Deborah E. McDowell’s 1993 essay, “In the First Place: Making Frederick Douglass and the Afro-American Narrative Tradition,” issues a call to “start putting an end to beginnings even those that would put woman in the first place” or a “reformulation or refocusing of genealogy as a concept of analysis” (56-7). This roundtable seeks papers that complicate how and in which ways we make visible the roots, sites, and lineages of Black women’s literary and historical production from the eighteenth century forward. Papers can interrogate visibility as a practice or theory of recovery, recentering, and resituating that we also must remain critical of even when establishing “firsts” or origins of Black women’s historical and literary traditions.

Please send 250-word abstracts and brief bios by March 20th to Courtney Murray at cxm2274@psu.edu.