Fascinating Q&A with editor of the Encyclopedia of Beat Literature, BSA secretary and EBSN member Kurt Hemmer on the Blues music website Blues.Gr! – check it out here:
https://blues.gr/profiles/blogs/q-a-with-professor-of-english-at-harper-college-kurt-hemmer-the-e
Call for Papers:
European Journal of American Studies (EJAS), Special Issue “Beat Times: Queer Temporalities in Beat Writing” (Edited by Estíbaliz Encarnación-Pinedo and Juan Antonio Suárez)
Issue description:
Spatial discourses have dominated much of the scholarly debate around the artistic and literary production of the Beat Generation, producing over the last decades a substantial body of work on travel, border-crossing, liminality, dwelling, and heterotopias. By contrast, the temporal dimension of Beat literature has remained fairly understudied. While Beat poets and artists traveled far and wide, inward and outward—as they embarked on physical and psychedelic trips—and their work offers ample testimony of dissident spatial practice, it also suggests new forms of thinking about and relating to time. Temporal loops, repetitions, time folds, anachronisms, heterochronias, diverse uses of memory and of the past, and multiple other disruptions of linear clock time occur frequently in Beat literature and art.
This special issue aims at studying how the Beats’ social, sexual, and artistic marginality prompted alternative perceptions and uses of time. Understood as queer temporalities—a concept developed by critics José E. Muñoz, Jack Halberstam, and Elizabeth Freeman, among others—these alternative perceptions contested reigning (chrono)normativity. At odds with the dominant temporal order, the Beats rebelled against the functional, productive time characteristic of contemporary technocratic societies and embraced unproductive, contemplative, and aberrant durations; they opposed the cult of linear progress with critical uses of memory and invocations of the past; they imagined utopian futures; and they generally envisioned life (in Halberstam’s words) “according to logics that lie outside of those paradigmatic markers of life experience—namely, birth, marriage, reproduction, and death.”
Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):
About the journal:
The European Journal of American Studies is an open-access, peer-reviewed academic journal published by the European Association for American Studies (EAAS). It is indexed in SCOPUS, SJR (Q1), and the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI, Q2).
Timeline:
Contributors send their abstracts by May 1st 2023
Contributors send their manuscripts by December 1st 2023
Editorial Screening by December 15th 2023
Peer review round 1 completed by March 15th 2024
Peer review round 2 (if necessary) by June 1st 2024
Final Editorial decision by August 1st 2024
Acceptance letters will be provided upon acceptance.
Submitting Articles:
Abstracts and articles should be submitted electronically in a message sent to the editors (estibaliz.encarnacion@um.es and jsuarez@um.es) as an attachment in .doc format. Contributions should be between 7,000 and 8,000 words and should be preceded by a short abstract and a list of key words. Biographical references and general presentation should follow the MLA Style sheet (here)
William S. Burroughs in Context (Cambridge University Press), edited by Oliver Harris, Davis Schneiderman and Alex Wermer-Colan, is seeking expressions of interest for potential contributors. The volume joins the successful Literature in Context series, and will be a landmark publication that aims to capture the multi-faceted fascinations of Burroughs’ work.
In the mid-1950s and after, Tangier welcomed many artists, poets and intellectuals. Influenced by Paul Bowles, members of the Beat Generation came to the northern city to be inspired, to complete their projects and to live the Moroccan dream. Few lived a human dialogue with the locals, but most of them wanted to experience other things in order to expand the language of experience beyond the practical world.
During the “INTERZONE” times in Tangier, the East met the West in a debacle of utter incomprehension, each one waiting for the Other’s Answer, the Secret, without being able to find it, because neither one nor the other had it. For some, it was a place of intercultural encounters, and for many others rather the place of a debacle, which signals the failure of the “culturalist” approach to reality.
Via our film program : ” TANGIER INTERZONE 2 “, we will try to explore this frontier between reality and fiction, and discuss the imaginary dimension of this same “reality”. This year we expand our program to works and artists who don’t only have a direct link with the movement, but were inspired by it and lived the experience from within.
The event is taking place at The Arab Media Lab’s headquarters in Marrakech, and also online.
You can find the full program here: http://www.arabmedialab.org/tangier-interzone-edition-2-nov2022/
Online event staged by The Global Blake Network – EBSN member and Blake/Beat expert Franca Bellarsi will discuss the emerging sphere of ecocriticism and the Beats, via the work of Allen Ginsberg and William Blake. See here: https://globalblake.zoamorphosis.com/2022/10/17/global-blake-in-conversation-with-franca-bellarsi/
The CFP for CUT-UPS@2023 is now live. This conference replaces the 2020 conference that was cancelled due to COVID. It’s great that we can now look forward to holding this event!
As a “Special Conference”, it has a particular focus, rather than the usual scope of EBSN Conferences.
It will take place at the excellent University of Chicago Center, Paris, September 12 to 15.
As the programme will differ from the one planned in 2020 we are posting a general call for papers, talks, panels, events, and performances with a deadline of 1st February 2023.
An all-members email should have appeared in your inboxes – see the mailing shot here:
https://mailchi.mp/a8ed4d8c4542/quarterly-update-12131475?e=c2e3406256
Access the poll (on future event planning) here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1HYK_9DzLmg-b-6kgbMLc0q3RHM7PrnT19GYtsHBaGGo/edit?ts=6360e6c6
On October 28, 2022, the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of Coimbra, Portugal, will host a celebratory event to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Jack Kerouac. The event includes a keynote by Prof. Polina Mackay, panels on Kerouac’s literature and on the film adaptations and translations of his work, a debate on the influence of Kerouac and the Beats on the Portuguese literary scene and a multimedia concert.
Really excited that our first live in-person conference since 2019 is about to start! If you are coming and have not registered yet you can do so HERE. The same link will work if you wish to attend virtually (for only €30) – which also includes access to the screening of the film Songpoet! How can you afford to miss out? Looking forward to seeing you all 🙂
On March 12, 2022 it was a hundred years ago that the American writer Jack Kerouac was born.
To celebrate his centennial a large number of events is taken place this year. Kerouacs’ birthplace Lowell, Massachusetts takes centre stage with readings, film presentations and concerts during the whole year – Kerouac’s birthday has not gone by unnoticed!
In the Netherlands we pay homage to the great writer with a full-day program on Sunday October 9 at the artists’ village of Ruigoord, near Amsterdam. A day dedicated to Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation. Writers, performers and scholars from the Netherlands, Germany, Spain, England and the USA will take part in the event. Keynote speakers Joyce Johnson and Ed Sanders, both contemporaries and friends of Kerouac, will take part via Zoom.
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