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Extracting Indigeneity:Revaluing the Work of World Literature in These Times
Get PDFThis essay examines extractivism as both a project and a process that is bolstering new forms of imperialism on a world scale. It argues that extractivism is as much grounded in material accumulation as it is in cultural extraction to create new forms of value. The writings of indigenous writers such as Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar offer an important key to understanding the work of the literary in making visible and resistant that which extractivism seeks to exploit for profit
Landscapes of Resistance
No full text(95 min, Marta Popivoda 2021) Serbia / France / Germany, How can a landscape speak? It’s like wondering whether the grass, the crickets, or the pond are only a backdrop to the events, or whether they actually participate in them, with their shadows, depths, sounds, waiting to become narrators? A. Vujanović Landscapes of Resistance, a film by Marta Popivoda, traces a journey through the memories of antifascist fighter Sonja (97), one of the first Partisan women in Yugoslavia, who was also among the leaders of the Resistance movement at Auschwitz. As Sonja speaks, we travel through the landscapes of her revolutionary youth as they exist in the present time – the Serbian forests and mountains where the partisans gathered and the muddy grounds and countless chimneys of Auschwitz – towards her tiny Belgrade flat where she lives with her husband and cat. Since Sonja is a great storyteller, capable of telling about past events without hindsight, she takes us directly into that peculiar atmosphere and mindset, which gave birth to antifascist resistance. We make her story travel through time towards the bodies of the new generation of antifascists, bespeaking that it is always possible to think and practice resistance. Landscapes of Resistance Tease
The Historicity of Materialism and the Critique of Politics
Get PDFThis chapter proposes one definition of critical materialism and a critique of politics based on several authors from Marx to Foucault. This critique occurs in several stages and unfolds as a criticism of universals such as human freedom, general interest, political rationality, or reconciled political community. The decisive materialist-historical question, then, is which of the different materialities is dominant at a certain point of time. I argue that Marx condemns politics as an illusion. He thought of ‘political reason’ as a form of ‘spiritualism’. Hence, critical materialism argues for a move away from the illusion of politics
What Ground Do We Read On?
No full textThe field of Medieval Studies has undergone a period of reckoning, including a greater awareness of histories of race and racialization, an increasingly fraught relationship of religious and racial identities, and the effects of the ’global turn‘, which has met with varying degrees of success. Beyond these challenges, attentiveness to Indigenous writers, artists, and knowledge-keepers requires those of us in literary studies to look critically at our disciplinary structures and foundational methods, and invites us to consider what we might mean by ’canonicity‘ and the ’canonical‘. If we do continue to read canonical writers — such as Dante, Chaucer, and Christine de Pizan — on what ground will we read them? This talk explores the process of writing a ’Handbook‘, drawing on the experience of co-editing the Oxford Handbook of Chaucer and commenting on the new Oxford Handbook of Dante, and sketches out what future approaches to these writers — and their canonical status — might entail.Suzanne Conklin Akbari is professor of medieval studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Her books are on optics and allegory (Seeing Through the Veil) and European views of Islam and the Orient (Idols in the East), and she’s also edited volumes on travel literature, Mediterranean Studies, and somatic histories, plus the Open Access collections How We Write and How We Read. Her most recent book is The Oxford Handbook of Chaucer (2020), co-edited with James Simpson. Akbari is involved with two global medieval studies projects, the ‘Practices of Commentary’ and ‘The Book and the Silk Roads’, with which she is co-Principal Investigator. A co-editor of the Norton Anthology of World Literature, Akbari co-hosts a literature podcast called The Spouter-Inn
Haunting Angels
No full textMany characters die twice in the nineteenth-century British and American novel, with protracted and repeated death scenes marking the profundity and inescapability of death, its communal nature, and the deep sentimentality associated with the loss of a beloved other. In Wings of the Dove (1902), Henry James repeats the trope of doubled death, but with a radical difference. His heroine, Milly Theale, initially stages her own death to represent less a death than an assumption, one James directly models on Swedenborgian accounts of the transformation of the human into an angel. That Milly dies again, although with an audience of one, suggests the complexity of James’ relationship to this Swedenborgian scene, one he comes to through the legacy of his father’s writings and an early novella by Honoré de Balzac, the enigmatic Séraphîta. But what happens when communal forms shape a quintessentially modern novel? To what extent is community expelled? Or is it, instead, transformed into a community of readers? Amy Hollywood joined Harvard Divinity School in 2005. She is the author of The Soul as Virgin Wife: Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart (1995), which received the Otto Grundler Prize for the best book in medieval studies from the International Congress of Medieval Studies; Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History (2002); and Acute Melancholia and Other Essays (2016). She is also the co-editor, with Patricia Beckman, of The Cambridge Companion to Christian Mysticism (2012). She is currently completing ‘Faith: Three Inquires on Religion, Literature, and Politics’, co-authored with Constance Furey and Sarah Hammerschlag. Also in progress is a book tentatively entitled, ‘Secular Death: Haunting Henry James’
What Happened to Lesbian and Gay Studies?
No full textDoes anyone do ‘lesbian and gay studies’? The formulation likely sounds quaint when gender and sexuality studies now aims its sights at so much more than what these identities designate. Just as feminist, queer and trans theory hotly debated the political and philosophical shortcomings of ‘identity’ in the 1980s and 90s, the 2000s and 2010s have given us the frameworks of homonormativity, homonationalism and queer liberalism to articulate how lesbian and gay identities in particular can become acute vectors of a racist modern governmentality. Across a range of politically-engaged scholarship, non-identitarian positions continue to seem like the most sophisticated ones. Yet, in other ways, identity still looms large across our lives, outside and inside the academy. Social and political emergencies continue to make the work of identity-based movements urgent and necessary. Scholarly controversies often circle back to identity: in ‘Trans* Studies Now’, a recent issue of TSQ (Transgender Studies Quarterly), a special forum responds to the argument that, of all things that could have been decentred in trans studies, it has, curiously, been transsexual identity. The Black Scholar has oriented a recent issue around the question ‘What was Black Studies’?, not to signal its end, but its vitality. Outside of the interpretive humanities, ‘lesbian’ and ‘gay’ read differently and ground work in disciplines such as history and sociology. Recent events beyond the Anglophone world—for example, in Poland and Hungary—show that these identities have not lost the political urgency that they may seem to have done in other contexts. So what happened to ‘lesbian and gay studies’? In what ways does such a formulation seem retrograde, if it does? What would the field have looked like without the strong impulse to self-deconstruction on which it was founded? How does this impulse relate (or not) to the structure of other identity knowledge domains? If ‘lesbian’ and ‘gay’ do not seem like the most urgent or necessary political identifications now, then what else could they be for? This symposium will gather scholars from across the academic and activist trajectory of lesbian and gay studies to ask these questions and more
