This proposed special session seeks critical assessments of recent representations of slavery in the American cultural imagination. What are we to make of the treatment of racial bondage in recent films such as Lincoln and Django Unchained, and in novels such as Toni Morrison's A Mercy? How do these representations of slavery resonate with, revise, and reimagine the nineteenth-century texts and tropes on which they draw? What are the broader aesthetic, political, and narrative implications of these and other manifestations of the recent interest in racial slavery? Papers focusing on various texts—filmic or literary—and deploying diverse approaches are welcome.

Send 250-word abstracts and a brief CV to gmlaski@gmail.com by 15 March.