This panel seeks 250-300 word abstracts exploring political and aesthetic questions across postbellum 19th and 20th century African American and Caribbean literature across a range of subjects including nonhuman animality, ecocriticism or ecopoetics, political ecology, and/or what Chelsea Frazier calls "black feminist ecological thought." Papers placing themselves in conversation with J.T. Roane's theorization of "black ecologies" in and/or beyond literature as well as those taking up Kimberly Ruffin's work on Black ecoliterary traditions are especially encouraged, but the call is open to the broadest sense of the concepts and terms listed above. 

Please submit an abstract and a short bio to baa2137@columbia.edu by March 27, 2024. The MLA Annual Convetion will be held in New Orleans, Louisiana, January 9-12, 2025.