Our moment is one in which information literacy is an increasingly vital skill. As misinformation invades everything from hallucinatory AI-generated online search results, to fallacious social media posts, to official statements from the highest levels of government, the ability to discern between facts, fiction, and opinion is as important as ever. Yet, as history reveals, our times are not entirely unprecedented. In particular, African Americans have long dealt with lies about who we are similarly promoted at every societal level. Here we might consider colonizers’ lies about the intellectual and physical capacity of enslaved Africans used to justify chattel slavery, white newspaper lies about Black male rapacity to justify lynching in the post-bellum period, and more contemporary slander about supposed Black “super predator” criminals to justify “tough-on-crime” policies and the age of mass incarceration.

Yet, African Americans have consistently responded to these lies in ways that are instructive to our own time. African American artistic and cultural production provides a history of how the American information ecosystem has always systemically sought to oppress those within it, as well as a potential blueprint for how to hone our critical thinking skills in order to navigate such an environment. This panel invites participants to reflect on the role of culture—literature, music, visual arts, etc—in recording and combatting such targeted misinformation.  Interested participants are invited to consider issues including but not limited to

• The use of unreliable narrators in Black storytelling
• Memoirs and autobiography as historical documents
• The use of visual culture to counter racial stereotypes
• Applications of W.E.B. Du Bois’s concept of art as propaganda
• The role of Black authors and artists in fostering abolition, integration, civil rights, etc
• The use of remix or remakes to retell white-authored stories
• The role of Black archives in recovering “lost” history

Interested participants should send a proposal of more than 100 words, along with a short bio and any requests for A/V equipment, to JustinSmith@rmc.edu no later than Friday, January 2nd, 2026 for inclusion in an African American Literature and Culture Society-sponsored (AALCS) panel at the American Literature Association (ALA) conference, May 20-23, 2026 in Chicago. Proposals not selected for this panel may be passed along for consideration to one of the other AALCS-sponsored panels at ALA.

More information about ALA can be found here (https://americanliteratureassociation.org), and more information about AALCS can be found here (https://aalcsblog.wordpress.com). Presenters must become members of AALCS prior to the conference.