Presidential Sponsored Session: History on Fire: A 25th Anniversary Roundtable for Scenes of Subjection

Abstract:

Scenes of Subjection set fire to normative conceptions of historical temporality, disciplinarity, and liberalism while excavating the magnitude of antiblackness, the complexity and centrality of Black practice, the perils of reform, and the elusiveness of freedom. The enormous stakes and remarkable form destined Scenes to become one of the most influential works in American Studies, albeit not without eliciting substantial controversy for both its substance and style (much like this year’s CFP itself). The timing of this proposed panel corresponds to the book’s 25th anniversary. Yet more importantly, it is intimately connected to this year’s theme, which demands that participants grapple with the nexus of devastation, relation, and creativity. Certainly, Saidiya Hartman’s transformative work demands a reckoning with the calamitous entanglement of slavery and emancipation and the nuances of Black life and living in enclosure. Scenes’ myriad interventions prefigure this year’s theme, which asks participants to examine the nuances of terror, precarity, and estrangement, and the contradictions of pleasure, culture, appropriation, and violence. These themes all find ingenious elaboration in Scenes, which might also be considered a foundational study of “dungeon economies,” one of the generative subthemes in this year’s CFP.

Participants:

Kimberly Juanita Brown, (Comment), Dartmouth College
Patrice D Douglass, (Comment), University of California-Berkeley
Denise Ferreira da Silva, (Comment), University of British Columbia
Marisa J Fuentes, (Chair), Rutgers University-New Brunswick
Sarah Haley, (Panelist), Columbia University
Jennifer L. Morgan, (Comment), New York University
Matthew D Morrison, (Comment), New York University
Emily A Owens, (Comment), Brown University