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World Congress of Scottish Literatures: Dialogues and Diasporas

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full name / name of organization:
International Association for the Study of Scottish Literature
contact email:
scotlit@sfu.ca

World Congress of Scottish Literatures: Dialogues and Diasporas

The second World Congress of Scottish Literatures will be held in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada from June 21-25, 2017 and will coincide with the annual meeting of the Eighteenth-Century Scottish Studies Society. The Congress’s subtitle, “Dialogues and Diasporas,” speaks to the range of ways in which Scotland is articulated both at home and within a global context. At the same time, it acknowledges the multiple roles Scotland has played in the production of both globalism and localism.

The geographical location of the conference on the West Coast of Canada draws particular attention to two key themes of the conference:
1. Indigenous/Scottish relations and 2. Transpacific/Scottish connections

The steering committee invites proposals for papers that explore these or any of the following themes:
• Imagining Scotland at home and abroad
• Connections between Scottish/non-Scottish writers, texts, genres
• Diaspora, migration and immigration
• Scotland in/and empire
• Globality, locality, glocalism
• Scottish literature/world literature
• Teaching Scottish literature in the world/teaching world literature in Scotland
• Scotland and the transatlantic
• Internal dialogues in Scottish writing
• Scottish literature and the dialogue across time
• Scotland, race and indigeneity
We also welcome pre-organized panels on any of these topics. In keeping with the conference’s focus on dialogue and in order to maximize discussion and participation, panel organizers are encouraged to explore alternatives to the traditional format of three to four papers: workshops, roundtables, lightning talks, pecha kucha.

Please note that in the interests of involving as many people as possible, participants are asked to present only one paper at the meeting; however, they may also serve on a roundtable/discussion or as a discussant.

Deadline for submissions of papers and panels: Oct. 1, 2016.

Further information about the conference is available athttps://dialoguesanddiasporas.wordpress.com/

Please send submissions to: Leith Davis at scotlit@sfu.ca

The ‘Conspiracy’ of Free Trade: The Anglo-American Struggle over Empire and Economic Globalisation, 1846-1896

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Following the Second World War, the United States would become the leading ‘neoliberal’ proponent of international trade liberalization. Yet for nearly a century before, American foreign trade policy was dominated by extreme economic nationalism. What brought about this pronounced ideological, political, and economic about face? How did it affect Anglo-American imperialism? What were the repercussions for the global capitalist order? In answering these questions, The ‘Conspiracy’ of Free Trade offers the first detailed account of the controversial Anglo-American struggle over empire and economic globalization in the mid- to late-nineteenth century. The book reinterprets Anglo-American imperialism through the global interplay between Victorian free-trade cosmopolitanism and economic nationalism, uncovering how imperial expansion and economic integration were mired in political and ideological conflict. Beginning in the 1840s, this conspiratorial struggle over political economy would rip apart the Republican Party, reshape the Democratic Party, and redirect Anglo-American imperial expansion for decades to come.

Dead Reckoning: Transatlantic Passages on Europe and America

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Dead reckoning is the nautical term for calculating a ship’s position using the distance and direction traveled rather than instruments or astronomical observation. For those still recovering from the atrocities of the twentieth century, however, the term has an even grimmer meaning: toting up the butcher’s bill of war and genocide.

As its title suggests, Dead Reckoning is an attempt to find our bearings in a civilization lost at sea. Conducted in the shadow of the centennial of the First World War, this dialogue between Romanian American poet Andrei Guruianu and Italian American essayist Anthony Di Renzo asks whether Western culture will successfully navigate the difficult waters of the new millennium or shipwreck itself on the mistakes of the past two centuries. Using historical and contemporary examples, they explore such topics as the limitations of memory, the transience of existence, the futility of history, and the difficulties of making art and meaning in the twenty-first century.

Andrei Guruianu teaches in the Expository Writing Program at New York University. His previous books include the poetry collections Made in the Image of Stones and Portrait without a Mouth.

Anthony Di Renzo is Associate Professor of Writing at Ithaca College and the author of many books, including Bitter Greens: Essays on Food, Politics, and Ethnicity from the Imperial Kitchen, also published by SUNY Press.

Little Miss Grouch: A Narrative Based Upon the Private Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith’s Maiden Transatlantic Voyage, pp. 1-206

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Leopold is delighted to publish this classic book as part of our extensive Classic Library collection. Many of the books in our collection have been out of print for decades, and therefore have not been accessible to the general public. The aim of our publishing program is to facilitate rapid access to this vast reservoir of literature, and our view is that this is a significant literary work, which deserves to be brought back into print after many decades. The contents of the vast majority of titles in the Classic Library have been scanned from the original works. To ensure a high quality product, each title has been meticulously hand curated by our staff. This means that we have checked every single page in every title, making it highly unlikely that any material imperfections – such as poor picture quality, blurred or missing text – remain. When our staff observed such imperfections in the original work, these have either been repaired, or the title has been excluded from the Leopold Classic Library catalogue. As part of our on-going commitment to delivering value to the reader, within the book we have also provided you with a link to a website, where you may download a digital version of this work for free. Our philosophy has been guided by a desire to provide the reader with a book that is as close as possible to ownership of the original work. We hope that you will enjoy this wonderful classic work, and that for you it becomes an enriching experience. If you would like to learn more about the Leopold Classic Library collection please visit our website at www.leopoldclassiclibrary.com

 

http://www.amazon.com/Little-Miss-Grouch-Narrative-Transatlantic/dp/B01BGZBZ7O/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1454989522&sr=1-2&keywords=transatlantic&refinements=p_n_publication_date%3A1250226011

The Mulatta Concubine: Terror, Intimacy, Freedom, and Desire in the Black Transatlantic (Race in the Atlantic World, 1700-1900)

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Popular and academic representations of the free mulatta concubine repeatedly depict women of mixed black African and white racial descent as defined by their sexual attachment to white men, and thus they offer evidence of the means to and dimensions of their freedom within Atlantic slave societies. In The Mulatta Concubine, Lisa Ze Winters contends that the uniformity of these representations conceals the figure’s centrality to the practices and production of diaspora.

Beginning with a meditation on what captive black subjects may have seen and remembered when encountering free women of color living in slave ports, the book traces the echo of the free mulatta concubine across the physical and imaginative landscapes of three Atlantic sites: Gorée Island, New Orleans, and Saint Domingue (Haiti). Ze Winters mines an archive that includes a 1789 political petition by free men of color, a 1737 letter by a free black mother on behalf of her daughter, antebellum newspaper reports, travelers’ narratives, ethnographies, and Haitian Vodou iconography. Attentive to the tenuousness of freedom, Ze Winters argues that the concubine figure’s manifestation as both historical subject and African diasporic goddess indicates her centrality to understanding how free and enslaved black subjects performed gender, theorized race and freedom, and produced their own diasporic identities.

 

The Female Fantastic, 1860-1930: On the Gendered Supernatural in Texts by Women

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FemaleFantasticBook@gmail.com

Where realism was the signature feature of earlier Victorian fiction, mid-to-late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century writers increasingly embraced fantastic modes. Rosemary Jackson, in her 1981 Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion, inaugurated the now-ubiquitous truism of literary studies that late Victorian fantastic narratives frequently hold strong – and often covertly revolutionary – metaphorical relations to social concerns. Supernatural and symbolic texts are ideal sites for encryption of radical queries and pervasive anxieties related to gender, sexuality, religion, medicine, science, ethnicity, substance abuse and colonialism (to name a few).

This is an especially persistent trait – one manifested and developed in many directions in the Edwardian and early Modernist fantastic. In supernatural thrillers, ghost stories, science fictions, and amorphous fantasias, counter-cultural angsts find substitutive satisfactions and conflated expression. The uncanny effects of fantastic literature enable this; indirection, obscuration and innuendo are ideal mediums for saying-not-saying things. Indeed, whatever energies crescendo in fantastic literature are exactly those that realism – by default – tends to eclipse, reduce, or normalize. Experiments in form and language, from aestheticism to Modernism, only add to the covert power of fantasy.

Given the substantial scholarship dedicated to non-realist representations written by male writers, this book project will specifically explore women-identified writers’ uses of the fantastic from 1860-1930. Writers like Ouida, Vernon Lee, Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, Mary Butts, Elizabeth Bowen, and Sylvia Townsend Warner used narratively polymorphous fantastic sub-genres to dramatize their particularly activist arguments and ideas. This provided the flexibility to explore not only the darkest corners of the external world, but also the deepest subterranean secrets of the mind. For not only did women-identified writers wield these forms’ easy strategic cover to subvert the status quo, but they also used them to explore the gendered psyche’s links to imagination, pathology and creative, personal and erotic agency. In addition to providing dynamic presentations of female and gender-queer subjectivity, these texts also illuminate intriguing and complex relationships to key moments in gender(ed) history.

This collection will be submitted to an already-enthusiastic selective academic press.

We invite submissions that engage in any related issues, including the following:

•Fantastic figures (ghosts, mummies, werewolves, vampires)
•The evolving genre and forms of the fantastic/supernatural
•Occult communication networks: Annie Besant, Emma Hardinge Britten, Helena Blavasky, and the women of the Golden Dawn
•The shifting meaning/purpose of the female fantastic from mid-century (Elizabeth Gaskell, Margaret Oliphant, Florence Marrayat, Charlotte Riddell) to the fin de siècle to the 20th-century
•The transatlantic, global, or colonial supernatural
•The role of the fantastic or otherworldly in conceptualizations of gender and sexuality
•Nationhood, the “fantastic” other, race, and empire
•Nationalism, Fascism, Socialism and other political movements
•Pacificism, war, and trauma
•The fantastic in periodical and print culture
•Visualizing or depicting the fantastic through illustrations, art, performance, photography and film
•Science, pseudo-science, psychoanalysis, medicine, and the supernatural
•Mental illness, Addiction, and Social Deviance
•Relations of Fantastic to Aestheticism, Decadence, Symbolist, Surrealist, Modernist or other movements
•Female-authored sources for and/or reactions to more “canonical” fantastic literature
•Female academic influences on the Classical and/or “Oriental” imagination (Jane Harrison and Margaret Murray, for example)

Abstracts should be 500 words, exclusive of a selected bibliography and brief author’s bio. Final papers should run between 4,000 – 6,000 words (inclusive of endnotes and works cited) and be formatted in current MLA style. Revisions may be requested as a condition of acceptance. Please send all queries to the editors (Dr. Elizabeth McCormick, Dr. Jennifer Mitchell, and Dr. Rebecca Soares) at FemaleFantasticBook@gmail.com.

Submissions Guidelines and Timeframe

By February 15, 2016:
Send one electronic copy of your 500-word abstract toFemaleFantasticBook@gmail.com. Include a selected bibliography of 10 sources and a brief bio of less than 250 words.

By March 15, 2016:
We will notify applicants of our decisions.

By July 15, 2016
Full papers are due.

New Conference: Traces and Memories of Slavery in the Atlantic World December 2016

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University of Montpellier, France
contact email:
lawrence.aje@univ-montp3.fr

Traces and Memories of Slavery in the Atlantic World
University of Montpellier, France
1-2 December, 2016

Keynote Speakers

Ana Lucia Araujo (Howard University)
Christine Chivallon (Research Director, CNRS)

In Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity (2001),[1] Ron Eyerman explores the formation of African American identity through the cultural trauma of slavery. While trauma directly affected individuals who experienced slavery, Eyerman argues that, as a cultural process, trauma is “mediated through various forms of representation and linked to the reformation of collective identity and the reworking of collective memory”. This international conference seeks to examine the foundation, the mechanisms and the scope of these memorial processes. It endeavors to explore a reality of slavery that rests on human memory, on a (re)constructed memory of individual, collective or family trajectories and migrations transmitted from generation to generation.

The Traces and Memories of Slavery in the Atlantic World conference sets out to interrogate how descendants reconstruct the history of their ancestors when transatlantic slavery is one of the variables of the memorial process. The conference also aims at examining the extent to which, by a process of collectivization of personal or family memories and (hi)stories, social actors of the present not only partake in generating and consolidating group identities but also how they foster “the emergence of the memory of slavery in public space.”[2] In addition to assessing the cultural and symbolic redistribution which are enabled by the commemoration, the museification and the patrimonialization of the memory of slavery, this conference aims at probing the constraints which determine the inscription of this memory in the public sphere and the extent to which social demand, especially in the context of the obligation of remembrance, influences the production of historical knowledge and sometimes leads to conflicts of memory.

As Ira Berlin has argued, can it be contended that although “[h]istory and memory both speak to the subject of slavery […] they speak in different tongues” ?[3] In the traumatic and post-traumatic context of slavery, conflicting memories of interracial relationships, for instance, call for a specific attention: can the mechanisms of memorial (re)construction, whether it be from a psychological or historical point of view, claim or aim to be neutral? It will prove interesting to study the historical and strategic importance of places like Gorée – their symbolic and affective charge, as well as their memorial function. In the same vein, instances of what Ana Lucia Araujo refers to as “memory replacement”, whereby “a local population appropriates an existing building or site and assigns to it stories of the Atlantic slave trade and slavery as if it was an actual heritage site” will also be worth considering.[4]

The organizing committee of this international and interdisciplinary conference welcomes papers in the form of case studies, analyses aimed at identifying general trends or comparative approaches. The geographic scope of the conference – the Atlantic space – is purposefully broad, as the issue of memorial modernity transcends individuals, race, nations, space and time. As memory of facts dating back to several generations can only be transmitted, reconstructed and inevitably fragmentary in nature, the palimpsestic dimension of the memorial process will be given particular attention.

Papers may build on recent theoretical works on memory, such as those of Michael Rothberg (2009) [5] for whom memory is constructed on the basis of multidirectional focalizations and synergies between events that are seemingly disconnected in time and space (Multidirectional Memory), or of Max Silverman (2013) [6] who has described the relationship between past and present in the form of a “superposition and interaction of different temporal traces [that] constitute a sort of composite structure, like a palimpsest, so that one layer of traces can be seen through, and is transformed by another” (Palimpsestic Memory). It might prove interesting to unravel the threads of family memory construction by studying the trajectory of founding individuals. The archival traces of key moments will thus be identified in order to interrogate and retrace the historical context of these trajectories and/or shed light on parallel trajectories, such as those of better-known historical figures. Genealogical research offers a propitious ground to retrace memories as genealogy reveals the memorial mechanisms which allow to recreate, from the interstices left by factual elements, decipherable paths which are historically credible and psychologically acceptable. Finally, it will be interesting to assess whether the memorial prism is necessarily ethnocentric.

The themes this conference endeavors to explore include, but are not limited to:

– the history and memory of slavery;

– the memorialization of slavery;

– the canonization of the memory of slavery;

– representation(s) of slavery;

– the commemoration, the museification and the patrimonialization of the memory of slavery;

– places and conditions of the production of knowledge on slavery and its circulation;

– the legacy/cies of slavery and the (re)construction of (collective) identity;

– slavery and genealogy;

– sources and archives on slavery.

Submission guidelines

The languages of the conference are English and French. Please send proposals of no more than 300 words in English or French (for papers or panels) and a brief CV mentioning your institutional affiliation totraces2016@gmail.com by February 29, 2016. Notification of acceptance will be sent by March 31, 2016. We welcome papers that cover any region of the Atlantic World as well as proposals for round table discussions.

New Conference: Maladies of the Soul, Emotion, Affect, September 22-25 2016, Banff

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full name / name of organization:
Canadian Literature Centre at University of Alberta and Canadian Studies Centre at University of Innsbruck
contact email:
clcconf@ualberta.ca

Keynotes

1. Daniel Heath Justice, University of British Columbia
2. Smaro Kamboureli, University of Toronto
3. Daniel Laforest, University of Alberta

Round-Table of Invited Authors

1. Nicole Brossard, Montreal, Quebec
2. Louise Dupré, Montreal, Quebec
3. Katherena Vermette, Winnipeg, Manitoba
4. Aritha van Herk, Calgary, Alberta

According to D. Bachmann-Medick, a scientific turn is not synonymous with the radical reorientation of a single discipline but basically provides a new pluri- and transdisciplinary perspective complementing and reinforcing already existing approaches. A new turn does not supplant another but becomes part of a dynamic process of competing forces, which eventually may give rise to new categories of analysis and concepts. Studying both the general implications and the positive effects and deficits of such a turn is particularly rewarding when it comes to comparing different academic traditions and – as is the case with this transatlantic and transdisciplinary conference – different literary productions written in different languages.

In the wake of the conference “Crisis and Beyond,” held at the University of Innsbruck in 2015, “Maladies of the Soul, Emotion, Affect” not only responds to recent attention to affect, or the “affective turn” dubbed by Patricia Clough, but also investigates the impact of previous forms of research both on emotions and cognition on the study of Indigenous, Canadian and Québécois writings in English and French. If empathy and agency have evolved as new guiding principles in some fields of literary analysis, their roots can be found in such classical disciplines as poetics, rhetoric, or hermeneutics (Th. Anz), and also in the focus on agency advocated by the Constance school of reception theory. While selecting contemporary Indigenous, Canadian and Québécois writings in English and French as a body of investigation, the participants are encouraged to explore the emotional and affective implications of the process of literary communication, including both conceptual and empirical research and covering the following aspects:

• the emotional and affective habitus of the producer (the “real” author), her / his intentional or non-intentional use of techniques of emotionalisation, her / his definition of a specific poetics, and their possible impact on the text
• the emotional and affective response of the “real” reader to these techniques
• the text as a vehicle of emotions or affects which names, discusses or presents them as parts of the mental habitus of the protagonists (Th. Anz); the aesthetic question of how such processes are evoked (use of metaphors, inscription of the body, syntax of the unspeakable, etc.).

The focus on contemporary literature necessarily confronts us with S. Žižek’s assessment of the 21st century as the “apocalyptic zero point” and S. Ahmed’s, L. Berlant’s and others’ warnings of the West’s “cruel” attachments to neoliberal optimism. S. Ngai identifies “ugly feelings” while M.C. Nussbaum addresses the ethics of care as an affective, and alternative, form of knowledge, agency, and democracy (J. Tronto).

• And so what are the affects and emotions that index the particularity of our literary moment or our moment of crisis?
• How does intimacy or privacy respond to publicness?
• What is today’s equivalent of Romantic ennui and melancholy?
• Do situations of exile and migration enhance the new “maladies of the soul” (J. Kristeva)?
• Do authors ask questions of liveliness and animacy (M.Y. Chen)?
• Which lives today are considered worth living and are recognized as such (J. Butler)?
• How might Indigenous literary and critical interventions undo the very categorizations and labels suggested by this call for papers and enable us to tell different stories (D.H. Justice)?

These and other lines of critical inquiry – on the basis of the above-mentioned emotional and affective implications of literary communication – are designed to allow participants to approach affect, emotion, and the new maladies of the soul of this 21st century, a task which will advance terminological, methodological, and theoretical knowledge both in the fields of affect and emotion and of text analysis.

In the treatment of this description, we encourage comparative, multidisciplinary, and interdisciplinary perspectives and methodologies. We invite proposals of traditional 20-minute papers as well as other forms of presentation such as short 10-minute position papers, round-tables, or pecha kucha presentations. Complete panel proposals (of 3 or 4 papers) are also highly encouraged.

Proposals (250 words per paper), in English or in French, with a short biographical note (50 words), should be submitted to clcconf@ualberta.caby February 1, 2016.

Faulkner and World Literature (March 15, 2016) – MLA 2017

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William Faulkner Society

contact email:
wfsociety@gmail.com

The William Faulkner Society is planning a panel for MLA 2017 in Philadelphia that will focus on Faulkner in the context of world literature. The expansive scope is designed to reveal a range of possibilities for reading Faulkner individually or in comparison to other figures. Papers topics might include but are not limited to the following:

–Faulkner’s international reception, reputation, and influence
–Translations and adaptations of Faulkner worldwide
–Constructions and expressions of literary nationalism
–Global modernism influencing and influenced by Faulkner
–Issues of empire and (de)colonization
–Reading Faulkner in North American, Latin American, transatlantic, Pacific, or Global North/South contexts
–Questions of world literature canon formation, curriculum development, and pedagogy
–Depictions of (uneven) economic development
–Approaches shaped by rethinking and redefining “world literature” (Damrosch), distant reading (Moretti), world systems theory (Wallerstein), globalization studies, or other critical theories and practices

Send a 250-word abstract and brief bio to Ted Atkinson (wfsociety@gmail.com) by March 15, 2016.

CFP: Transatlanticism and The Blithedale Romance

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full name / name of organization:
Nathaniel Hawthorne Review
contact email:
demson@shsu.edu

A special issue of the Nathaniel Hawthorne Review, Spring 2017
Guest editors: Derek Pacheco and Michael Demson

In The Blithedale Romance, Hawthorne famously derides Brook Farm’s utopianism by likening it to Charles Fourier’s outlandish prophecies of seas-transmuted-into-“limonade à cèdre.” For all its satire, however, the novel is positively awash, so to speak, in British and European literary, social, and intellectual currents—from pastoral aesthetics, to prison reform, to fantasies of agricultural improvement, to name a few. For example, Hawthorne’s wry allusion to Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey’s unrealized utopian Pantisocracy opens up questions about the extent to which he understood his own experience of Brook Farm in terms of the agrarian thought permeating transatlantic Romanticism. Indeed, that such preoccupations would drift across the Atlantic ocean’s temporal and geographic expanses exemplifies what Elisa Tamarkin has called the “irreducible ‘fluidity’ of the Atlantic world.”

We hope for a broad range of engagements with this topic, from the transcendental to the material, from the circulatory to the rhizomatic. Topics might include, but are not limited to

Blithedale’s reviews/reception/
circulation/reputation in Europe
Radicalisms
Anarchism and the commune
Transatlantic idealisms
Transatlantic feminisms
Transatlantic topography
Cottage, farmstead, and plantation
Labor: divisions, subordination,
and violence
Peasants, farmers, landowners
Pastoral, anti-pastoral traditions
Sustainability and/or primitivism
Revolutions of 1848 revised
Participants at Brook Farm

Abstracts of approximately 300-500 words by 15 March 2016 with a two-page cv (please send to demson@shsu.edu). Full essays (6,000-9,000 words) would be due by 15 July 2016.

Please address any questions to dpacheco@purdue.edu ordemson@shsu.edu