Kategorie: Call for Papers

Deadline: March 30, 2023

Since the Civil Rights movements in the U.S. on behalf of BIPOC, women, 2SLGBTQQIA+
people, and people with disabilities, research in literatures by members of these minorities is thriving. On the one hand, researchers from within marginalized communities within academia but also allies have contributed unique insights by reflecting their both scholarly and personal positionalities. For example, Hartmut Lutz, Florentine Strzelczyk, and Renae Watchman (Navajo) begin their volume Indianthusiasm: Indigenous Responses (2020) “[b]y locating ourselves within kinship, our family relationships, our backgrounds […]” in order to “[…] reveal our intent as researchers, our relationship to the project, and our responsibility as researchers who seek to work with Indigenous researchers” (7; comment added). Without such self-reflexivity, researchers from outside the communities of the authors they study face ethical challenges regarding the theories they apply. In addition, the outcomes of research may not reflect the intentions of the researchers due to limited approaches, as Eve Tuck (Unangax) and K. Wayne Yang state that “[…] the academy as an apparatus of settler colonial knowledge already domesticates, denies, and dominates other forms of knowledge” (235). The latter issue should especially concern literary scholars from Europe who belong to the mainstream of their societies but whose work participates in global discourses on inequalities resulting from Eurocentric colonialism. Yet, writing about their institutional contexts in Canada, Watchman, Carrie Smith, and Markus Stock advocate that, for example, “[…] Indigenous and German Studies can be bridged (and relations built) by reflecting critically on their mutual influences and definitions of each other” (318). Building such connections could appeal to scholars worldwide whose engagement with minority cultures invites comparisons to their own contexts while being grounded in identity politics. For example, as a Pakistani-American, Asad Haider writes about how the autobiography of the founder of the Black Panther Party, Huey P. Newton “[…] set for me a model of the life of the mind that was far more convincing than the bohemian hedonism of Henry Miller or the self-serving social climbing expected of members of a ‘model minority’” (“Introduction”). With an interest in such transcultural approaches, this journal issue aims to center concepts of universality and particularity insofar as they are reflected by minority literatures and as they can inform critical readings. This special issue follows a broad definition of “literature” to include figurative narratives with aesthetics referencing their genres and modes of production. The focus aims to supplement decolonial concerns by allowing contributors to trace overlaps between contexts.

Possible submissions may include (but are not limited to):
• Essays on minority literatures between scholarship and activism
• Essays reflecting on fictionality as performances to address (non-) minority readers
• Essays discussing non-fictional texts that foster personal identification with minority
issues
• Essays juxtaposing graphic elements in literary texts with extra-textual stereotypes of
minorities
• Book reviews of literary studies approaches in terms of their attention (or lack thereof) to
minority positionalities

Please send your proposals for contributions to positionalityspecialissue@gmail.com by March 30th, 2023. Proposals must include contact information, an abstract of 250-300 words, a bio note of 200 words, and 5-7 keywords. Notifications of acceptance or rejection will be sent out by the end of April 2023. If accepted, please submit your original contribution of 5000-10000 words, including notes and bibliography by September 30th, 2023. With regard to formatting and MLA citation style, please consult the following links:
https://amlit.eu/index.php/amlit/about/submissions and
https://amlit.eu/public/journal/1/__A_Instructions_for_Contributors_Update_June_2022.pdf

Contact e-mail: positionalityspecialissue@gmail.com
Works Cited
Haider, Asad. Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump. London/Brooklyn:
Verso, 2018. (E-Book)
Lutz, Hartmut/Florentine Strzelczyk/Renae Watchman. “Introduction.” Indianthusiasm:
Indigenous Responses. Eds. Hartmut Lutz/Florentine Strzelczyk/Renae Watchman.
Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2020. 3-32.
Tuck, Eve/K. Wayne Yang. “R-Words: Refusing Research.” Humanizing Research:
Decolonizing Qualitative Inquiry with Youth and Communities. Eds. Django
Paris/Maisha T. Winn. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2014. 223-247.
Watchman, Renae/Carrie Smith/Markus Stock. “Building Transdisciplinary Relationships: Indigenous and German Studies.” Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies 55.4 (2019): 309-327.

edited by Janne Cleveland and Cynthia Sugars

Studies in Canadian Literature / Études en littérature canadienne (SCL/ÉLC) invites interdisciplinary contributions to a special issue on Canadian Drama and the Performing Arts.

Deadline: March 31, 2023

This special issue invites submissions on the ways Canadian dramatists, scholars, theatre and performing arts practitioners, and audiences are engaging with the changing, and sometimes unstable, social and cultural landscapes of our time. Theatre, and the performing arts in general, respond to and reflect the socio-cultural conditions from which they emerge. How are concepts of performance and performativity adapting to reflect changing notions of identity and selfhood? How do theatrical representations respond to anxieties and traumas emerging from unstable political contexts? How do the performing arts attempt to de-colonize inherited narratives, systemic prejudices, and fraught social inequities? In this issue, we consider how theatre – and the performing arts generally – are responding to the challenges of an unstable sociopolitical landscape. These fraught conditions include, but are not limited to, the climate crisis, the pandemic, racialized oppressions, distrust of sources of information (fake news), technological changes, gender biases, and human rights inequities. In what ways has the inherently social and collective nature of theatre been used to forge new forms of community, sometimes by exploiting technological innovations? How have these developments found new ways to engage and inscribe audiences within emerging collective visions, sometimes by mobilizing a positive sense of community in the face of these pressures? What roles did online theatrical projects play in responding to the isolating effects of the pandemic?

(soutenu par le DAAD, sous l’égide du Centre canadien d’études allemandes et européennes [CCEAE] de l’Université de Montréal)

Les 23 et 24 novembre 2023, à Saarbrücken

Organisées par Robert Dion (UQAM), Louise-Hélène Filion (Université du Michigan) et Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink (Universität des Saarlandes, Saarbrücken)

Date butoir : 28 février 2023

Dans le cadre du projet « Modernités connectées : Québec-Allemagne 1900-2000 », qui met l’accent sur les transferts entre l’Allemagne et le Québec dans les domaines de la littérature, de la culture et des idées, nous organisons un colloque visant à poursuivre l’examen des configurations qui structurent les rapports entre les deux aires culturelles en cause. Nous envisageons ces deux journées comme un moment propice au déploiement d’une perspective résolument croisée sur l’objet d’étude en question : ainsi, nous accueillerons des propositions qui portent tant sur la réception de la culture québécoise en Allemagne que sur le mouvement inverse, depuis la fin du XIXe siècle jusqu’à l’époque contemporaine.
L’étude des agents des transferts culturels ayant été jusqu’à présent négligée, les commu-nications qui s’attacheront aux « passeurs culturels » entre le Québec et l’Allemagne sont particulièrement bienvenues. On songe à l’étude de médiateurs ayant œuvré dans divers domaines en Allemagne et au Québec : traduction, monde du théâtre, littérature, médias, enseignement universitaire, etc. Les formes d’appropriation productive d’une culture par l’autre seront également au programme de ces journées de réflexion : les communications pourront porter aussi bien sur les appropriations québécoises de textes allemands (incluant les médias et d’autres pratiques culturelles) que sur d’éventuelles formes de réception productive de textes québécois en Allemagne.

Les présentations, de 30 minutes, seront suivies de périodes de discussion en commun. Nous envisageons la publication des présentations revues et augmentées à la suite des échanges. Les personnes intéressées sont priées de nous faire parvenir un titre, un bref résumé de la proposition de communication (de 15 à 20 lignes) ainsi qu’un curriculum vitæ abrégé d’ici le 28 février 2023.

International Conference on Canadian Studies at Centre for Canadian Studies, Jadavpur University, 14-15 February, 2023

Deadline: January 26, 2023

Humanities and social sciences have already made the inevitable inter-disciplinary turn towards an understanding of the natural sciences which deal with ecology and the environment. This turntowards the natural sciences, needless to say, takes into account the nuances of how humans have inhabited, changed, and engaged with the planet. Nature and environment are comprehended as entities that cannotbe understood holistically if the functioning of human agency is discounted. Human agency and the activities that they manifest have apparently caused some irreversible changes tothe planet and hence their contributions in terms of how the ecosystems develop, falter, and function cannot be ignored anymore (Dipesh Chakraborty, 2021).These activities also involve steps that proceed towards different conservationist and sustenance practices— and not just resource extraction, pollution, technological ravage and other negative practiceswhich are often conflated as sole features that define the human relationship with natureand the environment. Though scholars are at a quandary with respect to realising if the ‘negative’ effects of human agency on nature are irreconcilable or not, efforts to understand the consequences of the environment/environmental change on human historyare also being undertaken in the humanities worldwide. This attention has opened up newer ways of looking at phenomena like imperialism, colonialism, post-colonialism, and globalisation. In a colonial and neo-colonial order, environmental degradation, or in other words, ‘taming of nature’, is often validated by asserting the need of a progressive nation that is open to the idea of a technological boom (Ursula Heise, 2006).This dependence on technology for the functioning of our lives— the over-encompassing influence of the ‘technosphere’ — is apparently very difficult to exterminate.It has percolated and intermeshed itself inextricably in our relationship/understanding of the ecologiesthat we inhabit (Peter Haff, 2014;2017). Nonetheless, humans have also proceeded towards the realisation that it is the ‘world’ that will precede and succeed them and stand testament to the inter-generational time and values. Hence a lot of attention has been directed towards the redressal of the ‘irreconcilable changes’ that human activities have caused to the environment — climate change being one of them Climate activists, conservationists, and sustenance policy makers (like David Suzuki in Canada) have emerged globally to address and redress these changes and have tried to contest the very utility-based relationship humans have with the environment. This requires individuals to go beyond an understanding of human engagement with nature as ‘means’ to a beneficial (mostly monetary) ‘end’, and to denounce an existent hierarchisation between different species that inhabit an ecosystem (Arne Naess 1989).

RIAS Vol. 16, Fall–Winter (2/2023)

Deadline: March 30, 2023

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a drastic loss of human life worldwide. An unprecedented challenge to the human existence and survival on the global level in the post-World War-II history, the pandemic caused devastating economic and social disruption. Over six million people died, countless others lost their jobs, often falling into extreme poverty, thousands of businesses folded. Suicide statistics skyrocketed; the count of isolation-related depression cases has never been higher, and mental health, especially among the youngest, has become imperiled. The impact of the pandemic has been so abrasive that human perceptions of the essence of life have undergone an enormous transformation. And although the Ruscist invasion of Ukraine has diverted the world’s attention from the pandemic, millions of people world-wide continue living under the constant threat of the virus. Beyond doubt, the experience of the pestilence affected everyone. Yet, a renewed focus on the fundamental truths of life, such as survival, livelihood, human dignity, and basic human rights, much as many a government would prefer to avoid it, is an absolute necessity.