Society for the Study of Southern Literature
Call for Papers
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CALL FOR PAPERS: Society for the Study of Southern Literature [SSSL]
EVERYBODY LOVES YOU WHEN YOU'RE DOWN AND SOUTH:
Cultural Capital in Hard Times
April 8-11, 2010
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
Call for Papers
MLA 2011: Los Angeles, January 6-9, 2011
Landscape and Identity in the U.S. South
This session is sponsored by the Society for the Study of Southern Literature (SSSL) for the January 2011 Modern Language Association conference in Los Angeles. In the South, nature, however problematically defined, has always had complex relationships with cultural and individual identities. Landscape has traditionally served as a marker of race and/or class, with different features identified with particular, often marginalized Southern subcultures (mountain men, swamp rats, hillbillies), while more easily arable land (or land that better fit picturesque visions of the agrarian ideal) tended to be associated with aristocracy. In times of natural disaster, vulnerability often follows the divides of class and race, as well, making even these tragedies potential commentaries on the intersection of nature and identity. This panel focuses on representations of the intersection of personal and/or cultural identity and natural space in Southern literature, particularly reflecting those moments when either cultural attitudes toward the landscape or the landscape itself have undergone significant change -- as space is transformed, marketed, protected, polluted, abandoned, or destroyed. Papers might also consider representations of the southern landscape by travel writers, or as commodified and marketed in promotional literature to various ends during different eras.
Please email an abstract of approximately 500 words along with any equipment requests to Anthony Wilson at awilson@lagrange.edu by March 1, 2010. All panel participants must be members of the MLA before April 1, 2010.
Call for Papers
MLA 2011: Los Angeles, January 6-9, 2011
Literary Architectonics of the U.S. South
This session is sponsored by the Society for the Study of Southern Literature (SSSL) for the January 2011 Modern Language Association conference in Los Angeles. In addition to iconic images of southern architecture (e.g., the neoclassical, white-columned plantation manor flanked by rows of slave cabins, the shady front porch and solid clapboards of the pastoral homestead, the run-down sharecropper shack, the trailer park), what other architectures pervade literary depictions of the U.S. South, and to what purposes? This panel will address the ways in which literary architectonics provide space for cultural reflection and critique, speaking to-or against-the recent discourse concerning the spatialization of history. Can we draw connections between literary and architectural styles and structures? What do representational architectures tell us about their surrounding cultural histories, especially with regard to matters of economics, race, class, gender, regionality, and nationhood? Do these (symbolically) built environments embody a sense of historical weight, or one of obsolescence and ephemerality? Do they imply an exceptional rural past for the South, or a crossregional (sub)urbanizing impulse? Are these structures aesthetic and/or functional? Panoptical and/or liberatory? Do they bolster traditional conceptions of regional identity, or offer blueprints for challenging the tropes of southern essentialism and point towards a transregional ethos?
Please email (as an attachment and copied into the text of your message) an abstract (250-500 words), along with any requests for a-v support, to Daniel Cross Turner at dturner@siena.edu by March 1, 2010. All panel participants must be members of MLA before April 1, 2010.
2010 New Orleans Conference