MLA 2026 PANEL

Summary

Annette Beauchamp
March 23, 2025

Proposal for 2026 Modern Language Association Convention
Displaced families panel with Dr. Namrata Dey Roy

Title
Disposable people and chosen kinship in Cherríe Moraga’s biographical
diasporic play, Heroes and Saints

Abstract
In the 1980s, a predominately Latinx campesino (farmworker) community in Central California exhibited obvious signs of pesticide poisoning. Agribusiness and elected officials, however, denied wrongdoing and withheld resources to help address the emerging public health crisis in a subaltern community. This official response underscores the notion of disposable people in the U.S., a concept often applied to displaced peoples in the Global South. Campesinos of Mexican/Indigenous descent, the majority of farmworkers in California and a displaced people, particularly after the Mexican-American War, contend with ongoing intergenerational harm and the limits of belonging in a society that values their labor but refuses to recognize their humanity. Cherríe Moraga documents this historical moment in Heroes and Saints. By meeting with the families affected and animating this difficult and overlooked lifeworld through the creation of a campesino family—the Valles—and their chosen kin, Moraga takes audiences into the heart of the conflict and makes legible subaltern knowledge and experiences through the campesino perspective. In McLaughlin, a fictional stand-in for the real community of McFarland, Moraga shows how making familia any way you can in the face destruction constitutes an act of love, resistance, and survival. But, as this paper reveals, Moraga makes visible the limits of kinship and solidarity. Specifically, the continuing absence of institutional support harms campesino families, including newborn and other children of diaspora. In this way, Heroes and Saints provides a way for remembering and mourning a displaced community in the U.S.

Bio
Annette Beauchamp is an assistant professor in the department of curriculum and instruction at the University of Minnesota. Her work focuses on the ways in which the arts and humanities can inform the professions. She received a Ph.D. in English and Education from the University of Michigan, from which she also holds graduate certificates in Latina/o studies, environmental justice, and world performance studies. Her forthcoming work in Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies examines resistance in a refugee camp.

Alexandra Meany
Assistant Professor
Department of English
Louisiana State University

Panel: Displaced Families: Memory, Trauma, and the Limits of Kinship in Diasporic Writing

Title: Reproduction, Kinship, and the “Urban Indian” in Tommy Orange’s Novels

This paper examines how Tommy Orange’s 2018 novel There There, and the recently
published prequel/sequel, Wandering Stars (2024) each negotiate Native kinship and
reproduction in the context of settler urbanity. There There is set in contemporary Oakland and
takes up the figure of the “urban Indian,” the generation of Natives born in cities after their
forcible resettlement from reservation lands as the result of U.S. Indigenous Relocation policies.
Wandering Stars travels both backward and forward in time from the relocation period, framing
the figure of the urban Indian as the result of the collective, reproductive efforts of generations of
Indian children – “Indian children whose Indian children went on to have Indian children” –
despite the settler violence of child removal, Indian boarding schools, and relocation (Stars xi). I
argue that by lifting up reproduction and kinship, both novels challenge the settler notion that
urbanization was the “final, necessary step” in the elimination of Native peoples and their
historical memory. I show how Orange’s novels account for the ways in which Native life and
the relations among Native peoples and their lands are reproduced by and through the urban
Indian in the urban present. I lift up various forms of reproduction – the transmission of Native
blood, embodied memory, and kinship – to show how they function across both novels to posit
the urban Indian as both living memory and enduring threat to ongoing settler elimination.

The Architecture of Loss in Sabba Khan’s What is Home, Mum?
Eleanor Ty, Wilfrid Laurier University

Sabba Khan’s What is Home, Mum? (originally published in Britain as The Roles We Play) is a graphic memoir of the author’s family immigration from Pakistan-occupied Kashmir to their settlement in London, as well as a narrative of Khan’s search for belonging and “self-actualization” (Bo Ren, Epigraph). Reviewer Andy Oliver writes that Khan resonantly uses “moments of quieter symbolism with some compelling visual metaphor [to give] the reader an insight into the conflicting pull of two cultures on her sense of self” (Oliver 2021). The book is typical of immigrant graphic memoirs in its depiction of the conflict between generations, alienation from mainstream culture, and experiences of racism. What is different about it is its extraordinary use of space—maps, rooms, floor plans, doorways, windows, and mirrors to illustrate these themes. This paper looks at the way place and spatial metaphors reinforce notions of displacement, racial and religious performativity, gender roles and expectations. Khan’s graphic memoir uses human bodies, non-living objects and spaces to reveal familial loss, intergenerational memory, the author’s self-discovery and eventual rejection of her family’s Muslim tradition. Using Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson’s classification of genres of life narrative, Khan’s book is an “autoethnography” as it traces the “transculturation” of the Kashmiri immigrants in Britain, as well as a form of “ethnic life writing” that recounts a Muslim woman’s struggle with her religious identity (Smith and Watson, 258-9, 269).

Works Cited

Khan, Sabba. The Roles We Play. Myriad Editions, 2021
—-. What is Home, Mum? Street Noise Books, 2022.

Oliver, Andy. “The Roles We Play—Sabba Khan’s Exploration of Identity and Self as a Second-Generation Muslim Migrant is One of the Key Releases of 2021.” Broken Frontier: Exploring the Comics Universe.16 July 2021. https://www.brokenfrontier.com/the-roles-we-play-sabba-khan-myriad-editions/
Smith, Sidonie and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. 2nd ed. University of Minnesota Press, 2010.

Eleanor Ty, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and Fulbright Canada alumna, is Professor of English at Wilfrid Laurier University. She has published on life writing, graphic novel, Asian North American, and 18th -Century literature. She is author of Asianfail: Narratives of Disenchantment and the Model Minority (U of Illinois P, 2017); Unfastened: Globality and Asian North American Narratives (U of Minnesota P, 2010), and The Politics of the Visible in Asian North American Narratives (U Toronto P 2004). Beyond the Icon: Asian American Graphic Narratives (Ohio State UP, 2022) won the Comics Studies Society’s 2022 Prize for Edited Book Collection.