This panel seeks to explore the concept of work in the United States South and beyond. How does the region honor, resist, and reimagine labor practices? In what ways do the histories of slavery and exploitation of immigrant laborers complicate the notion of southern ingenuity and progress? How do these histories give rise to subtle and profound…[Read more]

Disability and Public Health in the U.S. South 

A key part of colonizing in the U.S. South depended on the rhetoric of health, such as Ponce de Leon’s mythical fountain of youth and nineteenth-century boosterism claiming Florida as the “winter sanitarium of the country” (qtd in Knight 5). The semi-tropical warmth of the South invited justif…[Read more]

Passages of Water and Labor Cultures of the Coastal South and the Caribbean

In Edwidge Danticat’s short story “Without Inspection,” an undocumented Haitian immigrant, Arnold, dies from unsafe working conditions at a construction site in south Florida. In the news coverage about the event, the construction company and developer release a state…[Read more]

Passages of Water and Labor Cultures of the Coastal South and the Caribbean

In Edwidge Danticat’s short story “Without Inspection,” an undocumented Haitian immigrant, Arnold, dies from unsafe working conditions at a construction site in south Florida. In the news coverage about the event, the construction company and developer release a state…[Read more]

MLA 2022 CFP: Afrosouthernfuturism and the Black Speculative Arts

Recently scholars have begun to explore how black artists, writers, musicians, and filmmakers construct blackness, black embodiment, and black experiences in the speculative arts. Indeed, as Isiah Lavender III has argued, “one might argue that chattel slavery is an apocalyptic e…[Read more]

For MLA 2022:

Subaltern Souths

2022 MLA Convention

Washington, D.C., January 6–9, 2022

In her contribution to Keywords for Southern Studies (2016), Shirley Elizabeth Thompson contends that southern studies would benefit from “more precisely articulating the disruptive knowledge of subalterns.” This panel seeks to continue this work by problem…[Read more]

The attached documents provide a list with links to the 2021 MLA LLC African American Forum-Linked Virtual Panels.

Hello Everyone!

I currently chair the executive committee of the LLC Southern US Forum and am seeking feedback from our membership. Our forum hasn’t been particularly active in the MLA Commons, and I am currently completing a report for the MLA, one of the goals of which is to find out what would make the Commons more useful for our purposes.…[Read more]