Roundtable: 'Companion Texts' and Regenerated Feminist Pedagogy (NEMLA 2026 Pittsburgh)

In Living a Feminist Life, Sara Ahmed recalls that when she first read Audre Lorde’s work, she had felt “a lifeline was being thrown to me,” attesting to the work of rescues and regenerations that literature can enact. One may be rescued by a text that is old or new, exhaustively analyzed, or a recent publication, but for the reader living with injustice, it helps one “survive a shattering experience.” Beyond survival, literature, according to Ahmed, “enable[s] you to proceed on a path less trodden” (16). Literature may raise consciousness, validate resistance, and empower action. For Ahmed these types of connections can be made with works from any genre–critical, fictional, verse, and otherwise–as well as any period, and she gives special attention to works “assumed to be dated, to belong to a time that we are in no longer.” These are, what she calls “companion texts” -- works that connect and build communities capable of acting.

This roundtable encourages submissions that identify “companion texts”—such as the Combahee River Collective Statement, to take one example-- which throw us a lifeline and allow us to envision what a re/generated feminist pedagogy might look like in this moment. What literary or critical texts, what genres would help teach, illustrate, inspire a feminism for these times—a feminism that attends to issues such as the environmental crisis, or the despair of the dystopic present, or reproductive rights and freedoms? What work—critical, theoretical, pedagogical, political—do certain companion texts perform? What possibilities, imperatives, risks, and difficulties arise when we conjoin teaching or writing about literature to responding to the world at large?

In Person Only: The session will be held fully in person at the hotel. No remote presentations will be included.

Submit abstracts here: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/22029