CfP – Southern Studies Forum 2027
Southern Studies Forum 2027, Prague, June 28-30
Displaced Persons: Representing the Movement of People Across the US and Global Souths
Flannery O’Connor’s well-known short story about the arrival of Polish refugees from post-World War II Europe in small-town Georgia takes up an array of issues long of concern in the US and Global Souths, and of special urgency in the present moment. “The Displaced Person“ maps how migration to and immigration into Southern spaces troubles economic and racial protocols, religious traditions, ways of occupying land, a sense of ‘home‘ place, questions of state biopower, the affective experience of displacement, even the role of modern media in representing historical atrocity.
The international phenomena of coerced or voluntary mass population movement, border-crossing, exile, the rise of authoritarian nationalisms, etc. are of foremost global significance and invite consideration from a wide variety of approaches in Southern Studies. The Forum scheduled in Prague in June 2027 solicits scholarship on subjects associated with the historical and contemporary movement of people across the the U.S. South and beyond. We propose topics such as displacement, migration/immigration, fugitivity, border-crossing, the deterritorialization of geographic place, etc.
One longstanding opposition in Southern Studies between the “city” and the “country” might be newly approached, for example, from this standpoint as an effort itself to stabilize regional place and time as resistance to ‘disorderly’, not fully intelligible or recordable movement of persons. The dichotomous juxtaposition between the country and the city constitutes two imaginaria of the U.S. South– traditionally encapsulated in an opposition between agrarian “cotton fields“ and the urban “skyscrapers“ – which crystallize into two competing landscape myths of regional identity. They have long served as a point of departure for the study of modernism, cultural paradoxes, and regional nostalgia, and more recently, their critical constatation has played a pivotal role in historical counter- narration and the deconstruction of monolithic narratives about the “imagined” South. How might we see displacement as challenging what Raymond Williams in his classical study The Country and the City characterized as a dominant trope of the field: “The contrast of the country and city is one of the major forms in which we become conscious of a central part of our experience and of the crises of our society.” Note the significance of “our experience” and “our society.” Who, and whose experience?
During the SSF 2027 conference, we will explore displacement as a wide-ranging, heterogeneous phenomenon across the spaces and times as experienced in the U.S. South. We can imagine intersections with other prominent fields such as Black, Asian, Arab, and Jewish Diaspora Studies; Borderlands Studies; Black Studies; Latinx Studies; Labor Studies; Hemispheric Studies; Atlantic Studies; Indigenous Studies, among others. In what we hope will be a wide spectrum of papers from literary , cultural, and historical persepctives, we will investigate the phenomena of movement across borders, immigration, internal migration, new experiences of identity, the environment, temporality, affect, and so on.
The organizers of the SSF 2027 Conference invite submissions of abstracts of 300 words with a bio note of 50 words on the following or other related topics:
– historical episodes of ‘discovery’, dispossession, ‘removal’, expatriation, deportation
– narratives of displacement in Southern literature, movies, and art
– “city” and “country” as sites of historical, social and cultural (re)inscription
– gender and queer perspectives on displacement
– racial aspects of the representations of displacement
– the role of genre, such as recourse to the Southern Gothic, as sites of transgression, disruption, movement
– intertextual aspects of displacement in Southern literature
– the capitalistic transformation of the Southern landscape in literature and culture
– ways in which a “megalopolis of the South,” as Ted Spivey put it 1986, did or did not grow in ways different from the great cities of the North and West
– public spaces in the “city” and the “country” as sites of historical debate
– other ways of imagining the relations between location, personhood, and community that involve movement and temporalities
– cosmopolitan perspectives on the Southern “rural” and “metropolitan” landscapes
– travel into as well as within the South
– fictions of immigration, temporary stay, return, repeated transit
– forced vs. voluntary relocation
– environmental refugism
Interdisciplinary approaches that bridge literature with other cultural forms (music, film, theater, visual arts and digital media) are welcome.
Proposals for papers should be submitted by November 15, 2026, to Hana Ulmanova (hana.ulmanova@ff.cuni.cz) and Jack Matthews (jtmattws@bu.edu).