Melville Society MLA 2017 - 2 Panels - 2 CFPs
Two Panels - 2 Calls for Papers: Modern Language Association
Philadelphia January 5-8 2017
1st CFP
Melville's Taxonomies
The panel will look into how Melville's works from Mardi on problematize categorial divides, confusing living and non-living, persons and things, prophetic and rational, sacred and profane. Sometimes they do that by turning terrestrial landscapes, oceanic milieus and vegetal life into agencies that revise what counts as a person and what constitutes the experience of suffering. In other instances obscurity concerning what or who counts as living is maintained by rendering humans as beings that are passive to the point of becoming inanimate, or by dignifying what is low and material and demoting what is divine. Topics: persons and things, taxonomies of the human; biological politics, vitalism, vegetal and animal life, extinction.
Please send CV and 250 word abstract to Branka Arsic (ba2406ATcolumbia.edu) by March 1, 2016. Please substitute @ for the AT being used to block spambots.
2nd CFP
Melville and Black Lives Matter
This panel seeks papers that address how Melville's art both speaks to racial crises and mediates philosophical dilemmas, political unrest, concepts of history etc. Black writers (Ralph Ellison, C.L.R. James, Toni Morrison, George Lamming, David Bradley, and more) turned to Melville's literary forms and provocative content to engage historical and political transformation in the Americas. What is it in Melville's aporias, assemblages, and abstractions that we can continue to excavate for its relevance to social conflict—especially conflict where racial/ethnic/queer difference is performed, expressed, and/or represented? Topics may include but are certainly not limited to: attention to interventions by one or more of the black writers mentioned above; racial violence; police brutality; prison reform/abolition; the rise/fall imperial states; totalitarianism; race and neoliberalism; New World Slavery; inequality in Latin America; US/Middle East turmoil.
Please send 250 word abstract and short bio to Chris Freeburg: ccfreeburgATgmail.com by March 15 2016. Please substitute @ for the AT being used to block spambots.