MLA, January 7-10, 2016, Austin, Texas

The "Year in Conferences" (YiC) accelerates the circulation of ideas between and 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 eighth year, this report includes MLA, ALA, and C19.

Mla, january 7-10, 2016, austin, texas

The Modern Language Association's annual conference was held in Austin, Texas in January 2016. In his presidential address, "Literature and Its Publics: Past, Present, and Future," Roland Greene asked attendees to reimagine the futures of public scholarship and of the publics that scholars study and engage. A range of panels on nineteenth-century topics explored the past as palimpsest, the ways publics circulate in time and space, and how archives and archival practices both create and conceal publics. Three recurring keywords wove these panels together: culture, public, and archives. These terms remind us that to be a scholar-in-public in the twenty-first century will require that we continually reevaluate them and how we work with(in) them.

Program link: http://apps.mla.org/conv_listings_res

Afterlives of the american nineteenth century: or, reimagining the literary past

Several panels explored the ways that nineteenth-century studies challenge historical linearity, either through demonstrable continuities between past and present, or through studies that thematize haunting, endurance, and legacies that allow works, authors, and ideas to outlast single, defined moments. In "The Afterlives of Nineteenth-Century American Racism," panelists examined links between nineteenth-century racism and our contemporary moment. Attending to photographic records and social media, Autumn Womack read the Baker lynching exhibit (1899) via the Black Lives Matter movement to reveal a shared desire to understand racial violence through documentation, even though racism eludes representation. Gordon Fraser explored the relationship between Thomas Dixon Jr. and Dylann Roof to suggest that individual and state violence were mutually constitutive during Reconstruction and linger today in manifestos like Roof's. Christine Yao considered "how conditions of sympathy contribute to racism," analogizing Harriet Beecher Stowe's sentimental rhetoric with the #whitetears Twitter trend to interrogate valorizing white women's feelings in moments of racial upheaval. Kirsten Silva Gruesz connected the identifications of solidarity among nineteenth-century Haitian and US writers to the solidarity expressed after Haiti's 2010 earthquake; these juxtaposed histories reveal a "new vocabulary for the possibility of Pan-African and Pan-American thought" that deemphasizes nation-states. Marlene Daut examined the 2014 Central American refugee crisis at the Texas and Arizona border with nineteenth-century immigrant narratives that emphasize citizenship and closure as well as foreshadow "today's version of sentimentalized 'right feeling.'"

Three author-specific panels considered the afterlives and legacies of Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Twain. To celebrate the Thoreau Society's seventy-fifth anniversary and Henry David Thoreau's two-hundredth birthday, "Anticipating Thoreau at Two Hundred" previewed the forthcoming Thoreau at Two-Hundred (2017, Cambridge), evidencing the author's enduring relevance. Sandy Petrulionis illuminated Thomas Wentworth Higginson's shaping of Thoreau. Though both men were committed extremist abolitionists, Petrulionis noted that Higginson's silence on Thoreau's Civil Disobedience (1849) and reform essays depoliticized Thoreau's postbellum legacy. Lance Newman maintained the author's value relative to twenty-first century ethically- and politically-linked environmental problems. Newman read Thoreau's Walden (1854) against Swiss-American geographer Arnold Henry Guyot's Earth and Man, Lectures on Comparative Physical Geography in its Relation to the History of Mankind (1849). Whereas Guyot celebrates European and North American achievements in which individuals work their land to make it livable, Thoreau critiques capitalism's demand for perpetual work. Alan Hodder interrogated millennials' appropriation of Thoreau as a disciple for the emerging "spiritual, not religious" identification and noted how this appropriation manifests physically in yoga's exploding popularity. Hodder suggested that conversations regarding spirituality beyond institutionalized religion can draw productively from Thoreau's writing.

"Posthumous Hawthorne" explored Nathaniel Hawthorne's unfinished "Septimius" manuscripts. Charles Eaton Baraw argued for the author's transatlantic position within "necromanticism" and...