MMLA’s permanent African American Literature section invites papers that examine the way black writers use black aesthetics in their work(s) to promote a “cultural ensemble” as Fred Moten notes. With the 2022 MMLA theme of “Post-Now,” this section is concerned with how black writers use aesthetics to shape and/or reshape the resistance that blackness brings. American Blackness, of course, begins through the resistance of the object and the irruption or interruption of personhood and subjectivity. Even through, or perhaps because of, this resistance, blackness maintains a collective being. As such, I invite works that are concerned with how black writers use: music, art, violence, movement, language, communication, sex, etc. to maintain a black collectivity. This panel invites abstracts, of no more than 250 words, for presentations on African American literature at the Midwest Modern Language Association conference. Please submit your abstracts and CV to idale@nd.edu