Dan Burns, an instructor in English, presented a paper at the March 3-6 meeting of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States.
Burns’s paper, “Toward a Mestiza Modernism: Multi-Ethnic Canon Formation and the Borderland Discourses of Gayl Jones’s Mosquito,” examines the novelist Gayl Jones’s use of transnational and interethnic border imagery to advance a critique of the Western canon’s historical neglect of writers and communities of color. Exploring the larger conference theme of “Performing Racial, Gender, Sexual, and Class Identities in Multi-ethnic American Literatures and Culture,” the paper was part of panel dedicated to authors of diverse ethnicities—including Samson Occam, Winnifred Eaton, and Gina Apostol—who often revise society’s expectations for their characters and for themselves as artists through the reinvention of literary devices and genre definitions.
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.
This year’s conference was held in Charleston, South Carolina, to celebrate the rich legacy of the coastal city’s multicultural peoples.