Half a century later, the seeds Alice Walker planted with her seminal essay “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens” (1974) continue to blossom today in aesthetic conversations. In Search of a Beautiful Freedom: New and Selected Essays (2023), whose title is inspired in part by Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983), Farah Jasmine Griffin asserts, “That book helped to shape many of us formed as intellectuals and writers in its wake. It also identified a specifically womanist (defined as Black feminist) aesthetic, mapped the direction of Black feminist literary and cultural criticism, and proved the essay to be a powerful form of the articulation of creative, critical, and innovative thought” (xi). While Griffin speaks to the lasting contribution of a text whose aesthetics define a school of thought, Margo Crawford uses aesthetics to culturally distinguish a literary corpus in her book What Is African American Literature? (2021). Upon inquiring, “Are there formal lines (or wavy lines that seem more like vibrations) that separate African American literature that ‘speaks as [B]lack’ and American literature at large? Is there anything distinctive about [B]lack literature that allows us to know this is what makes it [B]lack?,” she declares that “African American literature is a strategic abstraction” (3, partial emphasis).

Both Griffin and Crawford show how even though abstract in nature, when delineated, aesthetics can serve for a variety of functions such as mapping directions and distinguishing literary traditions. With Crawford offering African American literature as an example, what are additional ways we might conceptualize the notion of “strategic abstraction” as it relates to literary inquiries rooted in aesthetics? How might using aesthetic practices in literary criticism contribute to pedagogical approaches to performing literary critiques? In what ways do literary aesthetics cultivate dynamic, critical discourse that reexamines established readings, provokes reconsideration of how we read, and drives the evolution of literary genres and movements? What trends can we identify in literary studies that help understand seminal aesthetic discussions and their legacies across time and space? How do literary aesthetics integrate with other fields, such as art history, sociology, musicology, or philosophy?

In the spirit of writers whose works cultivate longevity in defining and expanding aesthetic movements that shape how we read, contemplate, and engage with literary arts, at this 8th annual convening of The Gregory J. Hampton Graduate English Student Association Conference, we invite you to submit proposals that delve into the ways in which literary aesthetics have shaped our understanding of literature and continue to influence our literary encounters today.

Topics that will be considered include but are not limited to:

Digital Humanities
Literary Genres and Movements
Caribbean Aesthetics
Gender and Sexuality
Environmental Aesthetics and Ecopoetics
Black and Diasporic Aesthetics
Comics Studies
Video Game Studies
Afrofuturism
Disability Studies
Please submit proposals for individual papers or panels to: gesasecretary@gmail.com by Monday, January 13th. Notifications will be sent out by Monday, February 3rd.