"Narrating Racial Time in the Nineteenth-Century U.S."

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Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association
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Special Session at the 2015 PAMLA Meeting in Portland, OR, Nov. 6-8th: "Narrating Racial Time in the Nineteenth-Century U.S."

In recent years, scholars have questioned the extent to which nineteenth-century American literature participates in the progressivist, future-oriented temporalities often associated with this period. For example, Lloyd Pratt has argued that instead of embracing progressivism, nineteenth-century American literature drew upon genres that invoked a multiplicity of temporalities, creating a nation that failed to share either the "empty," national time that Benedict Anderson describes in Imagined Communities or a singular racial identity. Building on Pratt's work, this panel will assemble a body of papers that consider how race gets deployed alongside, against, or within various temporalities in American literature of the long nineteenth century. In particular, panelists are asked to consider the relationship between narrative temporality (for instance, the linear progress from beginning, to middle, to end that characterizes most novels) and how racialized figures or groups are positioned in relation to that temporality. The panel welcomes a broad range of texts and methodologies as panelists investigate how race and temporality might be linked – or even mutually constitutive – in nineteenth-century American literatures.

Please submit a paper title, 50-word abstract, and 500-word proposal via the PAMLA site at: http://www.pamla.org/2015/proposals by May 15th.

Please send any inquiries to Molly Ball at meball@ucdavis.edu