Call for Papers: MLA 2024

Philadelphia, PA, January 4-7, 2024

Guaranteed Session (GS Children’s and Young Adult Literature Forum)

Children’s Literature Under the Long Shadow of US Imperialism

Call for Papers for a guaranteed roundtable panel sponsored by the Forum for GS Children's and Young Adult Literature Forum at the Modern Language Association (MLA) Annual Convention, January 4-7, 2023 in Philadelphia, PA.

Scholars such as Marilisa Jiménez García (2021) and Brian Rouleau (2021) have made crucial contributions to Children's Literature Studies via their examinations of children's literature/youth literature through the lens of US imperialism. Yet this lens remains underutilized in the field. This roundtable considers how centering US imperialism can reshape the ways we define, theorize, and historicize children's literature. It engages with questions such as: How has US imperialism shaped childhoods and children's narratives in the US and abroad? How does US children's literature perpetuate or resist the US fortification of what Olúfẹmi O. Táíwò calls the "global racial empire"? How do authors and publishers in the global south resist, reproduce, or promote colonial and neocolonial structures and relationships? And what visions and practices of transnational solidarity, decoloniality, and deimperialization are offered in Black, Indigenous, global south, and postcolonial children's literature?

Please send 250-word abstracts and 100-word bios by 15 March 2023 to Lara Saguisag ([log in to unmask]). Accepted panelists will be notified within one week. All prospective panelists must be current members of MLA by April 2023.