Register Now for WLA 2017 Conference

 

6 July 2017

Dear WLA Presenters and Members:

Boozhoo! Hello from the land of 10,000 lakes!

Registration for the WLA 2017 conference in the Marriott City Center in Minneapolis, MN is now open! Early registration ends September 20, 2017, so please try to save yourselves some money!  Note to registrants: guest status means spouse, partner, sibling, grandparent—anyone coming along to be your cheerleader or to enjoy the Twin Cities while you are involved with WLA business. Guest status does not refer to a WLA member who is not presenting a paper.

We are excited to be welcoming you to beautiful Minnesota, a landscape that was first inhabited over 12,000 years ago by the ancestors of our many Native communities. The mighty mythic Mississippi owes its creation to the last Ice Age, and you will be able to explore its banks and falls while visiting Minneapolis. Fort Snelling , built in 1819 as Fort Saint Anthony as one of the first western military outposts, is now a National Historic Site and worth a visit while you attend WLA. The West of WLA begins on the west banks of the Mississippi, and we have a program of nearly 300 presentations to enrich your minds and expand your vision of western North American writers, playwrights, filmmakers, storytellers, poets, and scholars.

We encourage you to come in time for our Wednesday evening kickoff, which features two Minnesota treasures—Minnesota Poet Laureate Joyce Sutphen and storyteller Kevin Kling—to get you feeling Minnesota. Other featured writers are Will Weaver, Linda LeGarde Grover, and Heid Erdrich.  Our Distinguished Achievement Award recipient playwright Rick Shiomi will be bringing some actors. We will be announcing an amazing band shortly that adds to the celebration of Minnesota greats!

You can begin your registration process at

https://www.conftool.pro/wla-conference-2017/

Our conference hotel is the Marriott City Center in the heart of downtown Minneapolis. Reservations must be made by 26 September 2017 or until the block is full to assure the conference room rate of $150/night. Our group rate is available 3 days prior to and 3 days following the dates of our conference based on availability. When making your reservation, inform the reservation agent that you are receiving the Western Literature Association group rate for your visit. Reservations can be made at:  https://aws.passkey.com/e/49008766  or  1-877-303-0104.

Once again, WLA has contracted with United Airlines for a 5% discount for WLA members. United has numerous domestic and international flights to the Minneapolis/St. Paul International Airport daily. For your discount, please book online at united.com/meetingtravel. Use the code ZY5Y175071. MSP also serves all major North American airlines.

We will send ground transportation information later this summer. Travel to and from the airport is easy via light rail. Amtrak also arrives and departs from the beautifully restored Union Station in St. Paul. Light rail then provides ground transportation into downtown Minneapolis as well. Many of you are Uber and Lyfft customers and have that option as well.

We are hard at work on the conference program. As soon as the first program draft is completed, we will put it on the conference website and alert all participants via ConfTool. Please note your two deadlines: September 20, 2017 for early conference registration and September 26, 2017 for your guaranteed hotel group rate.

Miigwech, thank you, WLA colleagues! We look forward to serving as your hosts to the 52^nd Annual Conference of the Western Literature Association, 25-28 October 2017.

Your co-presidents,

Florence Amamoto (amamoto@gustavus.edu)

Susan Maher (smaher@d.umn.edu)

 

Reminder:  If you want your conference paper considered for the Manfred award (creative writing) or the Taylor or Grover awards (best grad student papers), please send final copies to us (copy both co-presidents) by Aug. 15.  Grad students wishing to be considered for the Owens awards (to foster diversity), please send application material to Lisa Tatonetti (tatonett@ksu.edu) by Aug. 15.  More detailed descriptions of WLA awards on the WLA website.

C19 Conference: Climate

C19 Seminars and

proposal submission site

Dear C19 members,

We are delighted to announce the nine seminars that will be featured at the fifth biennial C19 conference, “Climate.” The conference will take place March 22-25, 2018, in Albuquerque, NM, and is hosted by the University of New Mexico.

We are also very glad to say that the conference submission site is now available: https://c19conference2018.exordo.com/. We look forward to reading your proposals.

Here are the nine seminar topics and leaders; a full description of each seminar is attached and can be found on our conference website:  https://c19conference.wordpress.com/seminars/.
1. Childhood Teleologies: Climates of Growth

Seminar Leaders: Anna Mae Duane and Karen Sánchez-Eppler
2. C19 Environmental Humanities

Seminar Leaders: Teresa A. Goddu and William Gleason
3. Pacific Intersections

Seminar Leaders: Hsuan L. Hsu and Paul Lyons
4. Expanding Forms: a Writing Workshop

Seminar Leaders:Sarah Mesle and Sarah Blackwood
5. Dissonant Archives: The History and Writings of Nineteenth Century Afro-Latinas

Seminar Leaders: Nancy Raquel Mirabal and Gema Guevara
6. Performing Citizenship in Hostile Climates

Seminar Leader: Koritha Mitchell
7. In/Civility

Seminar Leaders: Tavia Nyong’o and Kyla Wazana Tompkins
8. Feminist Critical Regionalism and the Climate of Western Literary Studies

Seminar Leaders: Jennifer S. Tuttle and Jean Pfaelzer
9. Indigenous Textualities: Native Americans, Writing, and Representation

Seminar Leader: Hilary E. Wyss, Trinity College
Seminars will provide participants the opportunity to have a collaborative conversation around a particular topic. Seminars will be capped at 15 participants and will be run by co-facilitators with expertise in the topic. Each participant will submit a five-page position paper before the conference to be read in advance by the other participants so that seminar time can be reserved for discussion. Seminar participants will be listed in the program.
We hope to see you in Albuquerque,

 

Hester Blum, President

Meredith McGill, Vice President

Carrie Tirado Bramen, Program Chair

Alex Black, Program Committee member

Martha Schoolman, Program Committee member

Conference Deadline Extended

Attention WLA Members and Interested Participants: Due to some registration challenges, we are changing the submission due date to July 1, 2017. We don’t want anyone to miss the voyage to Minneapolis! Come to hear writers Linda LeGarde Grover, Kao Kalia Yang, Will Weaver, Joyce Sutphen, Heid Erdrich, and Kevin Kling! Our distinguished achievement honoree is playwright and theater great Rick Shiomi.

Go to the 2017 Western Literature Association Conference page on the WLA website for more information and to submit your proposal.

New Directions in Black Western Studies (CFP)

New Directions in Black Western Studies

Western History Association Conference

Hilton San Diego Resort & Spa, San Diego, California

01-04 November 2017

 

We are seeking proposals for the 57th Western History Association Conference workshop and American Studies Special Issue: “New Directions in Black Western Studies.”

Though several scholarly historical treatments of Blacks in the North American West exist, few engage with what Black Western Studies means in a contemporary context. Over the past decade there has been a return to the west in intellectual and artistic production at a rate not seen since the 1970s. Several critically acclaimed television series, films, music albums, and literary texts are rooted firmly in western historical legacies. Likewise, the relationship between Blackness and western geographical and cultural identity has been explored in various disciplinary genres. From film, music, literature, and art to theatre, architecture, and museum studies, These possibilities drive several questions undergirding this workshop at the 2017 Western History Association Conference.

How do we make sense of conventional westerns and science fiction westerns such as HBO’s Westworld and AMC’s Hell on Wheels that  feature black characters in lead roles, but render the mythic west primarily a “white” space? How do we hear songs that claim the West as a site of a distinct “authentic” black culture? Here, N.W.A’s “Straight Outta Compton” (1988), 2Pac and Dr. Dre’s “California Love” (1996), and Kendrick Lamar’s “Compton” (2012) come to mind. How do musicians conjure up images of the Black West in their lyrics and chords? How do we make sense of memorials and commemorations of Blacks in the West that position their presence as part of frontier exceptionalism? How do we document riots and revolutions in a black western context? How do murals of Black subjects in Western cities serve as correctives to cowboy and pioneer histories of the West?  How have fiction and creative non-fiction writers imagined the Black West in their texts? Is the Black West gendered? What are the boundaries of the Black West? For example, when we include the American Pacific states and western Canadian territories in our understanding of the Black West, how does that open up new avenues for understanding black Western subjectivities?

Papers accepted for the WHA workshop will be vetted for a subsequent special issue of American Studies (AMSJ) on Black Western Studies. For both the workshop and the journal we are interested in what it means to read the North American West as a Black space with varied and deep possibilities.. By this we mean, how the concept of presenting/representing the West is informed by black identities and identity-making, rival geographies tied to black mobility, black culture, black knowledge production, black arts, and black literatures. The WHA workshop and AMSJ special issue  will fill a gap in American Studies by bringing Black Western Studies into current dialogue with other fields of American Studies that focus on the intersections between race, ethnicity, and place/geography. Borderland studies, Canadian Studies, Midwestern Studies, Southern Studies, and Asian/Pacific/American Studies are just a few examples of such fields.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• 21st century Television and Film
• Reconsidering Public Memorials, Museums, and Historic Preservation
• Photography
• Visual Arts (painting, murals, and sculptures)
• Literatures
• New Media
• Music and Song
• Theatre and Performance
• Architecture and Built Environment
• Graphic Novels and Comic Books
• Gender and/or Sexuality
• Urban and/or Rural Spaces

Abstracts of no more than 500 words should be emailed to Jeannette Eileen Jones, Kalenda Eaton, and Michael Johnson at blackwesternstudies2017@gmail.com by 30 June 2017.

All submissions should include the name of the author, title/position, institution, email address, a short profile, the title of the proposed paper, and the abstract. Once accepted, drafts of complete papers will be due from contributors by 15 September 2017.

Note: Accepted contributors must register for and attend the 2017 Western History Association, which will meet 01-04 November 2017 at the Hilton San Diego Resort & Spa, San Diego, CA.

During the conference the accepted contributors and guest editors (Jones, Eaton, and Johnson) will workshop pre-circulated drafts of papers in a closed session for two days (Thursday and Friday). The contributors will present their work in an open session on the last morning (Saturday) of the conference. Please note that all papers MUST go through a blind peer-review process with American Studies (AMSJ) prior to final publication. We expect the special issue to be published in 2018.

K-12 Teaching Awards (2017 Conference)

The Western Literature Association and the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies will sponsor two K-12 Teaching Awards that will provide teachers with the opportunity to attend and present at the Western Literature Association Annual Meeting in Minneapolis, Minnesota on October 25-28, 2017. The selected teachers will share their instructional plans and teaching approaches at the conference on a K-12 Teaching Panel on Saturday, October 28.

The prize will include conference registration, award banquet ticket, and $750 toward conference related costs such as hotel, airfare, and a WLA membership.

More information can be found on the WLA website:

http://www.westernlit.org/k-12-teaching-award/

Please feel free to forward this announcement to other listservs and to share this information on social media.

Randi Tanglen

Austin College

Sherman, Texas

Weird Western (deadline extended)

CFP: Race and Gender in the Weird Western (critical collection)

Deadline extended: May 30

Editors:Kerry Fine, Arizona State University, Michael K. Johnson, University of Maine-Farmington, Rebecca M. Lush, California State University San Marcos, Sara. L. Spurgeon, Texas Tech University

This proposed anthology explores the genre category of the Weird Western–a hybrid genre form that mixes western themes, iconography, settings, or conventions with elements drawn from horror, fantasy, supernatural, or science fiction genres. The particular focus of the anthology will be a critical analysis of race and gender in the Weird Western. We are interested in submissions that explore either how the Weird Western challenges the representation of race and gender in the conventional Western or how the Weird Western can serve as a way to reinforce existing gender and racial paradigms in the Western. We are especially interested in contributions that consider the inclusion and representation of African American and Native American characters in the Weird Western. We are seeking contributions that consider the following possible topics (but the volume’s scope is not necessarily limited to only these):

• Indigenous Futurism and the Western
• Afrofuturism and the Western
• The Queer West in the Weird Western
• Race and the Weird Western
• Gender and the Weird Western
• Sexuality and the Weird Western
• Weird Westerns by Native American authors
• Latinx/Chicanx Futurism and the West
• The Dark Tower (books and/or film)
• etc

Please send proposals to weirdwesterncollection@gmail.com by May 30, 2017. Proposals should be between 500-700 words. Those with accepted proposals will be expected to submit a full draft (6,000-8,000 words) in August 2017.

Beyond Local Color ( CFP_

Abstracts Invited for a panel titled

“Beyond Local Color: Late 19^th-century Regionalisms”

The occasion:

American Literature Association Symposium

“Regionalism and Place in American Literature”

September 7-9, 2017

Hotel Monteleone, New Orleans

The organizers of the Sept 2017 ALA Symposium on “Regionalism and Place in American Literature” have invited us to “question spatial boundaries and definitions” and to ask what it means “to publish or write ‘regionally.’” With these questions in mind, this proposed panel seeks to tease apart the terms “regionalism” and “local color” within the period most closely associated with the latter. Some regional scholars seek alternatives to “local color” by working in periods other than the late nineteenth century, but this panel seeks to discover varieties of regional expression as they coexisted and possibly competed for authority after the Civil War. Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse have suggested gender differences as a key to recovering alternative regional forms; many other scholars continue to use the terms “regional” and “local color” more or less interchangeably in this period. This panel asks what new angles of vision and methods of study are required to make additional regionalisms visible or legible between 1870 and 1900?

Questions of interest may include:

• What regionalisms have been made visible by the proliferation of digital nineteenth-century materials?
• What genres besides the local color magazine sketch negotiated regional meaning and regional relations after the Civil War?
• Does research on nineteenth-century reading and publishing offer insight into the reception of local color and other regionalisms?
• Is the local color movement the product of an elite literary consciousness, popular taste, or both? What other regional forms are produced by class differentiation in the late nineteenth century?
• When local color = regionalism in the late nineteenth century, what exactly is lost?

Please submit 250-300-word paper proposals to Tara Penry, Professor of English, Boise State University (tpenry@boisestate.edu) by June 1 with a subject line of “ALA Panel Abstract.”