CFP: Captivity Narratives of Samuel Delany and Octavia Butler (3/25/03; MLA '03)

"Close Encounters: The Captivity Narratives of Samuel R. Delany and Octavia
E. Butler"

Call for Papers for a proposed special session at MLA
Deadline for Paper Proposals: March 25, 2003

Abstracts are requested for a proposed special session which seeks to
understand the significance of tropes of confinement in the speculative
fiction of Samuel R. Delany and Octavia E. Butler. The panel will suppose
then that many of Delany's and Butler's texts are illustrative of a strand of
literary Afrofuturism--the term coined by Mark Dery for SF which considers
African-American themes and engages African-American issues--which shares
motivations and aims with American conversion narratives, spiritual
autobiographies, community biographies, secular autobiographies, and, most
notably, captivity and slave narratives: the projection of a futurity which
must acknowledge and transcend a past circumscribed by historical erasure,
alienation, oppression, torture, and/or some form of physical confinement.

While papers that focus on texts of Delany or Butler or both are preferred,
papers on topic that treat other Afrofuturist literary, musical, or visual
texts will be considered. Analyses comparing and contrasting American
Afrofuturist texts with other American captivity or slave narratives are
especially welcome. As the most significant way Delany's and Butler's texts
complicate SF conventions is by foregrounding the subjective limits of
narrators and protagonists, papers will likely wish to address these limits
in some way. Papers may wish to relate physical circumscription to the
following concerns: the formation of gender, sexual, racial, species
identity; biological determination, in its extreme form essentialism;
reproduction and/or maternity; kinship or other forms of community-building;
the role or construction of a subconscious; traumas of rape, sexual
exploitation, or dislocation; technological change; utopian or colonialist
aspirations; the function of desire, pleasure, love, empathy, disgust, pain,
hatred, depression, or apathy.

Please send abstracts of 250-500 words in the body of an email message to

John Honerkamp
Dept. of English
New York University
jh236_at_nyu.edu

Presenters must be members of the MLA by April 7, 2003.

         ===============================================
         From the Literary Calls for Papers Mailing List
                      CFP_at_english.upenn.edu
                       Full Information at
                http://www.english.upenn.edu/CFP/
          or write Erika Lin: elin_at_english.upenn.edu
         ===============================================
Received on Wed Mar 12 2003 - 15:50:57 EST