CFP: "Black, White, and Red on Green, White, and Orange: Racial and
Colonial Discourses in Irish and American Minority Literatures"
Northeastern Modern Language Association (NEMLA) Convetion 2005
Cambridge, MA
March 31 - April 2, 2005
Panel Organizer: Sebastian T. Bach, English Department, Boston University
Paper Proposal Deadline: September 15, 2004
*** Visit http://people.bu.edu/nakedlun/NEMLA2005 for the official panel
website. ***
I am haunted by the human chimpanzees I saw along the hundred miles of
horrible country. I don't believe they are our fault. I believe ... that
they are happier, better, more comfortably fed and lodged under our rule
than they ever were. But to see white chimpanzees is dreadful: if they
were black, one would not feel it so much, but their skins, except where
tanned by exposure, are as white as ours.
--from _Charles Kingsley, His Letters and Memories of His Life_, vol. iii,
ed. by Frances E. Kingsley (Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1989), p. 111.
Thanks to recent revisionist criticism, scholars of Irish literary history
find themselves in the position to address the frequent intersection of
racial and colonial discourses that provided both ammunition for and
protection against assertions of English hegemony in the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. Due to the constellation of different concepts
that "race" entailed in European thought of this period, British
colonialism justified its hold over Ireland via a wide variety of perceived
biological, socioeconomic, political, and religious superiorities, which,
by contradistinction, constituted the backwardness of the Irish. The
breadth of these definitions of race also facilitated conceptual slippages
between the Irish and other oppressed peoples, not to mention lesser
creatures. Both scholarly commentary and the British popular press
compared the Irish to various animal species (e.g., swine, reptiles, apes)
and non-white human races, such as Africans (and African-Americans) and
Native Americans. At the same time, similar characterizations of
Irish-American immigrants populated the pages of American letters and
journalism. In the ante- and post-bellum United States, African-Americans
frequently found themselves uneasily sharing a nearly comparable
socioeconomic status with Irish-Americans. Moreover, with the
simultaneous, mid-nineteenth century emergence of Fenianism in the United
States and Ireland, critical and popular response to revolutionary violence
compared the Irish to bestial, bloodthirsty, revolting slaves.
Consequently, images of the Irish and Irish-Americans as white Negroes or
papist savages took shape on both sides of the Atlantic with manifold
consequences.
This panel seeks papers on literary representations of and/or sympathies
(or antipathies) between the Irish and American racial minorities within
racial and colonial discourses of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Especially welcome are new approaches to analysis of racial and colonial
discourses and their convergence. Topics may include but are not limited
to transatlantic political influences and collaborations, Irish(-American)
representations of American minorities, American representations of the
Irish(-Americans), Irish(-American) representations of the
Irish(-Americans) and American minorities, American minority
representations of American minorities and the Irish(-Americans), similar
challenges to colonialism and oppression (including stereotype reversals),
racial and cultural hybridity between Irish(-Americans) and American
minorities, and literary offerings of alternative discourses to address
differences between the Irish(-Americans), American minorities, and their
political adversaries.
Please send 250-300 word abstracts in Microsoft Word, Corel WordPerfect, or
Adobe Acrobat format to Sebastian T. Bach via e-mail at nakedlun@bu.edu
(preferred method) or via mail at
Boston University English Department
236 Bay State Road
Boston, MA, 02215
by September 15, 2004. You may also submit paper proposals or make
inquiries via the panel website at http://people.bu.edu/nakedlun/NEMLA2005
(preferred method). Panelists must be members of NEMLA or join by December
2004.
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