The goal of this panel is to contribute to the scholarly work being done on Gloria Naylor in light of the creation of The Gloria Naylor Archive. Gloria Naylor’s novels, correspondence, screenplay adaptations, essays, research, and unpublished material reveal a writer who not only incorporates and reconfigures the Western literary canon, but who pushes back against that tradition and the forms of white supremacy. As Barbara Christian explained in “The Race for Theory” (1988), Black women writers were creating worlds, language, and theory that eschewed “abstract Western logic.” Maxine L. Montgomery (2008) reads Naylor’s novel, Mama Day, as part of the Black feminist project to create an alternative resistance to hegemony through the use of ancestral folklore, spirituality, and the re-historicization of the artifacts of slavery. More recently, Sami Schalk (2018) centers Black women’s speculative fiction as a site of resistance. In the vein of speculative fiction, Naylor’s texts especially use geography, place, and memory to create a sense of the uncanny and otherworldliness. Both Karla F.C. Holloway, and Paula Gallant Eckhart have recently pointed to the liminal spaces that Naylor’s work explores between memory/presence, life/death, black/white, magic/science, folklore/history. The papers on this panel locate Naylor in this practice of resistance by creating alternative worlds and narratives, especially through her own research and archival practices.

Randi Gill-Sadler’s presentation, “Gloria Naylor's Black Study and the Making of Mama Day,” explores Naylor's research process for writing her third novel Mama Day. The paper pays special attention to Naylor's travels to Robinsonville, Mississippi and the Lowcountry of South Carolina as well as Naylor's treatment of African American folklore. In so doing, this paper situates Naylor in a tradition of Black study, alongside writers like June Jordan and Toni Cade Bambara, that sought to wrestle study and knowledge making from the grasp of the imperial university. Gill-Sadler’s analysis of Naylor’s research process and the novel’s representation of Willow Springs, a Black community outside the boundaries of American jurisdiction affirms Naylor’s resistance.

In Mama Day, Naylor not only conceives of geography on the edges of the American coastline, but she also reconstitutes the relationships between characters outside boundaries of time and space. Michelle-Taylor Sherwin’s presentation, “’Mama Day say no, everybody say no’”: Mentorship in Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day" shows how Naylor engages with the traumatic displacement of African Americans on a more individual scale through mentorship. Descended from the formerly enslaved Sapphira Wade, Mama Day is a proud woman whose healing knowledge and perseverance mentors a community at large. She ensures both the survival of this community and her niece as an individual who, in turn, then enhances that same community. Divested of temporal and physical boundaries, Sapphira Wade’s knowledge is what strengthens Mama Day and makes visible the resilience of the human spirit through ancestral memory.

Finally, Suzanne Edwards mines the research and writing Naylor left on her unfinished novel, Sapphira Wade. Her presentation, “Sundiata, One Thousand and One Nights, and Sapphira Wade: Global Literary History in the Gloria Naylor Archive” argues that Naylor’s research and archival practices themselves represent a significant intellectual achievement: an outline of a decentered global literary history. The historical research and literary texts that Naylor collected as she worked on Sapphira Wade—as well as the trips she took to West Africa and India—approach global literary history in terms of the movement of narratives across continents, between oral and written traditions, and through time. The existing draft of Sapphira Wade includes extended allusions to medieval epics, The Saga of St. Olaf, Sundiata, and One Thousand and One Nights which reflect layered histories of domination—colonization, nationalism, religious conversion—and resistance. Edwards argues that Naylor’s research of three medieval epics of kingship to tell Sapphira Wade’s story disrupts Eurocentrism.

Michelle Loris, Professor of English at Sacred Heart University, who interviewed Gloria Naylor, produced an early collected text of critical essays on Naylor’s work, developed a collegial friendship with Naylor, and made a place for Naylor’s archives at Sacred Heart, will be the respondent to the panel. Each panelist will speak for 15 minutes, and Dr. Loris will respond for 10 minutes, allowing 20 minutes for questions. Papers will be made available in advance, and a link to The Gloria Naylor Archive.