Layered Memories: Migration, Slavery, and Erasure in Multi-ethnic Literature
This session explores how multi-ethnic American literature navigates palimpsestic memory—narratives layered with the lingering and hidden imprints of forced migration, slavery, displacement, and systemic erasure. From the brutal dislocations of the transatlantic slave trade to the quiet erasures embedded in ongoing displacement and marginalization, writers have often turned to transcribing stories of the past and present as a process of “Rememory[ing].” This panel seeks papers exploring the ways in which multi-ethnic literature traces stories despite systematic and social mandates to usher such narratives into oblivion. We especially welcome literary papers detailing a resistance and reclamation of racially oppressed identities.