W. Jason Miller @ NeMLA’s 58th Annual Convention

This year’s presidential theme is Empowering Communities. This theme evokes the process of transformation from a state of passivity to being active agents of change. It represents a shift away from authoritarianism and toward a model that values (and solves problems through) local knowledge, collaboration, and collective action.

Under the theme of empowering communities, we welcome scholarship that examines how cultural knowledge can serve as a source and means of empowerment, the role of culture in constructing agency, and how communities are creating spaces conducive to such empowerment. As always, we also welcome proposals that extend, challenge, or bypass the annual theme to make space for cutting edge scholarship and ideas.

The opening plenary will be given by Dr. Jerome Branche, whose current work addresses the interwoven themes of slavery, necropolitics, and coloniality from a transhistoric standpoint.

The keynote address will be given by Manuel Muñoz, the author of a novel and three collections of short stories, most recently The Consequences (Graywolf, 2022), and recipient of the 2023 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize.

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Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood

Nina Simone, Langston Hughes, and the Birth of Black Power

by W. Jason Miller

248 pp., 30 halftones

ISBN 978-1-4696-9821-2 $30.00 cloth

Publication date: September 29, 2026

For more information: https://www.uncpress.org/book/9781469698212/dont-let-me-be-misunderstood/