This panel takes as its jumping off point the centrality of unconventional speech in modernism, and the ways that speech is informed by migration. What forms of articulation become available at the periphery? In what ways does the periphery become a space for distorted, nonstandard, or unconventional speech patterns? How do modernist, postmodern and postcolonial writers articulate themselves within overlapping webs of empires, cultures, customs, and languages?

We are interested in papers that explore the intersection of speech, migration and literary form, or papers that respond to long-standing debates in cultural studies over the direction of cultural influence. As scholars have come to embrace nonlinear, planetary, biomorphic, oceanic and transatlantic models (e.g., Friedman, Dimock, DeLoughrey), we have a newfound opportunity to trace the shape of the literature of migration and its patterns of speech. We also invite panelists to examine underappreciated trajectories of literary influence–whether through tours (dance, performance, book tours, readings, lectures), circuits of literary exchange, translation, or other multidirectional and nonhierarchical flows of literary exchange. 

Questions to be explored might include whether the literature of migration is best construed as a global phenomenon that transcends time/place or within a historical world system (center/periphery, colony/metropole). How might these models prove applicable or inapplicable to poets and writers whose language-use is idiosyncratic? How might they account for writers who experience communication disability, language barriers or linguistic violence? How can we think beyond models of influence and imitation? How can we listen for unexpected resonances across disparate texts? 


Below is a list of keywords for our panel:

• 
  

  Global Englishes, Global Anglophone

  
  


• 
  

  War, empire, postcolonial theory

  
  


• 
  

  Mimicry, imitation, parody, pastiche

  
  


• 
  

  Disability, poetics, crip theory

  
  

Our panel will be an opportunity for scholars at all stages of their careers to share the ways they see movement, migration, mobility and speech informing their work. We welcome modernist scholars, comparatists, disability studies scholars, as well as scholars taking an interdisciplinary, transnational or trans-periodizing approach.