CFP: Delany at 70

(I don't think this has been posted to delany-list yet.  Apologies if it is a duplicate)  

CALL FOR PAPERS --

Samuel Delany at Seventy:
Honoring the Life & Work of Samuel R. Delany.
The Fifth Annual DC Queer Studies Symposium
University of Maryland, College Park
Friday, April 20, 2012

Deadline for submission of materials: February 6, 2012.

We invite proposals for presentations at DELANY AT 70, the 5th Annual DC Queer
Studies Symposium at the University of Maryland. The symposium will be a
day-long series of conversations in critical queer, race, and gender studies
inspired by the multifaceted cultural work of author, literary critic, and
professor Samuel R. Delany, whose seventieth birthday is April 1, 2012. Events
will include paper sessions featuring faculty and graduate students. The day
will culminate in Mr. Delany reading from his new novel, Through the Valley of
the Nest of Spiders, and engaging in conversation with Robert Reid-Pharr,
Distinguished Professor of English at the Graduate Center of the City
University of New York.

In recognition of Delany’s wide-ranging influence on queer studies scholarship,
the symposium takes themes prominent in his work as its point of departure. We
are eager to invite papers dedicated to Delany’s diverse body of writings, but
we also encourage proposals that address any of the following (or related) points
of contact with key preoccupations of Delany’s work:

• Black and queer cultural politics
• Crossing boundaries: cross-class contact, private/public divides, the
dynamics of normativity and respectability
• Landscapes: utopia, dystopia, heterotopia, desire, lust
• Queer time: futurity, potentiality, paradox, anniversaries, commemorations
• Queer/ing visions: reflection, refraction, mythology, memory, language,
perception
• Geographies of power: settler colonialism, racialization, territorialization,
gentrification
• World-making and undoing: fantasy, performativity, self-elaboration,
autobiography, selfhood, abjection

Proposals for 15-minute presentations should include name, affiliation, e-mail
address, title of paper, a 250-word abstract, and a 1-2 page CV. Please send
materials by e-mail attachment (Word or PDF only) by February 6, 2012 to
[email protected]. Put “Submission for Delany at 70” in the subject line
of your message. For more information, contact JV Sapinoso at [email protected].
Selected participants will be notified by February 27, 2012.

In the words of Jeffrey Allen Tucker, Samuel R. Delany is “the ideal postmodern
intellectual.” Delany is known for his long and well-established career as a
writer of science fiction, fantasy, and memoir as well as his critical work in
literary, African American, urban, and LGBT/queer studies. Speaking about the
significance of his work, Delany says, “Science fiction isn’t just thinking
about the world out there. It’s also thinking about how that world might be --
a particularly important exercise for those who are oppressed, because if
they’re going to change the world we live in, they -- and all of us -- have to
be able to think about a world that works differently.” Exercising the need to
“think about a world that works differently” might well be adopted to describe
the projects of both LGBT and queer studies.

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