african-american

Nella Larsen’s Passing at Ninety

Guest Editor: Donavan L. Ramon, PhD

Assistant Professor of Liberal Studies, Kentucky State University

When Nella Larsen published her second novel Passing in April 1929, the critical reception was mixed. Writing for local papers in New York, some critics found the novel’s conclusion abrupt, ambiguous, and unconvincing. However, Alice Dunbar-Nelson noted that the novel “delights,” while W.E.B. DuBois praised it as a novel “of great moral import.” In his review, DuBois hoped that passing would one day emerge as a “a petty, silly matter of no real importance which another generation will comprehend with great difficulty.”

This session welcomes abstracts on any aspect of Modern Drama. Paper proposals addressing the SAMLA 89 theme, High Art/Low Art: Borders and Boundaries in Popular Culture, are especially welcome. By July 14, please submit a 250-word word abstract, brief bio, and A/V requirements to Aaron Botwick, The Graduate Center, CUNY, at abotwick@gradcenter.cuny.edu

The African American session is open to all papers that explore some aspect of African American culture, but we are particularly interested in papers attuned to some facet of the conference theme, "The Sense of Sight: Visuality, Visibility, and Ways of Seeing."

Individual paper presentations will be between 15 and 20 minutes long. Please submit proposals via the online system by May 21, 2017. The PAMLA 2017 Conference will be held at the lovely Chaminade University of Honolulu (with the official conference hotel being the Ala Moana) from Friday, November 10 to Sunday, November 12.

Paper proposals must be made via our online system found here:

Most handbooks on the subject of horror focus specifically on film, whereas books on the literary manifestations of horror tend to be bound to the idea of the “Gothic.” The current field of Gothic studies grows out of the study of Romanticism, and refers specifically to a late eighteenth-century genre, but has also come to denote a critical approach to literature, film, and culture, drawing on psychoanalysis, post structural criticism, feminist and queer theory. These perspectives are all to be included here, but the book responds to a growing sense that “horror” is itself a worthwhile focus of analysis.

Transgressing Artistic Borders: The High/Low Portrayal of the African-American Experience in the Work of Langston Hughes and His Contemporaries