Defining "environment" as at once social and material, this panel seeks papers that enrich and complicate our understanding of how African-American literature may be read as environmental writing. Especially welcome are papers that explore the relationships between African-American literary representations of environment and other forms of discourse (sociological, anthropological, conservationist, or ?) at particular historical moments. Also welcome are papers that focus specifically on the relationship between environmental content and literary form, perhaps by exploring and/or theorizing encounters between African-American poetry and ecopoetics.

The panel will be held at the Northeast Modern Language Association (NEMLA) Convention in Buffalo, NY, April 10-13, 2008. Please email paper abstract and a brief bio to Anne Raine, araine@uottawa.ca, by September 15, 2007.