TRANSCULTURAL UNDEADNESS: HISTORIES AND INCARNATIONS OF MULTIETHNIC HAUNTINGS AND HORROR

The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the Unites States (MELUS)
contact email:
eandersd@gmu.edu, bussecj@mcmaster.ca

MELUS 2013
March 14-17, 2013
Downtown Pittsburgh

Deadline: October 20, 2012

Panel co-organizers: Eric Gary Anderson and Cassel Busse.

One point of departure for this session is our conference location, Pittsburgh, the home base of veteran horror filmmaker George A. Romero. Starting with his now-classic 1968 movie Night of the Living Dead, Romero has built a formidable career as an independent-minded writer and director who unleashes cultural critique by way of zombies and “undeadness.” Crossing various boundaries and speaking truth to social, political, racial, ethnic, sexual, and other forms of power, Romero’s horror films point the way to fresh considerations of the ways horror film and/or literature work multiethnically.

For this session, we invite proposals that explore ideas and practices of “transcultural undeadness.” We’re interested in proposals that develop fresh readings of particular multiethnic horror novels, poems, non-fiction texts, plays, and/or films; but we also welcome proposals that offer multiethnically-informed analyses of texts not usually considered as multiethnic.

Some possible keywords and points of departure:

film zombies, from White Zombie to Night of the Living Dead to Shaun of the Dead to Juan of the Dead —and 21st-century representations of global/globalizing zombies in relation to earlier accounts of zombie origins and circulations.

literary zombies

other incarnations of undeadness (vampires, revenants, etc.)

other genres/textual forms that represent and explore transcultural undeadness

horror and technology

“undeadness” in relation to one or more elements of the general conference theme, “The Changing Landscapes of American Multiethnic Literature through Historical Crises.”

the late 20th- and early 21st-century popularity of Asian horror (“J-horror” and “K-horror,” among others), Scandinavian horror, the movies and co-authored vampire novels of Guillermo del Toro, etc.

intersections of multiethnic and transnational horror.

Americanizations of European and Asian (particularly Japanese) horror films.

reworkings of familiar horror tropes such as blood and migration/immigration (“Let the right one/s in”?)

and much more!

Please e-mail proposals to Eric Gary Anderson and Cassel Busse .

Deadline: October 20, 2012