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Harboring: People, Places, and Practices
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA
April 27-30, 2017
The Destruction of Tea at Boston Harbor by Nathaniel Currier, Hand-colored lithograph, 1846
Known, among its many tourist attractions, for its Boston Harbor—historical site of the Boston Tea
Party where a group of men called the Sons of Liberty disguised themselves as Mohawk people in
order to dump 90,000 pounds of tea into the harbor in political protest—Massachusetts conjures
up not only famed events, landmarks, and narratives within the global and American national
imaginary, but also the very origin of its name in the Massachusett Native American people.
Viewing Boston’s harbor as more than a geographical location and thinking beyond it to include the
city’s inextricable link to other regions, the 31st Annual MELUS Conference adopts as its theme the
activity of harboring. In light of the political upheaval that the Boston Tea Party inspired as well as
the laws of protection agreed upon in the eventual creation and signing of the Constitution, the
transition from thinking about what and where a harbor is to thinking about what the work of
harboring entails and who exactly engages in that work seems particularly apt. Indeed, the very
language of safe harboring inheres in the Constitution itself: “We the People of the United States, in
Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, ensure domestic Tranquility, provide for the
common defence, promote the general Welfare […] do ordain and establish this Constitution for the
United States of America.” But if as the great American novelist Toni Morrison once wrote,
“Paradise necessitates exclusion,” then perhaps what we might infer from the kind of superparadise the framers of the Constitution aspired to in the term “more Perfect” are commensurately
rigorous strategies of exclusion.
We envision the conference to be an occasion for scholars to generate dynamic literary
interpretations and critiques of the notion of a safe harbor and the harboring practices it demands,
especially considering how global formations of oppression are often coextensive with these
formations of refuge. Whether these safe harbors are touted as legitimate (e.g., sanctioned by the
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state) or understood to be unofficial or mere temporary solutions, spaces and laws that claim to
provide refuge from danger harbor their own problems and contradictions.
In addition, we also invite contributors to consider the relationship between harboring and
collusion. Who or what can you become as a person who chooses to harbor criminals, refugees,
fugitives, or rebellious thoughts? What does the experience of being harbored actually feel like?
Whose definition of safety have we collectively been abiding by this whole time (for how long?), and
what exactly are the limitations of the ideological principles that reinforce it?
We welcome proposals for individual papers, and strongly encourage proposals for panels on, but
not limited to, the following topics:
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The borderland as a harbor
Actual harbors as sites of cultural encounter and exchange from the Atlantic slave trade to
the arrival of Latino and Asian immigrants
The lessons we learn from representations of activities focused on harboring
The implications of harboring “our own” or of those designated “other”
Harboring secrets and coming out, such as passing, being in the closet or being
undocumented
Involuntary harboring and settler colonial studies in literature
The body as a harbor for disease, for the unborn, for bloodlines, for scars, etc.
The campus novel in the age of trigger warnings, school shootings, and “safe space” rhetoric
Sanctuary cities and immigration stories
Segregation as safety
Narrating safety through strategic omissions in the slave narrative
How safety differs through the lens of race, gender, class, culture, politics, and sexuality
How identity formation proceeds while in hiding
The kinds of writing that harboring or being harbored enables
Utopian fictions
Protection from discovery and “masquerading as Indian” in U.S. literature
Actual “harbor novels” such as Colson Whitehead’s Sag Harbor, for example
Experimental multi-ethnic literatures of the U.S. that don’t “play it safe,” as it were
Submission Guidelines
Proposals can take one of two forms: (1) an individual paper or (2) a complete panel.
A proposal for an individual paper should consist of a title and abs tract; if accepted, this paper and others
related to i t will be combi ned into a complete session of 3 or 4 panelists. An individual-paper proposal should
be single-spaced and no more than one page long. Pl ease include ins titutional affiliation and email address for
an individual paper.
A proposal for a complete panel provides a prospectus for a coherent collection of 3-4 papers, including a
title for the session, a title and abstract for each paper, and a chair, if possible. A complete panel propos al
should be single-spaced and no more than two pages long. Pleas e include ins titutional affiliations and email
addresses for all participants.
Submission Procedures
Please submit proposals to: [email protected]
Proposals are due by Tuesday, November 15, 2016