CFP: Literature of the Pacific (6/1/04; collection)
We call for papers for a proposed edited collection on the topics of literature and authority—governmental, legal, rhetorical, anthropological--in the Pacific, including Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, other Pacific Island nations and Hawai’i. Successful essays will address one or more Pacific writers and/or texts, including both indigenous and "white" writers, and will address either how the interrelationships of politics and culture affects writers, readers, and literature or how literatures (traditional and non-traditional) reflect themes of the relationship of history, authority, and cultural self-expression.
Possible topics:
--literature as revisionist historiography/anthropology
--colonialism, postcolonialism, or neo-colonialism and as discussed in Pacific literature
--laws (or governmental practice) about who can write, about what is piracy or copyrighted, criminality, social transgression, incarceration and other related topics as related to national identity and/or national literature
--governmental coups or instability as reflected or discussed in literature
--politics of land rights and property, treaty, mining, farming rights, and land use, both of indigenous and non-indigenous people, as reflected or discussed in literature
--ecological and environmental laws and issues as reflected or discussed in literature
--women’s rights and family laws about domestic violence, reproduction, marriage, and divorce as reflected or discussed in literature
--welfare, worker’s rights, and social justice legislation as reflected or discussed in literature
--education as reflected or discussed in literature
--medical practice, medicine, drug use, drinking and public drunkenness laws as reflected or discussed in literature
--law enforcement or the penal system as reflected or discussed in literature
--questions of what is a crime and who are criminals (outlaws) as reflected or discussed in literature
Deadlines: Please submit 150-250 word abstracts of original, unpublished work by June 1 to one of the following addresses. By e-mail: Ned Watts: wattse@msu.edu; Roger Bresnahan: bresnaha@msu.edu; Rebecca Weaver-Hightower: raweav1@yahoo.com. By mail: Roger Bresnahan, Dept. of Writing, Rhetoric
and American Cultures, 235 Bessey Hall, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824-1033.
The editors will respond to submissions by July 15 and will expect completed manuscripts by December 15. The editors are interested in essays that are theoretically mature yet highly readable, that are grounded in readings of literature in the service of cultural studies, and that add to the growing interest in literature of the Pacific and in intersections between literature and legal issues.
=====
Dr. Rebecca Weaver-Hightower
Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures
Michigan State University
Book-reviews editor,
Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies
raweav1@yahoo.com
www.msu.edu/~weaverr
