MLA 2020 Seattle: Pleasure, Arts and the Human in Africa Summary Call The panel explores the multi-dimensional ways in which literary and cultural forms – new or old – might help us navigate the nexus of pleasure and the human. Send 250 word abstracts and a one-page CV before March 15 to Naminata Diabate, nd326@cornell.edu with ‘MLA PANEL” in subject line. Expanded Call The Africa since 1990 Forum of the MLA welcomes abstracts for a guaranteed panel titled “Pleasure, Arts and the Human in Africa.” The panel is part of the 2020 MLA Annual Convention in January 2020 in Seattle. We are interested in papers that address the multi-dimensional ways in which African literary and other cultural forms—new or old—might help us navigate how artistic practices and theoretical methodologies provide meaningful, illuminating ways of reading pleasure as it intersects with current contributions and/or threats to human thriving. The impetus of the panel comes from three interrelated points. 1-The presidential theme for the 2020 MLA convention that Simon Gikandi has chosen” the human.” 2- Despite prominent and precolonial accounts of the human in African social and moral thought and practice pace Gyekye 2010 and Wiredu 1987, still the colonial enterprise ignored and proceeded to frame the native as savage, primitive, and less than human. In the light of these contesting formulations of African humanity, it is useful to wonder which versions of the African human prevails today in an era of impending threats to human prosperity. The panel seeks to focus on how pleasure participates in current accounts of the human, which we may apprehend through our creative imagination. In its most general definition, pleasure includes the fleeting affective positivity of all joy, gladness, liking, and enjoyment, all our feeling good or happy. This and other accounts posit pleasure as the only actual ultimate ends and the only justified ultimate ends of all our voluntary pursuit and avoidance. In neurobiology, pleasure has be identified as the principle of human evolution and survival (Victor Johnson 2003). Given the centrality of pleasure inhuman (and relevantly similar animal) life, a pressing question emerges, How do we conceptualize pleasure as formulated in African philosophies and artistic products. In enriching the ongoing academic conversations on pleasure and cognate terms, this panel seeks to examine the extent to which pleasure, arts, and the human reconfigure conventional sites, methods, and theories of literary and cultural criticism. Prospective panelists should submit a 250-word abstract to Naminata Diabate (nd326@cornell.edu) by March 15, 2019 with “MLA Panel” in subject line. We welcome papers engaging the following questions among others: How might we either theorize or critique the search and the enjoyment of pleasure by creative avenues from and about Africa? To...

16 – 18 August 2019, Woldia University, Ethiopia Theme: East Africa’s Elsewheres Historically, Africa has a rich tradition of inter-regional trade and cultural exchange. East Africa is no exception. However, while the Southern and Western Africa have considerable scholarly attention, little research in the humanities has been carried out in the East African context. In particular very little attention has been paid to literary and cultural studies. This conference proposes to address those discursive and geopolitical failings by seeking to engage with East Africa’s nodes of connectivity, entanglement, engagement, contestation and transactions through papers, roundtables and panel discussion. Eastern Africa has interacted with other African regions for many years. It has seen intellectual, cultural, trade and political exchanges, despite and perhaps because of differing ideological agendas. East Africa’s role in this process is widely known, but only in part. We can see the role of East Africa in the forging of the Pan-African project, and can see connections with Europe, the Indian subcontinent, the Middle and Far East and elsewhere in Africa in the faces of local people. These global connections seem to be under-researched. While the attention of the rest of the world has been focussed on the unstable Great Lakes region, the mobility of scholars and cultural artists across the region in the 1960s and 1970s has left a lasting impact on the history and culture of the region. Even earlier, voyages of exploration to and from the Far East generated hybrid cultures of people and creative art, symbolised by images of shipwreck and slavery. This cultural intermixing generated a pot-pourri of associations between cultures and civilisations that were derived from, but differed in major ways from those of the people. That can be seen to day in the popular view of Zanzibar as a haven of leisure and fine living, a vision completely at odds with it’s history of slavery and oppression. The commonality of ideas and cultures that transcends current political borders raises questions in many cases about the logicality of those borders. Another area of great interest is the effect of the Cold War on the politics of East Africa and the choices made by nation states at that time and after the end of the Cold War. The Cold War had a profound effect on cultural exchange and the activities and postures of artists and thinkers in East Africa. Some consider that process an unfinished aspect of colonialism and its legacy to the region. The conference seeks to invite contributions, at this stage papers, to a sustained meditation on how East Africa’s diaspora and local heritages have created and modified East African literary and artistic development thus far, and how we can envision...

Ecotones: Encounters, Crossings, and Communities 2015-2020 Ecotones 5 – The Caribbean: Vulnerability and Resilience at Manhanttanville College June 21-22, 2019 in partnership with EMMA (Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3) and MIGRINTER (CNRS-Université de Poitiers) Click here for a PDF of this call. CALL FOR PAPERS An “ecotone” initially designates a transitional area between two ecosystems, for example between land and sea. The “Ecotones” program (2015-2019) is a cycle of conferences which aims to borrow this term traditionally used in geography and ecology and to broaden the concept by applying it to other disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities. An “ecotone” can thus also be understood as a cultural space of encounters, conflicts, and renewal between several communities (Florence Krall). The Ecotones 5 conference will include an interdisciplinary study of the wider Caribbean as a space of cultural, historical, geographic, and linguistic diversity, a meeting place of peoples from different corners of the world. Central to this study is the idea that the Caribbean is a dynamic and heterogeneous space that has clearly been shaped by the persistence of colonialism. Colonialism created an exploitative and extractive economy based on forced labor which in turn led to multiple forms of resistance beyond rebellions and revolutions that were endemic throughout the region. Recently, the region's response to several natural disasters has also demonstrated multiple forms of resilience. These forms of resistance and resilience can be seen in the wide array of literary/historical/ social/nationalist movements that came after the end of colonization. Postcolonialism gave rise to movements such as Antillanité and Créolité that stress the multiplicity of the Caribbean experience. More recently, the idea of littérature-monde “echoes antillanité and créolité in that it calls both for an end to French ethnocentrism while advocating for a ‘return to the world’” (Moudileno). This multiplicity is evident in Fernando Ortiz’s use of the term “transculturation” which stressed the merging and converging of cultures. This hybrid nationalism that Ortiz espoused and Albizu Campos epitomized, saw the Caribbean as an area that embodied hybrid postcolonial identities. Ortiz’s “transculturation” is echoed by Gilroy’s “Black Atlantic” which is a singular discrete work that uses the “Atlantic” as a geopolitical unit that carves out a cultural-political space for the discussion/creation of a hybrid Caribbean. Both concepts challenge the centrality of Europe through the use of indigenous languages and cross-cultural imagination. We invite proposals on a wide range of topics related to Caribbean as listed below, but encourage those that relate to the Caribbean as a space of vulnerability and resilience in light of natural disasters such as earthquakes and hurricanes, including the repercussions of the massive earthquake that hit Haiti in 2010 and the aftermath of more recent hurricanes, Irma...

Click here for a PDF of this call. The Literary Encyclopedia at www.litencyc.com is looking for qualified writers to enhance its coverage of Anglophone Writing and Cultures of Africa. The list below is not comprehensive or final, and new proposals of writers/works/context essays that are not currently listed in our database are also welcome. However, we will prioritize articles on writers and works frequently studied in university courses, and those that are highly topical and well-known. You can browse our current content, and find more information on the Encyclopedia – including its publishing model, editorial policies, and specific information for authors at www.litencyc.com, under the ABOUT tab. To log in please use the (case-sensitive) Guest details: username: SummerGuest2018 password: Mahfouz1911 [case-sensitive] All offers of contribution should come accompanied by an up-to-date CV and, in the case of doctoral students who wish to offer a contribution, also a short writing sample. The overwhelming majority (about 90%) of our contributors are academic scholars, while the remaining percentage is made up of highly endorsed doctoral students and independent researchers. We hope that you will wish to join us in this enterprise. If you wish to contribute, please contact the volume editors: Dr Helen Cousins (H.Cousins@staff.newman.ac.uk), or Alex Wanjala (awanjala@yahoo.fr), or the managing editor, Dr Cristina Sandru (cristinasandru@litencyc.com). GENERAL (life and work) AUTHOR-PROFILES and WORKS Uwem Akpan Elechi Amadi Monica Arac Jared Angira Ayi Kwei Armah Sefi Atta Kofi Awoonor Violet Barungi Asenath Bole Odaga Doreen Baingana A. Igoni Barrett Achmat Dagor Amma Daro Cyprian Ekwensi Akachi Ezeigbo Aminatta Forna Stanley Gazemba Jowhor Ile Francis Imbuga Jane Kaberuka Jonathan Kariara Leonard Kibera Peter Kimani Barbara Kimenye Goretti Kyomuhendo Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi Okey Ndibe Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ Mary Karooro Okurut Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor Okot P’Bitek Tayeb Salih Taiye Selasi Lola Shoneyin Chika Unigwe Noo Saro-Wiwa   INDIVIDUAL WORKS by Ayi Kwei Armah Fragments (1971) Two Thousand Seasons (1973) by Syl Cheney-Coker Sacred River by Aminatta Forna The Memory of Love by Flora Nwapa Novels Efuru (1966) Idu (1970) Never Again (1975) One Is Enough (1981) Women are Different (1986) Short stories/poems collections This Is Lagos and Other Stories (1971) Cassava Song and Rice Song (1986) Wives at War and Other Stories (1980) by Grace Ogot Novels The Promised Land: a novel (1966) Short story collections Land Without Thunder (1968) The Other Woman: selected short stories (1976) Miaha (1983) by Amos Tutuola Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952) by Yvonne Vera Why Don’t You Carve Other Animals (short stories) (1992) Nehanda (1993) Without a Name (1994) Under the Tongue (1997) The Stone Virgins (2002) by Rebeka Njau Ripples in the Pool (1975) The Sacred Seed (2003) by Margaret Ogola The River and the Source (1994) I swear by...

Paradise on Fire ASLE Thirteenth Biennial Conference June 26-30 2019 University of California Davis https://www.asle.org/conference/biennial-conference/ This year the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) is experimenting with a two-part submission process intended to make the conference more participant-driven and democratic. The second step is this Call for PAPERS. Proposals must be submitted by December 15, 2018 at 11:59 pm EST. A diverse array of panels has been chosen by the conference committee; this call for papers now invites anyone who wishes to submit a paper proposal for consideration for inclusion within a specific panel, or to the open call, between October 15 and December 15, 2018. Panel organizers themselves will choose presenters from the submissions that they receive; the panel organizer will evaluate your proposal carefully and notify you of its final status by January 10, 2019. All paper proposals that do not find a home in the panel to which they were submitted will be considered for placement into one of the conference’s open panels. If you submit to the open papers call, or you were not accepted to the original panel you applied to, conference organizers will evaluate your abstract and you will be notified by February 4, 2019 of its final status. Only one paper submission per person is allowed. There are nearly 130 panels seeking participants on a variety of topics. Submitting to an accepted panel GREATLY increases your chances of being accepted to the conference, as there is very limited space on the schedule for panels formed via the open call for submissions. Conference Theme: Paradise on Fire “If paradise now arises in hell, it's because in the suspension of the usual order and the failure of most systems, we are free to live and act another way.” ― Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster The Biennial ASLE Conference will be held in Davis, California, in June 2019. Following a longstanding tradition, this conference gathers scholars and artists working in a diverse array of environmental humanities projects and offers a special focus on some themes that resonate well with the location of the meeting. Paradise does not exist, and yet that never seems to stop people from finding it, or building it, or dreaming its contours – often to the detriment of humans and nonhumans on the wrong side of its walls. Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy imagines a walled city with a climate-controlled dome called Paradice where genetic engineers create new forms of life, a bubble breached by human violence and climate catastrophe. In the sixteenth century Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo imagined a place called “California,” an island ruled by a dark skinned Amazonian queen with an Arabic name,...

Ariel: a Review of International English Literature seeks proposals for publication in its 50th Anniversary Special Issue, slated for publication in 2020. This special issue will unpack and explore the tensions and interrelationships between postcolonial studies and Indigenous studies. When Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin published The Empire Writes Back (1989), the ensuing recognition of Canada and the United States as products of imperialism and colonization necessarily provoked questions about the people who preceded settlers. Indigenous literary studies became recognized as a necessary missing piece of those conversations. However, the vocabulary and approaches of postcolonial theory often failed to address--or even obstructed--questions that Indigenous literary scholars, particularly those with community obligations, needed to consider. Ariel’s 50th Anniversary Issue is an opportunity to reconsider the trajectory of discussions among Indigenous and postcolonial studies scholars and practitioners. At this historical juncture of increased visibility of issues concerning Indigenous rights, migration, displacement, and global imperialism among other pressing urgencies, now is the moment to return to these debates and recast the dialogue. In imagining new ways of understanding the conversations about the past, present, and future of these disciplines--both separately and together--the issue’s special editors seek to open the conversation to emerging, as well as more established scholars of postcolonial and Indigenous studies, in part by curating interviews between junior and senior scholars across the two disciplines. Where possible, these conversations will take place at a workshop, which will include a keynote, roundtables, on-stage interviews, and large group discussions on November 10, 2018, in Vancouver, in order to more organically bring practitioners from these two disciplines into actual as well as textual conversations. Questions to be addressed could include, but are not limited to, the following: How have the vocabulary and approaches of postcolonial theory often failed to address--or even obstructed--questions that Indigenous literary scholars needed to consider? Why has postcolonial theory sometimes resisted the insights of Indigenous scholarship? How might contemporary scholars move beyond these disagreements to integrate postcolonial and Indigenous theories? What are the benefits and costs of doing so? What are the protocols of positioning and the relevance of relationship and credentials to theoretical approaches? Indigenous studies considers foundational ideas encoded in traditional ways of knowing. How can it also acknowledge the role of texts written in English by nineteenth-century Indigenous Christian converts, theories coming out of the mid-twentieth century Red Power Movement, the emergence of postcolonial theory, and the contributions by twenty-first century Indigenous writers who are dislocated from home lands and communities? To what extent do the labels “settler” and “Indigenous” name an important distinction, and to what extent does this duality overlook other histories, such as Black history, and the severe threats that “settlers”...