Society for the Study of Southern Literature
Upcoming Conference
2010 New Orleans Conference
Be sure you've saved the dates--April 8-11, 2010--and made
plans to attend. We're meeting in New Orleans at the
Renaissance Pere Marquette Hotel, a small boutique hotel
(run by Marriott), just a block across Canal Street from the
French Quarter and steps away from the streetcar, with easy
access to the Garden District and Uptown. Rates for the
hotel will be only $139, an excellent price for this
location and our April date-which often features the
prettiest weather (and the most festivals!) of the year.
Registration will be $100, or $90 if you register before
February 1. The rate for graduate students will be $40
before February 1 and $50 thereafter. A website for
registration will be posted soon, with a hotel registration
site later this year.
We are planning a number of exciting plenary sessions,
featuring Thadious Davis of the University of Pennsylvania
as our keynote speaker, a lecture by Harvard historian
Walter Johnson, presentations by poet and cultural critic
Kalaamu ya Salaam and performance artist Cherice Harrison
Nelson, and special guest, Caribbean writer Cristina Garcia,
author of Dreaming in Cuban and The Aguero Sisters. Other
special events in the works are specialized tours of New
Orleans and the area on Sunday (including post-Katrina
tours, a Laura Plantation tour, Black History in New
Orleans, literary New Orleans and more). One lecture and
reception will also be held uptown, on the campuses of
Loyola and Tulane. It's going to be a great weekend!
Paper and panel proposals will be due November 15; please
submit your one-page proposal to sssl2010@gmail.com.
CALL FOR PAPERS: Society for the Study of Southern
Literature [SSSL] Conference 2010
EVERYBODY LOVES YOU WHEN YOU'RE DOWN AND SOUTH:
Cultural Capital in Hard Times
April 8-11, 2010
Renaissance Pere Marquette Hotel
New Orleans, Louisiana
In the southern United States "hard times" seems redundant:
the South has always been the bad news region of the
country. We are the site of violence, poverty, despair,
bigotry, and floods of biblical proportions, which makes us
something to see. So we become a preferred destination: for
tourists and carpetbaggers, entrepreneurs and retirees,
historians and theorists, writers and readers. And hard
times turn into good times, at least for some. One powerful
paradox of the South has been the ways that its deficiencies
become its best asset. Hardship inspires the creativity
necessary not just for the traditional activities of
"making a chicken stretch," "piecing a quilt", or singing
the blues, but also for using that fabled cultural capital
to write poetry that travels the world or to get a
post-Katrina gig as a Mardi Gras Indian in Paris.
But even if we have taken our hard-earned cultural capital
and exported "America" across the globe in appealing and
profitable southern attire, if we've transformed the Bible
Belt into the Sun Belt, producing BMW's faster than
Baptists, we never really seem to be able to shake that hard
times handle. Why not? One reason is certainly that the
nation needs us as a projection screen, making the hard
times in the rest of the nation invisible. Something called
"The South" remains the movie set for a host of familiar
fears: about miscegenation, the loss of national identity,
economic decline, shifting sexualities, environmental decay,
and collapsing infrastructures. But as the rest of the
nation catches up, unable to deny being down and out both at
home and abroad, the exceptional status of the South seems
less exceptional. What can be learned from the ways that the
South has been surviving, enduring, and weathering or even
overcoming, transforming, and reinventing hard times? Has
the South always been selling itself up river in order to
survive? How has our co-dependent, perpetual otherness
created cultural capital, capital culture, and the culture
of capitalism for the nation and the world?
By taking our conversations down to the mouth of the
Mississippi, to New Orleans, that paragon of southern
cultural capital, we hope that we can take a harder look at
how the persistent (or perceived) deficiencies of the South
have become our primary currency--and thus continue our
efforts to re-conceptualize southern status-not just down
and out, but up and in, around and about.
Some of the topics we might want to address include:
o southern cultural capital and capitols
o economics and class disparities
o the cultures of poverty and violence
o migration and immigration in global hard times
o miscegenated space and cultural production
o ethnic identity as cultural capital
o Afro-Caribbean cultural interchanges
o Latino and Central American Souths
o climate change, hurricanes and weathering hard times
o industrial cultures: oil, fishing, sugar cane, cotton,
rice, indigo, chicken, Wal-Mart
o the economics of tourism
o Hollywood South
o tourist souths: Natchez, Nashville, Charleston, New
Orleans
o global exchanges: southern music, food, culture,
literature around the world
o sharecroppers and other silenced voices
o 1930's documentary south
o the south as a retirement community
o the Golf South
o archeological souths
o post-Katrina New Orleans
o music as survival capital: blues, jazz, bluegrass
o selling Native cultures and casinos
Program committee members: John Lowe, Nghana Lewis,
Katherine Henninger, Rebecca Mark, and Barbara Ewell. We
welcome both session proposals and individual paper
abstracts addressing the topics of southern cultural
capital, cultural exchanges, and weathering hard times.
Please send two-page session proposals and/or one page
individual paper abstracts by November 15, 2009, to
sssl2010@gmail.com
Barbara C. Ewell
Professor of English
Loyola University
2010 New Orleans Conference