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Aktuelles Call for Papers

CFP special issue of AmLit: “Potentials of Positionality and/or Ethics of Exclusion?: Critical Reading Approaches to Minority Literatures from the Americas”

Deadline: March 30, 2023

Since the Civil Rights movements in the U.S. on behalf of BIPOC, women, 2SLGBTQQIA+
people, and people with disabilities, research in literatures by members of these minorities is thriving. On the one hand, researchers from within marginalized communities within academia but also allies have contributed unique insights by reflecting their both scholarly and personal positionalities. For example, Hartmut Lutz, Florentine Strzelczyk, and Renae Watchman (Navajo) begin their volume Indianthusiasm: Indigenous Responses (2020) “[b]y locating ourselves within kinship, our family relationships, our backgrounds […]” in order to “[…] reveal our intent as researchers, our relationship to the project, and our responsibility as researchers who seek to work with Indigenous researchers” (7; comment added). Without such self-reflexivity, researchers from outside the communities of the authors they study face ethical challenges regarding the theories they apply. In addition, the outcomes of research may not reflect the intentions of the researchers due to limited approaches, as Eve Tuck (Unangax) and K. Wayne Yang state that “[…] the academy as an apparatus of settler colonial knowledge already domesticates, denies, and dominates other forms of knowledge” (235). The latter issue should especially concern literary scholars from Europe who belong to the mainstream of their societies but whose work participates in global discourses on inequalities resulting from Eurocentric colonialism. Yet, writing about their institutional contexts in Canada, Watchman, Carrie Smith, and Markus Stock advocate that, for example, “[…] Indigenous and German Studies can be bridged (and relations built) by reflecting critically on their mutual influences and definitions of each other” (318). Building such connections could appeal to scholars worldwide whose engagement with minority cultures invites comparisons to their own contexts while being grounded in identity politics. For example, as a Pakistani-American, Asad Haider writes about how the autobiography of the founder of the Black Panther Party, Huey P. Newton “[…] set for me a model of the life of the mind that was far more convincing than the bohemian hedonism of Henry Miller or the self-serving social climbing expected of members of a ‘model minority’” (“Introduction”). With an interest in such transcultural approaches, this journal issue aims to center concepts of universality and particularity insofar as they are reflected by minority literatures and as they can inform critical readings. This special issue follows a broad definition of “literature” to include figurative narratives with aesthetics referencing their genres and modes of production. The focus aims to supplement decolonial concerns by allowing contributors to trace overlaps between contexts.

Possible submissions may include (but are not limited to):
• Essays on minority literatures between scholarship and activism
• Essays reflecting on fictionality as performances to address (non-) minority readers
• Essays discussing non-fictional texts that foster personal identification with minority
issues
• Essays juxtaposing graphic elements in literary texts with extra-textual stereotypes of
minorities
• Book reviews of literary studies approaches in terms of their attention (or lack thereof) to
minority positionalities

Please send your proposals for contributions to positionalityspecialissue@gmail.com by March 30th, 2023. Proposals must include contact information, an abstract of 250-300 words, a bio note of 200 words, and 5-7 keywords. Notifications of acceptance or rejection will be sent out by the end of April 2023. If accepted, please submit your original contribution of 5000-10000 words, including notes and bibliography by September 30th, 2023. With regard to formatting and MLA citation style, please consult the following links:
https://amlit.eu/index.php/amlit/about/submissions and
https://amlit.eu/public/journal/1/__A_Instructions_for_Contributors_Update_June_2022.pdf

Contact e-mail: positionalityspecialissue@gmail.com
Works Cited
Haider, Asad. Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump. London/Brooklyn:
Verso, 2018. (E-Book)
Lutz, Hartmut/Florentine Strzelczyk/Renae Watchman. “Introduction.” Indianthusiasm:
Indigenous Responses. Eds. Hartmut Lutz/Florentine Strzelczyk/Renae Watchman.
Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2020. 3-32.
Tuck, Eve/K. Wayne Yang. “R-Words: Refusing Research.” Humanizing Research:
Decolonizing Qualitative Inquiry with Youth and Communities. Eds. Django
Paris/Maisha T. Winn. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2014. 223-247.
Watchman, Renae/Carrie Smith/Markus Stock. “Building Transdisciplinary Relationships: Indigenous and German Studies.” Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies 55.4 (2019): 309-327.

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Aktuelles Call for Papers

Call for articles: Special Issue – Staging Strategies: Trends in Canadian Drama and Performing Arts

edited by Janne Cleveland and Cynthia Sugars

Studies in Canadian Literature / Études en littérature canadienne (SCL/ÉLC) invites interdisciplinary contributions to a special issue on Canadian Drama and the Performing Arts.

Deadline: March 31, 2023

This special issue invites submissions on the ways Canadian dramatists, scholars, theatre and performing arts practitioners, and audiences are engaging with the changing, and sometimes unstable, social and cultural landscapes of our time. Theatre, and the performing arts in general, respond to and reflect the socio-cultural conditions from which they emerge. How are concepts of performance and performativity adapting to reflect changing notions of identity and selfhood? How do theatrical representations respond to anxieties and traumas emerging from unstable political contexts? How do the performing arts attempt to de-colonize inherited narratives, systemic prejudices, and fraught social inequities? In this issue, we consider how theatre – and the performing arts generally – are responding to the challenges of an unstable sociopolitical landscape. These fraught conditions include, but are not limited to, the climate crisis, the pandemic, racialized oppressions, distrust of sources of information (fake news), technological changes, gender biases, and human rights inequities. In what ways has the inherently social and collective nature of theatre been used to forge new forms of community, sometimes by exploiting technological innovations? How have these developments found new ways to engage and inscribe audiences within emerging collective visions, sometimes by mobilizing a positive sense of community in the face of these pressures? What roles did online theatrical projects play in responding to the isolating effects of the pandemic?

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Aktuelles Call for Papers

Appel à communications : Colloque « Modernités connectées : Québec-Allemagne 1900-2022. Transferts littéraires, culturels et intellectuels »

(soutenu par le DAAD, sous l’égide du Centre canadien d’études allemandes et européennes [CCEAE] de l’Université de Montréal)

Les 23 et 24 novembre 2023, à Saarbrücken

Organisées par Robert Dion (UQAM), Louise-Hélène Filion (Université du Michigan) et Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink (Universität des Saarlandes, Saarbrücken)

Date butoir : 28 février 2023

Dans le cadre du projet « Modernités connectées : Québec-Allemagne 1900-2000 », qui met l’accent sur les transferts entre l’Allemagne et le Québec dans les domaines de la littérature, de la culture et des idées, nous organisons un colloque visant à poursuivre l’examen des configurations qui structurent les rapports entre les deux aires culturelles en cause. Nous envisageons ces deux journées comme un moment propice au déploiement d’une perspective résolument croisée sur l’objet d’étude en question : ainsi, nous accueillerons des propositions qui portent tant sur la réception de la culture québécoise en Allemagne que sur le mouvement inverse, depuis la fin du XIXe siècle jusqu’à l’époque contemporaine.
L’étude des agents des transferts culturels ayant été jusqu’à présent négligée, les commu-nications qui s’attacheront aux « passeurs culturels » entre le Québec et l’Allemagne sont particulièrement bienvenues. On songe à l’étude de médiateurs ayant œuvré dans divers domaines en Allemagne et au Québec : traduction, monde du théâtre, littérature, médias, enseignement universitaire, etc. Les formes d’appropriation productive d’une culture par l’autre seront également au programme de ces journées de réflexion : les communications pourront porter aussi bien sur les appropriations québécoises de textes allemands (incluant les médias et d’autres pratiques culturelles) que sur d’éventuelles formes de réception productive de textes québécois en Allemagne.

Les présentations, de 30 minutes, seront suivies de périodes de discussion en commun. Nous envisageons la publication des présentations revues et augmentées à la suite des échanges. Les personnes intéressées sont priées de nous faire parvenir un titre, un bref résumé de la proposition de communication (de 15 à 20 lignes) ainsi qu’un curriculum vitæ abrégé d’ici le 28 février 2023.

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Aktuelles Ausschreibungen

Call for participants: Canadian History & Environment Summer School (CHESS) 2023

Deadline: February 1, 2023

https://niche-canada.org/2023/01/13/chess-2023-call-for-participants/

We’re back! After a 3-year hiatus, we are pleased to announce that the Canadian History & Environment Summer School (CHESS) is returning in 2023.

CHESS is an in-person event that brings together graduate students, faculty, and other scholars in the fields of environmental history, historical geography, and the environmental humanities for a weekend of workshops, field trips, public lectures, networking, and more. CHESS 2023 will be held at Western University in London, Ontario from Friday, 26 May to Sunday, 28 May – the weekend immediately preceding the Canadian Historical Association’s annual meeting at York University in Toronto.

CHESS 2023 is a revival of CHESS 2020, which was canceled because of COVID. The theme will once again be energy history, seen through the lens of the 19th century oil industry in southwestern Ontario & nearby Pennsylvania. Both places had their own “Petrolia,” and both were their nation’s – in fact, the world’s – leading oil-producing regions at the time. Petrolia, Ontario and nearby Oil Springs are no longer the centre of Canada’s oil industry, but they do continue to produce oil – with some of the very same 19th century technology.

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Aktuelles Veranstaltungen

Online lecture: Compensation over Reconciliation: Land Claim Processes and Canada’s Search for ‚Certainty‘

Tuesday, 17 January, 11:00 am

Allister Morrison (Senior Policy Advisor at Indigenous Services Canada) will present his guest lecture.

This is a guest lecture as part of the BA Seminar „From Land Grabs to Land Back: Indigenous Experiences of Place in Canada“ by Daniel Dumas and will be held online.

Access details may be found here: https://www.en.amerikanistik.uni-muenchen.de/aktuelles1/events/morrison/index.html