Layered Memories: Migration, Slavery, and Erasure in American Multi-ethnic Literature (PAMLA Conference )
Event: PAMLA Conference
This session explores how multi-ethnic American literature navigates palimpsestic memory—narratives layered with the lingering and hidden imprints of forced migration, slavery, displacement, and systemic erasure. From the brutal dislocations of the transatlantic slave trade to the quiet erasures embedded in ongoing displacement and marginalization, writers have often turned to transcribing stories of the past and present as a process of “Rememory[ing].” This panel seeks papers exploring the ways in which multi-ethnic literature traces stories despite systematic and social mandates to usher such narratives into oblivion. We especially welcome literary papers detailing a resistance and reclamation of racially oppressed identities.
Some possible topics include but are not limited to:
-Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) palimpsest of slavery
-Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return (2001) metaphorical palimpsest
- Intergenerational Hauntings in Kazuo Ishiguro's The Buried Giant (2015)
- Collective, transatlantic trauma within Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing (2016)
-Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer (2015) "palimpsest of ideologies"
Please submit your 250-500 word proposal and short bio through the PAMLA portal by May 15: https://pamla.ballastacademic.com/Home/S/19656
Please email the panel organizers, Courtney Walton, at cwalt2992@gmail.com, and Xiaoyu Gao at email shonnager@gmail.com, with any questions or concerns about the CFP.
Conference theme: https://www.pamla.org/conference/2025-conference-theme/
Courtney Walton and Xiaoyu Gao