Seminars

Postcolonial Perspectives on Injustice and Memory in Colson Whitehead's The Nickel Boys (2019) and Hisham Matar's The Return: A Memoir (2019)

Organizer: Walid Abdallah

This study investigates Colson Whitehead's The Nickel Boys and Hisham Matar's The Return: A Memoir, both pivotal works from 2019, through the lens of postcolonial theory. These novels grapple with... more

Literature, Resource Extraction, and Settler Colonialism

Organizer: Isabelle Hesse

Scholarly interest in literary engagements with resource extraction and extractivism has grown exponentially over the last decade. Special issues (Textual Practice 25.3; Modern Fiction Studies 66.1)... more

Where are the New Sex Wars?

Organizer: Micol Bez

While the tensions within radical 1970-80 feminism(s) are often articulated in the belligerent vocabulary of the Sex Wars, post-#metoo feminism seems to fish in another —more liberal— conceptual pool... more

The Roaring of the Twenties: Modernity and the Energetic Turn

Organizer: Daniel Brandlechner

The 1920s are a period of profound social, cultural, and technological transformation across the globe. Known as the Roaring Twenties in the US, Goldene Zwanziger in Germany, años locos in Argentina... more

Caribbean Fiction and the Environment

Organizer: Carine Mardorossian

The environment in fiction is often discussed as a backdrop or "setting" that complements or reinforces characterization. This seminar will instead foreground this traditional background and explore... more

Mapping the Asian-Hispanic Borderland: Cultural Interactions and Hybrid Identities

Organizer: Miaowei Weng

The contact between Asia and the Hispanic world began in the second half of the sixteenth century with the Spanish colonization of the Philippines, marking the start of a rich history of movement,... more

How It’s Made: Image-texts, Identity, Interpretation, Intersections

Organizer: Katherine Kelp-Stebbins

This seminar will explore how print and digital conditions of publication inform the legibility, translation, and circulation of ethnic, racial, gender, and other identity markers. How do visual... more

Alternate Relationalities

Organizer: Shanna Killeen

In an October 2021 interview with Fox News host Tucker Carlson, J. D. Vance responded to critics who, in Carlson’s words, “went completely bananas” over his claim that to be childless is to have no “... more

Mediating the Illegible: Theory, Aesthetics, and Activism under Regimes of Capture

Organizer: Rijuta Mehta

This seminar explores the notion of “illegibility” in critical thought, popular culture, and activist media that respond to neocolonial-neoliberal regimes of minority recognition. In light of global... more

The Textuality of Contemporary (Body) Horror

Organizer: Noah Terrell

Despite its long and varied history, the infamous subgenre of body horror didn’t gain critical currency until the 1986 January/February volume of the journal Screen. Indeed, it was in this special... more

Forbidden Roads: Travel as Metaphor in Contemporary Eastern European Cultures and Literatures

Organizer: Margarita Marinova

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the lifting of the iron curtain, for citizens of the former Soviet Bloc travel became an act of liberation and a symbol of finally overcoming the... more

World literature as a mode of doing and experiencing

Organizer: Bilin Liu

David Damrosch (2003) describes world literature as “a mode of circulation and of reading” (5) and “writing that gains in translation” (281). This perspective has long dominated the discourse on... more

“The Aesthetic Common: Rethinking the Politics and Ethics of Shared Being”

Organizer: Mikko Tuhkanen

With contemporary political life in mind, this panel calls for an urgent return to, but also a reconfiguration of, the politico-ethical concept of “the common.” Since Aristotle’s designation of “the... more

METAMODERNISM AND THE FUTURE OF THEORY: A NECESSARY DISCUSSION

Organizer: Luis Gonzalez-Barrios

According to Nigerian art historian Moyo Okediji, the metamodern is an extension of and challenge to modernism and postmodernism. Building on this premise, Jason A. Josephson Storm's recent work,... more

Displacing Academic Practices in the Ruins of the Neoliberal University

Organizer: Maddalena Cerrato

Rather than an acute crisis with the potential for a substantive renewal, the neoliberalization of the university has revealed and exacerbated a longer term condition of ruination whose effects have... more

Latin American Booms Then and Now: Revisiting the Archives and Recreating Diálogos Across the Americas

Organizer: Michael Parra

The historical and global phenomenon of the Latin American Boom has anchored scholars in the Cold War period when institutions like Casa de las Américas in Havana, Cuba, played a crucial role in the... more

Ghost Figures in World Literature

Organizer: Ido Fuchs

A ghost, Avery Gordon writes, “has a real presence and demands its due, your attention” (2008, Ghostly Matters). To answer this demand, our seminar invites submissions that turn their attention to... more

Literary Translation and the Cold War

Organizer: Claire Solomon

This seminar invites proposals for papers that explore the aesthetics and politics of Cold War literary translations. Around the world, literary translation increased during a period of intense... more

Intersections between Race/Caste and Religion in Literature

Organizer: Ali Ahsan

The intersection between religion and race may seem unlikely at first, but history shows a continuous pattern where religion aligns with social hierarchies like race and caste. Geraldine Heng (2018)... more

Aesthetic Approaches to the Qur'an and Islam

Organizer: Pardis Dabashi

Building from efforts within Islamic studies, Qur’anic studies, and literary studies, this seminar invites papers that examine the question of aesthetics, broadly conceived, in and around the Qur’an... more

ACLA