ACCUTE is excited to announce the addition of a new Member-Organized Panel for our 2022 Conference: New Intimacies: Literary Communities in the Aftermath, organized by Lily Cho (York University) and Erin Wunker (Dalhousie University).

To submit a proposal to this panel, please use our Online Submission Form. The deadline for proposals has been extended to Wednesday, 22 December 2021.

Literary Communities in the Aftermath

“My love to my pod in all directions. The smooth and the not quite so smooth. Those of you showing your back and those showing your belly. Those of you breaking through the surface and those staying in the deep. It’s an honor to be in the midst of you. Look around, listen out. Here we are.” ― Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Since last we gathered in rooms together we have endured both personal and global griefs, the aftermaths of which we will continue to reckon with in the years to come. We, Erin and Lily, find inspiration and learn from the intrepid work of Alexis Pauline Gumbs who draws together poetry, feminism, and intergenerational knowledge to transform the fields in which she works. With Gumbs’ directional love in mind, we invite papers that take up the question: how do we study literature in aftermaths? What texts ― past, present, or future ― are needed to keep us company? There is a textual purchase to the questions we are asking, as well as an opportunity to highlight, develop, or amplify scholarly modes of this work of being together in aftermaths. For us, this is a time of new intimacies that are still only beginning to form. We invite papers that engage with the following questions: 

• What is the shape of the new intimacies that we inhabit in the aftermaths of the individual and collective griefs that have unfolded in the last several months?
• How can we read for and think through these new intimacies?
• How can feminist friendships be the ground upon which these new intimacies form?
• What texts and ways of thinking will help us mourn together, and mend, the losses that we have endured? 
• What do we need to read, and how do we need to read, in order to live in the aftermaths of isolation?
• How has our relationship to longing changed and how can we read for this change? 

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