Call for Papers, Panels/Roundtables, Provocations, and Performances

Submission Deadline: 16 August 2024
Contact Email: gbetts@brocku.ca

Organized by Lillian Allen and Gregory Betts, this conference will serve to address a cross-cultural, interdisciplinary literary, musical, and sound poetry heritage across a variety of cultures. We intend to assemble a diverse collection of leading poets, sound artists, and musicians in a collaboration of diverse experimental energies. By foregrounding the work of authors who have broken through the binding silence of the page to produce astonishing and essential contributions, and engaging emerging voices in the field, we will reimagine the role of literary sound poetics in a society where silence is a luxury item, where culture is truncated by ideologies and the legacies of overlapping colonialism, and the cadence of our environment is overwhelmingly shaped by culture and capital. In a spirit of contestation to address climate change and colonialisms, we want to make noise together to expand the possibilities of contemporary performance experimentation and literary-sound scholarship. We will draw together sound poets, dub poets, digital and sound artists, Inuit throat singers, and scholars of various sonic poetries in a focused exploration of the possibilities of our auditory imagination.

Some of the foundational questions that inspired this event, and that applicants might like to respond to, include but are not limited to:

• If literature, and by extension language, are entwined with sound, music, and performance, how might the interaction of these forms open-up new ground for future literatures?
• How have literary cultures shifted in the contemporary moment in response to complex socio-cultural and ecological issues?
• How have traditions of Black orality and music carved a stance against Empire?
• What types of new pedagogies must emerge to make sense of the various interactions between literature and music, while acknowledging the complex transformation and the range of emerging cultural practices?
• Can we locate the new imaginaries in sound?
• Where can one hear climate change?
• If sound assumes listening, how can we decolonize our listening?
• What can we hear in history of the land?
• What does post-colonialism actually sound like?
• What are liberatory and emancipatory practices of anti-racism in sound/sounding?
• Where is the line between voice and tone, expression and intonation?
• What was there before language? What might come after?

Proposals should include a title, an abstract of 150–200 words, a brief biographical note (up to 100 words), and contact details. If you would like to propose a themed panel, roundtable or a provocation, do please get in touch informally asap.

Please submit your proposals to conference organiser Lillian Allen and Gregory Betts at gbetts@brocku.ca by 16 August 2024. We encourage submissions from scholars at all stages of their careers, including early career writers, and sound artists, researchers and postgraduate students. Interdisciplinary approaches and innovative methodologies are welcome.