Special Session Proposal for the 2027 MLA Convention (Los Angeles, 7–10 January 2027).

This MLA 2027 special session, “Unfinished Histories: Literary and Cultural Acts of Hope,” explores radical hope as an emancipatory and dynamic framework for examining how literature, film, and art cultivate creative and relational modes of remembrance. Rather than approaching the past solely through paradigms of loss, grievance, or melancholia, the panel asks how cultural narratives open generative spaces for imagining unfinished futures.

The session draws inspiration from Ann Rigney’s work on storytelling as a vehicle for transmitting hope and enabling social transformation in Remembering Hope: Transnational Activism beyond the Traumatic (2025), as well as Jonathan Lear’s concept of radical hope in Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (2006). Lear argues that in moments of profound cultural rupture— when a way of life becomes not only impossible but even retroactively unimaginable— what is needed are radical conceptual and ethical tools for cultural renewal. Radical hope, in this sense, is oriented toward a future good that cannot yet be fully conceptualized by those who hope for it. The panel is also informed by Rebecca Solnit’s reflections on hope as an embrace of uncertainty in Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities (2004; 2016), which understands hope not as naïve optimism but as a practice grounded in the openness of the future.

Building on these insights, this panel invites participants to think critically and creatively about what radical hope can do for literature and culture at moments when inherited narratives, forms, and imaginaries prove insufficient. How might literature, film, and the visual arts cultivate new vocabularies for engaging difficult pasts, uncertain presents, and emergent futures? How might aesthetic practices create spaces for reimagining collective life not only through critique but also through imagination, affirmation, and relational repair?

At a time when cultural discourse is often dominated by crisis and grievance, this panel explores how artistic practices might help reorient cultural memory toward possibility, renewal, and collaborative world-making. It asks how narratives, across fiction, nonfiction, poetry, memoir, cinema, and visual art, might enable us to reinvent cultural and ethical imaginaries not in opposition to one another, but in co-creation with one another.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Radical hope in literature, film, and visual arts
• Storytelling as a practice of cultural survival and renewal
• Narratives of unfinished pasts and open futures
• Literary and artistic responses to cultural devastation or rupture
• Hope as an ethical, aesthetic, and political practice
• Memory, imagination, and cultural transformation
• Rethinking memory studies through affirmative or future-oriented frameworks
• Cultural afterlives of protest, resistance, and solidarity
• Environmental hope and ecological imagination in literature and art
• Postcolonial and decolonial articulations of hope
• Narrative forms of collective repair and relational memory
• Speculative, utopian, and future-oriented cultural imaginaries
• Storytelling and the transmission of hope across generations

Please submit a 250-word abstract along with a brief bio.Deadline for submissions: Sunday, March 22, 2026Contact: Dr. Deniz Gundogan Ibrisim, Kadir Has University deniz.gundogan@khas.edu.tr; denizgundogan@gmail.com 

References

Lear, Jonathan. Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation. Harvard University Press, 2006.

Rigney, Ann. Remembering Hope: Transnational Activism beyond the Traumatic. Oxford University Press, 2025.

Solnit, Rebecca. Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities. Nation Books, 2004. Revised edition, Haymarket Books, 2016.