Dates: May 24-27, 2012
Location: Hyatt Regency San Francisco
In Embarcadero Center
5 Embarcadero Center
San Francisco, CA 94111
Tel. 415-788-1234
Fax 415-398-2567
Conference Director: Alfred Bendixen
Texas A & M University
Conference Fee: For those who pre-register before April 15, 2012: $85
($50 for Graduate Students, Independent Scholars, and Retired Faculty).
After April 15, the fees are $100 and $60.
For More Information Contact:
www.americanliterature.org
First Panel: Home and Toni Morrison’s Works
In all of her fiction, Morrison examines how the feeling of belonging and a sense of an identity have been put in jeopardy by the perils of history. Her fiction also explores how social, cultural, and political changes produce for individuals a sense of dispossession from their homes. Morrison herself has defined components of home as memory and ancestry as well as citizenship and belonging. We are pleased to accept papers for this panel that conceptualize and/or theorize representations of home; home and identity; home and repressed memory/trauma; and home and nostalgia.
Second Panel: Women, Migration, Movement and Mobility in Toni Morrison’s Fiction
Migration, whether forced, voluntary or induced, and the variable patterns of temporary mobility are forms of territorial movement which inform Morrison's fiction. The Great Migration in Jazz, the Ohio crossing in Beloved, the temporary, repetitive and transnational movement in Paradise and the forced migration in A Mercy are some of the spatial circuits traversed by women. This panel seeks papers with various critical and theoretical approaches to the patterns, processes, and effects of migration, movement, and mobility on women. Papers that theorize the ethnic and intercultural networks women create and the ways that women transform the geopolitical spaces they inhabit are also welcome.
Abstracts must be submitted by January 25, 2012 to Alma Jean Billingslea at jbilling@spelman.edu and Evelyn Schreiber at eschreib@gwu.edu