MLA President Herman Beavers notes, in his summarization of the convention theme: “possibilities, be they the product of serendipity or desperation, are ever before us.” A full, final emancipation from imperialism—including chattel enslavement, the trade in labor and laborers, and their legacies—achievable through justice mechanisms, such as reparations, has been plagued by a discourse of impossibility aimed at foreclosing it. And Professor Beavers' reminder is apt: vast possibilities to finish emancipation---from empire, from enslavement—do indeed lay “before us.”

On March 25, 2026, six days before April 1^st, a related and unprecedented event in international politics: the UN passed Resolution A/80/L.48 declaring “the trafficking of enslaved Africans and racialized chattel enslavement of Africans the ‘gravest crime against humanity’ and calling for reparatory justice.”[1] (Given the date, there was not time to get a session thus inspired populated/approved.) The occasion opens on to rich possibilities embedded in the theme--Emancipation as Narrative, be it economic, labor, a relevant gender-freeing or touching shapes of political power. Respectfully, I ask for space-and-time at the convention for a group of scholars working on political justice from multiple directions and distinct disciplinary means to explore possibilities raised by the theme. The question for the session: How write this “Emancipatory Narrative,” that is, 1) how is it already under development and in what forms, and, 2) how make the call to justice manifest, build an equitable global future?

This panel takes the event at the UN as jumping off point for a key development of the theme and a globally urgent matter. Given the paucity of reparations as research subject (anywhere outside the study of slavery), including in areas one expects to find it (postcolonial/Atlantic/Global South studies, human rights, peace and global justice...), we hope to initiate that dialogue at MLA and to keep it going---to spur interest, discourse, and scholarship, ultimately, on justice and justiciable repair for slavery and empire. I designate this “urgent” owing to our Anthropogenic condition together with historically undermined economic development across historically colonized nations—an unevenness not caused by so-called “backwardness,” as claimed in some discourse worlds, but by imperialist colonization and extractivism. The list of economically undermined nations subjected to slavery under empire is a long and winding road—and, it's a panorama of possibility, of the emancipatory “possibilities [...] ever before us” and now, with a UN mandate.

Speakers will present intellectually rigorous, well-researched, distinct answers to the session prompt. There are 4 and none will exceed 12 - 15 minutes’ talking time, thus reserving 15+ minutes for Q&A.

--Gabriel Quigley makes the case for a view of slavery as “event” and “disaster” (Blanchot) rather than era or moment thus raising the ethical stakes (Sharpe) for reckoning with it, he argues. This difference bears on its justiciability: it posits the liability of nations de facto exonerated by historicism, refuses the alibi of causal determinism, and renders slavery an infinitely demanding event.

--Mercedes Albert-Llacer presents a compelling, incisive case for literary accounts centered on enslaved girls or young women viewed as core Emancipatory Narrative, literary testimony framed as legal deposition. Texts by Jacobs and Morrison provide a narratological “infrastructure” that operationalizes a reparative political economy and demonstrates that the UN mandate for slavery justice must (also) restore stolen youth, spatial autonomy, and reproductive sovereignty.

--Lindsay Parkhowell argues that Black female lament—performances by Smith, Holiday, Simone, and Mother—is intrinsic to reparatory justice. They argue that lamentation stages a revisable self that resists the legal grammar of enslavement: property, possession, and dispossession and, critically, that gives legal categories a cultural grammar. This Emancipatory Narrative illustrates that recognition, rehabilitation, and satisfaction mandate vocal embodiments and a revisable self-relation, a staging of futurities beyond trauma that might be possible.

--Maureen Ruprecht Fadem delineates the “discourse of impossibility” surrounding justice efforts around slavery and empire, an actively manipulated discourse laden with error and "blind spot." She reviews modern-era reparations history in so doing repudiating the notion that reparations is unwise, unmerited, or impossible. Turning to the “how” question, finally, Maureen urges the formation of a global justice alliance including the entire decolonizing world that works collectively toward reparatory futures.

A group of diverse global scholars: Gabriel is Filipino-Irish-Canadian and a member of the faculty at University of Victoria; Mercedes is a Spanish scholar located there and doing research globally; originally from Australia, Lindsay is an LGBT PhD student (ABD) completing their dissertation in Germany; and Maureen is an active scholar working on political justice, reparations particularly, and an English Professor at a community college in NYC

[1] https://www.kolumnmagazine.com/2026/03/16/america-and-the-crime-it-still-wont-fully-name/?fbclid=IwY2xjawQyOyhleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETE4eXVNV1FnUUFRdHZVc0Voc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHvakuUgMrww2C5ygNtX1PzZBcEtX2L20xMXzsDGxge-SmfXY7_wdAHrKIlhq_aem_PxEzwMvB8U58kyJFj9lfkw