[UPDATE] MELUS 2015 PANEL: Writing Across the Color Line

full name / name of organization: 
Brittany Miller

Please send 250 word abstracts to bmiller@laspositascollege.edu and vanengen@usc.edu.

Deadline: November 1, 2014

Writing Across the Color Line: Ethics, Problems and Productive Possibilities

In the 1930s, columnist Julia Jerome delivered inspiring pro-woman and pro-Negro relationship advice to fellow black women in The Pittsburgh Courier, the most widely circulated black paper in the US. But as Karla Kaplan reveals to us in her groundbreaking book Miss Anne in Harlem, Julia Jerome was actually Josephine Codgell Schuyler, a rich white southern woman who eschewed her privileged heritage for life in black Harlem. After this revelation, we're left to wonder what to make of Jerome's column. Can it still be considered a black woman's advice column? Is the race of the author the deciding factor?

From Harriet Beecher Stowe, to Carl Van Vechten, to Iggy Azalea, this panel inquires into the political acts and knowledge formations generated by white-authored works that take non-whites as their main subject. To what extent do these works reinscribe stubborn racial stereotypes and to what extent do they exceed caricature? Is there every any productive value in whites writing "color"? Can a white-authored text be located in a non-white canon? What are the criteria, and who decides? How does history, commodification, and collective trauma circumscribe or open up avenues of racial crossing in cultural texts? How do we, as readers and scholars, respond to these white-authored texts? And what problems and possibilities arise from interrogating these texts in ethical and nuanced ways?

We invite 250 word abstracts for a panel on the ethics, problems, and productive possibilities of writing across the color line. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

passing (as non-white)
representation and authenticity
border crossing and intersectionality
race and the publishing industry
race and censorship
whiteness
audience and readership
genre and authenticity
drag and blackface performance
essentialism and cultural appropriation
the death of the author and multiethnic literature

Papers should address any genre of literature and drama, non-fiction texts and/or other cultural works. We will also consider papers which investigate people of color writing outside their prescribed race, should those papers address the above concerns. Please send 250 word abstracts to bmiller@laspositascollege.edu and vanengen@usc.edu by November 1.