CFP: Writing Shared Futures: African American Literature and Racialisation
BAAS Panel at ‘English: Shared Futures,’ 5-7 July 2017, Newcastle, UK

Contributions are invited for a BAAS panel at ‘English: Shared Futures,’ a large-scale conference spanning across the discipline.

The panel ‘Writing Shared Futures: African American Literature and Racialisation’ will explore the significances of, and engagements with, racialisation in post-Civil Rights writing by African Americans. It will seek to ask how understandings of racialisation are connected with understandings of the future, and to examine the ways in which literary texts have questioned categories and binaries of race and have complicated views of the processes by which racial identity comes into being.

Such processes might be made visible in contexts such as:

• migration and immigration
• multi-ethnic coalitions
• intersectional politics
• future worlds
• internationalism
• coming of age narratives
• popular culture/music/sport
• contemporary politics, especially the Obama years
• new technologies and social media

Possible writers include Elizabeth Alexander, Paul Beatty, Octavia Butler, Samuel Delany, Percival Everett, Adrienne Kennedy, Andrea Lee, Reginald McKnight, Toni Morrison, Suzan-Lori Parks, Claudia Rankine, Ishmael Reed, Colson Whitehead, John Edgar Wideman and August Wilson.

We welcome submissions from researchers at all career stages, including postgraduates. Please send paper proposals of no more than 300 words and short biographies of no more than 200 words to both Jenny Terry j.a.terry@durham.ac.uk and Nicole Kingn.king2@reading.ac.uk by Monday 12 September 2016.

For further details of this conference, organised by the English Association and University English, please see: http://www.englishsharedfutures.uk/