Deadline for Abstracts: November 15th, 2004. Please submit an abstract of 150-250 words, a working title, and a brief academic biography.

Proposals for papers that address any aspect of narratives of captivity - widely defined - are now being accepted for the 2005 SW/TX PCA/ACA conference. Papers may consider figurative and psychological as well as literal forms of captivity and may examine the representation of captivity in any period, genre, or media (textual, oral, visual, filmic, etc).

Potential topics could include, but are not limited to, the examination of portrayals of slavery in different historical and cultural contexts; narratives concerning settler-invader and indigenous relations during colonization; stories of imprisonment, kidnapping, political exile, or impressed labour; and accounts of abduction (alien or otherwise).

Proposals which address the politics and pedagogy of captivity narratives are especially encouraged. For instance, what concerns arise in teaching a body of highly-racialized texts like those produced by North American colonial or 'frontier' settlers? Does the revered place in the American literary canon of a text like Mary Rowlandson’s _The Sovereignty and Goodness of God_ function to obscure other forms of what Gordon M. Sayre has recently called the "inverse captivity": the colonially prevalent practice of Native or indigenous imprisonment and captivity? What strategies are effective or ethical in twenty-first century college classroom discussions of colonial captivity scenarios? Proposals that address the above, or other related, pedagogical questions are most welcome.