The Year in Conferences—2020

Abstract

The Year in Conferences—2020 Rachel Heffner-Burns (bio), E. Dean (bio), Delisa Hawkes (bio), Sam Plasencia (bio), Brianne Dayley, Senior Advisor (bio), Daniella Cádiz Bedini (bio), Mara Curechian (bio), Amanda Louise Johnson (bio), Ali Tal-Mason (bio), Monica Urban (bio), Georgia Walton (bio), and Amanda Louise Johnson, Senior Advisor (bio) The "Year in Conferences" (YiC) accelerates the circulation of ideas among scholars by covering the field's major conferences. Graduate students from across the country collaboratively author an article that appears annually in ESQ's first issue. Now in its twelfth year, this report includes MLA and C19. ________ mla, 9–12 january 2020, seattle, wa written by: rachel heffner-burns, e. dean, delisa hawkes, sam plasencia senior advisor: brianne dayley In their plenary addresses at this year's convention, Gayatri Spivak, Viet Nguyen, Jennifer Wallace, and Charles Johnson called upon our discipline to avoid assuming a shared definition of humanity. Spivak, in particular, instructed us to view the assignment and use of the term "human" as both a medicine against immoral acts and a poison that grants those who are labelled "human" the "right" to committing acts of destruction and hate. Because, as Nguyen similarly observed, our professions similarly support and dismiss—humanize and dehumanize—simply by grouping certain individuals, groups, and ideas under the moniker "the humanities," we have an imperative to develop a more critical understanding of what it means to deploy the term "human." The nineteenth-century scholars this piece examines pose adjacent questions: Is "being human" a question [End Page 279] of individual subjectivity or is it communal? How does "human" function as a value judgment in social and political spheres? How has the attribution of nonhuman or parahuman qualities to certain genders, races, and social classes contributed to social value judgments? Does "human" demarcate a unique set of experiences, character qualities, or abilities? Does the term separate certain creatures as mentally and physically unique, or does it only highlight the conflation of the human, the animal, and the environment? And finally, can studies of nineteenth-century texts help us reevaluate human interactions today? Together, these scholars indicate that such studies can, and they demonstrate methods of doing so. Program Link: mla20.org or https://mla.confex.com/mla/2020/meetingapp.cgi ________ readers, reading practices, and their relationship to race Altering our understanding of race as a socially constructed but subjectively understood discourse, numerous panels explored questions about who reads and how they read. In "Racialized Reading in Nineteenth-Century America," panelists examined how reading practices have reflected and developed social ideas about race. Jackson Truschel argued that Thomas Dixon Jr.'s "Reconstruction trilogy" is central to the development of a distinctively white supremacist aesthetic. Truschel showed how white supremacy functioned through literary language rather than as an effect of writing. Lori A. Leavell then invited scholars to examine reading and news distribution practices in Charles Chesnutt's Marrow of Tradition (1901) as racialized. By depicting white characters reading reprinted messages from Wellington's Black newspaper [End Page 280] to the audience rather than reprinting the messages themselves, Chesnutt draws readers' attentions to how racialized reading practices, and not the messages, incite racial violence. Melissa Daniels-Rauterkus reflected on the reception history of Jean Toomer's Cane (1923) to examine issues surrounding authors' self-proclaimed racial identifications and their consequent textual limitations. Daniels-Rauterkus read Toomer's writing as exemplifying what she called "Afro-realism," a counter to culturally monolithic Blackness. In "Race, Recovery, and Early African American Print Culture," panelists examined the various tactics writers implemented to garner readerly engagement. Benjamin Fagan showed how the New Orleans Tribune/La Tribune de la Nouvelle-Orléans' (1864–1870?) editors required Civil War-era readers to read both English and French in order to fully understand the draft process. In this context, Fagan suggested that language acquisition might serve as a racial and class barrier. Sarah Sillin examined how Yankee Notions Magazine (1852–1875) used black and white caricatures in its cartoons to direct feelings about the war, while simultaneously removing Black people's feelings from the conversation. Thus, Sillin questioned how the cartoons' Black caricatures question who can identify with and conceptualize...