Southern American Studies Association Conference
January 31-February 2, 2013
Charleston, SC

This panel will interrogate the relationship between empathy and the struggle for racial equality particularly in the U.S. South. Empathy remains a compelling mode of political engagement even when often dismissed as either insufficient or naive. In light of recent discoveries about the science and psychology governing the capacity for empathetic relations, this panel is particularly interested in rethinking the practice of empathy in historical, cultural, and literary accounts that seek to address and redress racial inequality. Ultimately, it is concerned with the cultural investment in empathy alongside the realities of its political consequences.

Questions to be considered include (but are certainly not limited to):

Is there still something to learn about matters of race from American literature’s most controversially empathetic writers (e.g., Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harper Lee, Kathryn Stockett)?
What is the relationship between gender and racial empathy? Is empathy gendered?
What is the relationship between sentimentality and empathy?
What is the instructive value of empathy in a neoliberal/late capitalist moment?
Can anyone really walk in someone else’s shoes without condescension, paternalism, or privilege?
Does empathy have any experiential authority?
And finally, what happens to the narrative of race in the U.S. South without the discourse of empathy?

This panel welcomes proposals that consider a range of media/genre including memoir, fiction, photography, film, television, and new/social media.
Due abstracts should be a
maximum of 500 words.

Along with your abstract, please submit the following:
• Individual Paper Title (maximum of 15 words per title. Do not begin the title with quotes or other characters.)
• Special A/V Requests
• Individual information including: first name, last name, affiliation, e-mail address, and one page vitae.
• Confirmation of current membership status in the ASA and SASA

Southern American Studies Association Conference
Charleston, South Carolina
January 31-February 2, 2013

“Looking ahead to the sesquicentenary of the Emancipation Proclamation . . . We’ve borrowed our quite broad theme from an observation President Lincoln made less than a year before his assassination: “We all declare for liberty, but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing.” We welcome a range of panel proposals and individual paper proposals that zero in on one or more of these three intertwined and still contested terms — emancipation, liberty and freedom – placing them in a range of contexts reflecting the richness of American Studies.”