MLA 2026 – Toronto

Early American Literature LLC

Declaring Dependence

Short Description: 

What happens when we center dependence, interconnection, and shattered subjectivities in the literary cultures that have been used to mark or substantiate figments of agency surrounding the early United States? 

Long Description: 

So much depends upon dependence. Contrary to an affirmation that would celebrate the independent, sovereign individual, this guaranteed MLA panel aims to examine figurations of dependence, the fractured subjectivities that do not align with the liberal subject but instead descry alternative forms of connection, confluence, and collectivity. Using the occasion of the 250th anniversary of The Declaration of Independence, this panel will consider the aftermaths of liberalisms that center American subjectivities as coherent, whole, or self-evident. Indeed, in the quarter of a millennium since 1776, white male masculinity seems still to be all the rage, necessitating ways to unpack and analyze an otherwise or to show its continually conditional status. As such, we will consider ways to decenter, unlearn, and discombobulate the figurations of sovereign selfhoods that foreground popular conceptions of freedom and independence. How might dependence be recalibrated in the shadows of the Declaration’s phallogocentrism? What lessons are there to be learned through privileging cultures of care, forms of attachment that unravel myths of independence? 

Possible topics: affect studies, care work, critical race studies, disability studies, gender studies, queer studies

Please send 250-word abstracts to Ben Bascom (bdbascom@bsu.edu) by March 17, 2025.