2010 Call for Papers

The Latina/o Literature and Culture Society of the American Literature Association seeks proposals for the American Literature Association’s 21st annual conference at the Hyatt Regency in the Embarcadero Center in San Francisco on May 27-30, 2010.

Details for each session appear below. Those interested in submitting a proposal should send a one-page abstract with your name, position, affiliation, and contact information to the appropriate panel chair.

For information about the Latina/o Literature and Culture Society, please contact Latina/o Literature and Culture Society president Eliza Rodriguez y Gibson at eliza_rodriguezygibson@redlands.edu.

For more information about the ALA and the conference, go to www.americanliterature.org. 

Deadline for Submissions to the Society is January 4, 2010

Representations of Identity in Memoir, Autobiography and Testimonio

This panel will explore representations of Latina/o identity in autobiography, memoir, narrated autobiography and testimonios.  What are the possibilities, limits and dangers offered by the listed genres? What do they tell us about identity, displacement, agency, and history?  How have the genres evolved?  Does our current historical knowledge complicate our reading or does it illuminate our understanding? We are interested in examining how Latina/os articulate agency in circumstances that would otherwise contain them, and how these published narratives inform our own current-day struggles to articulate identity. Please email abstracts of 300-500 words by January 4th, 2010 to Lisette Ordorica Lasater llasa001@ucr.edu. Include with your abstract your name, academic affiliation, and contact information. 

Science Fiction in the Caribbean/Latin American Diaspora

When Junot Díaz’s protagonist in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) asks the question “What more sci-fi than the Santo Domingo?  What more fantasy than the Antilles?” he both draws our attention to the affinity that the geographical space of the Caribbean has for the fantastical elements of science fiction (SF) and also possibly indicts the critics of the genre for their lack of acknowledgement of the narratives from this area that might fit its characteristics.  This panel seeks papers that support Oscar’s assertion.  Papers may address the works in SF of writers from the Caribbean/Latin American diaspora, meditations on why these writers have been marginalized in this genre, new discoveries of writers or texts that should be classified as SF from the Caribbean/Latin American diaspora, or how the Caribbean/Latin American geographical space has been addressed in North American SF.  Please submit paper proposals of approximately 300 words with your name and academic affiliation to akb1@mit.edu by January 4, 2010.

Roundtable on Teaching Latina/o Literature.

This session will explore ways of teaching Latina/o literature from a variety of perspectives in a diversity of settings and from a range of approaches—both within and beyond Latina/o Studies.  What are the particular challenges and opportunities that teaching this body of work present to teachers and to students? We especially want to invite participants who are new to teaching Latina/o literatures to join us.  Please send a short (300 word) statement of interest along with a very short version of your CV (1-2 pages) to eliza_rodriguezygibson@redlands.edu by January 4, 2010.