mission and concerns of the proposed chapter.
The authors of the accepted proposals will be notified by 15 July 2017.
The deadline for submitting full articles will be 15 September 2017. Please send the proposals to textsandterritories@gmail.com.

 (posted 16 May 2017)