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”...

Summary Call African Literary Criticism Online. Discussions about the emergence of online criticism as a site for understanding knowledge production in/about Africa. 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 invites submission of abstracts for a guaranteed panel titled “African Literary Criticism Online” at the 2019 Annual Convention in Chicago. “It’s gotta be digital. And that’s the next thing. The moment when people will be consuming their school texts on a digital device will be a big moment for us--as a generation, our things will be read” predicted in 2011 Binyavanga Wainaina. Although not all textbooks are accessed on a digital device, texts by the new generation of African writers are being read, reviewed, and even criticized online. The rise and development of African literatures on digital platforms (blogs, e-magazines, social media, and the Internet) is accompanied by the emergence of African literary Internet. Contributing to the renaissance of African literary practices, these platforms include, among others, Saraba, Enkare Review, Brittle Paper, Okadabooks, the Jalada Collective, Iqra, StoryMoja, LibHub, Afrikult, James Murua’s literature blog, Chimurenga, and Sunshine. Unquestionably the list is getting longer by the day. As these online platforms generate new reading publics, network existing ones, foster a sense of immediacy, they also create celebrities, canonize texts, and invigorate less formalized genres. Despite their welcome presence, literary criticism online suffers many setbacks, including but not limited to an ephemeral life span, an informal and unstructured dynamic, a questionable quality, and the constantly fragile boundaries between criticism and the search for fame. In expanding the ongoing academic conversations on the life of this literary culture, this panel seeks to examine the extent to which African literary Internet reconfigures conventional sites, methods, and theories of literary criticism. Prospective panelists should submit a 250-word abstract to Naminata Diabate (nd326@cornell.edu) by March 15, 2018 with “MLA Panel” in subject line. We welcome papers addressing the following questions among others: How might we either theorize or critique online literary criticism by exploring practices from and about Africa? To what extent is the interaction between authors, readers, and critics shaping new African writing and by extension African literary studies? To what extent do these platforms shape the future of criticism as an academic exercise? How might we define and conceptualize the ways in which academic literary criticism can guide digital literary culture’s compelling tendencies evolve and thrive? How does online literary criticism put pressure on concepts such as authorship, publishing, criticism, academia, and journalism? How might we write the history of African literary Internet? How might we conceptualize the political and...

Please find below the call for panels and papers for the Thematic Stream on Autobiography in Africa for the ASA-UK to be held in September 2018. We would be most honoured if you could send in a proposal for a panel or a paper for this occasion before the deadline of 16 February 2018. Within this Thematic Stream I will organise a Panel on Detention and Autobiographical Writing. (See call for papers, also below.) If you want to submit an abstract on that subject, you may contact me directly (preferably before 6 February 2018). But feel free to submit a paper proposal on another theme related to autobiographical narrative (use the option 'open panel' in your registration): Godwin, Tom and I will come up with panel proposals for these abstracts. Thank you in advance and looking forward to receiving your proposal. Met vriendelijke groet / With kind regards, Inge Brinkman   Conference Stream Text, paratext and context in African autobiographical narratives. At the CONFERENCE: ASA-UK 11-13 September 2018, Birmingham You can now submit your panel and/or paper for the thematic stream on autobiography in Africa. Submit through: Call for Papers and Panels ASAUK 2018: NOW OPEN Please note: deadline for the proposal: 16 February 2018 Abstract Always straddling and dismantling the boundaries between truthfulness and imagination, between memory, concealment and referentiality, between psychology, history, geography and literature, autobiographical narrative invites the audience to (re-)consider the relations between text and context, or text and co-texts. In its counterdiscursive capacity, postcolonial autobiographical narrative has been especially emphatic in this respect: its critical constellation in the end rests on reference to political practices and hierarchies beyond the text, weaving palimpsestic layers of (counter-)meanings. In this light it is not surprising that many African autobiographers have stressed the importance of realism for their work, and they and their publishers often employ various strategies – in the text, but also in paratextual elements – to enhance the effect of realism as the starting point of meaning-making. Meanwhile, discussions on African autobiographical narrative have over the last decades expanded to include oral genres, life histories, auto-ethnographies, online blogs and Facebook pages, apart from the more classic form of a published book. This begs the question how relations between text and context are established in these more recent forms of autobiography. In this thematic stream we will focus on text, paratext and context in autobiographical narratives from Africa. We welcome paper proposals that deal with African autobiographical narrative in whatever form – published, online, oral –, and in principle from any discipline or from an interdisciplinary perspective. See also: STREAM: Text, paratext and context in African autobiographical narratives. We regret to note that no financial support...