“Racing Through Adolescence” was conceived by the Forum board as a topic to expand potential interest to scholars from a wider range of specialty and research than our sessions in most recent years. For the uninitiated, “age studies” translates loosely to “discourse about getting old.” In fact, our forum engages with representations and effects of aging across the lifespan. Because the very idea of age is necessarily reflective of national, ethnic, cultural and racial considerations, we asked for proposals that overtly discussed race as a factor in depictions of adolescence.

We were pleased to receive a total of nine submissions, all very closely aligned with our vision. From that strong field we selected four proposals that most seemed to engage in conversation with each other. Laura Soderberg provides the opening to the discussion with a paper about racialized childhood in two Western novels of the 1870s -- María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s Who Would Have Thought It? (1872) and Bret Harte’s Gabriel Conroy (1876). She will examine how these novels articulate new fears about the overt and self-interested presence of the state in all aspects of settler life, especially the lives of children. Stephen Knadler’s paper draws on 20^th-century texts to expand the discussion of political aspects of adolescence. He will consider works from a Black Arts Era writer associated with the Harlem Writers Guild, Rosa Guy, wherein “’adolescents’ were reimagining their own lives--to envision different futures of alternative national, political, and racial belonging.”

The other two papers on the panel offer contemporary manifestations of the ideas of racialized youth exposed in the first two. Lan Dong will discuss two graphic memoirs, Robin Ha’s Almost American Girl and Malaka Gharib’s I Was Their American Dream. Her discussion will consider the fluidity of language and culture as situated in the unique visual properties of the graphic form. Dong’s paper complements the presentation from Ricardo Quintana-Vallejo, which focuses on the roles of state violence in the identity development of young boys in marginalized communities. Quintana-Vallejo will discuss Alfonso Jones and Manuelito, two graphic coming-of-age narratives that expose the violence that accompanies social invisibility.

We have listed a Presider for the session, but she will not give any prepared presentation, only serving to facilitate conversation and move the session along. Speakers will introduce themselves. Each member of the panel was invited to accept their spot with the understanding that they would be one of four, and would therefore need to aim for a presentation of 10-12 minutes.

These four speakers come from different fields within literary studies, and from across the country, with truly varied research interests and publishing histories. Their intellectual convergence around this topic promises to provide a unique opportunity for scholars to learn from one another. I cannot rightly provide information to you on existing scholarship on this topic, since so far as I know we are inventing a cross-cultural, multi-era investigation of themes and history surrounding race and adolescence. All four proposals referered to published works related to their texts and arguments, but they are working from varied scholarly perspectives.