CFP: JAm It! #5, Special Issue
“Watching the Watchmen:” The State of Policing in U.S. Cultural Production
US obsession with policing can be traced back as far as John Winthrop’s sermon “A Model of Christian Charity” (climaxed in the noted “the eyes of all people are on us”), delivered in 1630 on board of the Arbella. In one of white America’s foundational texts, the “eyes of all people” stand as an early figuration of panoptical undercurrents in the United States, whereby a professedly metaphysical yet very concrete control is enforced to safeguard social and ethical order. Canonical US literature, from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man also reminds us that order, even when not deferred to the State, has been violently enforced through coercion, stigma, or segregation throughout the history of the nation. Echoing the seminal figure of Esther Prynne, narratives produced by authors as diverse as W. E. B. Du Bois, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and, more recently, Sandra Cisneros, Louise Erdrich, and Ta-Nehisi Coates, are figurations and proofs of the United States’ leviathan policing apparatus and its employment in regulating non-conforming subjects in the name of a perfectly-engineered City Upon a Hill and the capitalistic permutation of its transcendental concept of social order.
Please find below a call for papers for an international conference entitled “Beyond Borders: Mapping Sexualities and the Sexualisation of Spaces.” It will be held at Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3 in Lyon on May 6 and 7, 2021.
300-word abstracts should be sent to Pierre-Antoine Pellerin (pierre-antoine.pellerin@univ-
Read More “02/11/2020 – CFP: Beyond Borders: Mapping Sexualities and the Sexualisation of Spaces” »
Paper proposals are invited for a special issue on the topic of Pandemics in European Literature (20th -21st ce.): Theory and Practice and they might explore the topic of pandemics in the European Literature.