MLA, Jan. 7-10, 2021, Toronto, Theme: PersistenceQuare Souths RoundtableForum: Southern United States As E. Patrick Johnson suggested in his article from 2001 entitled "'Quare' Studies, or (Almost) Everything I Know About Queer Studies I Learned from My Grandmother," "'quare'...not only speaks across identities, it articulates identities as well. 'Quare' offers a way to critique stable notions of identity and, at the same time, to locate racialized and class knowledges." Twenty years later, we ask whether southern studies has yet to be fully "quare"-ed. For this roundtable, we seek papers and innovative presentations that investigate--across genres and time periods--critical intersections of racial and sexual politics in southern texts, broadly defined, as connected to the presidential themes of MLA 2021—namely, “persistence…endurance, survival, defiance, resistance, creating, and flourishing.” Issues addressed might include: the ways in which texts show individuals and collectives surviving and enduring in the face of oppressive and restrictive expectations related to race and sexuality; the ways in which intersecting racial and sexual identities can provide liberation and sources of pride and political agency for individuals and collectives; how sites within and beyond the U.S. South function within texts as sources of oppression and/or power for queer/ quare, non-white individuals. Papers that move beyond expected racial and sexual binaries and that point scholars in new directions within southern literary studies will be given particular attention. Please send a 250-word abstract and CV to Molly McGehee at mmcgehe@emory.edu by 15 March 2020.