Call for Papers for:
Northeast Modern Language Association
March 30-31, 2001
Hartford, Connecticut
The Family, Inheritance, and Racial Property in U. S. Texts
Recent work in whiteness studies has productively explored the ways that
"race" continues to influence socio-political, economic, and cultural
structures, as well as the construction and transformation of U. S.
historical narratives. Within the context of this work, I would ask session
participants to (re)read nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction, focusing
their attention on the ways that "race" functions as a form of property that
is passed down through familial lines of inheritance. Because the family is a
primary site for biological and psychological production of racial identity,
and thus largely determinate of the racial identity of those inheriting and
controlling individual and national wealth, the "interracial" family in
particular creates anxiety for the white hegemony by its potential to
destabilize white control of cultural power through intergenerational and
"interracial" transfers of wealth. Such anxiety is especially apparent in
passing narratives and other texts that present characters whose racial
identity is similarly in question.
Focusing on nineteenth- and twentieth-century U. S. fiction, then, the papers
on this panel should examine "whiteness," "blackness," or other racial
categories as forms of culturally- (and differently-) valued racial property,
specifically investigating the interplay between "race" and the "family" in
producing, transmitting, and controlling material and cultural wealth. Papers
might investigate how issues of material inheritance complicate racial
identity; how racial property itself can be lost, stolen, or reclaimed; how
racial property is invested with or divested of "value;" how the desire to
control material, familial wealth motivates racial violence; or how the
manipulation of racial property within the family is fundamental to national
and local economies. Special consideration will be given to papers
investigating textual representations of "interracial" families and/or
passing characters. Submissions on "non-canonical" texts are encouraged.
All accepted panelists must be members of NEMLA by November 1, 2000. Please
send 1-2 page abstracts via email no later than September 15, 2000, to
jacary0@cs.com .
Julie A. Cary
University of Kentucky
Department of English
1215 Patterson Office Tower
Lexington, KY 40506-0027
jacary0@cs.com
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