Two new ACCUTE CFPs have been added to the Member-Organized Panels for our 2022 Conference: “What Fuckan Panel: Studies uv biill bisset,” organized by Eric Schmaltz (Glendon College, York University), and “Strangers and Kin,” organized by Rusaba Alam (University of British Columbia).

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

TO VIEW ALL ACCUTE MEMBER-ORGANIZED CFPS, PLEASE CLICK HERE.

What Fuckan Panel: Studies uv bill bissett

“well now iull be in th study for th rest of th night with my nose in a boo k”

— bill bissett, We Sleep Inside Each Other All (1966)

In 1963 avant-garde poet and painter bill bissett blew the gates of Canadian publishing wide open with the inauguration of the radical, collagist, ever-shifting mimeographed magazine blewointment. Since then, bissett has published countless poems, paintings, drawings, collages, recorded sounds, videos, sculptures, installations, and more. bissett’s work is an undeniably dynamic force in Canada, opening toward magic, beauty, spirit, action, and possibility. In that spirit of openings, this panel invites proposals for papers that reflect on the multifaceted nature of bissett’s artwork and writing. In particular, the organizer seeks proposals that attend to newer and/or lesser-discussed ways of knowing bissett’s work, including but not limited to his connection to international contexts, social and activist contexts (gay and queer activism, protest movements, disability, mental health), aesthetic contexts (painting, collage, music, video, performance, collaboration), ecological and environmental contexts, book and magazine publishing contexts (book art, periodicals, bibliography), and other ways of studying this work. 

STRANGERS AND KIN

“Stretching the metaphor, we might say that one goes in search of a ‘homeland’ that is as sufficient for the needs of strangers as of kin.”

Hortense Spillers, “‘All the Things You Could Be by Now if Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother’: Psychoanalysis and Race”

Critique is back once more. Awash in the essentialist politics of equity, diversity, and inclusion in the neoliberal university, many of us turn with renewed interest to critical methods like deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and the discursive analysis of power. These methods produced foundational queer, feminist, and anti-colonial interventions by undermining textual authority and the grounds of identity. In one such foundational text, Hortense Spillers writes of resisting racialized forms of methodological enclosure to prevent Black feminist insight about language, subjectivity, and psychic life from being siloed away under the sign of racial difference by the institutional demarcation of fields of knowledge and literary and critical canons.

Thinking along these lines, this panel invites papers on comparative and transnational approaches to reading, writing, and/ or teaching critical theory in Canadian English departments today. In our era of diversity statements, institutional apologies, and the sedimentation of neoliberal politics within fields of literary study, thinking through difference beyond tokenization remains more than possible. Strangers and kin alike are invited to meet, commiserate, and strategize about the critical encounter with difference as practice of freedom.

TO VIEW ALL ACCUTE MEMBER-ORGANIZED CFPS, PLEASE CLICK HERE.