Recovering Stories, Re-Writing/Revising Future Histories
CFP for ALA 2025 Panel
In the 2005 article, “A Narrative of the Interesting Origins and (Somewhat) Surprising Developments of African-American Print Culture,” Frances Smith Foster observed that “the definitions and assumptions with which one begins have a significant influence upon the story one finds” (735).
Although Foster speaks specifically to African-American print culture, recent publications on authors newly recovered and familiar alike– including Harriet Jacobs’ brother, John Swanson Jacobs (The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots, ed. Jonathan D.S. Schroeder); Hannah Crafts (The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts, by Gregg Hecimovich); Phillis Wheatley (The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet's Journeys Through American Slavery and Independence, by David Waldstreicher); and Emily Dickinson (The Letters of Emily Dickinson, ed. By Cristanne Miller and Domhnall Mitchell) –demonstrate the truth of Foster’s observations in a variety of literary contexts. Further, they illuminate the necessity and urgency of literary recovery as an ongoing practice that paves the way for inclusivity and scholarly integrity, on the one hand, and fresh critical eyes, on the other.
And yet, it can still be challenging for scholars to find a place at the table or in the pages of a journal or a monograph when working with less familiar subjects. It can be hard to gain recognition or authority when one is working with a text that cannot be entirely verified or that does not fit easy categories of genre or “literature,” either in their own time or by our current critical standards.
We seek four to six papers for a roundtable that explore methods and critical questions pertaining to the recovery of new writers and texts and/or revisionist approaches to more familiar authors and their works.
Papers for this roundtable could engage the following questions, but need not be limited to:
● How do the stories we tell ourselves about texts inform what we see, especially when we are doing the work of recovery? Relatedly, how do inherited or uninterrogated ideas limit scholarly horizons?
● How can interdisciplinary frameworks and previous or recent works of recovery inform our approaches to reading new subjects, even when they don’t appear to have anything in common on the surface? What frameworks and critical methodologies do we implement--or need to create–to do this work?
● What are the truths that we accept without interrogation? How do our own assumptions discourage us from doing work that is uncomfortable, unfamiliar? And why do we need to do it? What do we fear?
● What stories do we need to tell in order to justify our work--especially when we’re working to make marginalized, oppressed, underrepresented voices visible and viable for the future?
Submit proposals for five-to-ten minute talks to Nicole C. Livengood (nicoleclivengood@gmail.com) or Mollie Barnes (mbarnes2@uscb.edu) by January 10, 2025.