MLA 2024

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San Francisco, CA (and online)

January 5-8, 2023

ANS Panel at the Modern Language Association Conference

Friday 5 January 2024 in Philadelphia, PA, USA
1:45 PM – 3:00 PM

DIVERSITY, EQUITY, AND INCLUSION: NAMES AND NAMING IN LITERATURE

Diversity. Equity. Inclusion. Individually, each word has been used in multiple contexts with varying connotations. Narrative works can create scenes that make space for us to consider deeply the essence of the ideas encased in the labels. In this panel, we ask how literary components of narrative fiction and non-fiction works address DEI concepts through names of characters (charactonyms), places (toponyms), institutions, and events as well as through depictions of socio-cultural, religious, ideological, personal, and political practices of naming, renaming, and unnaming.

Presider: Anne W. Anderson, U of South Florida

Presentations:

Naming ‘Mutiny’: Equatorial Rebellions and Mark Twain’s Following the Equator
Rowshan Chowdhury, U of Massachusetts, Amherst 

        Naming Queerness in Writing Fiction Set in Türkiye
        Serkan Gorkemli, U of Connecticut, Stamford 

              What If the World Is Like Misfits Like Us: Calling Out Name-Calling in James Howe’s The Misfits
              Iman Nick, American Name Society