CFP: Resisting Region, Breaking Boundaries: Women Writers and (the Problem of) Сommunity (American Literature Assn, May 26-29, Boston)

In recent thinking about cosmoregionalism, critics have intensified the questioning of regional insularity and boundedness through attending to the interdependence of the local and the global. Far from a simple reclaiming of regionalism from perceptions of backward provincialism, such an approach has sought to explore the ways that local communities are formed and sustained through transregional connections, ones that do not necessarily circulate in and around the nation state. Given that traditional dismissals of provincial, insular regionalism, or local color, have historically been most charged, and most damning, one might argue, when they have been levied against American women writers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, this panel aims to reexamine “women regionalists” and female “local colorists” through the lens of cosmoregionalism.

How is locality approached in work by women writers in this period, and how does it navigate ideas of belonging, personal and cultural identity, and broader concepts of ethnicity and nationality? How might cosmoregionalism complicate or stretch notions that women find voice or define themselves best through community? In broader terms, then, how do the fields of cosmoregionalism and feminism speak to each other through these literary texts? Papers that explore the work of women writers from approximately 1850 to 1910 that focus on national identity as well as race, class, and/or sexual identity are especially welcome, as are those that take a historical approach.
Potential panelists might also explore modern texts which represent and/or
rework the historical and literary phenomenon of the female regionalist.

Email 250 word abstracts and brief CVs by January 22 to Rebecca Walsh
(rawalsh@duke.edu) and Susan Fanetti (sfanett@siue.edu). Each panelist
will deliver a 20-minute paper. Panelists do not necessarily have to be
members of the American Literature Assn.

For more information about this year's ALA conference, see
www.americanliterature.org, or
www.calstatela.edu/academic/english/ala2/american_literature_2005.html