We are looking for additional contributors to our book project "Orient and Orientalisms in American Poetry and Poetics", to be published in the series "Transcription: Cultures – Concepts – Controversies," general editor Sabine Sielke (Frankfurt: Lang, 2007).

American poetry and poetics have repeatedly called upon or taken refuge in so-called Oriental cultures, which include Asian cultures east of the Mediterranean as well as African cultures, especially those of Morocco, Algeria, and Egypt. In this way American poetic practice and theory have, on the one hand, participated in creating dominant notions of ‘the Orient.’ We should remember, on the other hand, that while our contemporary understanding of the terms Orient and Orientalism capitalizes on Western notions of cultural dominance over ‘the East,’ poetic references to and adaptations from Asian cultures became most prominent at (‘revolutionary’) times when the genre underwent fundamental transformations of its forms and cultural functions, that is during Romanticism, modernism, and early postmodernism. In the history of American poetry, Orientalism and modernity thus seem inextricably linked and inseparable from processes of colonization and modernization as well as decolonization.

This collection of essays seeks to explore the poetics and politics of American poetry’s multiple investments in Oriental cultures and their particular aesthetics from Romanticism to contemporary poetics. By tracing new crossroads of cultures and rediscovering places as foreign as Afroasia this debate is likely to open up novel perspectives on central moments of American literary and cultural history.

The book publication is well on its way, but we seek to enlarge its scope. So far, we have assembled essays on the poetic Orientalisms of Emerson, Melville, the Harlem Renaissance, Lowell, contemporary Chinese American poets, and writers dealing with 9/11. We are looking for contributors who are already working on a related subject and can submit an essay in short time, and would contribute additional angles and perspectives. Essays may take issue with Edward Said's work and can both support or reject its theses.

For all inquiries, please contact Christian Kloeckner at c.kloeckner@gmx.de.

Abstracts of between 250 and 400 words, accompanied by a short CV, should be sent to c.kloeckner@gmx.de by December 15, 2006.
Notification of acceptance will be sent out by Christmas, and completed papers will then need to be submitted electronically before January 31st, 2007.
Papers should be submitted in MLA style, 1.5 spaced, 12 pt, Times New Roman, and not exceed 25 pages, including a full biblio