African American Literature and Culture Society Call for Papers
American Literature Association
34th Annual Conference
May 25-28, 2023
The Westin Copley Place
10 Huntington Ave
Boston, MA 02116
The African American Literature and Culture Society invites abstracts (of no more than 250 words) for presentations at the annual conference of the American Literature Association (http://americanliteratureassociation.org/). We will also consider a limited number of panel proposals (of no more than 500 words).
This year, we are soliciting works that engage with rhetorics of resistance in African American literature. Inspired by the conference location, Boston, we encourage the submission of papers on revolution, protest literature, and acts of citizenship in Black writing.
Possible paper topics include, but are not limited to:
-Revolutionary literature
-Conceptions of citizenship in African American writing
-Protest literature
-Black literature and American identity
While we welcome papers on the above themes and subthemes, we also strongly encourage submissions on any topic related to African American literature and culture.
Submission Information:
Please send abstracts or proposals to Rachel Carr (CarrR@lindsey.edu) and Jean-Philippe Marcoux (jean-philippe.marcoux@lit.ulaval.ca) no later than January 15, 2023. Include your name and email with the abstract. Presenters must be members of AALCS by the time of the conference. Information about the Society and how to join can be found at the AALCS website: https://aalcsblog.wordpress.com/
Tyrone Williams, our Henderson Award recipient, is an extraordinary and prolific writer. He has authored a number of chapbooks, including Convalescence (1987), Futures, Elections (2004), Musique Noir (2006), and Pink Tie (2011), among others. His full-length collections of poetry include c.c. (2002), On Spec (2008), The Hero Project (2009), Adventures of Pi (2011), and Howell (2011). In 2017, Williams won the Baltic Writing Residences Europe & North America. In 2019, Williams co-edited the anthology Inciting Poetics. He is a Professor in the Department of English at Xavier University in Cincinnati.
Ivy Wilson, our Turner Award recipient, is an Associate Professor of English at Northwestern University. He is the author of Specters of Democracy: Blackness and the Aesthetics of Politics in the Antebellum U.S. He is also the editor of a number of books, including Whitman Noir: Black America and the Good Gray Poet and At the Dusk of Dawn: Selected Poetry and Prose of Albery Allson Whitman. His work is published in ESQ, Arizona Quarterly, and PMLA.
Madhu Dubey, our Butler Award recipient, is a Professor of English and African American Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago. She is the author of Black Women Novelists and the Nationalist Aesthetic and Signs and Cities: Black Literary Postmodernism. Her work is regularly published in Novel, Twentieth-Century Literature, and African American Review, among others. Dubey has also contributed to numerous edited collections.
John Edgar Wideman, our Henderson Award recipient, needs no introduction. From his first novel A Glance Away to his most recent collection American Histories, Wideman’s writing career spans five decades during which he has asserted himself as one of the most singular voices in American literature. Wideman’s works have been widely celebrated: he has notably won the International PEN/Faulkner Award twice for Sent for You Yesterday (1984) and for Philadelphia Fire (1990), which also won the American Book Award. His novel The Cattle Killing won the James Fenimore Cooper prize for best historical fiction in 1997. In 1993, he was the recipient of a Macarthur Genius Grant, and most recently in 2016 was elected to the American Academy of the Arts and Letters. Wideman founded and chaired the African American Studies department at the University of Pennsylvania. He has also taught at the University of Wyoming, the University of Massachusetts and Brown University.
African American Literature and Culture Society 