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5.30 Pm PARALLEL SESSIONS PANELS 1,3,4,9 TUESDAY, 13 JUNE 4 – 5.30 p.m. PARALLEL SESSIONS PANELS 1,3,4,9 PANEL 1 Identity Formation and Trauma in the Works of Toni Morrison. Justine Tally (Universidad de la Laguna, Spain) Chair “Return of the Repressed: The Politics of Engraving and Erasure in God Help the Child.” Abstract While early critics of Toni Morrison’s latest novel, God Help the Child, were fairly quick to notice its intersexuality with her first novel, The Bluest Eye, with its emphasis on skin color, social acceptance, concerns with pedophilia, and stunted childhood, the title itself seems to echo another novel from 1964 which also examined the furious chase for material wealth and social acceptance … though less obviously concerned with skin color. Kirstin Hunter’s God Bless the Child also traces the pursuit of happiness by a young black girl who looks in the wrong places for fulfillment. Hunter’s novel picks up on the Billie Holiday song written in 1939 which she supposedly confectioned around something her mother had quoted during an argument: “Mama may have, Papa may have. But God bless the child that's got his own.” But own what? Hunter’s protagonist finally comes to the realization that what she’s so steadfastly sought is more illusion than reality; Morrison’s Bride discovers that her sense of “self” has also been seriously misplaced. Bio Justine Tally is Professor of American Literature at the University of La Laguna (recently retired) where she has specialized in African American Literature and Culture. She is author of Paradise Reconsidered: Toni Morrison’s (Hi)stories and Truths (Lit Verlag, 1999), The Story of Jazz: Toni Morrison’s Dialogic Imagination (Lit Verlag, 2001), and Toni Morrison’s Beloved: Origins (Routledge, 2009). She has edited the Cambridge Companion to Toni Morrison (CUP 2007), and co-edited with Walter Hölbling Theories and Texts (Lit Verlag, 2007, 2009), co-edited with Shirley A. Stave of Toni Morrison’s A Mercy: Critical Approaches (CSP 2011); and is co-editor of a volume of collected essays with Adrienne Seward entitled Toni Morrison: Memory and Meaning (UP Mississippi, 2014). She is also co-editor with Carmen Birkle of the section of E-JAS special issue on Women in the USA, volume 10, nº 1 (2015), entitled "Waging Health: Women in Nineteenth-Century American Wars." She has also authored the chapter on "Feminist Studies" included in Approaches to American Cultural Studies, Edited by Antje Dallmann, Eva Boesenberg and Martin Klepper (Routledge 2016) and has compiled the entry for Toni Morrison for the Oxford Bibligraphies Online (2016) Mar Gallego: (Universidad de Huelva, Spain) “Traumatized Children, Sorority and Healing in Toni Morrison’s Love and Home.” Abstract In Morrison’s works traumatized children abound due to the influence of damaging racist and sexist dominant ideology. In many cases these children evolve into conflictive adults, but other times some of them manage to survive their childhood traumas and thrive as somehow functioning adults. In the latter cases female bonding figures prominently as an instrument for redemption and a path to physical and psychological healing. My contention is that sorority is enacted in Morrison’s novels Love (2003) and Home (2012) precisely as a catalyst to help ensure the survival of vulnerable female children into their adulthood, as it is exemplified by Heed and Christine’s lasting friendship and Cee’s communal ritual of healing. Bio Mar Gallego has taught American and African American Literatures at the University of Huelva (Spain) since 1996. She obtained her Ph. D. Degree in 1997, and was awarded fellowships at the Universities of Cornell (academic year 91-92), Northwestern (1995, 2003, 2007, 2011 and 2016) and Harvard (1999 and 2015). She is currently director of the Research Centre on Migrations at the University of Huelva. Her major research interests are African American Studies and the African diaspora, with a special focus on women writers and gender issues. She has published two monographs entitled Passing Novels in the Harlem Renaissance (LitVerlag, 2003) and A ambas orillas del Atlántico: Geografías de hogar y diáspora en autoras afrodescendientes (KRK, 2016) and has co- edited several essay collections, such as Myth and Ritual in African American and Native American Literatures (2001), Contemporary Views on American Culture and Literature in the Great 60’s (2002), Razón de mujer: ensayo y discurso femeninos (2003), El legado plural de las mujeres (2005), Espacios de género (2005), Relatos de viajes, miradas de mujeres (2007), Género, Ciudadanía y Globalización (2009 and 2011), and The Dialectics of Diasporic Identification (2009). Shirley A. Stave (Louisiana Scholars’ College at Northwestern State University) “Skin Deep: Identity and Trauma in God Help the Child.” Abstract Shirley A. (Holly) Stave’s essay, “Skin Deep: Identity and Trauma in God Help the Child,” argues that Morrison’s novel interrogates the old debate over the social construction of identity vs. essential identity, focusing on idea of surface (or skin) vs depth. Although Booker rightly points out that at the genetic level, race does not exist, such a claim says nothing about the effects of a social system of racism that is predicated completely upon what is seen with the eye—the skin. While Bride’s wounding stems from her lack of nurturance, Booker’s suffering begins when his adored older brother is raped and murdered by a pedophile who has tattooed the names of his victims on his skin. Like Bride, Booker cannot get beyond the concept of skin, understanding that his brother’s beauty, his surface, was the impetus for his death. In the course of the lovers’ willingness to probe beneath the surface, the novel engages in the attempt to return to the site of the originary trauma, which is, of course, slavery. Whether the couple is able to overcome their fears to allow for the integration of surface with depth remains in question, although their willingness to bring a child into the world suggests an acceptance of adult responsibility. Bio Shirley A. (Holly) Stave , a professor at the Louisiana Scholars’ College at Northwestern State University, is the author of The Decline of the Goddess: Women, Nature, and Culture in Thomas Hardy’s Wessex, the editor of Gloria Naylor: Strategy and Technique, Magic and Myth, and Contested Intertextualities: Toni Morrison and the Bible and the co-editor of a collection of essays on Toni Morrison’s A Mercy . She is a contributor to the Cambridge Companion to Toni Morrison, to a collection of essays in honor of Toni Morrison’s 80th birthday celebration, and to various collections of critical work on Morrison. PANEL 3 A Thirst for Freedom: Afro-American and Afro-Barbadian Emigrationism within the Nineteenth Century Atlantic World. Tiffany Ruby Patterson (Vanderbilt University, USA) Chair Caree Banton (University of Arkansas, USA) “Barbadians Encounter the African Coast: Settlement, Identity, and Stratification in Liberia.” Abstract: This paper explores the outcomes of the settlement of 346 Barbadians in Liberia relative to the colonization of other groups of blacks. It shows how the story of Liberian colonization changed as Barbadians and other groups of blacks, whose identities converged and diverged from African Americans, joined the nation-building process. The paper intervenes in theoretical formations of race through an examination of the ways in which the social relationships between the different groups of blacks transformed the ethno-cultural identity of the Liberian nationality. In the tensions of settlement and encounter, new group identities, social ascriptions, and nomenclature became a way of establishing relationships with diaspora and the state. This suggest that migrants did not so much abandon the basic tenets of the life they had left behind; they merely subsumed them into behaviors no longer bounded by white racism. As a layered story of Caribbean emancipation, migration, and African liberation, Barbadian emigration revives some elements of the debates in African diaspora history and forges new connections and paths in its historiography to create a transatlantic history of black experiences of freedom, citizenship, and nationhood. Bio University Lecturer, Social and Economic History, University of Leiden, Netherlands Ousmane Power-Greene (Clark University, USA) “King Cotton’s Exile in Trinidad: Examining the formation of an African Diaspora in the late 1830s.” Abstract This paper will examine African American emigrationism to Trinidad in the late 1830s by placing it within the context of the transnational network of abolitionists, philanthropists, and human rights advocates who challenged slavery in the United States and within the broader Atlantic world after British emancipation. Those who left for Trinidad joined other African Americans who, as this paper argues, formed an “African American diaspora” by settling in nations, such as Haiti, Trinidad, and Liberia, and Canada. This “African American diaspora” has yet to be fully conceptualized or researched, and it remains an important site for scholars to examine the benefits, challenges, and setbacks of those black Americans who emigrated from the United States to various points on the Atlantic rim, such Trinidad, during the early nineteenth century. Black American “emigrationism” was not merely a reflex, but a clear illustration of the way black Americans came to situate their sense of identity with other African descended people living in the Diaspora. Ultimately this paper examines the history of black emigrationists who unified with other people of African descent by using their own mobility as a way to oppose racial oppression in the North and slavery in the Cotton Kingdom. Bio Dr. Power-Greene completed his B.A. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst in African American Studies. A specialist in African American social and political movements, Professor Power-Greene teaches courses for undergraduates and graduate students on American history with a focus on African American internationalism and comparative social and political movements.
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