CALL FOR PAPERS
African American Literature and Culture Society
American Literature Association
28th Annual Conference
May 25-28, 2017
The Westin Copley Place
10 Huntington Avenue
Boston MA 02116-5798
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).
Alice Walker’s 1983 In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens launched a new trajectory of black women’s scholarship and creative production that inspired African American literary scholars to extend her legacy at the intersections of ethnographic study, archival research, and literary production. This year we will be focusing on the theme, “Finding Our Mother’s Gardens: Black Women’s Writing, Activism, and Archival Research.” Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
*Black women authors and poets of the 70s-80s (Alice Walker, June Jordan, Toni Cade Bambara, Maya Angelou, Nikki Giovanni, Audre Lorde, Gayl Jones, Ntozake Shange, etc.)
*The Life and Work of Gloria Naylor
*Womanism Then and Now
*Writing as activism, writing as self-care
*Women in the Archive
*The Boston Women’s Health Collective: 46 years of “Our Bodies, Ourselves”
*Black Feminist Theory in the Age of Intersectionalism
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.
Please send abstracts or proposals to Belinda Waller-Peterson (waller-petersonb@moravian.edu) and Keith Leonard (kdl@american.edu ) no later than January 6, 2017. Presenters must be members of AALCS by the time of the conference.
African American Literature and Culture Society 