Race and Displacement: Nation, Migration, and Identity in the Twenty-First Century

Introduction

introduction Philip D. Beidler originally conceived of and entitled the alabama Symposium on english and american literature, the university of alabama symposium series sponsored by the english department and the College of arts and Sciences, begun in fall 1974, may now be said manifestly in its own substantial scholarly record of nearly four decades to trace out the radical evolution of the discipline and of critical inquiry over the period. Most visible in both relations has been the growth of cultural studies, highlighted by the new intersections, professional and theoretical, of scholarship and discourse in the traditional fields of language and literature with those of philosophy, linguistics, psychology, sociology , anthropology, religion, politics, and economics; nor is this to neglect exciting evolutions in the idea of disciplinary work itself in such fields as race, gender, postcolonial, and material culture studies. accordingly, the early years of the symposium series itself included a sequence of inquiries on current critical issues in the works of major individual figures: William Shakespeare, Geoffrey Chaucer, Samuel Johnson, Mark twain, William faulkner, ezra Pound, and others. Within the first decade, however, in keeping with what may now be properly called the theory revolution, the purview quickly extended into contemporary problems and topics: rhetoric and literacy, theoretical feminism, postmodern poetry and poetics, critical theory futures. representative titles included “after Strange texts: The role of Theory in the Study of literature,” “The differences Within: feminism and Critical Theory,” “our academic Contract: The Conflict of the faculties in america,” and “Myth, Memory, and Migration: The Black South in the Cultural imagination.” a more recent, thematically connected set of programs and resultant publication series was entitled Signs of race, with titles rang- 2 / Philip D. Beidler ing from “Writing race across the atlantic World” to “english and ethnicity” and “eruptions of funk.” The latest event, in 2011, brought together an array of international researchers and writers on the corpus linguistics. a central feature of the symposium project throughout was the attempt to combine the authority of established scholarship with the innovative work of younger figures. in the first case, the programs over the years came to include such eminent invitees (to name just a representative sampling), as northrop frye, d. W. robertson, Cleanth Brooks, alfred kazin, M. h. abrams, hugh kenner, kenneth Burke, Geoffrey hartman, Jane Marcus, J. hillis Miller, helen vendler, fredric Jameson, and Jacques derrida. in the second initiative, selected participants in earlier stages of their careers included Stephen Greenblatt , Barbara Johnson, Jonathan Culler, Gayatri Spivak, annette kolodny, Peggy kamuf, and farrah Jasmine Griffin. for selected programs, major literary figures joined the invitees. These included denise levertov, louis Simpson , William Gass, alice Walker, and august Wilson. in light of the above history, the intended—or, perhaps better, the aspirational —reach of the 2009 symposium was to continue and enlarge the process of evolution so described in a number of respects. its wide-ranging call for papers, with the intention of attracting submissions from a potentially novel assortment of fields and research communities, announced a focus “on the concept of racial diaspora—removals, migrations, colonial and postcolonial geographies, and transnational identities, both individual and collective. What is the relationship between race and place in the various senses of those terms? What does race have to do historically with place? What is the place of a given race, ‘its’ place geographically, historically, in terms of social, educational , economic, and political traditions, hierarchies, power relations, and so on? What is the ‘place’ of a person in relation to race as well as in regard to other forms of difference—gender, sexuality, ethnicity; class, labor, ideology?” a second, related innovation, also described in the announcement, was the proposed focus of conference presentation and participation on the core work of beginning scholars. to this end, the call for papers was addressed and promulgated exclusively to graduate students in all relevant fields, with program and prospective volume selections to be chosen by competitive submission . to establish further a project of conversation between scholarly and professional cohorts, participation was invited from two preeminent senior figures in the field, houston a. Baker Jr., distinguished university Professor at vanderbilt university, and trudier harris, J. Carlyle Sitterson Professor of english emerita at the university of north Carolina at Chapel hill. organizers included a senior professor from the sponsoring department of english, with research interests in the atlantic world of the contact era, and two fac- Introduction / 3 ulty...