*CFP* "BODIES OF WATER IN AFRICAN AMERICAN FICTION & FILM", BOOK CHAPTER

We invite abstracts for a new book of original essays which explore the meaning and/or function of still or moving bodies of water -- lakes, rivers, the sea, gulfs, streams, ponds, canals -- in narratives by African Americans.  In particular, we seek other innovative and provocative critiques of images of water in 20th and 21st Century African American fiction and film, poetry and drama.  At once, a few pieces of literature and film come to mind:  August Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean; Zora Neal Hurston’s Janie Crawford in the Everglades; Michelle Cliff’s short story collection, Bodies of Water; so much of Toni Morrison’s fiction; readings of Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust; Spike Lee on Hurricane Katrina; and, Kasi Lemmons’ Eve’s Bayou, for example.  Our volume wants analyses which acknowledge the legitimacy of but move beyond the familiar or conventional interpretations of the Atlantic Ocean Middle Passage and/or Transatlantic Slave Trade.  

Some possible questions for African American analysis, including environmental or ecocritical contemplation:

• What roles do bodies of water play in African American literary and filmic creative imagination?  In particular, how does the trope of water/waterways get interwoven into works by African American authors and filmmakers?  

*CFP* CALL FOR ARTICLES, SPRING 2022 GENERAL ISSUE, JOURNAL OF AMERICAN STUDIES OF TURKEY

An international biannual print and on-line publication of the American Studies Association of Turkey, the Journal of American Studies of Turkey operates with a double-blind peer review system and publishes work (in English) on American literature, history, art, music, film, popular culture, institutions, politics, economics, geography and related subjects.

The Editorial Board welcomes articles which cross conventional borders between academic disciplines, as well as comparative studies of the United States.

The Journal of American Studies of Turkey is indexed in the MLA International Bibliography, TÜBİTAK/ULAKBİM TR Dizin, and the Classificazione ANVUR delle riviste scientifiche (Italy). It also appears in the Ulrich’s International Periodicals Directory and the MLA Directory of Periodicals. It can be accessed online, in print, and through the EBSCO and Dergi Park databases.  

Please see our submission guidelines for how to submit your manuscripts.

*CFP* "THE WORKS OF SHONDA RHIMES", SCREEN STORYTELLING EDITED VOLUME

This edited volume on the works of Shonda Rhimes will be the first book in a new series to be published by Bloomsbury Academic. Seeking 250-word abstracts for previously unpublished essays on television series created by Rhimes. Final essays will be 3,000-3,500 words, written for an audience of student readers, and will be due in the Spring of 2022.

The Screen Storytelling series is designed for students, professors, and enthusiastic consumers of film, television, and new media who seek information about contemporary and historically significant screenwriters that is both accessible and critically rigorous. The intention with this new series is to bring much-deserved attention to screen and television writers who have developed noteworthy films and television series of significant aesthetic or cultural achievement, critical acclaim, or commercial success, and to offer close readings of the films and series from the perspective of story, screenwriting craft, audience reception, and cultural impact. Each volume will explore the works of a single screen storyteller. The series will place a strong focus on examining works by screenwriters often left out of classroom syllabi, including women, writers of color, LGBTQ writers, and international writers. (Note: The Works of Jane Anderson is slated as the second volume in the series.)

 

The Works of Shonda Rhimes

*CFP* "ENTERTAINMENT AND AMERICAN POPULAR CULTURE SINCE 1950", ESSAYS COLLECTION

Popular Culture has been an integral factor in the fabric of America since its inception. Indeed, the clothes we wear, the music we listen to, the film and television we watch, literature we consume and other facets of our daily being is heavily, if not entirely influenced by the culture that we reside in. Exploring this culture can reveal some of our most deeply held beliefs and assumptions, ideas that we may otherwise take for granted. This is particularly the case since the mid 20th century. We are soliciting proposals for a collection of essays on Entertainment and American Popular Culture Since 1950. Submitted proposals should discuss any of the following topics, celebrities, events, awards, music, pageants, film, television, race, gender, religion, literature, sexuality, family. technology etc… Essays must focus on the topic of entertainment or the entertainment industry in some fashion.

While we will consider submissions from ABD’S and individuals from varied academic backgrounds, strong preference will be given to Ph.D.’s , Ed.D’s, MFA’s, MBA’s , Juris Doctorate’s , Journalists, MD’s and others with terminal degrees. Proposals should be no more than two pages. Submissions should be sent to either:

Elwood Watson, watsone@etsu.edu

Blake Scott Ball, bsball@hawks.huntingdon.edu

*CFP* "ENTERTAINMENT AND AMERICAN POPULAR CULTURE SINCE 1950", COLLECTION OF ESSAYS

Popular Culture has been an integral factor in the fabric of America since its inception. Indeed, the clothes we wear, the music we listen to, the film and television we watch, literature we consume and other facets of our daily being is heavily, if not entirely influenced by the culture that we reside in. Exploring this culture can reveal some of our most deeply held beliefs and assumptions, ideas that we may otherwise take for granted. This is particularly the case since the mid 20th century. 

We are soliciting proposals for a collection of essays on Entertainment and American Popular Culture Since 1950. Submitted proposals should discuss any of the following topics, celebrities, events, awards, music, pageants, film, television, race, gender, religion, literature, sexuality, family. technology etc… Essays must focus on the topic of entertainment or the entertainment industry in some fashion.

While we will consider submissions from ABD’S and individuals from varied academic backgrounds, STRONG PREFERENCE will be given to Ph.D.’s, Ed.D’s, MFA’s, MBA’s , Juris Doctorate’s , Journalists, MD’s and others with terminal degrees. 

*CFP* "HAMILTON AND THE POETICS OF AMERICA", SPECIAL ISSUE, EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF AMERICAN STUDIES

For those following the course of its reception since its premiere in 2015, there is little doubt that Hamilton: An American Musical is not just theatre. Rather, it is a cultural phenomenon embedded in America’s efforts to make sense of a national selfhood in crisis and an increasingly beleaguered image. The way Hamilton has reflected, fed into and off these efforts does not have to do only with the musical as “self-contained” work of art. Perhaps most importantly, it correlates with how the work has been negotiated in the realm of popular culture and beyond. Hence the main premise of this issue of the European Journal of American Studies: how Hamilton has been talked and written about, the remarkable range of response it has attracted within America, and throughout America’s geocultural ambit, signposts processes of fathoming America’s shifting poetics; that is, the intricate ensemble of meaning-making tools and concepts by which the functioning of contemporary American culture can be accessed and assessed.

Lin-Manuel Miranda, the creative genius behind the musical, approached Hamilton as a liminal mythic figure, and thus as a cultural text of distributed authorship. Hamilton the work can be construed as an instantiation of Hamilton the myth, a thread woven in the mythic matrix of America’s beginnings. As an instance of reception that has itself been generatively received to the point of becoming a cultural phenomenon, Hamilton arguably betrays more about the context from which it sprang than about the primary mythical material itself. Although it gestures back to the past, it also resonantly speaks to its (our) own present.

*CFP* "THE FRACTURED STATES OF AMERICA", 6 ISSUE, JAM IT!: JOURNAL OF AMERICAN STUDIES

The quest to define the true essence of US identity dates back to colonial times, long before the nation itself was formally established. Yet, scholars traditionally situate the first explicit investigation into what constitutes an American citizen in J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur’s Letters from an American Farmer (1782). The third of the titular letters, aptly named “What is an American,” offers a list of features that de Crèvecœur considered quintessential to Americanness: industry, freedom, individualism, equality, assimilation. All these elements converged in what later became known as American exceptionalism, a doctrine that undergirded (and, to an extent, still undergirds) most, if not all, of US foreign policy.

De Crevecoeur’s essay also introduced the concept of the ‘melting pot’ to describe the yearned-for-homogeneity of a nation aspiring to merge the different cultures informing it, rather than to preserve their differences. Ever since, the United States has strived to present a solid front against the rest of the world, returning time and time again to the defining features of its citizens, and to what sets them apart from their European counterparts. Yet, over the past few decades, it has become evident that internal divisions and differences are increasing, rather than decreasing. While the national narrative of the United States insists on advocating the exceptionality of its people, it is also continuously confronted by the hard truth of their lived experiences (Sieber 2005; Hodgson 2009; Grandin 2019; Spragg 2019).

*CFP* "KIMPOSIUM! THE SEQUEL", SYMPOSIUM

Kimposium! The sequel

14 - 16 September 2021

 

In 2015 we held Kimposium! to great success.  Now, as Keeping Up with the Kardashians draws to a close after twenty seasons, we revisit and renew our feminist thinking about these globally famous women.  Renowned and reviled, loved and hated, the Kardashians are quintessential icons of early 21st century celebrity cultures.  But this family represents and embodies so much more.  Indeed, studying the Kardashians and their products leads to consideration of some of the most pressing social and cultural issues of our time.

Dr Meredith Jones, from Brunel University London, says:

“Love them or hate them, the Kardashians are arguably the USA’s new ‘royal’ family, their every move scrutinised. But unlike the British Royals these people invite the public in to observe their everyday lives. In the course of doing this they have redefined reality television and had profound social impacts: Notably, Kim is at the forefront of an international change to what an ‘ideal’ woman’s body is, and Caitlyn has brought trans into the mainstream like nobody before her.”

*CFP* "BEYOND CALIFORNIAN IDEOLOGY? TECH COMMUNITIES AND ALTERNATIVE IMAGINARIES OF DEEP MEDIATIZATION", SPECIAL ISSUE, THE INTERNATIONAL JOOURNAL OF COMMUNICATION

In their 1996 publication of the same name, Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron characterized what they called the “Californian ideology” as a combination of “the free-wheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies” (Barbrook & Cameron 1996: 44). At its core, this Californian ideology is defined by the notion of a society characterized simultaneously by libertarian markets, alternative ideas of community and individual freedom—shaped by technology more than other social forces. Such notions were driven by networks such as those that emerged around the Whole Earth Catalog, and later, Wired magazine (Turner 2006), which communicated these ideas far beyond the American West Coast. Many of today’s platforms and digital infrastructures, which drive the current “deep mediatization” (Hepp 2020) of society, were created in the spirit of such an ideology, supported by ideas of “global scalability” of once found "technical solutions”.

At the same time, there were groups early on that seem to be opposed to such ideas. Examples of this are the Hacker, Open Source, or Civic Hacking movements, which are interested in critically questioning tendencies of commercialization. Such groups exert their influence by developing alternative “sociotechnical imaginaries” (Jasanoff & Sang-Hyun 2015) about possible futures – thus creating a space of possibility. However, if one also looks at emerging communities today such as the Maker, Quantified Self, or Biohacking movements, it becomes evident that many “alternative” imaginaries are closely interwoven with the Californian ideology. On closer inspection, the boundaries do not appear to be so easily drawn; there are manifold connections, fractures, affinities, and differences in the various communities.

*CFP* "BEHIND THE SCREEN AND OFF THE STAGE: FILM AND TELEVISION REPRESENTATIONS OF AMERICAN ENTERTAINMENT", TWO-DAY VIRTUAL CONFERENCE

Behind the Screen and Off the Stage: Film and Television Representations of American Entertainment

Two-Day Virtual Conference

12 and 13 November 2021

London Metropolitan University

 

Movies and television shows set in the world of American entertainment have been a central feature of the big and small screens since the early days of Hollywood. From the backstage musical to the star biopic, and from the rise-and-fall narrative to critiques of the business of show, screen narratives have repeatedly sought to dramatize life behind the scenes of American entertainment. Their persistent allure is illustrated in film and television history ranging from Show People (1928) to All About Eve (1950), and from Valley of the Dolls (1967) to Fosse/Verdon (2019) and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (2020). The ten Oscar nominations announced for David Fincher’s 2020 film Mank only reinforce the appeal of the genre for audiences, directors and the film and television industries as reflections on entertainment history in the digital age.

*CFP* "BEHIND THE SCREEN AND OFF THE STAGE: FILM AND TELEVISION REPRESENTATIONS OF AMERICAN ENTERTAINMENT", TWO-DAY VIRTUAL CONFERENCE

Behind the Screen and Off the Stage: Film and Television Representations of American Entertainment

Two-Day Virtual Conference

12 and 13 November 2021

London Metropolitan University

 

Movies and television shows set in the world of American entertainment have been a central feature of the big and small screens since the early days of Hollywood. From the backstage musical to the star biopic, and from the rise-and-fall narrative to critiques of the business of show, screen narratives have repeatedly sought to dramatize life behind the scenes of American entertainment. Their persistent allure is illustrated in film and television history ranging from Show People (1928) to All About Eve (1950), and from Valley of the Dolls (1967) to Fosse/Verdon (2019) and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (2020). The ten Oscar nominations announced for David Fincher’s 2020 film Mank only reinforce the appeal of the genre for audiences, directors and the film and television industries as reflections on entertainment history in the digital age.

*CFP* "LITERARY AND ARTISTIC CONNECTIONS BETWEEN LATIN AMERICA AND THE US", BOOK CHAPTER

Vernon Press invites book chapters to be included in a forthcoming scholarly volume on Literary and Artistic Connections between Latin America and the US.

In spite of the often-unfavorable political relationship between Latin America and the US, artists and writers have always managed to transcend conflicts, establishing friendships and connections, as revealed in their works, cultural exchanges, and in associations such as international book fairs, multilingual poetry festivals, and the PEN Club. The intertextual dialogues of the Chilean poet Nicanor Parra and the poets of the Beat Generation, for instance, not only reflect what Harold Bloom called ‘the anxiety of influence’ but also a symbiotic sharing of historical perspectives, literary movements, techniques, and approaches.

This volume aims to examine the intertextual and interpersonal relationships between US and Latin American artists and poets and the commonalities reflected in their works.

Possible contributions include (but are not limited to):

*CFP* "CORONAVIRUS, CRISIS AND CULTURE: POLICING, PROTEST AND THE MEDIATION OF DISSENT DURING THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC", BOOK CHAPTER

Global restrictions on protest

In May 2020, the Bonavero Centre for Human Rights published an analysis of twelve nations’ response to the pandemic: the authors identified ‘a global rise in autocratic populism’ accompanied by ‘Covid 19 emergency measures’ that ‘risk becoming a foundation for greater consolidation of executive power’ (3). A month later, Amnesty International produced Policing the Pandemic, which drew attention to ‘systemic human rights concerns regarding institutional racism, discrimination in law enforcement and lack of accountability regarding allegations of unlawful use of force by law enforcement officials’ (4). In March 2021, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace identified over 230 anti-government protests in some 110 countries, with 25 significant protests aimed specifically at coronavirus restrictions.

This Call for Chapters from the Media Discourse Centre emerges in response to the worldwide limits placed on public protest during the last twelve months, and the social movements that have continued to mobilise in the face of these conditions. Contributors can discuss new manifestations of dissent, the adaptation of existing movements to political/pandemic restrictions, live and mediated events, and the online reconfiguration of the protest tradition (see below).  

*CFP* "THE US REPRESENTATION IN POPULAR CULTURE AND MEDIA", SPECIAL ISSUE, ACADEMIC BLOG POPMEC

We are a lively academic collective interested in investigating the articulation of the numerous and heterogeneous representations which have been constructing images of the US. Our research delves into how the US—their history, society, and diverse cultures—have been represented in popular media and cultural creations. 

Our blog aims at providing a collaborative, engaging, and fair environment for any interested scholar, promoting the sharing of knowledge, experience, and ideas across disciplines and thematic fields. We’re also working to foster a stimulating space for early career researchers and postgraduate students in North American studies, thus we’ll warmly welcome their proposals as well.

We invite you to browse the academic blog Popmec, and contribute to feed our collaborative space with your work, sharing engaging, stimulating, fun academic work!

We welcome full papers (about 3000 words, bibliographic references excluded) on topics related with popular culture, including (but not limited to):

*CFP* "WHEN AMERICAN TELEVISION BECAME AMERICAN LITERATURE", BOOK CHAPTER

Brill is interested in publishing a volume that broadly addresses American television series produced between (approximately) January of 1999 (debut of The Sopranos) and May 2015 (final episode of Man Men).  Specifically, the volume addresses the manifestation of American literary themes, recurrent references to American literature broadly and individual artists and works specifically, as well as the reconceptualization of established American characters.       

In a 2015 interview with David Simon (creator of The Wire) President Barak Obama offered that The Wire is, "one of the greatest -- not just television shows, but pieces of [American] art in the last couple of decades." The Wire combines hyperrealism (from a-quasi anthropological capture of syntax and dialect that recalls the language of Langston Hughes and Zora Neal Hurston to a preference for actors who lived “the game” in Baltimore’s inner city) with the reinvention of fundamental American themes (from picaresque individualisms to challenging American exceptionalism) within a (at the time) emerging convention: the premium cable serialized drama.

*CFP* "LONELY ARE THE BRAVE: THE WESTERN AND POST-WAR AMERICA", AN ONLINE 2021 CONFERENCE

Lonely are the Brave: The Western and Post-War Americ

An Online 2021 Conference

15th-17th June, 2021

Online

The western was once seen as a key genre for understanding both Hollywood and the culture of the United States more broadly, but studies of the genre are few and far between today (Corkin, 2004; Nelson, 2015; Wallin and Godfrey, 2019). Significantly, most work on the western does not actually focus on the whole generic corpus of the western as on a particular cohort of pictures from the 1950s and 1960s, a period that was seen at the time as a major departure from earlier eras (see Bazin,1971; Cawelti, 1971 and 1976; Kitses, 1969; Maltby, 1995; Schatz, 1981; Wright, 1975). Many examples were distinguished specifically from the westerns of the past through the processes of promotion and publicity: these westerns were consciously seen as ‘upscaling’ the genre, and many were prestige films that were presented as serious, significant and even as ‘Class A productions’. 

If later critics would stress the mythic qualities of these films, promotion and publicity at the time often stressed their realism, psychological complexity and social commentary (often through an implied contrast with the westerns of earlier periods). Significantly, despite the often quoted ending to John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) – ‘When the legend becomes fact, print the legend’ – this film actually spends it time detailing the ‘facts’ at the expense of the ‘legend’ (see also for example Fort Apache, which has a similar structure).

*CFP* "COSMOPOLITAN STRANGERS IN LATINA/O LITERATURE AND CULTURE", EDITED VOLUME

This volume sets out to identify and analyze current definitions of the figure of the stranger, as well as ‘rooted’ or ‘vernacular’ cosmopolitanism at work in Latina/o literature with a cosmopolitan outlook that runs counter to discourses that criminalize ‘strangers’. While necessarily examining the workings of xenophobia, racism, gendering and othering in that specific context, we will focus on the alternative processes of interaction, conviviality, and inclusive practices.

While the stranger is a long-standing figure, the defining characteristics of the figure are specific in space and time. All studies of alterity implicitly contain the stranger (i.e., in postcolonial and gender studies, and critical multiculturalism). Most markedly, the figure of the stranger has been foregrounded in spatial and urban theory (Young 1986, Ahmed 2000, Sandercock 2003). The affinities between the stranger and the cosmopolitan subject have been recently dissected by Vince P. Marotta (2010, 2017), who conceives the stranger as a social type, and argues for its importance in understanding the human condition and cross-cultural interaction (2010, 106).

*CFP* "READY READER ONE: THE STORIES WE TELL ABOUT, WITH, AND AROUND VIDEOGAMES", CHAPTER BOOK

Videogames are a powerful storytelling medium—but what are the stories we tell about videogames, with videogames, around videogames? What can we learn from novels that describe the struggles of young people trapped in virtual reality, from fan fiction that explores the private life of a popular Nintendo character, or from a poem that compares Pac-Man to Saint Augustine?

Quite a lot, actually.

There is an extensive body of scholarship that explores the ways videogames create worlds, construct characters, and tell emotionally compelling narratives. But there has been almost no scholarship on the representation of videogames, videogame players, and videogame culture in literary texts, whether traditional genres like novels, short stories, memoirs, and poems, or non-traditional and emergent forms like fan fiction, how-to-guides, hip-hop lyrics, or young-adult fiction. Our anthology is designed to fill that gap.

*CFP* "VIVA LAS VEGAS: MUSIC AND MYTH IN AMERICA'S CITY OF SECOND CHANCES", CHAPTER PROPOSALS

Las Vegas has been an important commercial hub for live and recorded music for most of the twentieth century. It is also arguably the most American of America's cities--as art critic Dave Hickey put it, at least in Vegas “the payoffs are posted and the odds easily calculable.” Largely, however, the critical attention toward place and music industry has privileged other American commercial centers, namely Los Angeles and New York City. Despite Las Vegas’s rich musical entanglements, in fact, a full study of the musical and cultural values of the city has not yet emerged. Viva Las Vegas sets out to examine the sonic place-making and musical mythologies surrounding America’s City of Second Chances.

This book will investigate venues of fantasy and myth-making during this critical moment when broader mythos of America have become political and cultural lightning rods. Contributors to this volume will consider collectively the values and perspectives of music-making in, around, and through Las Vegas. This book places itself alongside vibrant studies of popular music and place, including Stacy Wolf’s study of amateur and community musical theater in America; Barry Shank’s investigation of various music “scenes” in Austin, Texas; Fred Bartenstein and Curtis W. Ellison’s illumination of bluegrass networks in southwestern Ohio; and my own work on religious communities in the middle of America employing popular music to slow the creep of modernity. It also joins robust scholarly intrigue in media studies, sound studies, queer studies, and critical geography, situated within and between a number of developing transdisciplinary spaces. Making a book (and making book) on Las Vegas seems a safe bet for a rapidly expanding American music studies: what happens in Vegas should no longer stay in Vegas.

*CFP* "AMERICAN COUNTERCULTURES", SPECIAL ISSUE, LAMAR JOURNAL OF THE HUMANITIES

The Lamar Journal of the Humanities, an interdisciplinary journal, invites papers for its Spring 2021 Special Issue on American Countercultures. 

Papers are welcome that contribute new insights into American movements, in society or as reflected in literature, film, and art, that have run “counter” or against mainstream ideas and values. Examples are nineteenth-century utopian communities, non-conformists of the “Jazz Age” or “Roaring Twenties,” Beat poetry and lifestyles of the 1950s, and “hippies” of the 1960s and 70s. Landmark films include “Rebel without a Cause” (1950), “The Wild Ones” (1954) and “Easy Rider,” (1964). Consideration will also be given to studies that analyze other American religious, political, or ideological sub-cultures as countercultures.