Burns, assistant professor of English, presented the paper at the May 3-6 meeting of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, sponsored by the University of Nevada-Las Vegas.
Burns, assistant professor of English, presented a paper on transnational detective fiction and postcolonial literary theory at the annual Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, sponsored by the University of Nevada-Las Vegas and held May 3-6.
Burns’ paper, “Secret History as Subterraneity: Excavating Chris Abani’s Las Vegas” takes a geocritical approach to poet-novelist Abani’s 2014 neo-noir novel “The Secret History of Las Vegas,” in which apartheid’s traumatic legacy is subtly remapped onto Sin City and its surrounding desert environs.
Targeting the familiar activist trope of “going underground” and the secret history subgenre’s rich legacy in exploring it, Burns’ discussion departs from conventional readings of Abani’s work within the theme of masculinist critique associated with the fiction of other “Third Generation” Nigerian English-language writers (Cole, Obioma, Onuzo, and Adichie) to argue for the theoretical co-development of “excavation” as both cultural metaphor and epistemic lens.
Following this logic, the paper locates Abani’s work in the telluric tradition of contemporary novelas de la tierra—an ethnographic strategy the novelist shares with other recent popular writers of color such as Hanya Yanagihara (“The People in the Trees”), Marlon James (“A Brief History of Seven Killings”), and Colson Whitehead (“The Underground Railroad”).
Addressing the larger conference theme of “TransCulture,” the paper was part of a panel dedicated to genre, gender and identity that examined the transnational and transhistorical dimensions of the multi-ethnic West, as well as issues of transience and permanence in migrant, immigrant, refugee, and diasporic experience with respect to debates about citizenship and borders.
A national conference and journal founded in 1973, MELUS seeks to expand the definition of new, more broadly conceived US literature through the study and teaching of Latino, Native American, African American, Asian and Pacific American, and ethnically specific Euro-American literary works, their authors, and their cultural contexts.