Laura Gallon | University of Sussex (original) (raw)

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Peer-Reviewed Publications by Laura Gallon

Reading #Instapoetry: A Poetics of Instagram, edited by James Mackay and JuEunhae Knox, Bloomsbury, 2024

Conference Papers by Laura Gallon

ENSFR Conference, 2023

Comestible metaphors abound in the language surrounding reader-reception theory. While the novel,... more Comestible metaphors abound in the language surrounding reader-reception theory. While the novel, no doubt because of its status and length, is comparatively rarely described in culinary terms, the short story has long been derided as literary fast food, as revealed by Kasia Boddy in The American Short Story Since 1950 and Aimee Gasston in Modernist Short Fiction and Things. This paper looks at how the particular context in which the genre developed (with the industrial revolution and stories publications in magazines) up to the present day (with the rise of short story dispensers across the Western world), together with the bite-size genre’s brevity contribute to its status as a ‘literary snack’. By focusing on the voices of migrant women writers, this presentation explores how traditionally marginalised authors challenge or playfully engage with this image, whether through individual short stories, collections or cycles. In these texts (which “appeal to the senses and taste buds”, to quote Elaine Chiew), the moment of the meal, central to the narrative, takes on an almost metatextual role and reflects its author’s concerns about form, identity, and cultural status. The tensions central to migrant women’s relationship to food, both as a nourishing link with home and as an inescapable trope pushed by publishers to promise authenticity and spice to the Western reader, come to light in these short yet substantive moments.

"Short Fiction as World Literature", ENSFR annual conference, University of Lisbon, October 2022

Abstract: In recent years, there has been much debate about the so-called “renaissance of the [En... more Abstract: In recent years, there has been much debate about the so-called “renaissance of the [English-language] short story”. This paper demonstrates that this rhetoric is more than just a media strategy to keep the genre in the news and increase its sales, as suggested by Chris Power. It traces back this contemporary moment to the 1960-80s canon wars, in order to argue that the form’s contemporary growth and success is inseparable from its influential role in promoting marginalised voices in the West.

Drawing from my doctoral research and my upcoming book on migrant women and the short story form (Palgrave, 2023), this paper explores the historical, social and material conditions which have led both to the increased habitability of the short story scene for marginalised voices, and to the form’s current prosperity.

Among other examples, it discusses the short story’s crucial yet often overlooked role in the North American canon wars, its international cultural impact with the Caine Prize for African Writing (1999-present) and the increased inclusivity of short story anthologies, teaching, and prizes in the wake of the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements. It reveals how the form’s brevity, which has long made it particularly well suited for publication in pamphlets, cultural magazines, anthologies, newspapers and/or academic journals is also well adapted for digital spaces. Online, contemporary discussions about diversifying literature, the rise of new forms of short fiction, and new literary platforms give voice to authors from underprivileged backgrounds. This presentation, then, offers a critical attempt to look at the progress made in terms of decentring white voices from the anglophone short story canon, and how this has significantly revitalized the form.

Contemporary Women Writing Race: Textual Interventions and Intersections Symposium, 2021

Jhumpa Lahiri became world famous for her Pulitzer-prize-winning debut, Interpreter of Maladies, ... more Jhumpa Lahiri became world famous for her Pulitzer-prize-winning debut, Interpreter of Maladies, in 1999. The bestselling books that followed, namely The Namesake (2003), Unaccustomed Earth (2009) and The Lowland (2013) share, with her debut, the same Bengali-American subject matter and focus on migrant families. Lahiri has written expansively about the pressure and cultural weight placed on her shoulders as the figurehead of “Indian American” literature. In 2015, she took the radical decision to no longer write in English, and to choose Italian instead – a language in which she believes to be “a tougher, freer writer”. Following the publication of her 2015 language memoir, In Altre Parole (In Other Words), she wrote a novel entitled Dove Mi Trovo which she translated as Whereabouts in May 2021.

I argue that this subversive linguistic choice allows Lahiri to escape the burden of representation while anchoring herself even further into the Western canon. In this presentation, I compare her English-language and Italian-language writing to suggest that what occurs in her most recent publications is not only a linguistic ‘deracination’ but also a form of ‘deracialisation’. Leaving behind detailed descriptions of Bengali life, Lahiri’s Italian texts are more impressionistic and meditative. They contain nameless and wandering characters and take place in unidentified locations. And yet, the themes of identity and otherness continue to dominate her writing, while her grammatically perfect Italian is, as scholars have observed, somewhat peculiar to a native ear. As such, Lahiri’s Italian stories reveal the pain of being unable to indulge in a sense of belonging fully to a culture and of being devoid of secure roots.

British Association for American Studies, 2021

Instapoetry, and the online space more broadly, has offered commercial possibilities for women of... more Instapoetry, and the online space more broadly, has offered commercial possibilities for women of 'minority' backgrounds who have traditionally been marginalised by the Western publishing industry. Bypassing the politics of literary production allows them to reshape the publishing world.

“Instapoem” is a term for short, simple poems, often with accompanying images, designed to be circulated primarily on the Instagram platform. It is undoubtedly the most popular movement in poetry for many years, with the success of writers such as Rupi Kaur being credited for a “trickle down” effect that has boosted sales of poetry more generally. Yet it is also a highly contested form. Many Instapoets reject the label as demeaning, while critics have dismissed the form as lacking in craft and appealing only to the lowest common denominator. In this panel, we concentrate on how Instapoetry reflects changing working conditions in the digital age. The movement is branded with the name of a private corporation, and, while there have been movements such as Twitter lit previously, there has been nothing like the market penetration of Instapoetry. The poet’s labour is casualized and constantly forced into competition for virtual currency (“likes”). Thanks to hashtags and reposts, the poet’s output is objectively measurable, and it is the most popular poets who are rewarded with a contract (usually with Andrews McMeel, the major Instapoetry publishers.

No Place to Go? Perspectives on Displacement, Belonging and Non-Belonging, Delhi University, 2021

This paper establishes the centrality of short fiction by migrant women on the global literary sc... more This paper establishes the centrality of short fiction by migrant women on the global literary scene. To date, scholarly attention has concentrated on the novel as the default migrant fictional genre and has often read migrant writing for its content, as a sociological mirror to our contemporary ‘Age of Migration’. Short story theory, on the other hand, has privileged the work of writers whose identities and stories fit the narrative requirements of the nation. In other words, this focus has tended to overshadow migrant women’s significant contributions to the short story. In 2020, for instance, the U.S.-based Story Prize was awarded to Edwidge Danticat for the second time since 2004, out of a shortlist fully comprised of women of migrant backgrounds, including Zadie Smith and Kali Fajardo-Anstine. That same year, the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection was delivered to Mimi Lok; four out of the five finalists were migrant women.

This paper thus brings forward some of the findings of my PhD thesis which set out to expand scholarly and popular awareness of the genre of migrant women’s short story writing since the 1980s. It questions the assumptions, drawn both from the novel’s economic and popular success and from Georg Lukács Theory of the Novel (1962), that the novel is the form best suited for migration. By discussing the important role of the short story in establishing migrant women writers on the contemporary North American literary scene, this presentation highlights the significant, but overlooked, role of the short story in the canon of migrant literature. It interrogates the national criterion central to short story theory to argue instead that it is an international genre which transcends national borders and is easily disseminated via the globalised publishing industry and the online space.

READING #INSTAPOETRY, University of Glasgow, 2020

More than just a passing trend or a pop phenomenon, instapoetry, like slam and spoken-word poetry... more More than just a passing trend or a pop phenomenon, instapoetry, like slam and spoken-word poetry before it, has emerged from a context which is not particularly welcoming to women and members of the BAME community. Poetry occupies a privileged and distinguished position within western literary traditions, yet what is viewed as “poetic” or “avant-garde” continues to be based on standards set several centuries ago by an educated, white and male elite, and to be enjoyed only by a small subculture of readers.

My contention is that Instagram has opened up a space for ethnic, queer and/or female writers, free from the hostility – and patriarchal elitism – of the publishing industry and the established poetry world, a hostility well documented in “Gender and Genre” by Dinah Birch and Dorothy Wang’s Thinking Its Presence. I argue that instapoetry is a highly subversive form where the minority status of its (ethnic) writers (including Rupi Kaur, rh sin, Nikita Gill, and Yrsa Daley-Ward, to name but a few) interacts with the low-brow status of Instagram, the shortness of the texts (which are required to fit into a picture frame), and their engagement with issues generally considered unimportant or “not universal”. In this paper, I claim that the instapoem is a new poetic form that has not received the scholarly and literary attention it deserves, and that it offers greater stimulant for powerful reflection on our contemporary society, our consumption of Otherness, and the value given to ethnic writing, than, say, the sonnet.

Short Fiction as Humble Fiction, Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3 , 2019

In the past fifty years, feminist critics have begun the process of rediscovering, rereading and ... more In the past fifty years, feminist critics have begun the process of rediscovering, rereading and revaluing women’s cookbooks as works of literature and as an alternative “feminine literary genre”. In historical and social contexts which were not hospitable for Western women and migrant/ethnic women writers, cookbooks were deemed acceptable, precisely because food was disregarded as trivial, utilitarian and culturally unimportant. As Sherrie Inness explains in Secret Ingredients, recipes in fact carry stories, are powerful exercises in style and voice, and like stories, originate from oral forms of knowledge transmission. Literary critics too have paid growing attention to representations of food in women’s literature worldwide, and have noted a tendency among writings by Third World women especially to consider food and cooking “as a vehicle for artistic expression […] an opportunity for resistance and even power” (Arlene Avakian). Such research has tended to concentrate on the novel, and to discuss food as theme and metaphor, as content, without paying attention to questions of form and genre.

This paper bridges this gap by exploring the formal, rhetorical and imaginative relationships between contemporary short story collections by immigrant women, and cookbooks. It builds on the affiliation of recipes and stories invited by Edwidge Danticat’s “Women Like Us” (1995), the title of Madeleine Thien’s prize-winning debut collection Simple Recipes (2001), and the incorporation of recipes in the stories, named after dishes, contained in Lara Vapnyar’s Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love (2008). My intention is to place culinary short fiction within a migrant female story- and recipe-telling tradition, and consider it as a genre which strengthens the bond between generations of marginalized women. Ultimately, such culinary stories expose the oral and embodied origins of female storytelling and recipe-transmitting, and, more importantly, act as a testimony to culinary storytelling ancestors whose voices have gone unheard.

British Library Summer Scholars, 2019

In the North American imagination, especially from the 1960s onwards, stories of immigrants and e... more In the North American imagination, especially from the 1960s onwards, stories of immigrants and ethnic minorities have been laced with stories of, and fascination for, exotic foods. This paper offers a reflection on this phenomenon and argues that for migrant women in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, writing popular yet culturally-disregarded culinary literature such as cookbooks and/or novelistic ‘food porn’ has provided a space for them to affirm their identities, record their own (hi)stories and convey important alter/native cultural messages in a ‘palatable’ form.

Objects In Focus (University of Sussex), 2019

More than just a protective container and an emblem of displacement, the suitcase encapsulates th... more More than just a protective container and an emblem of displacement, the suitcase encapsulates the in-betweenness of the migrant’s identity. As the link between here and there, and now and then, it is loaded with symbolic and metaphorical meaning. Contemporary exhibitions by Western artists, journalists, museums and memorials present suitcases as allegories for immigrant bodies and archives of lives gone by, drawing a parallel between the object’s nature and the exteriority and interiority of human beings. This type of representation, which sometimes even allows the observer to see the private contents the suitcase has transported through space and time, risks objectifying the migrant and neglecting the political relationship of power between people who carry suitcases, and people who do not need them, but inspect and control them. In this paper, I turn to writing by migrants in order to explore their own diverse and ambiguous reflections on this evocative object. Unsurprisingly, despite the scarceness of academic work on the subject, the suitcase is a recurrent motif in migrant writing worldwide. A frequent trope is the tension over whether or not to let go of the suitcase, of the cultural, historical and emotional baggage it hints at, that weighs heavy on individuals while simultaneously grounding their sense of self. In this piece then, I navigate between the narrative, symbolic and political functions of suitcases in texts from different countries, cultures and languages to offer a comparative and intercultural reading of this object of global capitalism.

British Association for American Studies (University of Sussex), 2019

American identity is embedded in food imagery, from its inception as a “melting pot” or “salad bo... more American identity is embedded in food imagery, from its inception as a “melting pot” or “salad bowl” to its worldwide association with burgers and fast-food. Proverbially, being “as American as apple pie” attributes a sense of cultural purity to Americanness, which is simultaneously challenged by the apple pie’s own history of immigration, colonisation and cultural encounters. Unlike many other countries that formed “imaginary communities” around similar culinary practices, Donna Gabaccia writes that the preoccupation with an “American national cuisine” is a fairly recent one which developed in reaction to immigration. This enduring cultural anxiety is reflected if not perpetuated by the thorough restrictions on food at the U.S. border. By focusing specifically on literary representations of scenes involving searches of migrant suitcases packed with foods at the border, this paper argues that in migrant texts, food, although often politicized to draw cultural borders between “us” and “them”, actually points to the porousness of national and cultural borders. Through close-readings of short stories by immigrant women writers (including Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Edwidge Danticat), this paper exposes the artificiality of borders as a patriarchal and nationalistic performance of power. Foreign food becomes a metaphor for the immigrant’s body and values: the arrival of foreign foods and smells is understood literally as cultural rape: by crossing borders and circulating freely, smell “involves a physical penetration of the body” (Benjamin AldesWurgaft), and eating foreign food becomes an act of “incorporating the other”, swallowing and digesting a new and threatening “worldview, […] cosmology” (Claude Fischler). Such food narratives by migrant women thus attempt to deconstruct patriarchal myths of culinary and national purity by pointing to the permeable nature of American borders.

EGStravaganza (English Graduate Seminar), University of Sussex, 2019

Laura Gallon 'Cornflakes and Milk, and Egg Curry: Gender and Food in Migrant Fiction' Ashley Barr... more Laura Gallon 'Cornflakes and Milk, and Egg Curry: Gender and Food in Migrant Fiction' Ashley Barr 'Some shower thoughts and a procedure for Carrie' Nicole Mennell 'Macduff, the 'household cocke' of Macbeth' Charlotte Potter '400 Years of eggs and female sexuality: from Jan Steen to Sarah Lucas'

Reading #Instapoetry: A Poetics of Instagram, edited by James Mackay and JuEunhae Knox, Bloomsbury, 2024

Excursions, vol 12:1 , 2022

See here for the whole issue: https://excursions-journal.sussex.ac.uk/index.php/excursions/issue/view/home

European Network of Short Fiction (ENSFR) Blog, 2022

Also Available Here: https://ensfr.univ-angers.fr/2022/03/18/migrantshortstory/ In this blog p... more Also Available Here: https://ensfr.univ-angers.fr/2022/03/18/migrantshortstory/

In this blog post, I write about how migrant writers are leading the development of the contemporary short story revival and influencing the form's aesthetics.

A Personal Anthology, edited by Jonathan Gibbs, 2021

Available here: https://apersonalanthology.com/category/laura-gallon/ A Personal Anthology is a ... more Available here: https://apersonalanthology.com/category/laura-gallon/

You can sign up to receive the emails and read recent letters here: https://tinyletter.com/apersonalanthology. There are currently approaching 1,300 subscribers.

Voice Magazine, 2019

ENSFR Conference, 2023

"Short Fiction as World Literature", ENSFR annual conference, University of Lisbon, October 2022

Contemporary Women Writing Race: Textual Interventions and Intersections Symposium, 2021

British Association for American Studies, 2021

No Place to Go? Perspectives on Displacement, Belonging and Non-Belonging, Delhi University, 2021

READING #INSTAPOETRY, University of Glasgow, 2020

Short Fiction as Humble Fiction, Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3 , 2019

British Library Summer Scholars, 2019

Objects In Focus (University of Sussex), 2019

British Association for American Studies (University of Sussex), 2019

EGStravaganza (English Graduate Seminar), University of Sussex, 2019

American Studies Roundtable (University of Sussex), 2017

Between Borders: Exploring Spaces of Exclusion and Belonging in Global Migration (University College London), 2017

Physical borders are often perceived as a means of protecting a nation state and forming a territ... more Physical borders are often perceived as a means of protecting a nation state and forming a territory for a community of people sharing a sense of identity through a common culture, values and customs. But such borders have also been drawn by external parties as a way of exerting world control: the partition of Africa by European forces, for example, succeeded in weakening potential rebellion by dividing tribes and forcing together groups with nothing in common. Drawing on textual analysis of Shani Mootoo’s “The Upside-Downness of the World as It Unfolds”, I will argue that admiration for borders, clear categories and cultural boundaries are a sign of nostalgia for the power structures of the past. As globalization creates the potential for new power hierarchies, this story underlines how physical and symbolic boundaries have become a tool for continuing Western superiority and cultural segregation. Mootoo’s story focuses on an Indo-Trinidadian lesbian who moves to Canada after receiving a British education in Trinidad, and becomes friends with two white Canadian women who teach her about her Indian cultural background and expect her to perform it. Geographical, cultural and ethnic boundaries are crossed and become a source of confusion and chaos to the narrator, who comes from a multicultural background – since Trinidad has undergone several waves of colonization (by the Spanish, French and British) and migrations (incoming African slaves, and later indentured East Asians). Mootoo rejects cultural essentialism and boundaries as they recreate old colonial tropes and she underlines how all identities are, as Stuart Hall puts it, “hybrid”, intersectional – and non-homogeneous.

Sussex Migration Graduate Conference (University of Sussex), 2017

From “melting pot” to “salad bowl” and “tomato soup”, integration in America is linguistically ti... more From “melting pot” to “salad bowl” and “tomato soup”, integration in America is linguistically tied to food imagery. The assumption behind these metaphors is that immigrants bring along cultural luggage, comprising customs, language and of course food. Food and language are two crucial aspects of culture as one provides life and the other allows for human communication. Both change over time and carry tangible traces of past events, attaching the individual to a group, society, collective tradition and identity. In diasporic contexts especially, where immigrants find themselves on the margins of the dominant culture, food preparation and language become forms of cultural and creative expression linked to an idea of home. This paper will discuss food imagery and language in relation to integration, through a study of Adichie’s “The Arrangers of Marriage”, a short story about a Nigerian woman who moves to America. There, she is forced to “be as mainstream as possible” by cooking only American food and speaking American English, metaphorically losing all forms of cultural expression. While polls show that Americans believe that immigrants should assimilate, this story reveals how alienating the assimilation process is. I argue that the text ridicules assimilation and the “melting pot” concept by challenging American cultural essentialism. As the U.S enters a phase of borders, isolationism and nationalism, such matters become even more relevant in starting a conversation on American identity, multiculturalism and immigration.

University of Sussex, 2021

This thesis explores contemporary short fiction by first- and second-generation migrant women wri... more This thesis explores contemporary short fiction by first- and second-generation migrant women writers in North America from 1980 to 2020, including Jhumpa Lahiri, Edwidge Danticat, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Jamaica Kincaid, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni and Shani Mootoo amongst others. To date, scholarly attention has concentrated on the novel as the default migrant fictional genre and has often read migrant writing as a sociological mirror to our contemporary ‘Age of Migration’. This thesis contends that only by expanding our definitions of the short story, citizenry and the nation, by stretching the parameters of short story theory, and by emphasizing form alongside theme, can we fully appreciate migrant women’s consequential contributions to the contemporary short story in North America.

Embargoed - current book project with Palgrave.

Home has long carried connotations of safety, comfort, warmth and familiarity. In the Western pop... more Home has long carried connotations of safety, comfort, warmth and familiarity. In the Western popular imagination, home is often seen as a shelter from the confusion of the outside world - a sacrosanct space in which individuals can express themselves freely and in private. A place which can become an extension of the self, and should be treated accordingly. However, in an increasingly interconnected world, the term ‘home’ takes on new meanings. Widespread media coverage of mass migrations resulting from political turmoil shed light on alternative understandings of home, with issues of statelessness, national identity, forced relocation, longing/belonging, acculturation, and assimilation becoming increasingly pressing. At a local level, the global pandemic and associated call to ‘stay at home to save lives’ has also impacted our understanding of home – it has become a space that incorporates work, schooling and healthcare, reminding us that it is a territory which reflects the interactions and intersections between the public and the private. It is also a site of inequality; inequality in accessibility, inequality of ownership, and inequality in the division of domestic responsibility. And at the global level, individuals and institutions have begun to recognise that the planet itself is also our ‘home’ – a home shared with uncountable others, human and otherwise - and therefore deserves the same, if not more, care and attention given to it as given to the buildings in which we reside. Regardless of the lens adopted, it is clear that ‘home’ is a complex signifier. It is a space which every individual will experience differently, imbued with contradiction, and deserving of academic attention. For our next issue, Excursions Journal invites researchers from all disciplines to 'home in' on one or several aspects of home. We welcome contributions from scholars in any discipline, including natural sciences, philosophy, sociology, social policy, geography, migration, politics, anthropology, cultural studies, linguistics, film, business, and literature. Potential areas for consideration include but are not limited to: Representations of home: artistic, media or literary representations Understanding home: sociology and home; homelessness; care homes Gender equality at, or gendered representations of, home Migration, mobility, and home, refugee experiences of resettlement Psychology and/or affect of home The Self at home: identity, emotions, well-being, body image, etc. Home and crime: domestic … View full abstract

Papers due 1st Dec. 2021, 2021

For our next issue, Excursions Journal invites researchers from all disciplines to 'home in' on one or several aspects of home. We welcome contributions from scholars in any discipline, including natural sciences, philosophy, sociology, social policy, geography, migration, politics, anthropology, cultural studies, linguistics, film, business, and literature. Potential areas for consideration include but are not limited to:

Representations of home: artistic, media or literary representations
Understanding home: sociology and home; homelessness; care homes
Gender equality at, or gendered representations of, home
Migration, mobility, and home, refugee experiences of resettlement
Psychology and/or affect of home
The Self at home: identity, emotions, well-being, body image, etc.
Home and crime: domestic abuse, prison, rehabilitation
The environment as home: climate, climate change, biodiversity, ecology
Home and the sciences: food and nutrition, home experiments, etc.
Home and economics: local organizations, family wealth, local business opportunities
Home and Covid19: lockdown, home-schooling, families and mental health
Please submit your extended abstract of 500 words by 11th October 2021 via our website. Final manuscripts will be due by the 1st of December and should be no longer than 5,000 words. Excursions adopts Harvard style for citations and bibliography. More information about Author Guidelines can be found here. If you have trouble with our submission system, please email us at enquiries@excursions-journal.org.uk.

Alongside traditional academic articles, we also consider alternative ways of communicating research, such as videos, short stories, photo essays, posters, verse, among others (please contact the editorial staff prior to submission via enquiries@excursions-journal.org.uk).

Submissions will also be considered for presentation at the Excursions Online Symposium (more information to come). We encourage submission as soon as possible, as we accept articles on a rolling basis.

Laura Gallon | University of Sussex (original) (raw)

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Peer-Reviewed Publications by Laura Gallon

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Conference Papers by Laura Gallon