[Jenny Bhatt]

Hi all.

I’m sharing a CFP for a proposed panel for MLA 2025. Here\’s the brief (35-word limit) CFP as posted. Below, you can see a slightly longer abstract. Please reach out if this might be of interest to you. Thanks.

MLA CFP Link: https://mla.confex.com/mla/2025/webprogrampreliminary/Paper26442.html

Working Title: Reconstructing Narratives, Reframing Discourses: Historical Fiction as a Mode of Visibilizing the Marginalized and Interrogating the Past

Abstract: This panel will explore the multifaceted role of historical fiction in visibilizing marginalized narratives and critiquing dominant historical discourses. We will discuss how fictionalized narrativizations of the past can enable creative excavations through empirical constructs of historical knowledge to unearth its many gaps, silences, ruptures, and discontinuities and reveal voices and experiences relegated to the peripheries and footnotes. Approached this way, historical fiction is about cultural interventions within imperialist or capitalist world-systems to “reappropriate our past,” as Toni Morrison has famously said, or about “a protest against the negation of our past,” as Chinua Achebe has said. Going beyond revisionism, this literary mode of interrogation and deconstruction also allows writers to hold the past as a mirror to the present and suggest nuanced counterpoints to contemporary sociopolitical realities. Such reflections can then prompt more profound considerations of how historical patterns, dominant discourses, and power/knowledge dynamics continue to shape our world now. Papers can address theories of the historical novel or specific works/authors.

Email: jenny.bhatt@utdallas.edu

[Author]

Posts