CFP: Pirates in World Literature (ACLA 2019)

The image of the pirate resonates universally across cultures and periods. Taking the pirate’s broad cultural relevance as its starting point, this seminar explores piracy’s representation in the early modern world. Works such as Claire Jowitt’s The Culture of Piracy(2010)  and Lauren Benton’s A Search for Sovereignty (2010)  argue for the importance of piracy to the study of early modern European transatlantic empires, highlighting piracy’s role in the consolidation of British national and imperial identity and the formation of early modern notions of sovereignty. East Asian historian Peter Shapinsky in Lords of the Sea (2005) considers pirates as cultural intermediaries, emphasizing pirates’ desire to remain autonomous by positioning themselves between land-based powers. In addition to exploring piracy’s relationship to early modern global politics, recent studies have reframed piracy’s relationship to literary history. Key interventions by Margaret Cohen in The Novel and the Sea (2010) and Gretchen Woertendyke in Hemispheric Regionalism (2016) have offered revisionist histories of the novel and romance forms by shifting the analytical focus from the land to the sea. These interventions demonstrate the dynamics of recent oceanic, trans-oceanic, and hemispheric turns in literary and cultural studies. Continue reading →

CFP: “Queer Pop in Post-2000 China” in a Special Issue of Feminist Media Studies

Since the 2000s, China’s media industrialization and cultural globalization have encouraged a burgeoning “queer pop”——that is, a soaring proliferation of non-normatively gendered and/or sexualized narratives and performances, cultural productions and inventions, artistic expressions and gestures, and social relations and kinship systems in China’s media, cultural, and creative industries and spaces. In the meantime, digital production and cyber distribution technologies, social networking sites (both online and offline), and cellular phone applications available to self-identified LGBTQ groups have become increasingly accessible and diversified. In the parallel off-screen public space, China has also witnessed several waves of LGBTQ and feminist sociopolitical movements, following the decriminalization and depathologization of homosexuality in 1997 and 2001 respectively. Some queer and feminist movements were significantly shaped by transnational queer and feminist currents, such as the most recent #MeToo anti-sexual harassment movement at China-based universities. Continue reading →

ACLA CFP: Poetic Materiality Today

The American Comparative Literature Association’s 2019 Annual Meeting will take place at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, March 7th-10th, 2019. We’ve proposed the following seminar:

In 2014, a poem titled “Crossing Over Half of China to Sleep with You” by Yu Xiuhua went viral online in China. Written by a rural woman with cerebral palsy and initially published on her blog, the poem represents a recent generation of poetic work that has developed around transformations in what a poem is physically and how readers encounter it. These poems are not always demonstrably globalized or translingual, but similar changes seem to be happening in poetry scenes, both popular and avant-garde, in many different places. Continue reading →