I have proposed the following session for SAMLA, November 4-6, 1999 in Atlanta:
Segregated Siblings: Interracial Same-Sex Sibling Relationships in U.S. Texts
This panel will investigate how Colonial or United States authors use
interracial, same-sex sibling relationships to represent and explore national
or regional race relationships. Various scholars have investigated how authors
use the rhetoric of “the family” to represent metaphorically and to
problematize relationships between various racial groups in the U. S. However,
many of these investigations have focused on texts in which the interracial
familial relationships are those between husband and wife or between parent and
child, relationships which are further circumscribed by cultural dichotomies of
gender or generation. The interracial, same-sex sibling relationship, however,
may allow for more prolific analyses of constructions of race and of how race
functions because it is free from these additional cultural proscriptions.
Consequently, papers should focus on relationships between brothers or sisters
of different racial identities. (Sample texts are Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie,
Cable’s The Grandissimes, Hopkins’s Contending Forces, or Faulkner’s Absalom!
Absalom!). Papers might discuss but are not limited to the following
questions:
* How do these relationships reflect on the issue of race as either
biologically or socially constructed?
* How are conceptions of a raced Self modified through confrontation with the
"other" race sibling?
* How do these relationships affect the individual subjectivities of the
characters?
* How are these relationships complicated by issues of sexuality?
* Do the relationships serve as strategies of subversion, or do they serve to
reify the current racial hierarchy?
* How are these relationships received by the families and the communities
within the texts, and how does that reception influence the characters’ sense
of a raced Subjectivity?
* How do issues of inheritance (both of property and of race itself) complicate
the relationships between interracial siblings?
Please send 1-2 page abstracts by March 26 to:
or
Julie A. Cary
1215 Patterson Office Tower
Department of English
University of Kentucky
Lexington, KY 40506-0027
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