- A Forum Discussion Sponsored by the Trotter Institute, UMass Boston

Is "The Help," which features several white houses with columns and a controversial outhouse, this generation’s "Uncle Tom’s Cabin," "Gone with the Wind" or "To Kill a Mockingbird" in which the ways of black folk are translated and voiced for the public by outsider guides to the culture, as happened so often during the abolitionist era of which Boston was the national center? Why are we revisiting that past now? Do we have a collective desire to turn back the clock? How are we translating what happened yesterday into history today? Does New England, where America was seeded in the global imaginary, have a particular moral and historical role to play in these cultural negotiations?

The Trotter Institute at UMass Boston is requesting papers written by graduate students and doctoral candidates in New England interested in the above and related questions examining the long and strange career of mammy beloved. To be considered for this forum, please send 200-word abstracts and short bios, including address, by October 5, 2011 to Dr. Barbara Lewis, Director, the William Monroe Trotter Institute for the Study of Black History and Culture, UMass Boston, via

trotterpopularcultureforum@gmail.com.