[This past week
we held the 50th
Anniversary NeMLA Convention in Washington, DC. It was a great time as
ever, and this week I’ll highlight a few of the many standout moments and
conversations for me. Lemme know
if you’d like to hear or chat more about the NeMLA Board,
the American
Area, next year’s convention in Boston,
or anything else!]
As I mentioned
in Tuesday’s post, I got so many great abstracts for my “African American
Literature and the Ironies of Freedom” call that I was able to create two panels.
Complementing the Morrison panel was this trio of wonderful papers that looked
at other African American lit and voices from across literary history:
1)
Emma McNamara: Emma, a Washington, DC high
school English teacher and independent scholar, started us off with a
linguistic and structuralist analysis of Walter
Dean Myers’s ground-breaking YA novel Monster (1999).
Emma’s paper highlighted four different languages/codes in the course of Myers’s
novel, and used them to analyze issues of race and culture, mass incarceration
and the justice system, and other vital American and 21st century
themes and threads. But she also made a potent case for two crucial literary
threads alongside those historical and cultural ones: the role of narrative in
creating and contesting images of such themes; and the role of audience (and
thus reader response theory) in engaging and interpreting those texts. All questions
that helped shape the rest of this great panel as well!
2)
Pearl
Nielsen: Pearl carried those conversations forward a couple decades,
looking at two complex and crucial works of contemporary African American literature:
Ta-Nehisi Coates’s autobiographical and political Between the World
and Me (2015) and Teju Cole’s novel Open
City (2011). Her multi-layered analyses of these texts nicely laid out
the complicated relationship between collective and individual identity, a
frame that of course relates closely to members of a racial and ethnic
community like African American (already complicated here since Cole is the son
of Nigerian immigrant parents while Coates’s American roots go back many
generations) but that has implications and meanings for all American audiences.
But she also and crucially introduced 21st century global
connections and contexts into the mix, particularly through the topic of
cosmopolitan patriotism, a middle ground between both individual/collective and
American/global dualities. Pearl’s paper gave me a lot to think about with both
these vital works/authors and every aspect of our current moment.
3)
Rod Taylor:
Rod took us back a century, looking at the late 19th century through
the lens of anti-plantation literature (a term of his own from his dissertation
studying this era). This is of course an era and broad set of literary and
cultural histories I know well, and indeed Rod was kind enough to name-check my
first book as part of his great analysis of the genre and period. But Rod’s
paper focused on an in-depth analysis (including wonderful work with rare
archival materials) of an author and figure about whom I knew very little: Daniel
Webster Davis. Rod analyzed both Davis’s published poems and his
unpublished lecture notes (held in a Richmond, VA collection) at length, making
the case for both the challenges/limits of Davis’s perspective and voice and
yet his potent revisions of plantation
tradition and Lost
Cause mythologies. But he also simply and crucially reminded me that there’s
always so much more to learn, which remains one of the most powerful and
inspiring lessons I take away from each and every NeMLA convention!
Last recap
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. NeMLA
reflections to share?
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