The idea of home is curious concept for African Americans. Though integral to the development and sustainability of the United States, the social death and cultural trauma of slavery render this country inhospitable to Black bodies and the psyches that inhabit them. African Americans are both at home and homeless. This tenuousness places them in a liminal space in which identity is simultaneously self-asserted and assigned, multifaceted, while limited, a fount of agency and a tool for impotence. The intersectional nature of Black femininity further complicates notions of identity and American hospitality. Black men have unsuccessfully employed patriarchy as an intraracial tool to combat the aforementioned social death. In her discussion of the historic position of African American women, Hortense Spillers “describe[s] a locus of confounded identities, a meeting ground of investments and privations in the national treasury of rhetorical wealth,” declaring “My country needs me, and if I were not here, I would have to be invented.” Spillers’s assertion reflects how White subjectivity exists as a byproduct of Black objectification against which Whiteness must be defined. Moreover, Spillers’ assertion that this is her country undergirds the inevitable contradictions of America as a space that evokes the comforts of home and the disruption of homelessness for African Americans.

For the South Atlantic Modern Language Association Conference that will take place November 5-7, 2026, we are seeking papers and presentations on narrative media—literature, film, and television—that explore Black women and what it means when patriarchy, respectability politics, and racism make home inhospitable. 

Submissions may include, but are not limited to discussion of

• § Transgressive female personhood and how it relates to marginalization and homelessness
• § The inherent conflict between culture that positions Black women as purveyors of hospitality in a society in which they are unwelcome
• § Intraracial gender dynamics and ideas of home
• § Black women and redefinitions of home

Please submit a 200-300 word abstract and a brief bio to LaRonda Sanders-Senu (laronda.sanderssenu@mga.edu) by September 1, 2026. Accepted presenters will need to upload abstracts to SAMLA via Ballast.