Darkness has always been defined in binary opposition to light. As Toni Morrison puts it in Playing in the Dark (1992): “Whiteness, alone, is mute, meaningless, unfathomable, pointless, frozen, veiled, curtained, dreaded, senseless, implacable.” While darkness and light are mutually constitutive, the threshold between the two is ambivalent; it is blurry and changing. In addition to its symbolic dimensions, the darkness-vs.-light binary can also be taken literally: the early settlers feared the dark while electricity effectively banished darkness from cities, for example. The dark may be rife with danger, a metaphorical space of erasure, and a tool of obfuscation, but at the same time, the dark may provide protection, a space for subversion, and a place of beauty.

In view of the multiple meanings of darkness in the American imagination, we invite papers on topics including—but not limited to:

• darkness and the racial imagination
• darkness and oppression/marginalization/erasure
• the surveillance of darkness
• dark bodies and/in light spaces
• darkness in memory/dark roots: trauma, selective memory of the past, etc.
• the aesthetics of darkness in (audio)visual media (e.g. the use of shadows)
• the role of literal darkness in everyday life, in the history of urban development, etc.
• the cartographic imagination and darkness
• darkness and the historical imagination (e.g. the “dark age”)
• darkness in political discourse (e.g. notions of America “descending into darkness,” the Intellectual Dark Web)
• darkness in performances
• power outages and sports
• the aesthetics of dark skies
• imagining the dark web
• darkness and outer space, the deep sea, the forest, the underworld, etc.
• darkness in Indigenous cultures
• artificial darkness
• the role of blank screens
• (color)blindness in literal and metaphorical senses
• the dark and darkness in subcultures (gothic, metal, witchcraft, etc.)
• darkness, existential dread, and making fun of it
• darkness and the monstrous (ghosts, otherworldly creatures, etc.)

DEADLINE FOR PROPOSALS: JUNE 11, 2023 (notification of acceptance by the end of June)

Popmec accepts abstract proposals for individual presentations (≈ 300 words) or full panels (3-4 presenters, ≈ 250-word description of panel plus abstracts of all papers). Please, email your proposal to popmec.darkness@gmail.com as a single attachment (.doc, .docx, .odt) including name, affiliation (if any), and contact email.

The conference will take place virtually, tentatively on 4-8 September 2023. Since Popmec expect that presenters from all across the globe will participate in the conference, real-time presentations will take place indicatively between 4PM and 9PM Central European Summer Time.

The organizers may decide to pursue a publication project based on the conference.