In her essay, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Hortense Spillers articulates the enduring violence of racial enslavement through the concept of the “hieroglyphics of the flesh” (67). This term marks how the captive body, stripped of legal and social personhood, became inscribed with meaning through the violence of racial differentiation. This transformation rendered the Black body not only a surface upon which terror was written but also a metaphysical site from which alternative modes of being might be imagined. In attending to the duality of skin and flesh, Spillers distinguishes between Black skin as legible and social, and Black flesh as ungendered, unsovereign, and open—both wounded and full of radical potential. 

As such, this NeMLA 2026 Panel invites papers under the theme of “Regenerative Blackness” to explore the ongoing implications of Spillers’ provocation: How do we think of regeneration from the site of skin and/or flesh, and what does it mean to insist on Blackness as regenerative in a world that continues to demand its exhaustion? This panel is particularly interested in submissions that engage Blackness across two interrelated dimensions of skin and flesh. As a locus of visibility, surveillance, beauty, resistance, commodification, and medicalization, Black skin is not only a surface but also a contested geography of identity. How do cultural, artistic, and political practices re-signify Black skin as a regenerative surface—one that resists being merely a sign of suffering or death, and instead points toward healing, futurity, and joy? Beyond the visible body, we turn to the flesh as Spillers theorized it—a space prior to subjectivity, to gender, and to normative legibility. How might we understand Black flesh as a site of metaphysical endurance and creative possibility? What practices, rituals, or theoretical frameworks (from Afropessimism to Black mysticism to decolonial healing traditions) engage with flesh not merely as violated but as a source of regenerative power? This panel seeks interdisciplinary approaches from scholars working in Black studies, philosophy, gender and sexuality studies, performance, literature, visual culture, theology, and beyond. This panel welcomes work that examines how regeneration might be theorized not as a return to normativity but as a radical reorientation: toward fugitivity, refusal, or even disorder. 

This panel will take place at the Northeast Modern Languages Assocation (NeMLA) conference in Pittsburgh, PA from March 5-8, 2026. 

To submit an abstract for this panel, please go to the following link: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/21606