As people migrate, they are drawn to the familiar in their need to adapt to the unfamiliar, forming communities whose cohesiveness emanates from shared value systems and experiences. Culturally homogeneous networks constructed by migrant communities in the U.S. both shape and are shaped by the spaces they occupy. From these socially constructed spaces (like Mary Louise Pratt’s contact zones), which can be construed as physical, emotional, intellectual, or creative, immigrant groups negotiate their position in U.S. society. This transnational lens affects both individuals’ perception of their place in society and their success or failure to thrive in this new home.

CALL FOR SPECIAL SESSIONS - POSTPONED EXTENDED DEADLINE: Virtual Conference Option Open!

Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association (PAMLA) Conference

In order to protect our members during the current pandemic, the PAMLA Board has voted to postpone the PAMLA conference until the fall of 2021. As a result, we will be putting offering a virtual option to our 2021 Las Vegas conference! Should you have any questions, feel free to call or email PAMLA Executive Director Craig Svonkin: 626-354-7526 or director@pamla.org.

PAMLA Needs You! Please consider joining PAMLA for the 2021 year to receive our journal and support PAMLA in these difficult times.

Hawthorne and the EcoGothic

The Annual Conference of the MLA will meet in Toronto on January 7-10, 2021. The editors of Gothic Nature observe that the Gothic now serves as a primary means to articulate the horrors of climate change and our current environmental crisis. EcoGothic, however, has been a fundamental component of American literature since William Bradford recoiled from the continent’s “hideous & desolate wilderness.” A recent spate of articles not only acknowledges this strange continuity but has begun to situate Nathaniel Hawthorne as one of the tradition’s key figures. This panel invites papers that further investigate Hawthorne’s entanglement with the ecoGothic.

Blurring distinctions between the morally edifying, instructive, and perverse, P.T. Barnum’s American Museum at the corner of Broadway and Ann Street in New York was central to the emerging culture of popular entertainment in the 1840s-1860s. Les Harrison estimates that by 1865, forty-one million visitors attended P.T. Barnum’s American Museum in New York: nearly six million more than the total population of the United States at the conclusion of the Civil War.