Friday, October 30th 1:30 – 3:00

Location: Miss Lou’s Room

1) Chris McIntyre, York University
On the lower frequencies:” Psychiatry, Electroshock Therapy and the Democratic Impetus in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man

Ralph Ellison's 1952 novel, Invisible Man, contains multiple references to psychiatric treatment, including the close proximity of  an insane asylum to the black college the narrator attends and the electric shock treatment that he undergoes. Within this context of treatment and institutionalization, Ellison's novel examines black subjectivity in the United States, drawing a parallel between a black racial identity and mental illness. While the Cold War entailed a need to project an image of the United States as a bastion of democratic participation, upward mobility and material comfort, the nation grappled with the need to incorporate African Americans into this political ethos.

This paper will examine the intersection of race and psychiatric treatment and how they come to bear on Ellison's conception of national identity during the early years of the Cold War. Anticipating the concerns of the Anti-psychiatry movement, Ellison articulates a mode of resisting the dominant political order that marginalized and infantilized African American subjects. The electricity that initially functions as a force that molds and depoliticizes Ellison's narrator in the form of electric shock treatment comes to signal the reconceptualization of the Emersonian notion of democracy that the conclusion of the novel presents. Rather than a means of immobilizing political participation in the United States, Ellison suggests that psychiatric treatment can be appropriated as a mode of political resistance, providing access to the ideals of the United States. In this sense, Invisible Man traces the enabling and limiting potentialities of psychiatry and psychiatric treatment as a site for the constitution of African American political identity.

2) Mamoun Alzoubi, Kent State University
Wright and Baraka Nexus: Representations of National Identity

My paper will Wright's exposed racial, social and sexual issues that black writers may not have been willing to write about before Native Son. Wright’s novel Native Son (1940), which established him as a major twentieth century writer, had even more of an impact on African American literature and the course it would take. An attempt to define the black identity and struggle with racism through the startling account of a young black man accused of raping and murdering a white woman, Native Son has generated many literary responses from other black authors in the form of revision. It is these literary responses or revisions of Wright’s work by other black writers that I explore in Representation and Signification. An African American fictional text that I believe revises not only the general plot of Native Son, but its definition of the black experience and identity, is Amiri Baraka’s (LeRoi Jones) Dutchman (1964). I will argue Baraka’s work is cultural and identity revision of Wright’s Native Son because each text has had a significant effect on the manner in which social forms of the black race is depicted to succeeding generations.

Baraka revise and sometimes reverse the elements of Wright’s novel to support his own agenda and concern about African American literature and the portrayal of black identity and experience that he apparently feel Wright failed to address. My paper will highlight the intersection of concepts of black identity and experience of Wright’s and Baraka’s literary period of the 1960s. Specifically, I seek to do a textual comparison between Native Son and Dutchman. I will also explain the authors’ different views of the black identity and experience and explore the reasons why Baraka may have felt the need to revise Wright’s work.

3) Katherine Shwetz, University of Toronto
Zombie boyscouts and national identity in the troop

“The violence was everywhere,” says a boy scout in Nick Cutter’s?1 2014 horror novel The Troop, “Like a virus, Max. Everywhere” (341). The metaphorical violence is not the only thing that is contagious: the narrative features an isolated troop of boy scouts that must contend with an uncontrollable biological weapon that turns them into zombies. In this paper, I show how The Troop relies on the rhetoric of biological weapons and biohorror to highlight the ways in which Canadian attitudes towards bodies, health, and community are changing, and how these changes reflect an affective and embodied response to bioterrorism. More precisely, The Troop draws from contemporary anxieties about terrorism and the globalized Other: the text juxtaposes a culture of paranoia with more individual fears that the borders of our selves are vulnerable, permeable, and unknowable. In this way, The Troop explores the anxieties associated with a growing sense that national identity is unstable and vulnerable in an increasingly paranoid and globalized world. Sheryl Hamilton points out that “like bioterrorism, the threat of epidemics is social science fiction. We are uncertain where the boundaries lie between present actuality and future threat and between fact and fiction” (171). Hamilton’s emphasis on the attention paid to the “ongoing leakiness of borders” (171) in both (and related) biological and political contexts is reflected in how the characters in Cutter’s text treat both their bodies and the world around them with fear and distrust. Cutter uses the genre of the horror story to highlight how living in a Canadian culture that is heavily oriented around discourses of paranoia and bioterror imbues representations of the body with distrust, to the extent that our own bodies begin to be seen as potential weapons that can be turned against us.