The Year in Conferences—2022

Abstract

The Year in Conferences—2022 Katrina Marie Dzyak (bio), Tenisha McDonald (bio), Nicole Musselman (bio), Hyunjoo Yu (bio), Max Chapnick (bio), Devon Bradley (bio), Chantelle Escobar Leswell (bio), Emma Horst (bio), Joe Hansen (bio), Max Chapnick (bio), and Andy Harper (bio) The “Year in Conferences” (YiC) accelerates the circulation of ideas among scholars by covering the field’s major conferences. Graduate students from across the country collaboratively author an article that appears annually in ESQ’s first issue. Now in its fourteenth year, this report includes ALA and C19. c19, march 31–april 2 2022, coral gables, fl written by: katrina marie dzyak, tenisha mcdonald, nicole musselman, and hyunjoo yu senior advisor: max chapnick C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists gathered for its first in-person conference since 2018 in Coral Gables, Florida, and appropriately addressed the (broadly conceptualized) theme of Reconstruction. Plenary speaker Desmond Meade, President of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition and Chair of Floridians for a Fair Democracy, joined virtually; severe storms and the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic disrupted many conference-goers’ flights. The seventh biennial conference’s material conditions could not escape reminders of ongoing crises in public health, democracy, racial capitalism, and climate catastrophe, and the papers presented addressed similar themes. Many panels connected the literary and the historical and are here arranged around the topics of justice, geography and race, print culture, embodiment [End Page 103] and feeling, reconstructing form, gender and sexuality, and literary radicals. Together, they reveal the embeddedness of literature in these various historical movements and in the collective attempts to reconstruct our world. Program link: https://c19conference.files.wordpress.com/2022/03/c19-program-2022-2.pdf environmental justice Panelists on “Being Together” explored social, class, and material links between disparate individuals and milieus. To begin, Michelle Neely decentered Henry David Thoreau by considering how the Transcendentalist writer links Native history, extermination, and immortal pines in The Maine Woods (1864). While readers today would likely consider restoring the trees to Indigenous communities, Thoreau uses them to rhetorically sanction ongoing non-Native settlement. Colleen Boggs turned to Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) to consider how the novel theorizes the US’s post-Reconstruction financial landscape. Boggs read Huck’s decided poverty as a type of social death. Huck’s decision prompts readers to consider poverty’s appearance and definition in a period of rapid and racial economic shifts. Finally, Dominic Mastroianni traced Ralph Waldo Emerson’s attention to how lifeforms from atoms to humans re-encounter each other after significant time apart. No matter the mode of re-encounter, Emerson’s writings show that all matter eventually recognizes itself. Mastroianni suggests that Emerson’s epistemological struggle produces a style of being together with matter, through separation, that maintains a universal rhythm. Panelists on “C19, or . . . ?: Reconstructing Time in the Environmental Humanities” prompted scholars to negotiate the energy sources that enable publishing and [End Page 104] ownership. Jamie L. Jones traced how the ocean, taken as material and metaphor, embodies history, society, and survival. According to Jones, rhetorical metaphors tend to “flee the scene,” while in Black radical theory and historiography, oceanic metaphors are potential vectors of liberation. Ana Schwartz traced the scientific inquiry into and literary representation of the cactus Opuntia to suggest how this plant thwarted early colonial science. Western records, Schwartz suggested, reveal that the cactus’s shape and abundance resisted material and epistemological management. Such history disrupts the presumed authority of colonial scientific methods and reveals settler-colonist scientists as uncertain and inept. Jennifer James considered alternatives to private ownership by taking up David Walker’s critique of the insidious means by which state and social ideologies prevent Black people from keeping land. In particular, James used the term dyspossession to signal the impossibility of creating a Black commons in a society that accepts the Earth cannot be owned. Stephanie Foote, lastly, considered the production, circulation, and decay of paper, a material that both conveys information and anticipates its own demise. Foote prompted audience members to consider paper’s double inheritance, including both the text it preserves and its ecological and material impact. In “Reconstructing the Earth: Soil, Technology, and Environmental Injustice,” panelists...