Eugene O’Neill Society – MLA 2023

The Eugene O’Neill Society
Modern Language Association Convention
San Francisco, January 5-8, 2023

The Duality of Eugene O’Neill on Race

Please submit proposals to the O’Neill Society

by March 9, 2022

What can we learn about race and inclusion in America today by reflecting on Eugene O’Neill’s plays? At first glance, O’Neill may not be the most likely playwright to turn to in examining issues of racial tensions. And yet, his plays repeatedly broke color lines on stages around the world for decades.

This panel examines the legacy of O’Neill in light of vital conversations regarding race, diversity, and equity today. Eugene O’Neill’s emphasis on racial themes and conflicts, especially in his early dramas, opened up extraordinary opportunities for Black artists to challenge racist structures in modern theatre and cinema. By changing scripts to omit offensive epithets, inserting African American music and dance, or including citations of Black internationalism, theatre artists of color used O’Neill’s dramatic texts to subvert barriers in American and transatlantic theatre.

Despite the innovations his work inspired, Eugene O’Neill is not an unproblematic figure in the history of racism in modern theatre. While O’Neill was the first major American playwright to write Black characters with complexity, he also relied upon stereotypes and forms of primitivism that continue to provoke criticism. And yet, recent productions around the world (from revivals of The Emperor Jones by the Irish Repertory Theater to The Iceman Cometh with Denzel Washington, directed by George C. Wolfe) demonstrate the power of O’Neill’s plays for examining the enduring questions of race and racism. This panel explores the complexities of that duality in our scholarly and artistic approaches towards O’Neill’s plays and various productions and considers what we can learn about racism and inclusion today from studying O’Neill.

This will be a 75-minute session at the MLA convention. We hope that half of that time can be devoted to discussion with the audience. The O’Neill Society seeks papers that can be presented in roughly twelve minutes either directly on O’Neill’s work or on issues of inclusion today that then can be applied to O’Neill’s work during the discussion. Please email proposals for presentations to David Palmer (dpalmer@maritime.edu) by March 9, 2022. That will allow the O’Neill Society sufficient time to review all proposals properly before submitting the Society’s session proposal to the MLA administrators by their deadline of April 1. Please note that to present a paper at the MLA 2023 convention the presenter must be a member of the MLA by April 7, 2022. Here is a link to information about membership fees and guidelines.

The Eugene O’Neill Society is an Allied Organization of the MLA. Our session is guaranteed a place at the convention each year.

Thank you for considering this call for papers.