[Commlist] MLA 2020 CFP

  Please consider submitting your abstracts to our panel by March 10 
2019. Here is the description:
*“The Unbearable Wrongness of Being”: Abjection, Power, and the 
Possibilities of the Human in Popular Culture*
*
*
Call for Paper Submissions
Panel Organizers: Debarati Biswas and Laura Westengard
Submission: 250-word abstracts/short bio
Deadline for submissions: March 10, 2019
Contact person information: Laura Westengard and Debarati Biswas 
((debarati.biswas /at/ gmail.com) <mailto:(debarati.biswas /at/ gmail.com)>)
In her conversation with Katherine Mckittrick, Sylvia Wynter reminds us 
that black/lesbian/feminists in the sixties such as June Jordan took up 
and further elaborated “the color line’s range of subjectively 
experienced nonnormalcy of being.” They voiced their outcry against what 
Jordan defines as our “unbearable wrongness of being.” This panel 
examines the presidential theme of being human by shifting our gaze to 
the abject spaces and formulations that function to deny humanity to 
certain subjects. To create the “human” normative literary and cultural 
production interprets racialized and queer subjects through the lens of 
social death. Locations associated with social death and therefore 
presumed to be incompatible with sociality or human bonding--such as 
prisons, segregated housing projects, war torn zones, and other such 
spaces of exception--have become the abode of displaced masses whom 
Stuart Hall describes as “perpetually unsettled people.” These spaces, 
however, have fostered socialites that have gone on to change the way 
abjected subjects exist in the world and have produced enormous 
socio-political changes over time. Our panel asks how texts such as pulp 
fiction, sci-fi, comic books, graphic novels, films, music, and other 
artistic expressions of marginalized “humans” have interrogated what it 
means to be human by embracing histories of negative inheritances, How 
do these cultural expressions from abjected spaces and outcries against 
the “wrongness of being” conceptualize the unknown possibilities of our 
freedom and creativity as a species? If as Darieck Scott argues 
“abjection in/of blackness endows its inheritors with a form of 
counterintuitive power,” then what are the possibilities of black 
power/power of the abject?
We invite papers that examine how popular cultural production offers 
other epistemologies of being human in relation to environments, 
socialities, and identities that have been abjected from normative 
formulations of humanity. Popular literature itself figures as a genre 
tied to excess and assumed to be undeserving of the critical gaze 
because of its location outside of the academic canon. From British 
Gothic Fiction to black and queer U.S. pulp fiction to the speculative 
afro-futurism of pop music stars such as Janelle Monáe, popular culture 
has been and continues to be a particularly apt location for 
investigating humanity from a place that exceeds hegemonic notions of 
cultural value and respectability.
Papers examining genres, spaces, and subjectivities in excess of 
normative definitions of humanity are welcome, specifically as addressed 
by popular cultural forms from any geographical location since the dawn 
of the twentieth century. Paper topics might include:
·Popular culture and the possibilities of the human as a species
·Queer of color critique, Cyborg studies, animal studies, posthumanism, 
etc. and the “nonnormalcy of being”
·Gothicism as a means of establishing binaries such as human/inhuman, 
inside/outside, good/evil
·Speculative fiction, lifeworlds and the human/non-human divide
·The “praxis of being human” in spaces marked by confinement, 
regulation, and surveillance
·Human/non-human entanglements in urban spaces of exception such as 
nightclubs, prisons, cruising grounds, etc.
·Spaces of joy, pleasure, resistance, or tumult and the possibilities of 
the human
·Unhomely spaces and the possibilities of communities, intimacies, and 
friendships


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