Amodern
Due Date: 06-15-2019
This issue of Amodern draws together poets, critics, and hybrid practitioners in the fields of contemporary poetics and disability studies to posit new approaches to experimental aesthetic practices that interrogate and represent the social, political, and mediated realities of disability. The issue will bring together work on contemporary poets and artists with new takes on earlier experimental poetry and will build on the work of Sheila Black, Jennifer Bartlett, and Michael Northen, editors of Beauty Is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability, to include new work in disability poetics from a wide range of aesthetic practices, media, and orientations. We welcome papers that situate disability in dialogue with analyses of class, race, sexuality, immigration status, and other forms of social precarity, as well as work that situates disability poetics within local, national, transnational, and planetary scales of instability and shift. The editors encourage essays that will read disability across fields and situate the body as a site of lived experience within environmental and social systems that press upon it. This special issue is in dialogue with the New Disability Poetics Symposium that was held at the University of Pennsylvania in October 2018. As a continuation of that symposium, the editors encourage new points of collaboration between disability studies and poetics that provide new avenues of inquiry for work by poets and theorists with disabilities.
In a commitment to providing accessible modes of engagement with the themes of new disability poetics, this special issue will explore new possibilities for public scholarship when disability and bodily difference are foregrounded. To this end, essays that explore different critical modes of accessibility, such as audio essays, video essays, enlarged font, and articles that examine technology and disability together are strongly encouraged. All content in this issue will be presented in multiple formats (large print and audio, with some pieces containing video and other formats) to support an inclusive public conversation on poetry and disability.
Possible topics include
- Disability and technology
- Performance and the body
- Trans/feminist and queer theories of disability
- Critical race studies and disability poetics
- Space, site, and accessibility
- Disability and the postcolonial
- Connections between disability activism and creative practice
- Care ethics and caring labor
- Theories and representations of illness
- Disaster and the body
- Indigenous approaches to disability and poetics
Proposals of 300 words are due 15 June. Completed articles of 4,000–8,000 words are due 1 September 2019. Please direct questions, abstracts, and full articles to newdisabilitypoetics@gmail.com.