56th WLA Conference
Santa Fe, NM

Wednesday, October 19–Saturday, October 22, 2022

Due to the uncertainty surrounding the Covid-19 pandemic, the Western Literature Association has reluctantly decided to postpone the 2021 conference. Instead, we expect to gather in Santa Fe in 2022.

In the meantime, we will be organizing alternative digital events for 2021. Please check for more information at Virtual Events 2021.

Palimpsests and Western Literatures:
The Layered Spaces of History, Imagination, and the Future

hosted by Professors Lisa Tatonetti and Audrey Goodman

Luci Tapahonso (Diné) was chosen as the 2022 Distinguished Achievement Award recipient. She will accept the award at the conference!

The conference will be held at the beautiful Santa Fe Convention Center, Wed, October 19–Sat, October 22, 2022 

https://www.santafe.org/meetings/meet-different/the-convention-center/ 

The main conference hotel will be the Drury Plaza Hotel, 828 Paseo de Peralta 

https://www.druryhotels.com/locations/santa-fe-nm/drury-plaza-hotel-in-santa-fe 

Room rates: $169 single or double; $179 triple; $189 quad 

Rates include complimentary hot breakfast and evening drinks and snacks; free wifi; access to business center; reduced rate parking ($10/day) 

Additional rooms will be available at the Inn of the Governors 

https://innofthegovernors.com/amenities/tea-sherry-hour 

Traditional room: $140 for single or double; $155 triple; $170 quad 

Rates include mountain sunrise breakfast; welcome sherry and biscochitos; year-round heated pool; free parking

Call for Papers:

Craig Dan Goseyun (San Carlos Apache), Apache Mountain Spirit Dancer (Courtesy Tourism Santa Fe)

A palimpsest is a material, be it birchbark, slate, or parchment, upon which something is written, and then expunged or blotted out, only to be written upon again. It is a thing made of layers of inscription, a thing made of strata of expression, a thing made of traces that may not be visible but can never be fully erased or repressed.

Santa Fe, the location of WLA in 2022, is a place made of palimpsests at once beautiful and disturbing. It is on Pueblo and Jicarilla Apache land and, at the same time, is the oldest capital in the United States. Called Ogha Po’oge or “White Shell Water Place” in Tewa, yet its more commonly known name translates as “holy faith,” declaring the incursion of Spanish Catholicism and colonialism in territory Anglo Europeans called the New World. Until 2020, at the center of the Santa Fe Plaza, stood a nineteenth-century settler monument honoring U.S. soldiers. One side of the obelisk read:

“To the heroes
who have fallen in the various battles with XXXX
Indians in the territory
Of New Mexico”

The missing word in the inscription had long been chiseled out. The carved-out indentation, layered upon that original, elided slur, spoke volumes. In recent years, the word “courageous” was written atop that same loud space. In preparation for Indigenous Peoples’ Day in October 2020, a coalition of protesters gathered and succeeded in occupying the Plaza and toppling the monument, despite the city’s efforts to police the area and protect the structure. This palimpsest speaks to the ways that settler colonialism tries to erase both the presence of Indigenous peoples and its own histories of violence and confirms the urgency and momentum of social justice movements throughout the U.S. West.

WLA 2022 takes such layered spaces of history, of imagination, of present, and of the future as its call.

We ask, then, for participants to look at the layers, collisions, omissions, and the expressive possibilities of the palimpsest. From Indigenous-Indigenous encounters, to settler incursions, to Mexican, Spanish, and broader Latinx landscapes, what is the palimpsest in Western literatures writ large? Is it the double exposure of a photograph? The bi- or tri-lingual text of a public mural? Is it in the queer traces in an Indigenous poem, a Cather story, or a Tarantino film? Or in the multiple narrators of a Midwest podcast? Is it a novel with a Black zombie-fighting hero that remaps both Post-Civil War Kansas and YA fiction? Or is it the elision of the words “climate change” from government documents about threats to the Ogallala aquifer?

We invite papers, discussions, posters, photo or video essays, or other alternative mediums that seek to describe, undercover, decipher, and animate the inscriptions in and beyond this layered western space.

Due date: June 15, 2022

Submissions will open via ConfTool in early 2022. See this page for more details as they become available.

Send queries to Audrey Goodman and/or Lisa Tatonetti at wlaconference2022@westernlit.org, our current WLA Presidents.