The editors of EJES are issuing calls for papers for the three issues of the journal to be published in 2020. Potential contributors are invited to submit detailed proposals of up to 1,000 words to the guest editors of the topic they are interested in.
The deadline for proposals for this volume is 31 October 2018.
Procedure
EJES operates a two-stage review process.
- Contributors are invited to submit proposals for essays on the topic in question by 31 October 2018.
- 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 spring 2019 deadline.
- The full-length essays undergo another round of review, and a final selection as well as suggestions for revisions are made. Selected essays are then revised and resubmitted to the guest editors in late 2019 for publication in 2020.
EJES employs Chicago Style (T&F Chicago AD) and British English conventions for spelling and punctuation.
Call for Papers for Volume 24 (2020)
Representing Trans
Guest editors: Elahe Haschemi Yekani (Berlin), Anson Koch-Rein (Grinnell) and Jasper Verlinden (Berlin)
The last couple of years have been shaped by a paradoxical simultaneity of unprecedented trans visibility in the arts and media and of ongoing transphobic violence, disproportionately affecting economically disadvantaged and communities of colour. How can we approach the (international) success of shows such as Transparent, Hit & Miss, Orange is the New Black, Sense8, The OA or the independent film Tangerine (2015), foreign-language Oscar-winner Una Mujer Fantástica (A Fantastic Woman, 2017) or Arekti Premer Golpo (Just Another Love Story, 2010), and others? How do these visual representations negotiate traditional gendered binaries of the ‘male gaze’ (Villarejo 2016) and the dynamics of trans feminine hypervisibility and trans masculine invisibility? How do these artefacts navigate “the trap of the visual” that offers trans visibility as the “primary path through which trans people might have access to livable lives” (Gossett, Stanley and Burton 2017)? Have we indeed reached a “transgender tipping point” in public and political discourse as the June 2014 heading of Time Magazine, featuring actress Laverne Cox as the first open trans woman on the cover, suggests? What kind of tensions does the mainstream marketability and recognition (e.g. of celebrities like Caitlyn Jenner or Chaz Bono) create?
How do trans visibility and new regulative attempts such as the House Bill 2 (HB2) that gave rise to a new form of ‘bathroom panic’, but also media-savvy counter strategies by trans activists on social media, shape public discourse and how will politics be affected by more trans people running for political office? How does the predominance of US-centred trans representations reflect “the complex global flows of shared subcultural knowledges” (Aizura 2006) and how do they circulate globally and get received, resisted, or repurposed locally? Are there specific national investments in a visibility of legible scripts of trans lives based on identitarian political representation and how does this relate to visual representations of other non-normative forms of embodiment that might not easily fit such narratives?
Topics
The editors invite papers that address trans representations in TV, film, visual art, performance art, video, and social and other media exploring, among others, the following topics:
- self-representation/trans-produced representations
- debates about representation, identity, and the conditions of production, for instance, in the call to cast trans actors in trans roles
- genderqueer and non-binary representations
- discourses of hypervisibility/invisibility
- differences in representing trans masculinities and femininities
- recognition and violence
- transnational comparisons/US-centrism and postcolonial critique
- race, class, and intersectionality in trans representations
- convergences in disability, intersex and transgender studies/activisms
Detailed proposals (up to 1,000 words) for full essays (7,500 words), as well as all inquiries regarding this issue, should be sent to all editors by 31 October 2018: Elahe Haschemi Yekani: elahe.haschemi-yekani@hu-berlin.de, Anson Koch-Rein: akr@alumni.emory.edu and Jasper Verlinden: j.verlinden@fu-berlin.de.
Guest editors: Rosario Arias (Málaga) and Mark Llewellyn (Cardiff)
What does it mean to be sympathetic to or antagonistic towards our nineteenth-century past? How do we negotiate the territory between self/other, host/guest, stranger/friend?
This special issue explores the concepts of hostility, empathy and hospitality in neo-Victorianism.
The term ‘hospitality’ encompasses the tension between host and other since, as Emily Ridge has recently noted, hospitality “at its very etymological root, harbours an otherness [and] manifests a paradoxical character.” This leads to an ambiguous understanding of the term, opening up this notion to the analysis of contemporary literary and political landscapes. There has been a recent move to address hospitality in Victorian fiction. In Narrative Hospitality in Late Victorian Fiction: Novel Ethics (2013), Rachel Hollander – drawing on Levinas and Derrida among others – has highlighted “an ethics of hospitality, in which respecting the limits of knowledge and welcoming the stranger define fiction’s relationship to both reader and world.” There has been no such critical intervention into the applicability or challenge to such understandings in neo-Victorianism. The aim of this special issue is therefore to examine neo-Victorian representations of ‘hospitality’ in its amplest sense, inclusive of the states of empathy (a term coined at the turn of the nineteenth century) and hostility as staging points on the spectrum of the hospitable as an ethical, political and aesthetic principle. Taking the double orientation of the neo-Victorian mode as a point of departure (cf. Heilmann and Llewellyn; Gamble; Johnston and Waters), we wish to solicit articles that argue that readings of neo-Victorian host-guest exchanges relate to contemporary anxieties about the glocal and the global, about individual and collective identities, and about affect in host-guest interactions.
We welcome essays dealing with literal and metaphorical readings of hospitality, hostility and empathy in neo-Victorian studies. These essays should address not only the home and the relation between domestic and public spheres but also the receptiveness of contemporary fiction and culture to the Victorian past. We are interested in essays that mobilise the ambiguous nature of hospitality, as well as (troubled) host-guest relations, in neo-Victorianism.
Topics
Relevant topics in this context might include (but are not limited to):
- Hospitality as explicated by Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, and concepts such as conditional hospitality and absolute hospitality
- Hospitality in relation to home/homelessness and domesticity
- Hospitality as a relationship between host and guest
- Hospitality to the (Victorian) past
- Hospitality vs. Hostility and/or empathy e.g. Victorian/Non-Victorian; European/Non-Europe
Detailed proposals (up to 1,000 words) for full essays (7,500 words), as well as all inquiries regarding this issue, should be sent to both editors: Rosario Arias: rarias@uma.es and Mark Llewellyn: LlewellynM4@cardiff.ac.uk
“Decentering Commemorations”: Literary, Cultural, Historical and Political Commemorations across and beyond the British Isles
Guest Editors: Antonella Braida-Laplace, Jeremy Tranmer and Céline Sabiron (Lorraine)
At a time of crisis concerning Europe’s identity and ideals, commemorations are not only intended as a nation-building process. They can also be appropriated by various actors at national, regional, and local levels, such as cultural institutions, political parties and social media. Increasing mobility and instability trigger off tendencies to go back to the past, to search for one’s roots and to emphasise the importance of heritage. Governments and lobbies/corporations such as Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple use landmarks to impose their readings of political, cultural and literary events, while grassroot communities organise their own remembrance events or commemorate differently and sometimes more informally and spontaneously.
The years 2018 and 2019 mark multiple anniversaries that will be commemorated transnationally, including the Armistice (1918) and the Treaty of Versailles (1919), the events of May 1968 in France, women’s suffrage in the UK (1918), the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), the release of the Beatles’ album Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) or the Woodstock Festival (1969). This EJES issue explores why and how these historical events, cultural productions and literary figures will be remembered across Europe. It intends to investigate in what ways and to what extent these commemorations are transferred from one cultural space to another, across and beyond the British Isles. It will also examine their transformations in the contemporary digital age and the shift towards new forms of democratic participation.
Topics
The editors invite proposals for articles dealing with transregional and/or transnational commemorations. Essays should account for the relationship between two or more regions or countries, one of them being the United Kingdom. Theoretical or practical approaches to the following topics, from different disciplinary perspectives, are welcomed:
- forms and modes of commemorating
- commemoration as an expression of soft power or a means of empowerment
- commemoration and technology in the digital age
- commemoration and cultural policies
- commemoration and hyphenated/conflicting identities (bi-nationals, and European nationals) in the UK due to Devolution and Brexit
- posterity and the literary canon
- literary and visual adaptations
- publishing policies
- commemorations as a way of asserting human rights
Detailed proposals (up to 1,000 words) for full essays (7,500 words), as well as all inquiries regarding this issue, should be sent to all three editors by 31 October 2018:
- Antonella Braida-Laplace: antonella.braida-laplace@univ-lorraine.fr
- Jeremy Tranmer: jeremy.tranmer@univ-lorraine.fr
- Céline Sabiron: celine.sabiron@univ-lorraine.fr
