cfp.english.upenn.edu

This panel seeks papers on the neo-slave genre in relation to modern literary fiction that illustrate how the neo-slave genre is not simply a re-fashioning of antebellum slave narratives but is rather a discursive genre that revises the realist aesthetic and politics of the slave narrative while it deepens our understanding of race, gender, temporality and the meaning of freedom in a diasporic context. Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• The historical novels of Arna Bontemps, specifically Black Thunder (1936) and Drums at Dusk (1938) and their relation to slave revolt.
• Proletarian literature and the time of slavery.
• Southern Agrarians, “the Southern primitive,” Southern modernism, and alternative landscapes of modernism.
• Reconstructing and re-visioning the hemispheric history of slavery and revolutionary transformation in the 1930s and the literature of the Americas.
• How do other forms-- poetry, film, and visual arts—expand and complicate our understandings of the neo-slave “narrative”?
• Radical African diasporic and European thought traditions at work in the neo-slave genre.
• Race, Slavery, and Global Politics.
• Gender and sexuality in the neo-slave genre.
• The problems, paradoxes, and meanings of freedom.

A major concern of this panel is to think about the ways in which we can reorient the neo-slave genre away from a US-based literary history, dominated by the mode of realism, and toward a more comparative view defined by the geography and history of the extended Caribbean.

Please send abstracts and 1-page CV by April 3, 2011 to Christine Lupo (christylupo@hotmail.com).

Slave Revolt and the Neo-Slave Genre in the 1930s
MSA, Structures of Innovation
Buffalo, New York
October 6-9, 2011.
Abstract Deadline: April 3, 2011.