In bell hooks’ Belonging: A Culture of Place (2009), she posits that “many folks feel no sense of place” (1). She continues by explaining her personal experience with this spatiality, noting that, “Like many of my contemporaries I have yearned to find my place in this world, to have a sense of homecoming, a sense of being wedded to a place” (2). To that end, a commonality shared between all humans is a searching for a place in which we belong, and this is particularly evident in literature that is produced during times of major societal events. Furthermore, in his ontological work, Being and Time (1927), Martin Heidegger, provides readers with the concept of “Dasein,” a German word that translates to “existence,” or as he means: “being-in-the-world” (40). Humanity, thus, longs to belong and share a community with people who possess similar phenotypical visualities, shared culture, history, or ideologies.

This panel seeks submissions that depict communities, broadly understood, from nineteenth-century transatlantic perspectives that a) showcase the importance of communities in an American or British sense and how those come to bear with major societal shifts of the nineteenth century, and b) demonstrate how authors conceived and depicted the importance of community concerning marginalized bodies.

At its most theoretical, the panel will also extend appreciation for communities as safe havens that allow oppressed people to grow and thrive artistically, intellectually, and socially, and engage with contemporary scholarship that incorporates the sociological thinking of communities as integral parts of humans’ lives in the greater Anthropocene.