This panel examines Dostoevsky’s influence on 19th-century to contemporary authors and studies possible connections and textual echoes between Dostoevsky’s writings and other texts potentially related to his literary legacy. We invite abstracts devoted to the contemporary literary analysis of the chosen texts, as well as broader research on philosophical or theological issues central to Dostoevsky’s worldview and that continue to be discussed and re-examined today.

In her seminal work In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Christina Sharpe writes: “I’ve been trying to articulate a method of encountering a past that is not past. A method along the lines of a sitting with, a gathering, and a tracking of phenomena that disproportionately and devastatingly affect Black peoples any and everywhere we are.” She calls this methodology “living in the wake” of slavery and its afterlives. This panel invites papers that think in and from the wake to propose new methods to bear witness to trauma particular to othered, oppressed people. How can we establish a restorative witnessing, one which is imaginative, hauntological, and apocalyptic?