CALL FOR PAPERS

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Literature has portrayed countless struggles against domination and control, reproducing at length the voices and woes of many generations of nonconformists. However, it has also been the target of domination and control. The banning and public burning of books stained history not only at the time of the Inquisition or during fascist and communist regimes, but also very recently. In 2019, the American Library Association reported a petition for removal of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) from public library shelves, on the grounds of profanity, vulgarity and sexual overtones in the text. Twentieth-century examples of attempts at silencing uncomfortable writers are legion, from the banning of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) to the Salman Rushdie affair in the late eighties. Indeed, literature has long suffered a tug-of-war between artistic and intellectual freedom on the one hand, and intolerance, bigotry and censorship on the other. Cultural history is also laden with movements and periods of resistance and rebellion, revolution and defiance. From pop culture to various alternative forms of communication (e.g. online) and underground views and practices of art, all disruptive forms of expression have met with the usual mainstream reactionary backlash. And even the use of language has been subjected to prescriptivism, the fetters of the ever-elusive “norms”, the frowning upon new words and new usages, upon youths’ linguistic creativity, non-standard English, and the unstoppable evolution of the way speakers speak.

In light of this, the 45th Annual Conference of the Portuguese Association of Anglo-American Studies (APEAA) invites 250-word abstracts in English, by APEAA members and non-members, for 20-minute oral presentations, followed by 10-minute discussions, OR for poster displays, addressing issues related to literary, cultural, and linguistic identity, resistance, and silencing. Proposals of panels, roundtables and book presentations are also welcome.  The conference will include the 2nd APEAA Doctoral Symposium (click here).

We warmly encourage papers from any of the three scientific areas of the Association: English Literature, Culture, and Linguistics. Within these, we welcome contributions from a large range of fields and theoretical frameworks: Literary theory, Literatures in English, Gender Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Translation Studies, Cultural Studies (including Media, Film, Performance, Visual and Music Studies), Discourse analysis, Pragmatics, Sociolinguistics, and History of English, among others.

Topics include, but are not necessarily restricted to, the following:

• Fictional depiction of oppression and silencing, from George Orwell’s 1984 (1949) to The Colour Purple by Alice Walker (1982).

• Cries for freedom in poetry: from Shelley’s Ode to Liberty (1820) to Langston Hughes’ Freedom’s Plow (1943).

• Pop culture and underground movements as subversive liberation from tradition: breaking the canon, disrupting normativity.

• Cultural censorship; Cancel culture; The offense issue.

• Gender trouble: the silencing of LGBTQIA+ identities throughout time.

• Children’s literature, moralism, and the pursuit of social and political goals: from Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit (1902) and Benjamin Bunny (1902) classics being accused of portraying only “middle-class rabbits” to Roald Dahl’s books being expurgated of purportedly racist and sexist passages.

• The silencing of women and the fights for freedom and emancipation: from Mary Wollstonecraft to the suffragettes and Women’s Lib; from the Seneca Falls Convention to the #metoo movement.

• Freedom, or lack thereof, in academia – the curriculum issue. Section 28: erasing queer history from the British education system. Deleting / rewriting uncomfortable histories.

• Battle for freedom and racial equality in American history and culture: from the 70th anniversary of Rosa Parks’s incarceration to Black Lives Matter; from the American revolution (the beginning of which will be 250 years in 2025) to the McCarthy years.

• Irish studies: Fight for autonomy and freedom from Britain: from the Easter Rising (1916) to the Troubles.

• Freedom and language: Prescriptivism vs. descriptivism; Evolution of language; Grammaticality vs. acceptability;

• Dialects and minority languages; World Englishes; Non-standard English.

• Linguistic creativity and freedom: Neologisms; Youth language; Figurative language.

• Free speech versus hate speech on social media.

• Free speech and counter-speech: Supporting the victim.

• Translation, AI, and the silencing of the human translator: Navigating censorship in translation; Amplifying silenced voices through translation; Ethical dilemmas of translating politically and socially resistant texts; The translator’s legal concerns: balancing neutrality with advocacy.

A collection of selected papers is expected to be published as a special issue of an international journal.

Please send your 250-word abstracts, together with a bio-note, to apeaa2025@gmail.com, with the “Subject” reading “Abstract submission”, no later than 20 February 2025.

We look forward to receiving your proposals! If you have any queries, feel free to contact us at apeaa2025@gmail.com.