“Rage, Resilience, and Response”
April 5-8, 2023
Emory University
Westin Atlanta Perimeter North
7 Concourse Parkway NE
Atlanta, GA 30305
“To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a state of rage almost, almost all of the time--and in one’s work. And part of the rage is this: it isn’t only what is happening to you, but it’s what’s happening all around you and all of the time” (James Baldwin, 1961). The College Language Association (CLA), in collaboration with host institution Emory University, invites papers, panels, roundtables, and workshops for its 81st Annual Convention on the theme of Rage, Resilience, and Response. CLA asks participants to consider how literature and languages provide a vehicle for writers, artists, and critics to offer a range of responses to the circumstances of their lives and the conditions of the world that they inhabit. How has rage, individual and collective, been captured and communicated through the works that respond to the political, social, and cultural realities of life? How have creative expression and cultural production functioned, often in concert with political and social movements, to produce a critically engaged response to conditions that writers, artists, and scholars have actively sought to challenge and ultimately to change? How have language, literature, and their thoughtful study, served to capture and communicate the resilience of the communities represented therein?
CLA welcomes proposals on Languages and Literatures in English and in World Languages and Literatures (proposals in French, Spanish, and Portuguese are strongly encouraged). We invite scholarly and critical inquiry across a range of geopolitical contexts and historical periods. Potential topics might include:
● Critical Engagement with Strategies and Approaches to Black Liberation
● The Resilience of Transmigrant Communities in the Literatures of the Black Diaspora
● Narratives of Black Awakening in Response to Racialized Violence
● Resilience of Diasporic African Religiosities in Literature, Film, and Music
● Representations of Rage from the Perspective of Black Existentialists
● Black Voices as Destabilizing Response to Global Literary and Cultural Discourses
● Rethinking (and Retooling) Gender and Queerness in Narratives of Black Rage
● Transnational Responses to Global Anti-Black Discourses from the Atlantic to the Pacific
● Reconsidering the Lyric of Contemporary Black Diasporic Poets, Musicians and Rappers
● Transgender Performances in Black and Afro-Latinx Literature and Culture
● Ecological Themes Tied to Black and Indigenous Resistance in the Literature of the Diaspora
● Relationships between Literature, Language, and Social and Political Activist Movements
● Critical and Scholarly Responses to Literary Works, Movements, and Figures
Deadline Extended: November 15, 2022
