CFP Return to the South: The Complexities of Southern Culture in Ryan Coogler's film Sinners (7/1/2025; Special Issue Journal of American Culture)

 

Return to the South: The Complexities of Southern Culture in Ryan Coogler's film Sinners

deadline for submissions: 

July 15, 2025

full name / name of organization: 

Journal of American Culture

contact email: 

Katrina.Moore@slu.edu

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2025/05/21/return-to-the-south-the-complexities-of-southern-culture-in-ryan-cooglers-film

Return to the South: The Complexities of Southern Culture in Ryan Coogler’s film Sinners. 

On April 18, Warner Brothers released Ryan Coogler’s long anticipated film Sinners. Since its release, the film has achieved both critical acclaim and popular resonance, marking a significant entry in contemporary Southern cinema. Critics and audiences praise Sinners for its nuanced treatment of inter/intra-racial dynamics, spirituality, and regional identity. In addition, the film has prompted sustained cultural discourse, and now, academic interest in the South. Its layered narrative and atmospheric rendering of the South position Sinners as a vital text for examining the complexities of Southern culture and history.

The Southern United States has long been mythologized, contested, and critically dissected; its socio-cultural historical complexities have been largely ignored. Ryan Coogler’s Sinners presents the complexities of the South and Southern culture(s) as it situates the story within the Mississippi Delta in 1932. Coogler utilizes the genre of horror and the conventions of the vampire to explore these complexities through a contemporary lens. The film situates itself at the crossroads of religion, race, history, and redemption, challenging romanticized and reductive portrayals of the American South.

The Journal of American culture is seeking contributions for a special edition titled, Return to the South: The Complexities of Southern Culture in Ryan Coogler’s film Sinners. We invite scholars, critics, and practitioners to submit papers that explore the multilayered dimensions of Sinners, with particular attention to how Coogler crafts, critiques, and complicates Southern cultural narratives. Interdisciplinary approaches, especially, are welcome, drawing from fields such as film and visual culture studies, Southern studies, African American studies, gender studies, theology, history, and cultural geography.

An abstract of 250-500 words is due July 15, 2025. If the abstract is accepted, the complete paper (3,500–7,500 words) is due October 15, 2025. Include your full name, institutional affiliation, title, and email address (not included in the 250-500 text limit) at the beginning of your abstract. Submissions and queries should be sent to Kwakiutl L. Dreher kdreher2@nebraska.edu and Katrina Moore katrina.moore@slu.edu

Topics of interest include but not limited to:

• Coogler’s directorial vision in reimagining the South
• The return to the south as a space of (re)ro(u)oting
• Identity of Cast and Director with the South
• Folklore and folk traditions in Southern Black culture
• The politics of sin, salvation, and moral ambiguity in Southern storytelling
• (Black) fe/male entrepreneurship
• Nature (birds, land, cotton, etc.)
• Lessons taught/lessons learned
• The performance of Black love and Black Joy
• Representations of kinship
• Generational trauma
• Black Southern identity and cultural resistance
• The role of religion, churches, and spiritual spaces
• Memory, land, and contested Southern geographies
• Intersections of gender, sexuality, and faith in Southern contexts
• Cinematic aesthetics of the Southern Gothic and its subversion
• Historical reckoning and the burden of legacy
• The role of sound, music, and silence in evoking Southern atmospheres
• Immigrant culture and influence/exchange on Black Southern tradition
• Dance and Spirituality
• Secular and Sacred traditions
• African/Ancestral cultural traditions in religion, dance, music, etc in Southern society
• Voodoo, Christianity and other practices
• Cultural analysis of other works by Coogler

Last updated May 28, 2025

CFP Southern Gothic Area (6/15/2024; PCAS/ACAS 10/17-19/2024)

THE SOUTHERN GOTHIC AT PCAS/ ACAS 2024

deadline for submissions: June 15, 2024

full name / name of organization: Popular Culture / American Culture Association in the South

contact email: SouthernGothicPCAS@gmail.com

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2024/03/04/the-southern-gothic-at-pcas-acas-2024

Steeped in the wide-flung diaspora of the Gothic mode, the Southern Gothic is one of the most prominent ways the South is represented in media and culture. Represented in the works of writers as varied as Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, and William Faulkner to Cormac McCarthy, Cherie Priest, and Jesmyn Ward, whether categorized as a form, a style, or a genre, the Southern Gothic is bound up with the specificity of regional cultural anxieties about race, class, gender, sexuality, history, and geographic identity itself. From its most stereotypical depictions to more nuanced, complex interpretations, the Southern Gothic shapes the wider perception of regional identities in ways that invite our contemporary scholarly engagement.



The Southern Gothic area of the Popular Culture / American Culture Association in the South (PCAS/ ACAS) invites proposals for individual presentations, roundtable discussions, or full panels of 3-4 papers at the 2024 PCAS/ ACAS Annual Conference, to be held October 17 - 19, 2024 in Greenville, SC.



Topics might include (but are in no way limited to):

• representations of the Southern Gothic in film, TV, and literature
• adaptation(s) of Southern Gothic literature
• the Southern Gothic in popular music
• Global elements of/ approaches to the Southern Gothic
• the Southern Gothic in new media (games, podcasts, graphic novels, etc.)
• the emergence of “Southern noir” as a subgenre
• race, class, gender, and/ or sexuality in the Southern Gothic
• Southern true crime as a cultural phenomenon
• documentary and the Southern Gothic
• Southern Gothic tourism
• monsters in the Southern Gothic: vampires, zombies, ghosts, etc.
• mental health narratives in the Southern Gothic
• specificity—or generality—in Southern Gothic geographies
• pedagogical approaches to/ uses of the Southern Gothic
• the spectre of history in the Southern Gothic
• sites of intersection between the Southern Gothic and other genres/ modes

PCAS/ ACAS is dedicated to working toward equity, diversity, and inclusion both within our organization and in academia at large. As such, we particularly welcome submissions by underrepresented and marginalized scholars across categories such as race, gender, sexuality, ability, and employment status (e.g., graduate students and non-tenure track or unaffiliated/ independent scholars).

To propose a presentation (of 20 minutes or less) or a roundtable discussion for the Southern Gothic Area, please send the following to Area Chair Stephanie Graves at SouthernGothicPCAS@gmail.com by June 15, 2024:

Name of presenter(s), institutional affiliation (if applicable), & email address for each presenter


Type of submission (individual paper, roundtable, or full panel)


Presentation abstract (250 words or fewer)


Indication if you need access to A/V (not all rooms have A/V available—if you don’t indicate the need, you may be scheduled in a room without AV)

Submission deadline is June 15, 2024; notifications of acceptance will be sent by July 1, 2024.

PLEASE NOTE: In order to be considered for the Southern Gothic Area, please follow the instructions above rather than submitting through the PCAS/ ACAS website.Everyone is invited to submit one academic paper and can, in addition, participate in one round-table discussion or creative session. Only those proposals intended for the Southern Gothic area should be submitted as outlined above; the PCAS/ ACAS website has an online submission form for the General Call.



Last updated March 6, 2024

CFP American Nightmares Symposium (10/31/2023; Salem, MA 3/21-24/2024)

Cross-posted from the Poe Studies Association list:


Call For Proposals

AMERICAN NIGHTMARES: THE INAUGURAL SYMPOSIUM OF THE SOCIETY FOR THE STUDY OF THE AMERICAN GOTHIC

March 21st – 23rd, 2024

Salem, Massachusetts



Conference director: Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, Central Michigan University

With the kind support of the American Literature Association





Proposals for individual papers, 3- or 4-person paper sessions, and 5-person roundtable sessions are solicited for AMERICAN NIGHTMARES: the inaugural symposium of the Society for the Study of the American Gothic.



This intimate event will be held at the iconic and charming Hawthorne Hotel in the heart of Salem, Massachusetts (a hotel ranked as among the most haunted hotels in America!) Author Paul Tremblay will deliver a keynote reading.



Proposals are welcome on all aspects of the American Gothic, including literature, film, television, gaming, music, podcasts, and new media. Proposals on keynote author Paul Tremblay are particularly welcome.

• Proposals for individual papers should be 200 words and include an abbreviated CV indicating academic affiliation and relevant publications, presentations, teaching, and/or research related to the topic of the presentation.
• Proposals for 3- or 4-person paper sessions should include abstracts and abbreviated CVs for each participant.
• Proposals for 5-person roundtables should explain the focus of the roundtable, identify the contribution of each participant, and provide abbreviated CVs for all involved.

Proposals and questions may be directed to the conference director, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, at Jeffrey.Weinstock@cmich.edu. Please note: due to space constraints, this will be a relatively small event and audio-visual support will be limited

THE DEADLINE FOR PROPOSALS is October 31st, 2023.



Current plans call for an opening event on Thursday evening, March 21; full sessions and a keynote talk on Friday (9am-6pm); and sessions on Saturday from 9 am until 3:30 with a closing reception. Registration for the event will be $250 USD and will include two breakfasts at the hotel, two lunches at the hotel, a Friday evening reception, and a Saturday afternoon reception. (Meals and the receptions are available to all who register, regardless of whether or not you choose to stay at the hotel). A tour of “haunted Salem” will be available as an add-on.



Additional information about the Symposium and registration as it becomes available will be available on the SSAG website at http://www.americangothicsociety.com. Interested parties are invited to join the SSAG facebook group at http://www.facebook.com/groups/americangothicsociety.

CFP Southern Gothic Area at PCAS/ACAS 2022 (6/1/2022; New Orleans 10/13-15/2022)

CFP: Southern Gothic Area at PCAS/ACAS 2022

Source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2022/03/03/cfp-southern-gothic-area-at-pcasacas-2022

deadline for submissions:
June 1, 2022

full name / name of organization:
Popular Culture/ American Culture Association in the South

contact email:
SouthernGothicPCAS@gmail.com

CALL FOR PROPOSALS: THE SOUTHERN GOTHIC AT PCAS/ ACAS 2022

Submission deadline: June 1, 2022; Notification of acceptance by July 1, 2022



Despite the difficulty in defining what exactly the Southern Gothic is, it nevertheless is one of the most prominent ways the South is represented in media and culture. From Flannery O’Connor to The Originals, Truman Capote to True Detective, and William Faulkner to The Walking Dead, whether categorized as a form, a style, or a genre, the Southern Gothic is bound up with regional cultural anxieties regarding shifting discourses of race, class, gender, sexuality, and geographic identity itself. From its most stereotypical depictions to more nuanced, complex interpretations, the Southern Gothic shapes the wider perception of regional identities in ways that invite our contemporary scholarly engagement.

To this end, the Southern Gothic area of the Popular Culture / American Culture Association in the South (PCAS/ ACAS) invites proposals for individual presentations, roundtable discussions, or full panels of 3-4 papers at the 2022 PCAS/ ACAS Annual Conference, to be held October 13 - 15, 2022 in New Orleans, LA.

Topics might include (but are in no way limited to):

• the Southern Gothic in film, TV, and literature
• adaptation(s) of Southern Gothic literature
• the Southern Gothic in new media (games, podcasts, graphic novels, etc.)
• the emergence of “Southern noir” as a subgenre
• race, class, gender, and/ or sexuality in the Southern Gothic
• Southern true crime as a cultural phenomenon
• documentary and the Southern Gothic
• Global elements of/ approaches to the Southern Gothic
• Southern Gothic tourism
• monsters in the Southern Gothic: vampires, zombies, ghosts, etc.
• mental health narratives in the Southern Gothic
• specificity—or generality—in Southern Gothic geographies
• the Southern Gothic in popular music
• pedagogical approaches to/ uses of the Southern Gothic
• the spectre of history in the Southern Gothic
• sites of intersection between the Southern Gothic and other genres/ modes

PCAS/ ACAS is dedicated to working toward equity, diversity, and inclusion both within our organization and in academia at large. As such, we encourage submissions by underrepresented and marginalized scholars based upon race, gender, sexuality, and employment status (e.g., graduate students and non-tenure track or unaffiliated/independent scholars).



To propose a presentation (of 20 minutes or less) or a roundtable discussion for the Southern Gothic Area, please send the following to Area Chair Stephanie Graves at SouthernGothicPCAS@gmail.com by June 1:
Name of presenter(s), institutional affiliation (if any), & email address for each presenter
Type of submission (individual paper, roundtable, or full panel)
Presentation abstract (250 words or fewer)
Indication if you need access to A/V (not all rooms have A/V available)

Submission deadline is June 1, 2022; notifications of acceptance will be sent by July 1, 2022.



NOTE: In order to be considered for the Southern Gothic Area, please follow the instructions above rather than submitting through the PCAS/ ACAS website.

Everyone is invited to submit one academic paper and can, in addition, participate in a round-table discussion or creative session. Only those proposals intended for the Southern Gothic area should be submitted as outlined above; the PCAS/ ACAS website has an online submission form for the General Call.




Last updated March 8, 2022

CFP American Gothic Domesticity: Blissful Misery (9/30/19; NeMLA 2020)

NeMLA Panel: American Gothic Domesticity: Blissful Misery
https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2019/07/11/nemla-panel-american-gothic-domesticity-blissful-misery

deadline for submissions: September 30, 2019
full name / name of organization: NeMLA 2020
contact email: caitlin.duffy@stonybrook.edu


Chairs:

Danielle Cofer (University of Rhode Island)

Caitlin Duffy (SUNY Stony Brook University)



Leslie Fiedler describes American fiction as “bewilderingly and embarrassingly, a gothic fiction… in a land of light and affirmation.” This panel pushes past Fiedler’s focus to instead explore the dark and enclosed spaces of the American home. These sites are featured in countless texts, from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), to Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), and beyond, to 21st-century films like Ari Aster’s Hereditary (2018). To better understand the role played by fictionalized domestic spaces in constructing American identity, our panel will yoke together gothic and sentimental theory and literature. Lora Romero’s remapping of literary landscapes challenges perpetual binarisms of the nineteenth-century by locating domesticity not only in the middle-class home, but also in the frontier. This panel adds to this work by further emphasizing the influence of domesticity in constructing American character.

This panel invites papers interrogating gothic depictions of domestic spaces in American fiction (including, but not limited to, literature, film, and television). Papers utilizing gothic and sentimental literature to support, challenge, or problematize conceptions of what qualifies as ‘home’ are especially welcome. We also encourage papers that explore the American home’s representation temporally by tracing transformations or continuations of its fictional appearance across time. Can home spaces be conceived of as racialized or gendered, and how might play between the inside/outside binary allow for new modes of thinking about the home and identity politics? In what ways can we problematize the fixity of home to include the sea and the expanding frontier? How are notions of selfhood and home inherently linked or radically redefined through genre?



Please submit abstracts of 300 words or less by September 30, 2019 through the NeMLA portal: https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/18286



The 51st annual NeMLA conference will take place on March 5-8, 2020 in Boston, MA. For more information: http://www.buffalo.edu/nemla.html

Please email any questions you may have to either daniellecofer@uri.edu or caitlin.duffy@stonybrook.edu.


Last updated July 12, 2019

CFP American Ecogothic (9/30/2018; NeMLA 2019)

American Ecogothic, NeMLA
https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2018/06/29/american-ecogothic-nemla

deadline for submissions: September 30, 2018

full name / name of organization: Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)

contact email: caitlin.duffy@stonybrook.edu


Leslie Fiedler describes American fiction as “bewilderingly and embarrassingly, a gothic fiction… a literature of darkness and the grotesque in a land of light and affirmation” (Love and Death in the American Novel, 29). However, for settlers within the early colonies and citizens of the young republic, the wilderness of the supposed New World not only represented material promise, but also unknown danger. This panel proposes a move away from the more common “land of light and affirmation” reading of American nature towards an ecogothic approach. Despite recent attention paid to the intersections between gothic and ecocritical studies, there continues to be an unfortunate dearth in scholarship focusing on the specifically American ecogothic. This scarcity is surprising given the important role played by nature in the formation of the American gothic mode. Three major critical works focused on the American ecogothic include Tom J. Hillard’s and Kevin Corstorphine’s essays within Ecogothic (2013) and Ecogothic in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (2017), edited by Dawn Keetley and Matthew Wynn Sivils. In the introduction to their volume, Keetley and Sivils note that, given its unwavering fixation with the wilderness, “American gothic literature has always been ecogothic” (6).

This panel invites papers that interrogate gothic depictions of landscapes and wilderness in American fiction (including, but not limited to, literature, film, television, and video games) from any time period. In particular, we seek papers that work towards a definition of the American ecogothic as a national mode or style. Papers that utilize the ecogothic lens to support, challenge, or problematize current conceptions of the American gothic are especially welcome. We also encourage papers that explore the American ecogothic temporally by tracing transformations or continuations of its fictional appearance across time.

All proposals must be submitted through the NeMLA portal by September 30th and should be no more than 300 words.

The 50th annual NeMLA conference will take place on March 21-24, 2019 in Washington, DC. For more information: http://www.buffalo.edu/nemla.html

Please email any questions you may have to caitlin.duffy@stonybrook.edu.

CFP Contemporary Horror Within and Beyond the Nation (9/30/2018; NeMLA 2019)

Contemporary Horror Within and Beyond the Nation, NeMLA 2019
https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2018/06/26/contemporary-horror-within-and-beyond-the-nation-nemla-2019

deadline for submissions: September 30, 2018

full name / name of organization: Jack Dudley, Mount St. Mary's University

contact email: dudley@msmary.edu



Accepted Roundtable for NeMLA 50, March 21 -24, 2019, Washington, DC.

As Sophia Siddique and Raphael Raphael write in Transnational Horror Cinema: Bodies of Excess and the Global Grotesque (2016), “From its origins, what would eventually come to be called ‘the horror genre’ has been deeply transnational both in contexts of production and reception.” In “The American Horror Film? Globalization and Transnational U.S.-Asian Genres” (2013), Christina Klein observes that this transnational quality has particularly been evident most recently, as cinema as a whole continues to become increasingly transnational. For Klein, genre films such as horror lend themselves to the transnational because of their indebtedness to convention or tropes, which can be culturally portable or which, in her words, “can be combined by local filmmakers in fresh ways to carry locally specific meanings.” This accepted roundtable invites participants to interrogate the relationship between contemporary horror—understood as roughly post-1960—and the critical categories of the nation, the global, and the transnational. How do the particular conventions, tropes, and forms most associated with horror facilitate and/or complicate its relationship to the nation? Are the conventions, tropes, and forms of particular national traditions truly exportable and what are the limits of their cultural adaptability? Have recent examples of contemporary horror resisted the transnational and instead laid claim to specifically national visions of horror? By exploring these questions, this roundtable seeks not only to examine how the category of the nation and the transnational have shaped contemporary horror, but how what is still often denigrated as a marginal genre, horror itself, can help us continue to theorize the nation and the transnational as well. Participants are welcome to focus on any medium.

Please submit abstracts through the NeMLA portal, which can be accessed here: https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/Login

Abstracts are due to the NeMLA portal by Sept. 30, 2018.

Please email dudley@msmary.edu with any questions.

CFP Re-Visions of Eden: The Idea of the Midwestern Gothic (9/1/2018)

Another great idea for a collection:

Re-Visions of Eden: The Idea of the Midwestern Gothic
https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2018/06/14/re-visions-of-eden-the-idea-of-the-midwestern-gothic

deadline for submissions: September 1, 2018

full name / name of organization: Brandi Homan & Julia Madsen

contact email: mwgothicscholar@gmail.com



In the American cultural imagination, the Midwest embodies the “home” or “heart” of the nation associated with frontier and rural values of promise, fertility, order, and stability, according to Joanna Jacobson in “The Idea of the Midwest.” Jacobson argues that the Midwest has come to symbolize the quintessentially “American,” speaking to “the impulse to invent a myth of commonality rooted in the physical landscape at the center of the continent and for the insufficiency of that myth as a response to the conditions of urban industrial culture.” While the idea and image of the Midwest in American culture serve as resources of recovery and refuge from the ill effects of urban industrialism, it is increasingly evident that these visions of a pastoral, rural middlescape illuminate the necessity for a more comprehensive, critical view of the region. The Midwestern Gothic complicates the Midwest’s role in myths of progress, drawing attention to vital sociopolitical and economic concerns of the region, including deindustrialization and economic disparity, crime, addiction, mental illness, racism, sexism, homophobia, and isolation. In this sense, the Midwestern Gothic counterintuitively articulates the region as the “wound” of the United States, a place ravaged by the nation’s myths and ideals.


The Midwestern Gothic tradition has a vibrant lineage in American literature, including authors like Sherwood Anderson, Toni Morrison, Sinclair Lewis, Bonnie Jo Campbell, and Ander Monson. This edited volume seeks critical, academic essays on the Midwestern Gothic in American literature and culture. In particular, this edited volume looks to establish the Midwestern Gothic as genre, exploring relationships with other regional gothics and the American gothic broadly speaking. It is also interested in critical essays on particular authors or works associated with the Midwestern Gothic tradition, including Sherwood Anderson, Toby Altman’s Arcadia, Indiana, Frank Bill, Sam Shepard’s Buried Child, Bonnie Jo Campbell, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Harmony Korine’s Gummo, Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son, Sinclair Lewis, Edgar Lee Masters, Ander Monson, Toni Morrison, Donald Ray Pollock, C.S. Giscombe’s Prairie Style, Michael Lesy’s Wisconsin Death Trip, Laird Hunt’s Indiana, Indiana, James Wright, and others.


This edited volume is particularly interested in original contributions of between 3,000 and 6,000 words on topics including, but not limited to:

• Intersections with other regional American gothics (e.g., the Southern Gothic, Great Plains Gothic, etc.)
• The Midwestern Gothic and popular culture
• Race, class, and gender politics in the Midwestern Gothic
• Grotesque, uncanny, and abject domestic spaces in the Midwestern Gothic
• Histories and myths of place and region
• Community formation politics and identity politics
• The Midwest and frontierism
• Deindustrialization and economic disparity
• The opioid crisis, addiction, and mental illness
• Pastoral/post-pastoral studies
• The decline of the Rust Belt
• Rural studies
• The dark side of Midwestern “niceness”
• Current politics of the Midwest
• Documentary and non-fiction approaches to the Midwestern Gothic
• Visual studies in the Midwestern Gothic (film, photography, and multimedia)

Please submit abstracts of 300-500 words to Dr. Brandi Homan and Julia Madsen at mwgothicscholar@gmail.com by September 1, 2018. Selections will be made by December 1, 2018. Final essays (of 3000-6000 words) are due March 1, 2019.

CFP Varieties of the Monstrous Feminine in American Literature (9/30/2018; NeMLA 2019)

“Varieties of the Monstrous Feminine in American Literature”
https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2018/07/01/%E2%80%9Cvarieties-of-the-monstrous-feminine-in-american-literature%E2%80%9D

deadline for submissions:
September 30, 2018

full name / name of organization:
Mary Balkun/Seton Hall University

contact email:
mary.balkun@shu.edu



NeMLA 2019

The monstrous female is a staple of the literary imagination. The Medusa, the witch, the Sirens, the succubus/vampire, the she-devil, the madwoman, the coquette, the cross-dresser—these are just some versions of this trope that can be identified from the earliest periods to the present day. Some figures represent the ways women have been marginalized as “other” and the impact of that designation, while others represent ways that outsider positions can become a locus of power. This roundtable will explore various manifestations of the monstrous feminine trope, specifically in American literature and culture. It will consider questions such as: Who defines monstrosity? How can it be construed as positive as well as negative? How does the monstrous feminine manifest in different time periods and locations (urban vs. rural, east vs. west vs. midwest, north vs. south)? Does the monstrous feminine always have to be female?

Proposals of 300 words should be submitted by Sept. 30, 2018 via the NeMLA portal https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/CFP.

CFP Trump-Era Horror Book (Last Call for Abstracts) (9/30/2017)

Trump-Era Horror Book (Last Call for Abstracts)
https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2017/09/07/trump-era-horror-book-last-call-for-abstracts

deadline for submissions: September 30, 2017

 contact email: v.mccollum@ulster.ac.uk



Title: Make America Hate Again: Trump-Era Horror & the Politics of Fear

Collection Editor: Dr Victoria McCollum (Ulster University)

Deadline for Abstracts: September 30, 2017

Contact: v.mccollum@ulster.ac.uk

Publisher: Routledge

Summary: Make America Hate Again: Trump-Era Horror and the Politics of Fear explores the intersection of film, politics, and American culture and society through a bold critical analysis of popular horror films/TV produced in the Trump era, such as Green Room (2015); The Witch (2015); Don’t Breathe (2016); The Purge: Election Year (2016); American Gods (2017); American Horror Story (2017); Get Out (2017); and The Handmaid’s Tale (2017). This collection of essays will explore how popular horror scrutinises and unravels the events, anxieties, discourses, dogmas and socio-political conflicts of the Trump years.

Lots of additional information/inspiration can be found here: https://popcultstudies.wordpress.com/

Last updated September 7, 2017

CFP Monsters and Monstrosity, A Special Issue of The Popular Culture Studies Journal (12/1/2017)

CfP: Monsters and Monstrosity, A Special Issue of The Popular Culture Studies Journal
Posted on September 5, 2017
https://www.fantastic-arts.org/2017/cfp-monsters-and-monstrosity-a-special-issue-of-the-popular-culture-studies-journal/ 

Call for Papers: Monsters and Monstrosity A Special Issue of The Popular Culture Studies Journal

Thanks to Norma Jones for supporting special issue. Please consider submitting and share widely.

Call for Papers: Monsters and Monstrosity
A Special Issue of The Popular Culture Studies Journal
Guest Editor: Bernadette Marie Calafell, University of Denver

Scholars, such as W. Scott Poole and Kendall Phillips, have argued that monsters, particularly those in horror, reflect or correspond to the cultural anxieties of a society. These cultural anxieties are often connected to struggles for power around race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability. Thus, historical context and power are central to studies of monstrosity. Given that we are immersed in what may be considered a horror renaissance, both in film and television, increasing violence against people of color in the U.S., and dangerous and toxic performances of white femininity and masculinity, this is a ripe moment to explore the relationship between monstrosity and popular culture, both literally and figuratively. Thus, this special issues solicits manuscripts that take interdisciplinary approaches to explore the theoretical and methodological possibilities of monstrosity. What can employing monstrosity as a theoretical framework or analytical tool contribute to the study of popular culture? Key questions driving this special issue include: What can monstrosity teach us about Otherness? How can it be used resistively? Conversely, how can monstrosity be used as a tool of oppression? In what ways we can be unpack figures, such as Donald Trump, through the lens of monstrosity? What constitutes monstrosity? How might we understand history differently through the construct of monstrosity? What are the necessary future directions for the study of monstrosity and popular culture? Critical rhetorical, critical qualitative (including critical auto-methodologies), and performative approaches to monstrosity are welcomed.

Potential areas of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Twin Peaks and monstrosity
• Monstrosity and comics
• David Lynch’s uses of monstrosity
• NBC’s Hannibal
• Adult Swim
• Monstrous remakes
• History and monstrosity
• Afrofuturism and monstrosity
• Monstrosity and agency
• Monstrous bodies
• Monstrous consumption
• Monstrosity and adolescence
• Monstrosity, menstruation, or menopause
• Fatness and monstrosity
• Excess and monstrosity
• Chicanxfuturism and monstrosity
• Celebrity culture and monstrosity
• Performance and monstrosity
• Wrestling and monstrosity
• Intersectional approaches to monstrosity
• Feminist possibilities of monstrosity
• American Horror Story
• Queerness and monstrosity
• Monstrosity and sports
• Disability and monstrosity
• Class and monstrosity
• Game of Thrones
• Monstrous politicians and politics
• The 2016 U.S. Presidential election
• Autobiography and monstrosity
• Monstrous methodologies
• Hybridity and monstrosity
• White femininity and monstrosity
• Monstrosity and military culture
• Monstrosity and toxic masculinities
• Monstrosity and white masculinity
• Monstrosity and religion
• Monstrosity and temporality
• Chicana feminism and monstrosity
• Monstrosity and Orientalism

Questions can be directed to Bernadette Calafell at Bernadette.Calafell@du.edu. Please electronically send submissions (three documents, MS WORD, MLA) to Bernadette Calafell via email at Bernadette.Calafell@du.edu by December 1, 2017.

1) Title Page: A single title page must accompany the email, containing complete contact information (address, phone number, e-mail address).

2) Manuscript: On the first page of the manuscript, only include the article’s title, being sure not to include the author’s name. The journal employs a “blind review” process, meaning that a copy of the article will be sent to reviewers without revealing the author’s name. Please include the works cited with your manuscript.

3) Short Bio: On a separate document, please also include a short (100 words) bio. We will include this upon acceptance and publication.

Essays should range between 15-25 pages of double-spaced text in 12 pt. Times New Roman font, including all images, endnotes, and Works Cited pages. Please note that the 15-page minimum should be 15 pages of written article material. Less than 15 pages of written material will be rejected and the author asked to develop the article further. Essays should also be written in clear US English in the active voice and third person, in a style accessible to the broadest possible audience. Authors should be sensitive to the social implications of language and choose wording free of discriminatory overtones.

For documentation, The Popular Culture Studies Journal follows the Modern Language Association style, as articulated by Joseph Gibaldi and Walter S. Achtert in the paperback MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers (New York: MLA), and in The MLA Style Manual (New York: MLA). The most current editions of both guides will be the requested editions for use. This style calls for a Works Cited list, with parenthetical author/page references in the text. This approach reduces the number of notes, which provide further references or explanation.

For punctuation, capitalization, hyphenation, and other matters of style, follow the MLA Handbook and the MLA Style Manual, supplemented as necessary by The Chicago Manual of Style (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). The most current edition of the guide will be the requested edition for use.

It is essential for authors to check, correct, and bring manuscripts up to date before final submission. Authors should verify facts, names of people, places, and dates, and double-check all direct quotations and entries in the Works Cited list. Manuscripts not in MLA style will be returned without review.

We are happy to receive digital artwork. Please save line artwork (vector graphics) as Encapsulated PostScript (EPS) and bitmap files (halftones or photographic images) as Tagged Image Format (TIFF), with a resolution of at least 300 dpi at final size. Do not send native file formats. Please contact the editor for discussion of including artwork.

Upon acceptance of a manuscript, authors are required to sign a form transferring the copyright from the author to the publisher. A copy will be sent to authors at the time of acceptance.

Before final submission, the author will be responsible for obtaining letters of permission for illustrations and for quotations that go beyond “fair use,” as defined by current copyright law.

CFP The Weird and the Southern Imaginary (proposals by 11/2/2015)

CFP: The Weird and the Southern Imaginary
https://networks.h-net.org/node/73374/announcements/77005/cfp-weird-and-southern-imaginary

Announcement published by James Rozier on Thursday, August 6, 2015
Type: Call for Papers
Date: November 2, 2015
Location: United States
Subject Fields: American History / Studies, Communication, Composition & Rhetoric, Cultural History / Studies, Ethnic History / Studies

Call for Papers:

The Weird & the Southern Imaginary

General Eds.: Travis Rozier & Bob Hodges



Keynote: The Weird & the Southern Imaginary will introduce the aesthetics and generic conventions of the Weird to cultural studies of the U.S. South and the region’s local, hemispheric, and (inter)national connections. Contributions from literary critics, film and popular culture scholars, philosophers, and critical theorists will consider forms of the Weird in a range of texts (literature, art, film & television, comics, music) from, about, or resonant with conceptions of different South(s).



Description: S. T. Joshi periodizes Haute Weird Fiction from 1880-1940, and China Miéville describes how the paradigm of Haute Weird Fiction, especially in its foremost practitioner H. P. Lovecraft, invokes horror, alterity, and/or awe on a cosmic scale, which seeps into the mundane experiences of cognitively ill-equipped scientific or academic protagonists. The Weird aesthetic, especially pre-World War II, is often inextricable from revanchist horrors of democracy, political revolution, miscegenation, and female or other non-normative sexualities, although Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s recent Weird compendium stresses the “darkly democratic” aspect of a C20 and C21 Weird tradition that spans nations, genders, genres, and levels of literary status.



Representations of the U.S. South as an irrational or reactionary space draw on what Deborah Barker and Kathryn McKee describe as the southern imaginary, a fluid reservoir of topoi referencing an enduring material history of land appropriation, coercive labor practices, carceral landscapes, racial and commercial mixing, extralegal violence, and insular patriarchies. The Weird & the Southern Imaginary will explore Weird South(s), whether that means national aberrance or cosmic otherness.  For example, the first television season of True Detective melds the conservative politics and religious fervor often equated with the South to vaster hints of conspiratorial and cosmic horror in a postindustrial Louisiana swampscape.



The dark fantasy of the Weird diverges sharply from the usual monstrosities of horror and speculative fictions as well as many modes of southern representation: the gothic, the grotesque, the uncanny, the ghostly or hauntological, or the folkloric, modes with longstanding southern associations and almost as longstanding critical fatigue for Southernisits. The Weird can also bridge Southern Studies and its old associations with recent work in object-oriented ontology, ecotheory, other new materialisms, and nihilist philosophy as well as apocalyptic popular cultural fixations without ceding inquires about the production of southern alterity.



Submission Guidelines: All proposed essays should address the concepts of the Weird and the South, however understood. Essays should be written in English, but can be written about texts read or viewed in other languages. We will also accept work on texts in translation. We are looking for critical essays (5,000-8,000 words). If you are interested in contributing an essay to the collection please send us a 300-500 word abstract by November 2, 2015.



Possible Topics:  (Feel free to combine topics or propose a topic not represented in the list)

• Weird South(s) in U.S. literature
• International Weird Fiction & southern imaginary, subtly connected or not
• Race & the southern imaginary in Weird Fiction
• Political or cultural reaction & Weird South(s)
• Weird carceral practices & the southern imaginary (Franz Kafka “In the Penal Colony”)
• Environmental transformation or degradation & Weird South(s)
• The nonhuman or posthuman in southern literature (Matthew Taylor)
• Dark ecology (Timothy Morton) & southern landscapes, swampscapes, etc.
• Nihilism, extinction, or the recalcitrance of the world (Eugene Thacker) & the South(s)
• C19 South & proto-Weird Fiction
• Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce, & H. P. Lovecraft
• The Weird associations of the South & the Antarctic (Poe, Herman Melville, Lovecraft)
• R. H. Barlow in Florida, his Weird Fiction, or his correspondence with Lovecraft
• Robert E. Howard in Texas, his Weird Fiction, or his correspondence with Lovecraft
• Weird Appalachia (Lovecraft, Manly Wade Hopkins’s Silver John stories, Fred Chappell)
• Henry S. Whitehead’s Weird West Indian tales
• Eudora Welty & Weird Fiction (Mitch Frye)
• Weird Fiction, modernist literary strategies, & the South (William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston “Uncle Monday”, Flannery O’Connor)
• The Weird in Latin American Boom fiction (Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, Augusto Monterroso), its forbearers (Jorge Luis Borges), & its successors (Junot Díaz, Jamaica Kincaid)
• Contemporary or New (South) Weird (Poppy Z. Brite, Stephen Graham Jones, Caitlín Kiernan, Joe Lansdale, Joyce Carol Oates, Jeff VanderMeer The Southern Reach Trilogy)
• Weird southern comics (Alan Moore et al. Saga of the Swamp Thing, Garth Ennis et al. Preacher)

Contact Info:

Travis Rozier, Ph.D.
Department of English & Linguistics
Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz
jamesrzr138@gmail.com


Bob Hodges, Ph.C.
Kollar Endowed Fellow
Dept. of English, U of Washington
bhodge4@gmail.com


Contact Email:
jamesrzr138@gmail.com