In keeping with the MLA Presidential Theme of “Emancipatory Narratives,” this panel reimagines madness as a creative opening for narrative agency. Drawing on postcolonial theory, feminist narratology, and critical disability studies, the session places insights from theorists such as Michel Foucault, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Jasbir Puar in conversation with critical madness studies to argue that madness is not a pre-discursive condition but an effect of epistemic regimes that determine who can be recognized as a sane subject. If, as Spivak asks, the subaltern cannot speak within dominant frameworks, this panel examines how madness becomes one of the primary mechanisms through which speech is disqualified, contained, or rendered unintelligible—and, crucially, how these literary texts rework that condition toward emancipation.
Dr. Rachel Norman’s paper, “Mad Tongues: Language, Madness, and Postcolonial Subjectivity in Le fou d’Omar,” begins the session and argues that Abla Farhoud’s multilingual novel reframes madness as a relational and linguistic phenomenon embedded in diasporic experience. By tracing how Arabic, French, English, and Italian intersect and fracture within the text, Norman demonstrates that linguistic instability becomes a mode of resistance to colonial ideals of purity and coherence, unsettling distinctions between sanity and insanity while exposing the limits of assimilation.
Ellen Stenstrom extends Norman’s discussion into the genre of memoir. Her presentation, “Self-Deprecating Narration: Trauma Memoirs, Epistemological Uncertainty, and Retheorizing the Unreliable Narrator,” examines how contemporary writers reclaim the label of unreliability as a strategy of narrative authority. Focusing on multiethnic memoirs of trauma and mental illness, Stenstrom shows that “self-deprecating narration” transforms a historically silencing designation into a rhetorical resource, enabling marginalized subjects to articulate experiences that resist conventional standards of credibility.
Concluding the panel, Yi Lu’s “Spectral Writing of Mental Illness: The Persistence of Trans-ethnic Trauma Narratives in Yiyun Li’s Works” explores how ghostly narration mediates the representation of trauma and mental illness in Asian American literature. Lu argues that spectral voices function as surrogate forms of expression for experiences that cannot be directly articulated, revealing how racialized subjects navigate conditions of voicelessness through indirect and fragmented modes of storytelling.
Taken together, these papers demonstrate that madness is not external to systems of meaning but deeply implicated in the production of legibility itself. By foregrounding linguistic disruption, narrative instability, and spectral mediation, the panel reconceptualizes madness as a generative force that exposes and challenges the epistemic structures governing narrative authority. In doing so, it contributes to ongoing conversations in critical madness studies about the politics of voice, the limits of representation, and the conditions under which marginalized subjects can be recognized as sane.
The panel features three papers, limited to 15-20 minutes, to leave 15-20 minutes of discussion.