CFP: Comics and the American South (Essay Collection - 12/15/08)

CFP: COMICS AND THE AMERICAN SOUTH

(Essay Collection - 12/15/08)

DESCRIPTION:

With the skyscrapers of Superman's Metropolis, Batman's Gotham City, and Chris Ware's Chicago dominating the storytelling landscape of American comics, vivid images of southern life and culture are often overlooked.

In response, the editors of COMICS AND THE AMERICAN SOUTH seek essays that demonstrate how familiar debates in southern literature surrounding race, class, sexuality, religion, and regional identity find new expression in serial comic books, graphic novels, editorial cartoons, webcomics, and newspaper strips. We also seek essays that demonstrate how integrating comics scholarship into southern studies might alter the terms of those familiar debates and challenge our fundamental assumptions about the South and southern literature.

Potential subjects range from nineteenth-century editorial cartoons to the modern southern icons of mainstream superhero comics or independently published graphic novels that critique social and historical legacies of the region. This proposed collection will bring together scholars in comics studies and southern studies alike for a wide-ranging and long overdue assessment of the rich and complex history of comics representations of the South and suggest the transformative potential of comics scholarship for New Southern Studies.

POSSIBLE EMPHASES MIGHT INCLUDE THE FOLLOWING:

• Editorial cartooning in/about the South (from any historical era)
• Newspaper comic strips in/about the South (e.g. Walt Kelly's Pogo, Doug Marlette's Kudzu)
• Representations of southern characters or settings in mainstream superhero and adventure comics (e.g. series such as Rogue, Impulse, Swamp Thing, Papa Midnight, Suicide Squad, Hawkgirl, Daredevil: Redemption, Hellboy: The Crooked Man; characters such as Cannonball, USAgent, Gambit, Photon, Shadowman, Brother Voodoo, Man-Thing)
• Comics that draw upon the conventions of the superhero genre to comment on the South (e.g. Captain Confederacy, The American Way)
• Representations of comics, comics readers, and comics tropes in fiction, poetry, and drama about the South (e.g. the work of Randall Kenan, Jack Butler, Jay Cantor, Lewis Nordan, Bob Rogers)
• Indie/Alternative/Underground voices (e.g. Bayou, Incognegro, Preacher, Sinland, Stuck Rubber Baby, James Sturm's America)
• Representations of southern folklore and cultural traditions in religion, music, and sports (e.g. Bluesman, Me and the Devil Blues, R. Crumb's blues comics, Stagger Lee, Farewell, Georgia, Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow)
• Comics on Hurricane Katrina and the Gulf Coast (e.g. Revacuation, A.D. New Orleans After the Deluge)
• Cartooning in the Global South
• Comics adaptations of southern literary works

SUBMISSION INFO:

Please submit a two-page abstract and CV to Brannon Costello
(bcostell @ lsu.edu) and Qiana Whitted (whitted @ sc.edu) by December 15, 2008.