[Leigh Anne Duck]

We’re seeking proposals for a panel at MLA 2015 (Vancouver, Jan. 8-11) and for a special issue of the journal The Global South (published by Indiana UP, available via JSTOR and Project Muse) on the topic “Narrating Global South Cities.” Even though the “global South” has emerged as a “new and powerful ordering system for academic disciplines,” its promise may well lie in its ability to challenge “long-standing assumptions about how the world has been ordered” (Levander and Mignolo 2011). We hope to explore how narratives from diverse media (print, film, digital, etc.) contribute to that process. Focusing specifically on urban locales, we want to understand how narratives articulate and oppose contrasting geographical frameworks, from the intensely local to the planetary; accordingly, papers may challenge understandings of the global South itself. We are particularly but not only interested in representations of port cities (New Orleans, Balboa, Montevideo, Valencia, Naples, Istanbul, Alexandria, Lagos, Durban, Mumbai, Chennai, Shanghai, Manila, etc, etc.) characterized by traffic, migration, and exchange. Papers on documentary and fiction film are equally welcome. Papers may also explore cinematic/media representations of different kinds of ports (sea ports, small ports, pleasure ports, etc.) or media cultures within such cities. For questions, email Sabine Haenni (sh322@cornell.edu) and/or Leigh Anne Duck (lduck@olemiss.edu).

For the MLA panel, we will need 250-word abstracts by March 21, 2014. For the journal, we will ultimately need  essays of 6,000-8,000 words by March 2015 for publication later that year. For now, please send 500-word proposals plus a short bio to Sabine Haenni (sh322@cornell.edu) and/or Leigh Anne Duck (lduck@olemiss.edu) by June 15, 2014.

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