[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!]
I attended and
was part of a number of other great sessions over the course of the conference’s
four days. Here are quick recaps of three more (each of which relates to
AmericanStudies in many ways):
1)
Form, Resistance, and U.S. Empire: I attended
this panel in support of William and Mary graduate student Jennifer
Ross, with whom I’m working as part of NeMLA’s new publishing mentorship program.
But Jennifer’s wonderful paper on Omar el Akkad’s novel American
War (2017) was complemented by the two from her co-panelists, fellow grad
students Muhammad
Waqar Azeem (who organized the panel) and Muhammad Sadiq, each
of whom framed broader theoretical lenses through which to analyze these vital
21st century literary, cultural, and historical topics. I was so
struck by the need to include those topics and these conversations more fully
in NeMLA’s American Area and NeMLA overall that I’m hoping to invite a
Pakistani American Studies scholar (or one from elsewhere, but that was a
specific focus for the latter two talks and what Azeem and I began talking
about after the panel) for next year’s area special event, and would love any
suggestions or ideas!
2)
Citizenship and American Literature: Following
up my two African American lit sessions (about which I wrote in Tuesday and Thursday’s
posts) was a two-part sequence on this central and related focus, panels
created by Timothy
Morris and Ariel
Martino from Rutgers. I unfortunately wasn’t able to attend the first, but
got back for the second, which featured Joe
Alicea on 1970s Nuyorican poet Pedro Pietri, Alexandra Lossada
on Hope
Leslie, Hediye
Ozkan on Zitkala-Ša,
and John
Rendeiro on Hawthorne’s “Wakefield.” First
of all, if that ain’t AmericanStudies, I dunno what is! And that’s not just a
delighted AmericanStudier’s response—it’s a vital point about how we define
both citizenship and America overall. That is, there’s significant value in the
simple but crucial act of including texts and stories, authors and voices,
cultures and communities in our conversations, not just on their own terms but
as part of the broad tapestry. I’m not sure I’ve ever encountered a conference
panel that did so more potently than this quartet of great talks!
3)
Landscape and Immigration: On the convention’s
final morning I was part of an informal roundtable on
NeMLA itself and then a formal panel on these topics, one organized by my friend
and predecessor as American Area Director John Casey, Jr. John and
our co-presenter Ariel
Silver both spoke about Willa Cather and her novelistic representations of
these historical and geographic themes, and I learned a lot from their readings
of Cather and her contexts. But while I was already familiar with those works,
I hadn’t heard at all of the focus of our fourth paper: recently minted PhD Laura
Whitebell’s presentation on Elizabeth Gaskell’s historical fiction Lois the Witch (1861).
British novelist Gaskell’s depiction of an English immigrant to late 17th
century Salem who ends up accused of witchcraft during the 1692 trials sounds
like a really interesting complement and challenge to Hawthorne’s House
of the Seven Gables (published just a decade earlier), and also like a
text that I simply need to get my hands on ASAP. Which, as I’ve said all week,
is one of the most inspiring parts of a convention that is always one of the
highlights of my year!
March Recap this
weekend,
Ben
PS. NeMLA
reflections to share?
No comments:
Post a Comment