african-american

ACLA (American Comparative Literature Association), March 7-10, 2019, Georgetown University, Washington DC

Radical Elegy: Memorial Praxis for Precarious Life

This seminar addresses elegy as a performative repertoire in political extremity.  Elegy, at a radical pitch, occupies public space and public memory to resist forgetting, a second death.  How have expressive practices to and for the dead generated ideas of justice, bonds of solidarity, ethical responses to violence, and communities of contested memory?

Black Panther ventures Afrotopic advancement and this panel engages receptions of Black civilization as literary form (i.e. reading film, graphic novel, etc. as text) in order to create dialogue generally about various aspects of African and African diasporic representation. This panel reviews and welcomes both ideal and/or dystopic civilizational interpretives.  Papers should endeavor various facets seen on screen as text and how it reveals connectivity from or to a Black past particularly locating eutopic notions that counter or embellish traditionalized (and/or sexualized, racialized, classized) gazes. We encourage submission that read rendering notions of race, class, gender, intelligence, civilizations, colonialisms, etc.

Race and Versification in Anglophone Poetry

Studies of versification tend to be silent on race, and with some exceptions (such as Anthony Reed’s 2014 Freedom Time), studies of race and poetic form tend to turn away from the mechanics of versification. As Dorothy Wang argues in Thinking its Presence: Race and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry (2014), most accounts of poetic form revolve around the technical accomplishments of white poets, while minority figures are seen as more valuable for their poetry’s social or thematic content. What would happen if nonwhite poets were read for their proficiency with poetic forms, and were made the center of conversations about poetic technique? 

NeMLA; Washington DC; March 21-24, 2019

Disillusioned by the racial issues in America, James Baldwin moved to France in 1948. Nine years later, however, he was drawn back after seeing a photograph of Dorothy Counts, a young black girl in Charlotte, North Carolina being harassed by a white mob as she entered an all-white high school. They threw rocks, spat on her, and told her to go back to where she came from. The image and situation were significant for Baldwin for various reasons. First, despite his attempts to avoid American racism, it had found him in Paris. Second, it was as if the taunts of "go back to where you came from" to Dorothy Counts drew Baldwin back "home" to document and confront American racism head on.

Northeast Modern Language Association Annual Conference: Washington, D.C., March 21-24, 2019

Riffing off Du Bois ("Criteria of Negro Art"), Wright ("Blueprint for Negro Writing"), Lorde ("Poetry is not a Luxury"), Baraka ("Black Art"), and many others, this panel seeks to situate, examine, interrogate, and align black writers in American literature and culture. Our objective is to define the many ways black/African American/Negro/Slave writers have characterized or fictionalized what it “means” to be a writer of color.

As Toni Morrison has written, a “black author…is at some level always conscious of representing one’s own race to, or in spite of, a race of reader that understands itself to be ‘universal’ or race free.”