Calls For Papers and
Conferences
2012 South Atlantic Modern Language Association Convention
November 9-12, 2012
Research Triangle Park
Durham, North Carolina
The Langston Hughes Society welcomes papers for a special session on “Text as Memoir: Tales of Travel, Immigration, and Exile in the Writings of Langston Hughes.” We are seeking papers that examine Langston Hughes’s writings within the context of the special session topic. Please email a one page typed abstract, a biographical profile, and contact information to Dr. Sharon Lynette Jones at sharon.jones@wright.edu by June 1, 2012. Any accepted presenter must join the South Atlantic Modern Language Association and The Langston Hughes Society. Accepted presenters will be notified of the deadline for joining SAMLA and the Langston Hughes Society.
“Langston Hughes and Literary Radicalism” at the American Literature Association 2012
American Literature Association Conference, May 24-27, 2012, in San Francisco
The Langston Hughes Society will sponsor a panel at the 2012 American Literature Association Conference that reexamines the vexed relationship between political and aesthetic radicalism in Hughes’s writing. Critical judgments of Hughes have long distinguished between the works of a politically-radical, leftist Hughes and the works of a formally-radical, modernist Hughes. For instance, Hughes’s sociopolitical Marxist verse of the 1930s, when not dismissed, has been devalued in relation to his modernist blues- and jazz-informed verse experiments of the 1920s and 1950s. As one of the modern period’s pre-eminent African-American writers, the bifurcation of political and aesthetic radicalism—of vanguardism and avant-gardism—in Hughes’s work shapes general assumptions we bring to African-American and U.S. literary politics and literary form.
In order to begin rethinking what radicalism means for studying Langston Hughes, we welcome submissions that address any aspect of Hughes’s political and formal projects, including:
Ways Hughes’s work dialogues with radical political movements such as Marxism, Pan-Africanism, and the Black Radical Tradition
The sociopolitical ramifications of Hughes’s poetic experiments with the blues and jazz
The relationship of Hughes’s work to predominant/canonical forms of modernist innovation
Hughes’s experiments with popular verse forms/ his relationship to popular verse culture
The politics of Hughes’s popular and/or literary-critical reputation
The dominant periodization of Hughes’s political radicalism as a limited 1930s phase
Cross-genre comparative analyses of the formal and political labors of Hughes’s verse, prose, and drama
International aesthetic and sociopolitical influences on Hughes’s work
The sociopolitical uses to which Hughes’s iconic literary and cultural status has been put
Please send a 250-word abstract and CV to Nathaniel Mills at nathaniel.mills@csun.edu by December 10, 2011. All presenters must be members of the Langston Hughes Society by May 1, 2012.
College Language Association Convention 2012
The Langston Hughes Society
Panel: “Langston Hughes and the U.S. South”
Convention Dates: March 28-March 31, 2012
Location: Atlanta, Georgia
The Langston Hughes Society welcomes papers that explore the connections between Langston Hughes and the U.S. South. Papers which examine racial identity (for example, "the mulatto"), Scottsboro, Langston Hughes's relationships with Zora Neale Hurston and/or other authors, and additional aspects of Langston Hughes's writings and life as related to the U.S. South are welcome. All accepted presenters must join the Langston Hughes Society and the College Language Association by February 1, 2012. Please email an abstract (300-400 words) and a biographical profile (3-5 lines) to Dr. Sharon Lynette Jones at sharon.jones@wright.edu by September 5, 2011.
Modern Language Association 2012, session # TBA.
Links provide abstracts as they are available.
"Reading Langston Hughes in the Age of Barack Obama"
Time and location to be announced.
Chair: Dolan Hubbard, Morgan State University
"Invisible Hughes: Barack Obama's 2008 Democratic National Convention Acceptance Speech," Jason Miller, North Carolina State University, Raleigh
"Postmodern, Post-Racial African-American Radicalism: Reading The Big Sea in Obama's Nation," Nathaniel Mills, California State University, Northridge
"'In Search of Sun': Self-Fashioning in the Autobiographies of Langston Hughes and Barack Obama," Andrew Yerkes, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Modern Language Association Convention 2012 (January 5-8, 2012)
Location: Seattle , Washington
Special Session: Reading Langston Hughes in the Age of Barack Obama
Abstracts exploring Hughes's transformative vision of ethnicity/race. 250 word abstract and CV by 1 March 2011 to Sharon Lynette Jones (sharon.jones@wright.edu).
All presenters must join the Modern Language Association and the Langston Hughes Society.
