CFP: 19th C. Racial and National Border Crossings (3/1/03; MLA '03)

A call for papers for “Racial Border Crossings in Nineteenth-Century
Britain and the United States,” a proposed panel for the 2003 MLA
convention in San Diego, CA.

In recent decades both American and British literary critics have given
much well deserved attention to the emerging concept of “race” in
nineteenth-century literature and culture. For instance, scholars of the
nineteenth-century U.S. have studied representations of racialized
blackness and whiteness to determine their contribution to the formation
of a national identity, and Victorian scholars have examined monolithic
institutions—like the Great Exhibition of 1851 or the rise of the
illustrated periodical—to learn how popular views of both foreign and
domestic “Others” shaped British race politics.

As yet, however, fewer works of literary criticism concern themselves with
the crossing of borderlines, whether racial or national. We are
interested in creating a dialogue about nineteenth century representations
of race that transgresses these traditionally drawn boundaries. We invite
papers that explore both literal and figural border crossings of race
and/or nationality in nineteenth-century America and Britain.

Paper topics might include, but are not limited to: miscegenation;
eugenics; literary and cultural troping of color; artistic representations
of racial (or racialized) “Otherness”; “scientific” racial categorization;
the boundaries of race and education, of race and class, of race and
gender (or a cross-national understanding of any of these); the English
response to American slavery and, more generally, the international
exchange over the politics of race.

Send 500-word abstracts by March 1, 2003 to one of the addresses below. E-
mail submissions preferred; please include your abstract in the text of
the e-mail and as a Word (or Word-compatible) attachment.

Molly Clark Hillard Tiffany Aldrich
mmhillard_at_ucdavis.edu tmaldrich_at_ucdavis.edu
Department of English Department of English
1 Shields Avenue 1 Shields Avenue
University of California University of California
Davis, CA 95616 Davis, CA 95616

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Received on Sun Feb 09 2003 - 19:32:17 EST