Calls for Papers  

“The Continuous Thread of Revelation: Eudora Welty Reconsidered” An International Welty Society Conference, Charleston, S.C. February 21 to 23, 2019 (Deadline August 1, 2018)
The Eudora Welty Society is excited to host its conference for the first time in Charleston, a city Welty visited and photographed.  We invite colleagues in Southern Studies, American Studies, and all related fields of study to join us in investigations of this renowned Mississippi writer, her legacy, and her national and international reputation.  This conference, held at the College of Charleston, will examine Eudora Welty’s fiction, photography, letters, memoir, archival documents, essays, reviews, interviews, films, and more. Along with presentations of scholarly work, the conference will also offer a Charleston Writers panel, receptions, literary and historical tours, a dramatic reading of a Welty work performed by Welty scholars, plus free time in the evenings to enjoy Charleston on your own.

We invite individual papers on any aspect of Welty’s work. We expect that most submissions will be individual, but we will also consider proposals for complete panels.  Topic suggestions follow this cfp. We hope for a wide range of panels and presentations, new scholarship, connections and perspectives. We especially encourage graduate students to submit paper proposals.  Please send a 250-word abstract and, if you are new to the society, a CV to [email protected] by Aug 1, 2018.

Topics might include explorations of

- Memory: how memory is constructed, reconstructed, repressed in W’s work; competing subjectivities in her fiction and the differing memories that result, W’s works alongside other texts that explore similar relationships to past histories, times, places, people
- Attention to history and historical trauma:  Jim Crow, the Civil War, the Holocaust, the Great Depression, the Cold War, the 1960s, the effects of American class, gender, and racial hierarchies
- Did the writer crusade? social justice and political issues
- History, public culture, and performance; representations of performers, performances, audiences, and performativity in the fiction and photography
- Welty out of the South: travel and transnational perspectives, especially Welty & black literatures (African American, diaspora, global South) 
- Welty’s immigrants (German, Irish, Italian, Spanish) and the topic of immigration
- The MDAH: archival work, editing Welty and her archive
- Welty’s relationship to detective, crime, mystery, horror fiction (see related cpf announcing a future volume on this topic)
- Welty’s bookshelf: her reading habits, who she read, how they influenced her work, relationships with contemporary authors, books in her texts, etc.
- Bodies in her work: ugly, beautiful, othered, disabled, alive, dead, and undead
- Welty, gender, and sexuality
- Artistic, historical, and social movements / modernisms: gothic, grotesque, surreal / Welty and genre
- Multi-media interactions: music, theater, radio, art, film, photography, pulp fiction
- Welty characters: especially her supporting, forgotten, elusive, controversial, different, or queer characters. Are there Welty character prototypes?
- Teaching Welty, especially by and for high school teachers
- Eco-Welty: political ecologies and economies / Welty, weather, and water
- Speculative Weltys: gritty Welty, satiric Welty, sassy Welty and other alternatives to “Miss Welty”
- Welty’s personal and professional networks / friendship
- Welty’s literary legacy: her influence on and after-life in later writers
- Issues of print culture: publishing, translating, serializing, editing, anthologizing Welty
- Canonizing, de-canonizing, re-canonizing Welty
- Culinary culture in Welty’s work
… and more.

Hyphenations: Muslim Writers, Artists, and Performers in America (Deadline August 15, 2018)
Additional contributions are invited for an anthology of essays about Muslim American writers, artists, and performers engaging with their hyphenated identities in the quest for creative self-expression. Current contributions range from analyses of social media activists, creators of various visual media, and hip hop artists in relation to their Muslim American identity. Of particular interest are more contributions on Muslim American writers and musicians, or those whose work defies genres, in their articulation of assimilation, alterity, dissent, and transgression as Muslim Americans. Essays should analyze the intersection of the imaginative spheres of arts/literature/music and the domains of faith in the different media of expression used by Muslim Americans as they challenge the sacred and the secular.

Abstracts of 300 words should be submitted by August 15 to Mahwash Shoaib ([email protected]). Please include a short biographical note of 50-60 words along with the submission. Scholars will be notified of acceptance quickly after the deadline for submissions. Once accepted, finished essays (6000-6500 words) will be due by the end of November 2018. Note that acceptance of the abstract does not guarantee acceptance of the paper.

"Bad Boys" and Girls in Sports (Deadline October 1, 2018)
At their most basic level, sporting events are about numbers: wins and losses, percentages and points, shots and saves, clocks and countdowns. However, when it comes to sports narratives—the expert commentary before, during and after, the athlete interviews and press conferences, the fan debates around a television or in online forums, etc.—the stories quickly leave the realm of analytics and enter into mythos. The narratives we tell make sports so compelling. We shape athletes into heroes or scapegoats, Davids or Goliaths. We mold the sporting event into a comeback tale or a fall from grace. In other words, we make sports dramatic.

Just like any great drama, sports imply conflict, not just battles on the field of play, but clashes of personalities, goals, and strategies for accomplishing those objectives. Conflict creates heroes … but it also invites stories of villainy. Sometimes an athlete is villainized for a game or a season, but occasionally a player breaks from social expectations so often or in such a dramatic fashion that (s)he is labeled a “bad boy” in the sport. From John McEnroe and Pete Rose to Tonya Harding and Michael Vick, sporting history is punctuated by these bad boys, and what it takes to be placed in this category varies depending on many factors: the particular sport, social trends, race, gender, relationship with the fans or media, etc.

This collection will explore “bad boys” and girls in sports and their place in both the sporting world and broader culture. Each chapter will focus on a central figure within a specific sport, and it will use that figure as a way to explore larger sporting and social issues. For example, what does it take to be cast as a bad boy in a specific sport? What does that say about the values held in that sport during that time period? How does race, gender, social-media use, media/fan relationships, background, domestic versus international competition, social expectations, etc. play a role in the creation of a bad boy?

We are seeking chapter proposals that explore this topic. Any methodological approach is welcome, but the chapter should be geared toward an audience that could range from sporting enthusiast to critical scholar. Although there is some room for overlap, we would like each chapter to explore a different sport, and no two chapters will explore the same central figure. Proposals have already been accepted that examine John Daly, Collin Kaepernick, Ryan Lochte, and Jameis Winston. We welcome analysis of any sport, but we are particularly interested in chapters on Baseball, Tennis, Cycling, Basketball, Soccer, American Football, Boxing, Hockey, Auto Racing, and Olympic competitions.

Proposals should be between 400-700 words, and they should include a brief author bio. Please email proposals to Dr. John Lamothe at [email protected] by May 1, 2018. Completed chapters will be expected by October 1, 2018.

Rohingya Refugees: Identity, Citizenship, and Human Rights (Deadline October 15, 2018)
Issue 53: December 2018: Rohingya Refugees: Identity, Citizenship, and Human Rights

Articles, research papers/reports, narratives from people who are working with Rohingyas in refugee camps, first-first narratives from Rohingyas themselves are invited. Submissions should be of roughly 2000-2500 words. Some longer pieces would be considered, if they deserve more space. Submissions will be accepted till 15 October, 2018 and the issue will be published on 1 December, 2018. Please strict to deadline and email your submissions to the issue editor, Chapparban Sajaudeen Nijamodeen: [email protected]

About the Magazine

Cafe Dissensus is an alternative magazine dealing in art, culture, literature, and politics. It’s based in New YorkCity, USA. We DISSENT. The magazine also runs a blog, Cafe Dissensus Every day. Our ISSN No: ISSN 2373-177X https://cafedissensus.com/ 

This multivolume anthology exposes the multi-modal art forms, practices, and aesthetics found in Kanor’s works – inclusive of rituals, text-based works, visual art, sound art, and performance art. It uncovers her trans-genre texts as hybrid makings also signifying the hybrid bodies they represent. Hence, issues of commodity, Creolization, trace, site, body, or landscape (to only name a few) will be analyzed through their porous (rather than impenetrable) boundaries between the literary, visual, and/or virtual. Contributions will offer new theoretical and critical examinations of Fabienne Kanor’s creative process: How can we investigate, theoretically or critically, Kanor’s transgressive aesthetics? In what ways her transgressive works challenge Western conventional perception of genres, the standardization of cultures and the material archive? How do Kanor’s works historicize agencies of resistance, test moral sensibilities, sabotage the voyeuristic gaze and sexualized pleasures? How do they stimulate a new methodology for reading the black body? 

• Language: English or French
• Due Date: March 15, 2019
• Late submissions will not be accepted
• Send Materials/Inquiries to: Dr. Gladys M. Francis [email protected]