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Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature by Daniel Hack

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Hardcover | 2016 | $35.00 | £27.95 | ISBN: 9780691169453
304 pp. | 6 x 9 | 12 line illus.

Tackling fraught but fascinating issues of cultural borrowing and appropriation, this groundbreaking book reveals that Victorian literature was put to use in African American literature and print culture in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in much more intricate, sustained, and imaginative ways than previously suspected. From reprinting and reframing “The Charge of the Light Brigade” in an antislavery newspaper to reimagining David Copperfield and Jane Eyre as mixed-race youths in the antebellum South, writers and editors transposed and transformed works by the leading British writers of the day to depict the lives of African Americans and advance their causes. Central figures in African American literary and intellectual history—including Frederick Douglass, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Charles Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, and W.E.B. Du Bois—leveraged Victorian literature and this history of engagement itself to claim a distinctive voice and construct their own literary tradition.

In bringing these transatlantic transfigurations to light, this book also provides strikingly new perspectives on both canonical and little-read works by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Tennyson, and other Victorian authors. The recovery of these works’ African American afterlives illuminates their formal practices and ideological commitments, and forces a reassessment of their cultural impact and political potential. Bridging the gap between African American and Victorian literary studies, Reaping Something New changes our understanding of both fields and rewrites an important chapter of literary history.

The 11th Biennial Symbiosis Conference, 2017 Returns & Revisions: The Eastward Counterflow from New World to Old

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A Symbiosis, Daemen College and University at Buffalo Event

Venue: Daemen College and the University at Buffalo, Amherst, New York, USA

Dates: Thursday 6th to Sunday 9th July, 2017

 

Keynote Speakers:

Eve Tavor Bannet, George Lynn Cross Professor of English, University of Oklahoma

Jahan Ramazani, University Professor and Edgar F. Shannon Professor of English, University of Virginia

 

 

The editors of Symbiosis, the Conference Directors, and Daemen College’s and the University at Buffalo’s Departments of English invite proposals for panels and individual papers of twenty-minute length, which engage a wide variety of transatlantic and/or transnational topics in the literatures and cultural histories of the Atlantic world. Especially welcome are presentations on the conference theme, Returns and Revisions: the eastward counterflow from New World to Old and revisionary literary texts and views on the discipline of Transatlantic Studies. Submissions are actively encouraged from all scholars and students of literary and cultural history and representation from every period from the earliest settlement right through to the present, including indigenous responses to imperial discourses.

Please submit 200–300 word abstracts with academic affiliation and contact details in Microsoft Word attachments by 3rd March, 2017 to both Conference Directors, Prof. Robert Morace (Daemen College) and Prof. Carrie Bramen (U at Buffalo): rmorace@daemen.edu and bramen@buffalo.edu. Add ‘Symbiosis 2017 Proposal’ to the subject line of your message, an essential detail since messages will be sorted automatically using this search term.

All inquiries are welcome; early acceptance may be possible if required for institutional or similar funding to facilitate attendance. Symbiosis cannot offer bursaries or fee waivers but will offer a reduced early rate. Further details will be posted on the conference and Symbiosis websites and on the journal’s Facebook page. See variously:

http://www.symbiosistransatlantic.wordpress.com/home/

http://www.symbiosistransatlantic.com
http://www.facebook.com/?ref=home#!/pages/Glasgow-United-Kingdom/Symbiosis-a-Journal-of-Anglo-American-Literary-Relations/313163095816

From Abolition to Black Lives Matter: Past and Present Forms of Transnational Black Resistance

deadline for submissions:
January 31, 2017
full name / name of organization:
Pia Wiegmink, Nele Sawallisch, Frank Obenland, Johanna Seibert
contact email:

October 26-28, 2017, Johannes Gutenberg-University, Mainz, Germany.

Conference organizers: Nele Sawallisch, Johanna Seibert, Pia Wiegmink, Frank Obenland

This conference hosted by the Transnational American Studies Institute aims at assessing and theorizing past and present forms of black intellectual, political, and cultural resistance from the era of abolitionist campaigns against the transatlantic slave trade to the recent global protest formation of Black Lives Matter.

Protests against racial discrimination, inequality, poverty, and injustice not only pervade (North) American history but span the globe and cross – oftentimes multiple – borders. Building on the recent transnational turn in American Studies and de-centering American Studies’ focus on the nation as the prime focus of analysis, this workshop invites papers that trace the Atlantic routes/roots (Gilroy), the diasporic and global trajectories, as well as the movement, circulation, and dissemination of past and present forms and ideas of black resistance. The conference aims at discussing the transnational dimension of various forms of resistance that are often embedded in larger social movements such as the anti-slavery, the anti-lynching, the Civil Rights, Black Power, Anti-Apartheid, the Global Justice, the Prison Abolition, or the Black Lives Matter movements. Investigating the transatlantic significance of these movements, this conference will also address how collective or individual acts of resistance are articulated and represented in print, performance, visual art, or other media.

How do we conceptualize the connections between past and present forms of transnational black resistance? How does this relationship between the past and the present shape existing notions of resistance? How did national movements for black equality and justice impact as well as intersect with national and international forms of protest? How do forms of black resistance initiate ways to re-think forms of protest and activism outside the United States? How do protest movements intersect with scholarly and intellectual pursuits in academia? What role have different media played in and for black resistance movements throughout the centuries not only in national but also international contexts? How have the digital world and global social media changed previous forms of transnational black resistance? What could be possible trajectories of movements such as Black Lives Matter in the face of the 2016 Presidential election in the United States? How can scholars and activists collaborate in articulating critical interventions in ongoing political discussions?

Confirmed keynote speaker: Prof. Charmaine Nelson, Professor of Art History, McGill University, Montreal, Canada.

We invite contributions from all disciplines, e.g. history, literary and cultural studies, visual culture/art history, political science, sociology. Potential paper topics could include, but are not limited to:

• transnational routes of political/social activism and cultural resistance/protest cultures

• transnational black intellectual histories of racial equality and justice

• methodological and conceptual perspectives that bring together approaches from transnational American Studies with African American and Black Diaspora Studies

• intersectional approaches to the study of black resistance with regard to class, gender, age, nationality, religion, etc.

• the role of women in and for black resistance movements

• Black literatures of protest and resistance

• Black resistance and cultures of performance, transnational aesthetics of protest

• Black resistance and popular culture, Black resistance and global (social) media

• Intersection of popular resistance movements and academic interventions in political discourse

 

Please send your paper proposal (max. 300 words) and a short bio (150 words) by January 31, 2017 to sawallis@uni-mainz.de

Shifting Tides, Anxious Borders: A Graduate Student Conference in Transnational American Studies (8th Annual)

deadline for submissions:
February 24, 2017
full name / name of organization:
Binghamton University
contact email:

Shifting Tides, Anxious Borders: A Graduate Student Conference

in Transnational American Studies (8th Annual)

Binghamton University

Saturday, April 8, 2017

Keynote: Russ Castronovo, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Deadline for Proposal Submission: February 24th, 2017

“Shifting Tides, Anxious Borders” is an interdisciplinary graduate conference dedicated to exploring the changing contours of the field of American Studies. This year’s conference theme, “Globalizing the Commons, Localizing the Transnational”, focuses on the transnational turn in American Studies in an effort to re-think the field imaginary, paying particular attention to the intersecting sites of identity, community, nation, and globalization along with the methodological trajectories which make these sites legible. Keeping in mind recent anthological interventions—Globalizing American Studies (2010), Re-Framing the Transnational Turn in American Studies (2011), and American Studies as Transnational Practice (2015), to name just a few—the conference seeks to investigate the conditions through which discussions of the transnational dialectically broaden the scope of the field while underestimating the nuances of the local, and, by the same concern, how local attentiveness precludes visibility of global, coalitional resistance.

In keeping with this year’s focus, we seek papers concerned with the relationships between conceptions of the local, national, and the global, as well as the liminality inherent to the delineation of these spaces. In lieu of examining the well-trodden ground of ‘the state of the field’ and resonant attempts to redefine American studies itself, we encourage papers that attend to more interdisciplinary limits of subjectivity, the state, and global community. We seek papers that localize the transnational, totalize the provincial, and speak to the constituting horizons necessarily produced by these methodologies.

Redolent questions include: How does the global trajectory of capitalism become individualized in neoliberalism? What are the resonances between the global war on terror and the militarization of local police forces? How do identitarian frameworks potentialize coalition while restricting conditions of belonging? More broadly speaking, when considering the roots of the transnational turn are found in the transatlantic, how can we resituate and trouble Occidental cultural dialogues between the United States and Europe? Finally, how is the totalizing schema of the anthropocene configured along local and global registers?

To submit a paper proposal, send a 250-word abstract to shiftingborders@gmail.com. To submit a panel proposal, include the names and email addresses of three participants, with individual paper abstracts and a 150-word abstract uniting them. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

  • Archipelagos and the Transnational Pacific
  • The Speculative Limits of Finance Capital
  • Racialized Transatlantic Histories and Communities
  • Mapping Subject and Species through Biopower
  • Relationships between Isolationism and American Empire
  • Feminist Coalition / Resistance and Co-opting Identity
  • Trauma in the Local/Transnational Sites of War on Terror
  • Localized Translations / Globalized Dialects
  • Multiculturalism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Individual
  • Dronification as / and Destabilized Imperial Violence

Virginia Woolf and the World: Call for Papers

deadline for submissions:
April 30, 2017
full name / name of organization:
Jeanne Dubino (Appalachian State University) and Paulina Pajak (Wroclaw University)
contact email:

Call for Papers: Virginia Woolf and the World

 

“As a woman my country is the whole world.” Virginia Woolf’s declaration in Three Guineas gains new meaning in the context of her increasingly global reception and legacy. To capture the many Woolfian currents now circulating around the world, we are proposing a new volume, Virginia Woolf and the World, edited by Jeanne Dubino (Appalachian State University) and Paulina Pajak (Wroclaw University).

 

Virginia Woolf and the World most broadly considers the global responses Woolf’s work has provoked and her worldwide impact. We are seeking essays on Woolf’s reception, her influence on literature, and her presence in contemporary (bio)fiction around the world. We envision this volume as a comparative one, incorporating both transnational and local developments insofar as they epitomize Woolf’s global reception and legacy. The collection is intended to move beyond the “center” and “periphery” binary, searching for new models of Woolfian global studies and promoting cross-cultural understandings.

 

We are interested not only in how social, cultural and political differences shape the ways Woolf is read and interpreted in all four corners of the world, but also in the ways Woolf’s works influence local cultures. We invite papers on Woolf’s impact on her contemporary artists, as well as on post-Millennial writers worldwide. Essays that give space to previously underrepresented regions of Woolf’s reception studies are particularly welcome, and will be given special consideration.

 

We have been in contact with Edinburgh University Press (EUP), who have expressed enthusiastic interest in our project.

 

If you are interested in contributing to Virginia Woolf and the World, please email a 500-word abstract and a brief biographical note by April 30, 2017, to Jeanne Dubino (dubinoja@appstate.edu) and Paulina Pająk (paula.pajak@gmail.com). Our expectation is that the full version of the essay (5,000-8,000 words) will be completed a year later, by April 30, 2018. We plan to follow the 7th edition (not the 8th!) MLA style for in-text documentation and bibliography.

 

 

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

Woolf’s Global Reception

  • Cultural, political and economic aspects of global Woolf
  • New theoretical models for Woolfian global studies
  • Transnational and local readings of Woolf’s oeuvre
  • Woolf’s translations worldwide
  • Woolf’s global and local audiences
  • Woolf’s transmediality and adaptations in various regions
  • Woolf’s works in transnational and local art
  • Woolf’s crossing real and imaginary borders
  • Internationalism in Woolf’s writings
  • Transnational spaces and characters in Woolf’s works
  • Woolf online
  • Woolf as a global icon
  • Woolf’s heritage industry around the world

 

Woolf’s Global Legacy

  • Woolf’s formal and thematic impact on writers and thinkers worldwide
  • Literature and art inspired by Woolf’s oeuvre around the world
  • Rewritings of Woolf’s works in different cultures
  • Woolf’s role in global and local circulation of feminist ideas
  • Woolf as an inspiration for global and local civil rights movements
  • Woolf’s role in shaping transatlantic and global modernism
  • Hogarth Press translations

 

Woolf in Global (Bio)Fiction

  • Woolf and her circle as characters in contemporary (bio)fiction
  • Films, plays and performances relating to Woolf’s life
  • Woolf’s biography in music and arts
  • The Bloomsbury Group’s global afterlife

 

We very much hope that Virginia Woolf and the World will demonstrate the diversity of the worldwide reception andlegacy of Woolf’s oeuvre and the remarkable possibilities of transcultural exchange. As Woolf herself wrote, “Though we see the same world, we see it through different eyes.”

Call for Essays: Transatlantic Eighteenth-Century Women Travelers

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deadline for submissions:
February 28, 2017
full name / name of organization:
Misty Krueger / University of Maine at Farmington
contact email:

Call for Essays: “Transatlantic Eighteenth-Century Women Travelers”

 

Editor: Misty Krueger, Ph.D.

 

I seek essay proposals for a collection in development entitled Transatlantic Eighteenth-Century Women Travelers. This collection will examine long eighteenth-century (approximately 1650-1830) accounts written by or about British, American, European, African, and/or Caribbean women who have traveled the Atlantic. While scholars have examined at length the travels of men who have crossed the Atlantic for religious, economic, and political reasons, few address in detail those of their female counterparts in the Atlantic World. This book aims to contribute to the fields of transatlantic and oceanic studies by focusing particularly on an aspect of both long eighteenth-century travel writing and transatlanticism that needs more scholarly attention: transatlantic women’s experiences. Inspired by formative studies in eighteenth-century transatlanticism by Eve Tavor Bannet and Susan Manning, which devote chapters to women writers, the proposed collection intends to provide insight into the different experiences women face, as compared to men, as they travel the seas, as well as when and where they land. Such experiences are the direct result of women’s marital statuses, class, race, age, genders, and/or sexualities. While the collection may include male writers’ accounts of transatlantic women travelers, the primary goal of this collection is to show how women portray transatlantic travel through either first-hand accounts, or through fictional narratives about transatlantic women travelers. Ultimately, the collection aims to include scholarship about 1) women writers and artists engaging in the travails of a transatlantic crossing, and 2) women depicting themselves or other women crossing the Atlantic, as well as the aftermath of these travels.

 

Topics for essays may address, but are not limited to, the following:

 

  • Stories or histories written by or about transatlantic women travelers of any nationality
  • Autobiographical or biographical accounts of transatlantic women travelers of any nationality
  • Female Robinsonades or castaway narratives
  • Captivity narratives
  • Seduction narratives
  • Pirate narratives
  • Genres besides prose, including poetry, drama, and art
  • Images of transatlantic women’s bodies, sexualities, and/or social roles

 

Proposals of approximately 500 words and a brief CV should be sent to Misty Krueger at misty.krueger@maine.edu by February 28, 2017. Contributors will be notified in March if their proposals have been accepted. Completed essays of 6,000-8,000 words will be due by August 28, 2017. A university press has already expressed interest in the collection, and the submitted volume will undergo the peer-review process.

CFP: Special Issue of Symbiosis– Transatlantic Franzen

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Transtalantic Franzen

deadline for submissions:
December 1, 2017
full name / name of organization:
Transatlantic Franzen; Special Issue of ‘Symbiosis: A Journal of Transatlantic Literary and Cultural Relations’

 

Special Issue of Symbiosis: A Journal of Transatlantic Literary and Cultural Relations

Transatlantic Franzen

 

The journal Symbiosis (http://www.symbiosistransatlantic.com/) invites articles of 5,000 to 7,000 words for a special issue on Transatlantic Jonathan Franzen, to appear in October 2018. While the following list is not prescriptive, articles may, for example, offer comparative analyses of Franzen’s representations of US and European culture; look at Franzen’s incorporation of or allusion to British or other European authors; assess the critical reception of Franzen’s work in Europe (perhaps, comparing this to US responses); or consider whether British or other European authors have published material that engages with or responds to Franzen’s fiction. More ‘general’ comparative pieces, reading Franzen alongside or against contemporary British / European fiction are also welcome. While we welcome essays that discuss European literature not written in English, contributors should provide translations of any passages that they cite. Regardless of the focus, articles should generally seek to articulate the ramifications of transatlanticism for future studies of Franzen’s fiction.

Submissions (abstracts in the first instance) should be double spaced throughout and prepared (initially) to any recognised humanities style sheet.

Complete papers to be received by December 1st 2017.

In the first instance, please address abstracts, queries or expressions of interest to the editors of this special  issue:

Dr. Sophie Vlacos, University of Glasgow (sophie.vlacos@glasgow.ac.uk)

Dr. Chris Gair, University of Glasgow (chris.gair@glasgow.ac.uk)

The Materials of Exchange between Britain and North East America, 1750-1900

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by Daniel Maudlin (Author), Robin Peel (Author)

Taking a multidisciplinary approach to the complex cultural exchanges that took place between Britain and America from 1750 to 1900, The Materials of Exchange examines material, visual, and print culture alongside literature within a transatlantic context. The contributors trace the evolution of Anglo-American culture from its origins as a product of the British North Atlantic Empire through to its persistence in the post-Independence world of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While transatlanticism is a well-established field in history and literary studies, this volume recognizes the wider diversity and interactions of transatlantic cultural production across material and visual cultures as well as literature. As such, while encompassing a range of fields and approaches within the humanities, the ten chapters are all concerned with understanding and interpreting the same Anglo-American culture within the same social contexts. The chapters integrate the literary with the material, offering alternative and provocative perspectives on topics ranging from the child-made book to representations of domestic slaves in literature, by way of history painting, travel writing, architecture and political plays. By focusing on cultural exchanges between Britain and the north-eastern maritime United States over nearly two centuries, the collection offers an in-depth study of Britain’s relationship with a single region of North America over an extended historic period. Contributors have resisted the temptation to prioritize the relationship between New England and England in particular by placing this association within the contexts of Atlantic exchanges with other northeastern states as well as with the South, the Caribbean and Scotland. Intended for researchers in literature, visual and material culture, this collection challenges single-subject boundaries by redefining transatlantic studies as the collective examination of the complex and interrelated cultural transactions that crisscrossed the Atlantic through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The Transatlantic Hispanic Baroque: Complex Identities in the Atlantic World

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by Harald E. Braun (Author), Jesús Pérez-Magallón (Author)

Gathering a group of internationally renowned scholars, this volume presents cutting-edge research on the complex processes of identity formation in the transatlantic world of the Hispanic Baroque. Identities in the Hispanic world are deeply intertwined with sociological concepts such as class and estate, with geography and religion (i.e. the mixing of Spanish Catholics with converted Jews, Muslims, Dutch and German Protestants), and with issues related to the ethnic diversity of the world’s first transatlantic empire and its various miscegenations. Contributors to this volume offer the reader diverse vantage points on the challenging problem of how identities in the Hispanic world may be analyzed and interpreted. A number of contributors relate earlier processes and formations to Neo-Baroque and postmodern conceptualisations of identity. Given the strong interest in identity and identity-formation within contemporary cultural studies, the book will be of interest to a broad group of readers from the fields of law, geography, history, anthropology and literature.

Traveling Traditions: Nineteenth-century Cultural Concepts and Transatlantic Intellectual Networks

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by Erik Redling (Editor)

This study seeks to fill a major gap in the fields of Nineteenth-Century American and British Studies by examining how nineteenth-century intellectuals shape and re-shape aesthetic traditions across the Atlantic Ocean. The study explores the roles of salient traveling concepts, such as realism, translation, the picturesque, and imagination, and traces their at times surprising paths within ever-widening transnational intellectual networks.