In his seminal and final film Black Is…Black Ain’t, the documentarian Marlon Riggs utilizes a pot of gumbo to articulate his thesis that Blackness necessitates an identity built on multiplicity, complication, and depth, a production requiring expansiveness in its sustained attention (Riggs 1995). Such a vision contests and destabilizes narratives depicted within the film that sought to limit Black identities and identifications, and it cuts against the second half of his title, which suggests Blackness in terms of negation, evasion, and minimization. The title to this conference continues a conversation with Riggs and also with Ralph Ellison, Ama Ata Aidoo, Toni Morrison, Stuart Hall, and centuries of international Black thought. By doubling down on the “is” and considering contradictory, harmonious, and contrapuntal accounts of the many ways Blackness is and can be, the Gregory J. Hampton Graduate English Student Association hopes to encourage a maximalist exchange with its conference, being held March 25-26, 2027, as a contemplation of storytelling and its connections to productions and identities of Blackness.

We also seek to do commemorative work as we honor the career of Dr. Jimisha Relerford, a graduate of our program and member of the Howard community who passed recently. Her dissertation broke critical ground in its study of Black women’s satire. We thus encourage the submission of papers about Black satire, especially Black women’s work in the genre. Writers such as Leone Ross, Danzy Senna, Fran Ross, and Zadie Smith, all of whom were discussed in Dr. Relerford’s dissertation, utilize satire to comment on and transform notions of Blackness. We hope to continue Dr. Relerford’s work by contemplating how storytellers work within this genre to talk about identity. We additionally encourage work on Afrofuturism and speculative Black texts in reference to our organization’s namesake, a pillar in Afrofuturist study. 

In addition to recognizing the intellectual impacts of Drs. Relerford and Hampton, this conference serves as a milestone, marking the tenth conference our organization has hosted in honor of Black literary study. Given Black academia and HBCUs’s influence on identity and storytelling around it, we also welcome papers grounded in studies of scholarly impacts on identity as seen in multimodal narratives, productions, protests, and criticism. We additionally invite papers in the following areas that intersect with identity and identification study in story:

• African Studies 

• African-American Studies 

• Caribbean Studies 

• Disability Studies

• Ecocriticism and Ecopoetics

• Diaspora, Ethnicity, and Migration Studies

• Food Studies 

• Hip Hop 

• Humor 

• Literary History 

• Protest and Rhetoric 

• Queer Studies 

• Television and Film

To submit a paper or panel to our conference, please email an abstract of 250-300 words to gesasecretary@gmail.com no later than January 15, 2027. Include in your email, your name, affiliation, contact information, and a brief biographical blurb.