Dan Burns, assistant professor of English, co-chaired a panel examining the belated legacy of Zora Neale Hurston’s "Barracoon: The Story of the Last 'Black Cargo'" at this year’s MELUS conference held March 21-24 in Cincinnati. Published to wide acclaim in 2018, Hurston’s long-awaited collection of interviews recounts the story of the final apparent survivor of the Clotilda (1860)—the last known U.S. ship to participate in the transatlantic slave trade.
Dan Burns, assistant professor of English, co-chaired a panel examining the belated legacy of Zora Neale Hurston’s "Barracoon: The Story of the Last 'Black Cargo'" at this year’s MELUS conference held March 21-24 in Cincinnati. Published to wide acclaim in 2018, Hurston’s long-awaited collection of interviews recounts the story of the final apparent survivor of the Clotilda (1860)—the last known U.S. ship to participate in the transatlantic slave trade.
Entitled “Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon: Recovery and Reception,” the panel featured the research of scholars from Brown, Harvard, Wright State University, and the Universidad San Francisco de Quito (Ecuador). Each presenter engaged with a variety of questions surrounding Hurston’s text, including topics ranging from the publication history of her anthropological writings and innovations in ethnographic fieldwork, to representations of gender in relation to Barracoon’s social, economic, and historical contexts. Conversation following the talks turned to the ethics of recovery work in the Hurston archive as well as the text’s contribution to research on global human trafficking in the 19th century.
Burns also served as a panelist on a session entitled “Temporality, Race, and the Fantastic in African American Literature” for which he presented his paper “‘Mock-Scholarship’ and the Research Space of Possible Queer Worlds in Samuel R. Delany’s The Mad Man.” The paper examined Delany’s intertextual use of “mock-scholarship”—a self-reflexive strategy commonly associated with postmodern satire—to recover previously neglected areas within LGBTQ history. In dialogue with recent literary criticism on the affective relations of queer experimental aesthetics and hermeneutics in postwar U.S. fiction, Burns’s paper joined scholars sharing their work on other contemporary writers of speculative fiction such as Kiese Laymon, Octavia Butler, Diana Gabaldon, Nnedi Okorafor, and N.K. Jemisin.
A national conference and journal founded in 1973, the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States seeks to expand the definition of new, more broadly conceived U.S. 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.