Tag: critical race narratology

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Guest lecture by James J. Donahue: Decolonizing American Literary Studies: Some Thoughts Toward a Native-Centered Pedagogy

Wednesday, October 12, 2022 at 12:00 in HS4 at the University of Klagenfurt, presented by the Narrative Encounters Project

North American scholars have recently begun talking about „decolonizing“ academic fields of study, many of which have historically contributed to the larger continuing project of the colonization of Indigenous peoples. Following some key principles drawn from Indigenous pedagogies, this lecture will offer suggestions for ways we might begin to „decolonize“ the teaching of American literature. What books and courses do we teach? What work do we ask our students to complete? Why should we teach this material at all? By attending to these questions with practices derived from Indigenous pedagogies, perhaps we can begin to better understand and challenge the underlying colonizing mindset that has informed much of the history of this field of study.

James J. Donahue is Professor in English and Communication at SUNY Potsdam (USA), where he holds a secondary appointment in Interdisciplinary Studies as coordinator of the minor in Native American Studies. He is primarily interested in exploring the complex literary and cultural tensions of twentieth century America and is the author of Contemporary Native Fiction: Toward a Narrative Poetics of Survivance (Routledge 2019) and co-editor of Narrative, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States (OSU Press 2017).

Image: : Fungus Guy

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Project volume published: Ethnic American Literatures and Critical Race Narratology 

We are very happy to announce that our Ethnic American Literatures and Critical Race Narratology volume is now published as part of Routledge’s Narrative Theory and Culture Series. Thanks to all our fantastic contributors!

Edited by Alexa Weik von Mossner, Marijana Mikić, and Mario Grill, Ethnic American Literatures and Critical Race Narratology explores the relationship between narrative, race, and ethnicity in the United States. Situated at the intersection of post-classical narratology and context-oriented approaches in race, ethnic, and cultural studies, the contributions to this edited volume interrogate the complex and varied ways in which ethnic American authors use narrative form to engage readers in issues related to race and ethnicity, along with other important identity markers such as class, religion, gender, and sexuality. Importantly, the book also explores how paying attention to the formal features of ethnic American literatures changes our under-standing of narrative theory and how narrative theories can help us to think about author functions and race. The international and diverse group of contributors includes top scholars in narrative theory and in race and ethnic studies, and the texts they analyze concern a wide variety of topics, from the representation of time and space to the narration of trauma and other deeply emotional memories to the importance of literary paratexts, genre structures, and author functions.

Foreword: Ethnoracial Encounters: From Myopic to Polyscopic Planetary Narratologies — Frederick Luis Aldama

Introduction: Narrative Encounters with Ethnic American Literatures — Alexa Weik von Mossner

PART 1: Narrating Race and Ethnicity across Time and Space

  1. Indigenous Time / Indigenous Narratives: The Political Implications of Non-Linear Time in Contemporary Native Fiction — James J. Donahue
  2. Time(s) of Race: Narrative Temporalities, Epistemic Storytelling, and the Human Species in Ted Chiang — Matthias Klestil
  3. Polychronic Narration, Trauma, Disenfranchised Grief, and Mario Alberto Zambrano’s Lotería — Mario Grill
  4. Whole New Worlds: An Exploration of Narrative Strategies Used in Afrodiasporic Speculative Fiction — Marlene Allen Ahmed

PART 2: Haunting Memories: Narrative, Race, and Emotion

  1. Emotions that Haunt: Attachment Relations in Lan Samantha Chang’s Fiction — W. Michelle Wang
  2. Race, Trauma, and the Emotional Legacies of Slavery in Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing — Marijana Mikić
  3. “There Were Strands of Darker Stories”: Reading Third-Generation Holocaust Literature as Midrash — Stella Setka
  4. Stories, Love, and Baklava: Narrating Food in Diana Abu-Jaber’s Culinary Memoirs — Alexa Weik von Mossner

PART 3: Race, Ethnicity, and Paratexts: Genre Structures and Author Functions

  1. Healing Narratives: Historical Representations in Latinx Young Adult Literature — Elizabeth Garcia
  2. Blood and Soil: Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony — Patrick Colm Hogan
  3. Metaparatextual Satire in Percival Everett’s The Book of Training and Kent Monkman’s Shame and Prejudice — Derek Maus
  4. Author Functions, Literary Functions, and Racial Representations or What We Talk about When We Talk about Diversifying Narrative Studies — Jennifer Ho

The book is part of Routledge’s Narrative Theory and Culture series, edited by Christopher González, and is available here.

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Final Program for the Narrative Encounters Conference now online!

Please join us for our international online conference “Narrative Encounters with Ethnic American Literatures” from Sept. 2-4, 2021.

Taking a cue from pioneering efforts at the intersection of context-oriented approaches in race and ethnicity studies and post-classical narratology, this conference is interested in the relationship between narrative, race, and ethnicity in the United States.

Our distinguished keynote speakers are:

– Frederick Luis Aldama, University of Texas, Austin
– Paula Moya, Stanford University
– Patrick Colm Hogan, University of Connecticut

The final program is available here.

Find out more on our conference website.

Interested colleagues and students can register for the conference here. There is no fee.

For inquiries, please contact Alexa Weik von Mossner at narrative.encounters@aau.at

The conference is supported by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) through the Narrative Encounters with Ethnic American Literatures Project

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Ethnic American Literatures and Critical Race Narratology forthcoming from Routledge

Photo Credit: Juan Alvarez-Ajamil

Ethnic American Literatures and Critical Race Narratology, edited by the Narrative Encounters Team — Alexa Weik von Mossner, Marijana Mikić, and Mario Grill — is now under contract with Routledge for Chris Gonzáles’ Narrative Theory and Cultures series. Interrogating the relationship between narrative, race, and ethnicity in the United States, the volume includes chapters by Frederick Luis Aldama, Marlene Allen, James Donahue, Elizabeth Garcia, Jennifer Ho, Patrick Colm Hogan, Matthias Klestil, Derek Maus, Stella Setka, and W. Michelle Wang.

These contributions cover a wide range of primary texts — from historical novels and memoirs to speculative fiction, graphic novels, television and film — that belong to the literary traditions of Latinx, African American, Native American, Asian American, Jewish American, and Arab American communities. They interrogate the complex and varied ways in which ethnic American authors use narrative form to engage readers in issues related to race and ethnicity, along with other important identity markers such as class, religion, gender, and sexuality. The book also explores how paying attention to the formal features of ethnic American literatures changes our under­standing of narrative theory and how narrative theories can help us to think about the representation of time and space, the narration of trauma and other deeply emotional memories, and the importance of literary paratexts, genre structures, and author functions.

We’re very excited that we were able to attract such a fantastic group of scholars to our edited volume and can’t wait to see it in print!

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Marijana Mikić receives grant from AAU’s Young-Scientists-Mentoring Program

Within the framework of the one-year grant, PhD researcher Marijana Mikić will work closely with her mentors Derek Maus and James Donahue at the State University of New York at Potsdam.

Professor Maus is an expert in contemporary African American literature, in particular in the field of black satire. His recent publications on the topic inlcude Conversations with Colson Whitehead (2019) and Jesting in Earnest: Percival Everett and Menippean Satire (2019). Professor Donahue is one of the pioneers in the field of critical race narratology, as is evidenced by his recent Contemporary Native Fiction: Toward a Narrative Poetics of Survivance (2019) and the volume Narrative, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States (2017), which he co-edited with Jennifer Ho and Shaun Morgan. Maus and Donahue’s interdisciplinary research at the intersection of narrative theory and ethnic American literature is of central interest to Marijana’s work on the Narrative Encounters Project and her dissertation, entitled “Black Storyworlds: Race, Space, and Emotion in Contemporary African American Literature.”

Marijana’s plans during the one-year mentoring program include a research visit at SUNY Potsdam next spring and a visit from her mentors here in Klagenfurt in September 2021. We are excited about these wonderful opportunities and congratulations Marijana!

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CFP for International Conference “Narrative Encounters with Ethnic American Literatures”

Photo Credit: Juan Alvarez-Ajamil

Conveners: Alexa Weik von Mossner, Marijana Mikić, and Mario Grill
Location: University of Klagenfurt, Austria
Date: September 17-19, 2020

Taking a cue from pioneering efforts at the intersection of context-oriented approaches in race and ethnicity studies and post-classical narratology, this conference is interested in the relationship between narrative, race, and ethnicity in the United States.

Reading so-called “ethnic” American literatures means encountering characters and storyworlds imagined by writers associated with various minority communities in the United States. Without doubt, the formal study of narrative can help us gain a deeper understanding of such encounters, but until recently, narratologists rarely grappled with the question of how issues of race and ethnicity force us to rethink the formal study of narrative.

Attesting that the relative “race/ethnicity-blindness” of narrative theory is a severe limitation, scholars such as James Donahue have called for a “critical race narratology” (2017, 3) that addresses this lacuna. A range of recent book publications (e.g. Aldama 2005; Donahue 2019; Donahue, Ho, and Morgan 2017; Fetta 2018; Gonzáles 2017; Kim 2013; Moya 2016; Wyatt and George 2020) demonstrate that a variety of insights can be gained from narratological approaches that open themselves up to issues of race and ethnicity in conjunction with other important identity markers including class, religion, gender, and sexuality. And, as Sue Kim has noted, there are shared interests in understanding the ways in which such narratives “operate within larger social structures as well as an investment in the scrutiny of how minds and subjectivity work in and through narratives” (2017, 16).

How do ethnic American literary texts use narrative form to engage readers in issues related to race and ethnicity? What narrative strategies do they employ to interweave these issues with other important identity markers such as class, religion, gender, and sexuality? How do they involve readers emotionally in their storyworlds and how do they relate such involvements to the racial politics and history of the United States? And how does paying attention to the strategies and formal features of ethnic American literatures change our understanding of narrative theory? These are some of the questions we hope to address at this conference.

Confirmed keynote speakers:

Frederick Luis Aldama, Distinguished University Professor, Ohio State University

Patrick Colm Hogan, Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor, University of Connecticut

Paula Moya, Danily C. and Laura Louise Bell Professor of the Humanities, Stanford University

We invite paper proposals on topics including, but not limited to the following:

  • Theoretical intersections of race/ethnicity and narrative theory
  • Narrative worldmaking and ethnic American storyworlds in fiction and nonfiction
  • Narrative strategies of representing racial and ethnic histories
  • Intersectional narratologies
  • Narrative identification and disidentification
  • Performativity and ethnic identity
  • Cognitive approaches to ethnic American literatures
  • Narrative engagement, simulation, embodiment, and emotion
  • Affective reader response and the empathic imagination
  • Unnatural narratives and non-normative narrators
  • Narrative ethics, race, and the environmental imagination
  • Empirical reception studies related to ethnic American literatures


The conference is supported by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) in the context of the Narrative Encounters Project.

There are plans to publish an edited collection related to the conference theme; selected papers will be considered for inclusion.

Abstracts (300-400 words) for 20-minute papers (in English) and a short bio note should be submitted by email no later than Jan 31, 2020 to: narrative.encounters@aau.at