Symposium | Keywords: Literature and Politics

1:00-2:45 pm

Keyword: Indigeneity

“Indigenous Connector-Texts: Literature, Art, Environment”

Chadwick Allen (University of Washington)

“‘Hope in a Time of Genocide’: Reading Connections, Reading Here”

Alice Te Punga Somerville (University of British Columbia)

2:45-3:15 pm

Coffee Break

3:15-5:00 pm

Keyword: Vulnerability

“Vulnerability and Sovereignty at the End of the World”

Russ Castronovo (University of Wisconsin Madison)

“Vulnerabilities Criticism”

Anna Brickhouse (University of Virginia)

5:00-6:00 pm

Reception

Abstract

This paper reflects on the interplay of narrative frames and legal frameworks of protection in international human rights, refugee, and humanitarian law. It examines protection in the contexts of colonial and mandate-era histories alongside the interventions of anti-colonial and dissident writers, lawyers, and internationalist feminist theorists in order to highlight how literary formal strategies challenge established frames of international protection—as historical formation, supportive structure, and conceptual parameter. In readings of Sara Uribe’s multi-genre assemblage Antígona González (2012, English translation 2016), which stages the interplay of fragmentation and genealogy in frameworks of international justice, and Adania Shibli’s novel Minor Detail (Tafsil Thanawi 2017, English translation 2020), which plays on the narrative frame structure and methods of detection to stage the problems of reading and the historical violence of the frame, the paper examines how literary strategies imaginatively crack open legal frameworks, restructure the relation of embedded fragments to frame, and reconceive the heart and horizon of collective freedom.

Angela Naimou is Associate Professor of English at Clemson University. She is the author of Salvage Work: U.S. and Caribbean Literatures amid the Debris of Legal Personhood (Fordham UP, 2015), winner of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present book prize and finalist for the MLA’s William Sanders Scarborough Award, as well as Editor of the volume Diaspora and Literary Studies (Cambridge UP, 2023). In addition to recent and forthcoming publications on contemporary literature and refuge/asylum, Naimou is Editor of Humanity journal and an associate editor for the journal Contemporary Literature.

Abstract

How is debt a structural and structuring aspect of the economic and political philosophy of human rights? Even as legal historians theorize odious debt, how does literature allow us to picture the dispersed social nature of debt—and especially unpayable debt? My paper for this symposium is concerned with how anti-colonial writers and Marxist theorists have contextualized and imagined the shape-shifting gift, the debt, the loan of human rights—also the possibility of a radical generosity and exchanges of mutual aid— in our present age of neoliberal sovereign debt crises, ongoing colonial wars, and global class struggles. The story of how the call for economic and social rights was overtaken by the invention of human rights (presupposed in the interest of the individual as citizen-subject) has been documented but also debated by influential historians and sociologists of the subject. Theorists have argued that human rights is an inadequate framework for addressing inequality and neocolonialism. These thinkers inspire us and challenge us to conceive of a human rights project that engages systems and movements. But where are there imaginative resources for thinking such an ethical project? Turning to examples from the literature of anti-colonialism, labor, and the black radical tradition, I consider where and how the figural logic of the literary opens up ways of understanding hidden meanings and paradoxes of the gift as debt—as well as shifting terms of donors and recipients.

Sonali Perera is an Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is the author of No Country: Working-Class Writing in the Age of Globalization (Columbia University Press, 2014). Her scholarship has appeared in PMLA, differences, Postcolonial Studies, Signs and in interdisciplinary anthologies, including South Asian Feminisms and The State of Human Rights. She is currently at work on her second book, Between Imperialism and Internationalism: World Literature and Human Rights and a short study reflecting on the relationship between feminism and world literature. She is a faculty associate of the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute Human Rights Program.

Abstract

There have long been two main lenses through which writing across the race line is refracted in discussions of southern African fiction. We might call the first “empathy” and the second “solidarity,” with the former valorizing a psychological or affective approach to inhabiting other lives and the latter prioritizing strategy and action independent of interiority. This paper attempts to split the difference between the two, re-casting empathy itself as an act not of “feeling,” first and foremost, but discipline. It does so by piecing together an un-heralded tradition of Black Zimbabwean writers who go deep into the weeds of white characters’ minds, often including overt forms of anti-Black racism. Extending from the period of Rhodesia’s UDI (Unilateral Declaration of Independence) in 1965 to work published in the last few years, it convenes figures as far-ranging as Stanlake Samkange and Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu around a political decision to suspend due condemnation of white supremacist psychology in order better to understand it.

Jeanne-Marie Jackson is Professor of English at Johns Hopkins and received her PhD in Comparative Literature from Yale. She is the author of two books: The African Novel of Ideas (Princeton 2021) and South African Literature’s Russian Soul (Bloomsbury 2015), as well as co-editor of J.E. Casely Hayford’s Ethiopia Unbound: A Critical Edition (MSUP 2024). Her third book, The Letter of the Law in J.E. Casely Hayford’s West Africa, is also forthcoming with Princeton. In addition to her many scholarly and public-facing publications, Jackson is Senior Editor of ELH. In 2021, she was named an Andrew Carnegie Fellow.

Abstract

Discipline’s murky etymology links it to a set of concepts that are both aligned and agitated. On the one hand it implies a process of education, an individual practice of patterning one’s movement and thought upon the teachings of another – an idea embedded in one root, “disciple.” On the other hand, it bears the weight of Foucault’s coupling with punish. Physical and psychic scourging may be one link, where violence subtends education and conformity, exposing the political function of both. However, discipline may also facilitate deeply pleasurable and empowering modes of relation. This paper takes the la y life of the United Methodist Church in Zimbabwe as a special case to investigate how religious discipline enabled a wide range of improvisations upon freedom within community. In other words, it is concerned with the relation between individual and collective. Anchored in two central texts, the Book of Discipline and Ngoma (the Shona hymnal), the paper takes up lay preaching, hymnody, gendered fellowship groups, and prayer meetings as practices of reading that take between constraint and liberation, offering a fresh perspective on African Christianity as a site of political thought and action.

Tsitsi Jaji holds the Helen L. Bevington chair in Modern Poetry at Duke University, where she is an associate professor of English and African & African American Studies. Also a senior research associate at Rhodes University in South Africa, Jaji is author of the award-winning monograph, Africa in Stereo: Music, Modernism and Pan-African Solidarity, two full-length collections, Mother Tongues and Beating the Graves, and a chapbook, Carnaval. Her poetry has been set to music by composers including Shawn Okpebholo, BE Boykin, and Stephen Jaffe.

Abstract

How might scholars anchor literary and cultural studies in the site specificity of the Indigenous local while remaining cognizant of potential relations to the Indigenous regional and global? And how might our specific conditions of conducting our work on university campuses—locations in which settler colonialisms are often hyper-visible not only in official discourses but also in built environments—affect our conception and completion of such work? In other words, how might we contend with the Indigenous as not simply surrounded by but actually embedded within colonial constructs at multiple scales? To begin to answer these complex questions, this paper meditates on assertions of the Indigenous—as enduring presence, as contemporary identity, as theory of ongoing relations—within the author’s specific context of working on the campus of the University of Washington, Coast Salish lands-waters-skies that bear the (seemingly) indelible marks of the settler state, its narratives, and its institutions.

Chadwick Allen is Professor of English and Adjunct Professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Washington Seattle, where he also serves as the Associate Vice Provost for Faculty Advancement. Author of the books Blood Narrative: Indigenous Identity in American Indian and Maori Literary and Activist Texts (Duke UP, 2002), Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies (U of Minnesota P, 2012), and Earthworks Rising: Mound Building in Native Literature and Arts (U of Minnesota P, 2022), he is a former editor of the journal Studies in American Indian Literatures and a past president of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA).

Abstract

How do we trace, account for, teach, and mobilize global Indigenous literary connections in ways that attend to our respective territorial and genealogical locations? Upon her return to Hawai’i from the Returning the Gift literary festival in 1992, Haunani-Kay Trask wrote a poem dedicated to Linda Hogan that reflects on her experience at the festival “an ocean and half a continent away” and articulates a sense of “hope in a time of genocide.” This talk is written on Musqueam territory by a Māori literary scholar about a Kanaka Maoli poem dedicated to a Chickasaw writer. Keeping an eye on Trask’s terms ‘hope’ and ‘genocide’ that are inextricable in any Indigenous-Indigenous connection, and bearing in mind Black Australian thinker Chelsea Watego’s argument “f*ck hope, be sovereign,” I argue that Indigenous creative networks and critical textual engagements are significant forms of Indigenous-Indigenous connection that refuse the logics of occupying settler states.

Alice Te Punga Somerville (Te Āti Awa, Taranaki) is a scholar, poet and irredentist who writes and teaches at the intersections of literary studies, Indigenous studies and Pacific studies. Having taught in New Zealand, Australia and Hawai’i, she now holds a professorship at the University of British Columbia in the Department of English Language & Literatures and the Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies. Her publications include Once Were Pacific: Māori Connections to Oceania (2012), 250 Ways To Start an Essay about Captain Cook (2021) and a book of poetry Always Italicise: how to write while colonised (2022). Her current book manuscript focuses on Indigenous engagements with periodicals 1900-1975 in New Zealand, Australia, Fiji and Hawai’i.

Abstract

The will to sovereignty that exists as a foundational concept in political theory has always been shadowed by its disavowed other, vulnerability.  Sovereignty has a long history in Western thought, but that august tradition is itself preceded by the recognition of vulnerability, which, at least from Hobbes’s Leviathan onward, motivates the acceptance of unitary power as a reaction to the unavoidable exposure to predation and wounding that all humans supposedly share.

Wounding constitutes the etymological heart of vulnerability (vulnus signifies wound), and this apprehension of injury generates the impossible fantasy of a subjectivity impermeable to change or dissolution, self-enclosed in and by its autonomy.  This paper explores the philosophical, political, and aesthetic dimensions of this fantasy, as it appears across two different yet converging contexts.  The first is the context of a neo-feudal imaginary that relies on technological utopianism to create frozen subjectivities, invulnerable to change, decay, even death itself.  The second is provided by Don DeLillo’s postmodern science fiction novel, Zero K, a work that imagines an environment of absolute climate control.  Each underscores how varying degrees of threat awareness about extremities like war, climate crisis, and even potential asteroid impact intensify the discourse of invulnerability as a millennial fix for what ails humanity—everything from biological death to the metaphysical pangs of consciousness itself.  Yet sovereignty not only never escapes but also requires the vulnerability it would disavow.  A snag in the logic of sovereignty, this unraveling creates a potential for viewing vulnerability as an aesthetic resource for reworking ideas about autonomy and independence.  It is an exercise that implicitly concerns humanist (and post-humanist) practices because at core it entails thinking about art and literature as endeavors capable of challenging illusions of self-sovereignty that are serviced and maintained by technologies of preservation for lasting beyond the end of the world.

Russ Castronovo is Tom Paine Professor of English and Hilldale Professor of the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he teaches courses on American literature, political theory, and aesthetics.  He is also Director of the university’s Center for the Humanities.  His most recent book, American Insecurity and the Origins of Vulnerability was published by Princeton University Press in 2023.  He is the author or editor of 10 other books, including The New Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies (2024); Propaganda 1776:  Secrets, Leaks, and Revolutionary Communications in Early America (2014); Beautiful Democracy:  Aesthetics and the Anarchy of Global Culture (2007); Necro Citizenship:  Death, Eroticism, and the Public Sphere in the Nineteenth-Century-United States (2001); Fathering the Nation:  American Genealogies of Slavery and Freedom (1995).  His articles have appeared in such journals as Critical Inquiry, boundary 2, American Literature, PMLA, and New Literary History.  He is the co-editor (with Yogita Goyal) of American Literary History.  In 2016, he received the Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award and the following year he was honored with the Underkofler Excellence in Teaching Award, a recognition bestowed on just four faculty members each year across the twenty-six campuses of the University of Wisconsin system.

Abstract

How did vulnerability go from a structural concept in development studies and related fields—used to mark demographic exposure to violence and death in war, torture, and starvation—to a desired quality of philosophy, critical and literary style, and human existence writ large? As critique has been called into question for purportedly running out of steam, an emphasis on vulnerability, often accompanied by a hunger for the personal, has simultaneously saturated our cultural moment. In the arts and humanities, readers are encouraged from a variety of standpoints to mobilize around shared vulnerability: from Judith Butler and other theorists who remind us that it is the precondition to recognition and thus to all ethics, to a celebrated writer like Maggie Nelson who describes her own aesthetic practice in Argonauts, a foundational work of auto-theory, as one of “feral vulnerability.” Meanwhile, in the self-help industry, the corporate-friendly Brené Brown has developed an emotional research empire centered on the valorization and cultivation of vulnerability. Vulnerability has become both a contemporary keyword and critical mode that captures something about the demands of this historical moment, which seems to call out for a style that is personal, often corporeal, and relentlessly self-exposing. To understand the political valences of the current vulnerability moment, this paper turns to an earlier hinge point in literary history during which the genre that is now called autofiction changed the cultural conversation—and literary style itself—in enduring ways: the emergence in the mid-1920s of Ernest Hemingway as the so-called “father of American prose.” What might the politics of literary style in this earlier vulnerability moment reveal about the current one? And what forms can literary criticism take in our current vulnerability moment as a political moment?

Anna Brickhouse is Linden Kent Memorial Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Virginia. Her new book, Earthquake and the Invention of America, is forthcoming from Oxford UP in October 2024. Her first book, Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere (Cambridge 2004), received the Gustave O. Arlt Award in the Humanities from the Council of Graduate Schools as well as Honorable Mention for the Lora Romero first book prize from the American Studies Association. Her second book, The Unsettlement of America (Oxford 2014), was awarded the Early American Literature prize from the Society of Early Americanists and the James Russell Lowell prize from the Modern Language Association. She is the recipient of fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Guggenheim Foundation.