MLA 2023

Margaaret Fuller Society

Conditions of Exile in the Nineteenth-Century and Beyond

What forms have the experience and idea of exile taken for U.S.-affiliated writers and intellectuals in the nineteenth century through the present? Can exile engender gain and growth, along with pain and loss? For whom, and under what conditions? The examples of Frederick Douglass and Margaret Fuller suggest a complex range of possibility and constraint: Douglass, as an orator, writer, activist, and formerly enslaved person living in the North—and temporarily a "triumphant exile" (in Peter Ripley's words), who considered making his successful tour of Britain permanent after the publication of Narrative endangered his freedom in the U.S. And Fuller, as a free, white foreign correspondent for the New-York Tribune in revolutionary Italy, who at times referred to the Roman Republic as "my country" and "my home," briefly shared exile with the Italian nobleman she loved, and inspired Emerson to call her "our citizen of the world by quite special diploma." 

Possible topics and approaches:

-    exile and citizenship

-    racial justice and citizen rights

-    labor and exile

-    activism, reform work, anti-racist projects

-    integration, alienation, cosmopolitanism

-    displacement and colonization

-    mobility and immobility

-    exile and travel (forced vs. chosen)

-    self-imposed exile and questions of agency

-    exile as a state of feeling

-    linguistic implications (multilingualism, translation)

-    historical examples and contemporary formulations

-    representations in fiction, (auto)biography, letters, diaries, and more

-    concepts of allegiance

-    constructions of home and community

-    avenues for publication 

-    quarantine and immigration

-    immigrant/expat writing as Black critique (for example, Anna Julia Cooper, Claude McKay, James Baldwin)

-    border crossings and escape 

Please send 200-word abstracts to Jana Argersinger at argerj@gmail.com by March 15.