To bend a phrase by Fredric Jameson, narrative is a historically symbolic act. Literary
scholars and historians have long argued that not only are texts implicated in the time, place,
political events, and economic forces in which they get produced, but they also produce their
own ideas of and uses for history. Indeed, for Marxist, psychoanalytical, and deconstructive
critics (among other schools of thought), a text’s historical contingency needs to be rigorously
elaborated to determine how it works across varied sites (from social to political) and
contexts (from academic to public); moreover, to differing degrees, they all agree that it is
only by understanding the historical undercurrents of a narrative that we might gauge how
effectively it intervenes and/or interrupts in subjective or collective life. Precisely for this
reason perhaps, contemporary academic and public criticism persistently holds onto the
“judgement” of history (Scott, 2020) to either repudiate the falsity of narratives as colonial,
racist, nationalist, or patriarchal; or champion it for being attentive to the "small voice of
history", subaltern perspectives, or pluralist and intersectional experiences.
This panel is interested in (tentatively) suspending such outright judgement by returning to
viewing historical narratives as what Hayden White has called “verbal fictions”. It is also
interested in suspending the theoretical knot predominant in well-rehearsed debates on the
relationship between history and literature by inviting reflections on how history itself
becomes a narrative object. Some of the questions that we ask are: How do writers construct
history within literary texts? What kind of tropes do they deploy when representing narratives
of the past? What pressures do the conditions of postcoloniality put on the writing of history?
How do those pressures manifest at the level of narrative form and aesthetics? What are some
narrative objects through which history is mediated in a text (such as museums, monuments,
archaeological ruins, ghosts, maps, radios, or photographs)?
We are open to submissions that consider “literature” broadly, working with textual, aural,
performative, digital, and visual narratives; as well as exploring how various adjacent
disciplines, such as psychoanalysis and media studies, can help explore the literary uses of
history. Proposals can be related but not limited to the following topics:
• Literary History and History in Literature
• Fictional/Speculative History
• Historical memory and its fictional representations
• Literary genres of historical storytelling (epic, katha, itihasa, dastan, bildungsroman
etc)
• The use of historical objects in different settings: the archive, the museum, the clinic;
the anti-colonial/liberatory revolution or movement; the university or classroom etc
• Instrumentalizing history for both fascist or liberatory politics
• Tools and tropes in visualizing history: from literature to video games to novel image
generation software

Submission window for abstracts is August 26 – October 2; more details can be found on the
ACLA website. Please feel free to reach out with any queries to organizers: Nisarg Patel (nvpatel@usc.edu), Ishan Mehandru (ishanmehandru2025@u.northwester.edu)