📚 MELUS 2022 Presentation: Thoughts

Today, I presented my paper at the 2022 MELUS conference on the panel entitled "Reckoning with Erasure". This marks my second time presenting at, and attending, a MELUS conference, though this was my first time doing so in person. The panel was, I believe, very fascinating, and there were a lot of interesting discussions had about different authors and filmmakers and how they either resist, or employ, erasure in their work. Sofia Coppola, Toni Morrison, Quentin Tarantino and more came up in a lively conversation after the panel; ideas about teaching these tough subjects, reworking them both in the classroom and in future texts, and thinking back on ways in which these ideas color early and modern novels became the central inquiry that moved many of the questions we were asked (and those we asked ourselves). The following is an abstract of my presentation:

          Morrison’s “rememory” is a sort of amorphous, stronger version of a memory, one that almost physically manifests in the world, public, shared by many. This desire to be “re-memoried” rather than simply be “remembered” is a key theme in two novels that have yet to be discussed together: Percival Everett’s Erasure (2004) and Paul Beatty’s The Sellout (2016). Both novels have roots in Wright’s Native Son (1960). Erasure ends with Monk becoming someone else, selling out. The Sellout ends with an undoing of erasure: Bonbon successfully puts his once-removed town back on the map. Though the conclusion of each novel echoes the other’s, what both novels require for their endings to work is “rememory.” Monk’s journey to understand his mother and solidify his late sister’s place in the world is that of seeking rememory. The Sellout is a call for a place to be remembered, that the experience of the town, and its people, be re-recorded. These novels redefine a call for rememory and building a future together in a new, fractured, absurd world and are hopeful rejections of Native Son: while Bigger’s courtroom display fails him, Monk and Bonbon’s public displays (one also in court) flip this realist, dour ending on its head—an optimistic turn that differentiates these narratives from the past and ask us all to, at the very least, “rememory.”

I look forward to meeting even more people, colleagues, and hopefully friends, next year during MELUS's 50 year anniversary at the conference in Indiana.