This roundtable will explore the theme of mad echoes within contemporary (re)generations of literature and her/their/history. The term (re)generation calls forth processes of renewing or restoring something that has been lost or damaged. Damage and loss have been ways of speaking about the lasting and ongoing violences against marginalized bodies that have been labeled as Mad, pathologized, or institutionalized, but the limits of these concepts have been contested, perhaps most notably in Eve Tuck’s “Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities,” which interrogates the (un)helpfulness of damage-focused research to the pursuit of justice and wellbeing for members of marginalized communities. This roundtable seeks to trace Mad echoes as they manifest in contemporary contexts of (re)generation and restoration. Our roundtable seeks to consider the possibilities for what (re)generation might mean in Mad contexts and to people affected by pathologization, criminalization, surveillance, and other forms of social, institutional, and state violence. The roundtable invites papers, art, and/or performances that trace or center Mad echoes as they exist in response or connection with the silencing, damage, or loss experienced by marginalized subjects, and encourages works that consider how Mad echoes in the present bear connection to suppressed histories and subjectivities in the past.

This interdisciplinary roundtable invites papers and presentations that interrogate the ways that Mad subjects and subjectivities call upon personal pasts, ancestral pasts, and literary or his/their/herstoric pasts to create something new. We are particularly interested in proposals that engage with the idea of “Mad echoes,” or the ways that a Mad subject’s many past(s) may come to haunt or evoke their generative contemporary works. Examples might include but are not limited to contemporary readings of Mad feminist echoes traceable in the deliberately disruptive Black subjectivity of Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman,” projects that explore connections between contemporary Mad feminist or queer theory and the role of insubordination in Audre Lorde’s “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” or explorations of the Mad echoes of Charlotte Perkin’s Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” in contemporary writings on post-partum depression or contemporary horror films.

Chair(s)

Jessica Mason (University at Buffalo, SUNY)

Nicole Crevar (Miami University)

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NeMLA 2026: https://www.nemla.org/ 

NeMLA Convention 2026, March 5-8, in Pittsburgh, PA