[A couple weeks back, NeMLA held our 52nd annual—and first entirely virtual—convention. So this week I’ll highlight a handful of the convention’s stand-out remote events, leading up to some broader reflections on virtual conferences.]
As part of my
final NeMLA as the American
Literature and Transnational Studies Area Director, I had the chance to
chair six wonderful sessions. So for yesterday’s and today’s posts I’ve briefly
highlighted those posts and the awesome presenters who made them go:
1)
Teaching Native American Lit: One of my main
goals during my time as Area Director was to expand and diversify our
conference conversations, and Native American lit & studies was one of the
disciplines I most wanted to amplify. This truly wonderful conversation illustrated
just how much we all have to learn when it comes to teaching and studying that discipline,
featuring great presentations from Lisbeth
Fuisz on rhetorical sovereignty in the classroom, Farhana Islam
on using visual images to teach earlier lit, Catherine
Umolac on residential school memoirs and archives, and Ron Welburn (one of
the scholars and teachers from whom I’ve learned the most in my own career) on
adding Eastern and Southern voices and tribes into our conversations.
2)
Racism and Antiracism in American Culture: This
panel’s topic was so big, and so timely, that it featured six presenters, each
adding a key lens into our crucial conversations about how we read, study,
analyze, teach, and talk about these vital 2021 questions. Those six were: Curtis Browne
on Afropessimism and Native Son; Alex Davis
on The Flintstones and white
fantasies of temporality; Sydney Delaney
on four artistic re-visions of race and female objectivity; Mitchell Gauvin
on Olaudah Equiano’s identities and transformations; John
Hadlock on New Negro Romantic poetry; and Kenneth
Sammond on teaching the long Civil Rights Movement with visual images.
While I was deeply inspired by every panel I got to chair (and attend), this and
the teaching Native American lit roundtable were two of the three that most
inspired my own continued teaching and public scholarship.
3)
Speculative Art in Dark Times: And this was the
third such inspiring panel. I proposed this session in March 2020, when my
Intro to Sci Fi and Fantasy class suffered the same abrupt shifts and
disruptions of the rest of the world in that month. As we tried to navigate the
rest of that chaotic semester, I thought a lot about what fantastic lit and
culture can offer us in such moments. I’m still thinking about that a year
later, and so too were these four wonderful presenters and talks: Brent
Young on realism and fantasy in Eyes
Wide Shut; Jason
Bartles on the ambiguous utopias of Ursula Le Guin and Angélica
Gorodischer; Jess
Flarity on 1930s fantastic fascisms in Sinclair Lewis and Karel Ĉapek;
and Michael
Torregrossa on appropriations of Arthuriana in times of national crisis. Whatever
our future holds here in 2021, I believe that both fantastic culture and
scholarly voices like these can help us move into more thoughtfully and
successfully.
Last recap
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. If you took
part in NeMLA 2021, reflections you’d share?
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