The guest editors welcome proposals for a theme issue of Clues focusing on the representation of disability, broadly defined, in crime and mystery fiction, television shows, films, and other media. We seek a wide range of critical and cultural perspectives on how bodymind anomalousness features in stories about wrongdoing, from the maimed and scarred villains of Conan Doyle to the neurodivergent hero-sleuths of contemporary popular culture. In what ways have impairment, disfigurement, and disease been used to raise the stakes of fear and upheaval in crime stories? How do such narratives perpetuate or challenge ableist notions of order and resolution? Does corporeal vulnerability stoke our pity, sympathy, or admiration—whether for criminals, victims, or detectives whose genius seems to triumph over adversity? Conversely, do the contours of disability facilitate alternative modes of sleuthing and lead to unexpected forms of justice? What alternate forms of knowledge do these characters and texts present and endorse? Since the genre of crime by definition entails what and how we know, how have authors—over time and around the world—engaged disability to probe the meaning of truth?
Saturday, March 23, 2024
CFP: #Disability and Detective Fiction (theme issue of Clues: A Journal of Detection) -Clues Journal
Thursday, March 7, 2024
Call for papers: Disability in World Cinema: Translating Subjectivity (NOV-2024)
Saturday, January 27, 2024
CALL FOR PAPERS #Palgrave Handbook of #Disability in #Comics and #Graphic #Narratives
We invite abstracts for articles to be published in a collection showcasing scholarly research related to disability in comics and graphic narratives. This edited volume will highlight insights from both disability studies as well as comics studies.
Centering a disability justice ethos, we especially welcome: submissions by disabled authors/creators; collaborative submissions; work that engages with disability life writing and/or disclosure; work that addresses accommodations and accessibility as they relate to comics pedagogy, form, and/or readership.
The collection envisions a diverse selection of contributors (i.e. a mix of early, mid-, and established scholars from the humanities, comics studies, and disability studies; disability activists; comics creators; comics journalists; and so on) that represent a range of perspectives, methodologies, and communities across the globe. The contents of the collection may be likewise diverse, including essays by individual and collaborative authors, interviews, and/or creative work. Essays in all languages are welcome (to be published in translation).
We encourage examinations of mainstream titles and characters, independent comics, as well as considerations of the ways disability shapes comics form in creative ways. We are especially interested in contributions that explore additional intersections of race, class, sexuality, and gender; and works that challenge ableism in comics theory and/or challenge comics’ ocularcentrism.
We especially welcome essays on potential themes and keywords such as:
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Accessibility
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Activism
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Archive
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Autobiography
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Coloniality
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Disability Justice
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Disability as Method
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Genre(s)
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Intersectionality
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Mental Health/Illness
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Monstrosity/grotesque
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Multiculturalism
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Neurodivergence
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Pedagogy
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Sexuality
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Sound
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Superheroes and supervillains
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Touch
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Transnationalism
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Vision
We welcome inquiries by email. Please submit 250-300 word abstracts and 50-word bios by February 28th, 2024. After reviewing submissions, the editors will select contributors and then submit a proposal for publication by Palgrave.
Final essays will be approximately 5,000-10,000 words depending on the topic. We also welcome submissions of scholarship in comics formats between 10 and 20 pages. For questions, or to submit a proposal, contact keyword.disability.comics@gmail.com
Monday, January 8, 2024
Call For Articles on - #Affect Studies, #BlackStudies, #Critical #Disability Studies, Critical #Race Studies, Digital #Humanities, #Environmental Humanities, #Media Studies, #Medical #Humanities, Sound Studies, #Transgender Studies, #Asian Canadian Studies, #Black Canadian Studies, #Canadian #Literature, Canadian History, Canadian Studies, #Diaspora Studies& #Indigenous Studies. - University of Toronto Quarterly
Wednesday, January 3, 2024
CFP: 10th Annual National RAW.Conference on COMPARATIVE LITERATURE: PERSPECTIVES, PRACTICES, POSITIONS: 5th – 7th March 2024 University of Hyderabad
Centre for Comparative Literature
School of Humanities University of Hyderabad
Hyderabad, Telangana – 500046, India
CALL FOR PAPERS
“We all know that the word ‘method’ is eventually derived from the Greek ‘methodos’ which again is derived from ‘meta’ meaning ‘after’ and ‘hodos’ meaning ‘way’. If method is moving after a way, then it must have been arrived at after moving wayward for some time.”
-Amiya Dev, “Comparative Literature from Below”, JJCL 29
Comparative literature is a way of reading literature. Literature is the object of study and the method is ‘comparative’. This begs questions like: what does a comparative reading entail? Why should we study literature comparatively? And most importantly, how do we do a comparative reading? These questions have been raised time and again at different locations, both by people within and outside the discipline and various answers have been offered. Historically, different ‘schools’ of comparative literature (the French school, the Russian school, the German school et al.) have conceptualized the method of comparison in different ways. If we look at comparative literature as a situated interpretive practice (as opposed to a theory or body of works), the question of (spatio-temporal and cultural) location becomes very important. Given our location in the plurilingual and pluricultural society of India, where living with plurality and difference is part of our quotidian reality, can we think of an Indian way of doing comparative literature founded upon plurality, relationality and an ethical engagement with difference?
Given the nature of literature which is marked by the singularity of each ‘text’ and its irreducible difference from another of its kind, how do we conceptualize a comparative method that is sensitive to this fact? Our method should follow a “from below” (Amiya Dev) approach which modifies itself according to the literary data and does not tweak data to fit the method and creates an open and inclusive discourse. Such an approach makes comparative literature a willing and ethical engagement with alterity and difference aimed at understanding the Other. Our textual practices of reading, writing and interpretation are aimed at understanding the process of textualization, its production and reception, in order to access through literature what Simone de Beauvoir calls a “taste of another life”. These acts of conscious and reflective reading taking into account the ontological plurality, relationality and living with alterity which are conditions of our being, we believe, are fundamental to comparative literature as a practice across the world.
Apart from this, what else can we say, if anything, in general about our research method given that each literary text is singular and hence, each engagement with it is unique? What are the essential characteristics our method must have so that we don’t move too wayward and invite charges of dilettantism that is often levelled against our discipline? Given the history of the discipline which has been beset by a number of crises, even pronouncements of death, calls for dissolution into other disciplines which are often from the Anglo-Saxon academia, how should the comparative method be applied, especially in the Indian academia, to different areas of research and assert its vitality and relevance for a location like ours? What makes our practice different from that of other disciplines like English studies, cultural studies, translation studies, area studies etc.? What is the relationship of comparative practice with theory? How do we negotiate with categories that are often used for the study of literature such as those based on region (South Asia, the Global South, the ‘third world’, regional language literatures, the Commonwealth, the nation), history (the post-colonial, industrial modernity) or identity (based on caste, class, race, gender, sexuality, religion, and other theories of marginalization)? What are the ethics and aesthetics of our engagement with alterity and plurality? Can we interrogate received categories and ideas of comparison and construct a method for research that is suitable to study our lived realities? This conference is an attempt to bring fellow comparatists together to reflect on these questions and clarify for ourselves and “others” the relevance of comparative literature methodology for literary studies today, in India and elsewhere and share our insights and ideas from the point of view of our own practice of comparative literature.
We invite papers that engage with, but not limited to, the following themes:
Literary historiography, genology and thematology: Integrated approaches
Comparative poetics: Sanskrit, Tamil, Greek, Perso-Arabic et al.
Literature and other arts: relations and intermediality
Reception aesthetics and reception history
Organic plurality of Indian languages: implications for literary studies
Literary movements and movements of literatures
Otherness and difference: encounters, engagements and ethics
Literary relations: interliterariness, contact and literary transactions
India as a site for comparative literature
Comics and graphic narratives
Spatiality, temporality, chronotope, heterotopia
Affective and existential and experiential/phenomenological categories for literary studies
Canons: making, unmaking and beyond
Dismantling hierarchies in differences
Aesthetics: poetics and politics
Identity and difference: comparative perspectives vis-à-vis literature
Disability as difference
Discourses of identity and comparative literature: caste, class, race, religion, gender, sexuality, marginality
Virtuality and literariness: new forms and modes of writing
Orality, oratures, oral and performance traditions
Narratology, narrativization and narratives of the other/ othered narratives
We expect the papers to deal with the practical aspects of Comparative Literature and demonstrate how the comparative approach shapes their actual practice of engaging with and reading literary and cultural texts, practices and phenomena. In other words, we expect to see the application of the comparative approach in reading of particular ‘texts’ in the papers and not just an exploration of theoretical ideas. Research scholars working in any discipline, particularly those working in literary studies in any language from a comparative perspective, are encouraged to send in their abstracts. Language of presentation will be English only due to logistical reasons.
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RAW.Con or Researchers at Work Conference is an annual offline event organized by the students of the Centre for Comparative Literature (CCL) at the University of Hyderabad. The conference is open to students who have registered for Ph.D. or aspiring PhD scholars (a few slots are available for MA students). As per practice, some of the eminent scholars will also be invited as resource persons for the conference. Candidates whose abstracts have been selected will be informed by 10th February 2024. If your abstract is accepted after review, you will be required to email the full paper by 24th February 2024. Selected paper presenters will be provided bed and board, and often train fare as well, if the budget allows.
Organizing Team:
Asit Kumar Biswal
Jomina C. George
R. Lalhriatpuii
Friday, October 27, 2023
Call for Book Chapters : Marginalities in South Asian Literature: Text, Context and Theory -Routledge Book Series
CONCEPT NOTE
In the context of literature, the term marginality would encompass not only the issues related to the social, cultural, economic or geopolitical spaces that give rise to it but also the literature emerging from these contexts and the communities suffering and contesting it. Such literatures that address the experience of marginality create discourses and counter discourses. Our proposed book is therefore interested in the trio: text, context and theory. Defining the margin/marginality is complex. The “margin” is a space which is generally understood in relation to the centre which is powerful socially, politically, economically, culturally, geographically and linguistically. But the margin does not belong only to the realm of the fringe, it is a dynamic space. It is a space full of possibilities. While the margin may refer to people who live on the peripheries, whose voices are ignored, who may have no representation in mainstream societies, it can at the same time become a space of impending conflict, confrontation and tension because it can question the logic of the divide of the centre and periphery. The problem with the discourse of marginality, however, is that one may get trapped in it in a bid to simply overturn it. But the margin is much more than that. It may offer a sustained scenario of contestation for its rights and share of power, thereby paving ways for new possibilities. The representation of the marginal subject, therefore, is extremely interesting and complex, especially in literature, because literature has the possibility in it to move beyond this kind of binary dialectics and demonstrate the problematics involved in its interstitial, in-between, hybrid, spaces. Such complex readings will help us understand the structures of dominance, discrimination, hierarchy and marginality in a multifaceted way keeping in mind the politics of difference in a multipolar, multicultural world.
The evolution of capitalism after its beginnings in the Enlightenment period to a post-Enlightenment transformation in neoliberalism and globalization has now created marginalities on an expansive scale in more varied ways. While these enterprises, backed by political systems, have privileged certain regions and groups, they have also incapacitated others. Western standards and concepts of progress and development imposed on other societies and indigenous cultures have suppressed the local and the regional cultures in different neo-colonial ways. Again, there is another side to marginality in a society: one’s acceptance into various cultural communities is also determined by one’s birth and other determinations such as gender, race, caste, disability, religion, region and so on. Many of these categories decide whether one is an insider or an outsider in a particular nationspace. One has to negotiate between the dominance of the mainstream culture and the marginality of one’s own subculture. Marginality also brings about psychological uncertainties, having to move between discord and harmony, exclusion and inclusion. While this rivets our attention to the question of the marginal personality, more recent studies have addressed the problematic in terms of further specificities as to how marginality affects one’s access to resources, opportunities, knowledge, respect, rights, recognition and identity. Consequently, while talking of marginality, one cannot but talk of mobilizations and movements which challenge these oppressive systems and hegemonic structures, and thereby give rise to the question of agency and emancipatory discourses. We have kept in view this diverse socio-political terrain of marginality, and for our projected volume, we are interested in these multifarious aspects of the varied kinds of marginality as represented in the different genres of South Asian Literature. We are also interested in the studies on the Contexts and Theories relevant to the proposed area and problematics concerned.
South Asian writing is populated by varied experiences of marginality specific to its history and localised realities. For instance, the figure of the muhajir, dalit, hijra or adivasi, some of whom find space in more universal social identity groups representing marginal experiences like race, religion, gender, caste, disability, region or tribe. Particular events in the history of the region like the Partition, Bhopal gas disaster, British rule and recent neoliberalisation-led economic developments have been moments where the tensions between dominant and other sub-groups have crafted the marginalised figure. Consequently, these historical contexts also alert us to the shifting terrain of the experience of marginality where the once dominant group can also become marginalised later, as is seen in the experience of colonisation for upper-caste identity. The ecological consequences of a shared history of multiple settlements and pursuit of economic development are evident in the change of the natural topography owing to deforestation and urbanisation. The negotiations between city dwellers, agrarian and forest-dwelling communities, are also therefore marked by framing of socio-political identity in the South Asian nation-state that creates and recreates the marginalised figure.
The proposed anthology is therefore interested in contributions that would primarily analyse literary representations and cultural discourses in the following areas but not limited to these:
- The experiences of social, political and economic marginalisation on the basis of caste, gender, disability, region, religion, tribe, ethnicity or race
- LGBTQ+, sexuality and fluid identities
- Marginal psychology, culture, hybridity, identity
- Framing of the nation, transnation, border and narratives of exclusion and displacement and the framing of the citizen in the nation state
- Marginalisation as a communal experience and the dynamics between individual, community and society
- Economic development in the postcolonial neoliberal nation state and the accompanying ecological fallout
- Ecology and environmental justice and the gendered perspective of ecology
- Poverty as a marker of the vulnerability and precarity of marginalised identity
- The dialectics of voice and representation in narratives of marginalisation
- The subversion of canonical and aesthetic standards of literary stylistics in texts that represent the experience of marginalised identities.
Key information for prospective authors:
- Abstract with a title and keywords: 250-300 words
- Word limit of full papers including citations: 6000- 8000 words
- Style of citation: MLA 9th edition
- Email your submission to: marginalities2@gmail.com
*The proposed anthology will be published by a reputed publisher
Deadline for abstract submissions: October 30, 2023
Abstract selection notification: November 30, 2023
Deadline for full paper submission: January 30, 2024
Dr. Arunima Ray
Associate Professor
Department of English
Lady Shri Ram College for Women, University of Delhi
New Delhi
Dr. Karuna Rajeev
Assistant Professor
Department of English
Lady Shri Ram College for Women, University of Delhi
New Delhi
Dr. Goutam Karmakar
NRF Postdoctoral Fellow
University of the Western Cape, South Africa
Routledge Book Series Editor on South Asian Literature
&
Visiting Scholar
Rachel Carson Centre for Environment and Society
LMU München, Germany