Research Flashcards
(62 cards)
Tell us about your dissertation / book project.
o OPENER. My project is the first broad literary history of the American civil rights revolution.
o ARGUMENT. … and it argues that writers like James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Chester Himes, the young Toni Morrison, and others engaged with the civil rights movement as it was unfolding by turning their attention to the major questions of juridical citizenship:
• how the state and its subjects ought to relate to one another, and
• what binds together those subjects as members of a political community.
o PREVIOUS CRIT. Previous criticism that’s sought to establish the historical relationship between midcentury writers and the movement has tended to do so serially—so it’ll focus on just Ellison—and it’s tended to overlook these questions of citizenship in favor of other themes, like identity and difference or class and economic relations.
o TO BE SURE. I find that these other themes are crucial to these writers.
o MY INTERVENTION. But in the era of Brown and Little Rock and Birmingham and the Civil Rights Act and Watts—all of which, I show through archival research, these writers were intimately involved with—in this era, between about 1952 and about 1970, these writers were asking, through their novels and plays, how the citizen and the state ought to relate to one another.
o CONCLUSION. That question shapes the black literary art of the era—and the way these writers answered it has something to offer both to literary history and to some of the most important unresolved debates in political theory in our own time.
Can you give us some examples of how these writers engaged citizenship?
o Yes. Let me tell you about two writers who engage the problem of citizenship in two very different ways within a couple of years of one another: James Baldwin, who’s a kind of ambivalent liberal writing his play in hopeful anticipation of the Civil Rights Act,
and the Black Power writer Sam Greenlee.
• Baldwin’s question about citizenship is a question about democratic citizenship in particular: can a majoritarian system, a democracy, protect the interests of a numerical minority? When I first started investigating the 1964 Blues for Mister Charlie, which Baldwin wrote and was involved in staging during the summer when the Civil Rights Act was being deliberated, I found a mystery: why did JB insist on setting the ticket prices so low as to kill the production almost immediately?
What I found is that Baldwin cared about audience demographics, because the audience was standing in as a figure for the democratic majority: the play is an inquiry into the capacities of democratic citizenship, into whether a democracy can protect the interests of a numerical minority. (You see how this is a question for the moment the CRM moves from the countermajoritarian courts into the majoritarian democratic system, the moment it begins trying to rely on passing major legislation.)
• Sam Greenlee’s novel, published a half-decade later in the Black Power era, doesn’t inquire into democratic citizenship generally or into U.S. citizenship in particular because it’s already written off the idea that the U.S. system can deliver racial justice at all So the first half of The Spook Who Sat by the Door is a satire of U.S. civil-rights statism, but then it gets to its own question of citizenship: what would the ideal state apparatus look like? Halfway through it it transforms from satire into a utopia, and here it uses that literary form to stage the question of if black people were to dismantle or split from the existing U.S. nation-state, then what their ideal new state and society might look like – and, by extension, what an ideal citizenship arrangement would look like. The novel stages a black mutiny, and then it has to figure out what beautiful new structure its rebels will build.
… So that’s a very different question, but you see how both these writers are theorizing citizenship.
What are those debates you mention in political theory? / How do you link up your work with political theory?
o They’re debates about whether the citizen and citizenship have to be abstract concepts, as they have been traditionally, or whether they can have space for particularity and specificity and historicity and difference.
o As I investigated the way these writers answered the question of how the state and the citizen to relate to one another, I found that, while they had the question in common with the political actors and advocates of their time, they were answering it in a very different way: they all reject the basic abstraction inherent to received notions of citizenship, Enlightenment notions of citizenship.
o If the Enlightenment tradition has taught us to theorize the citizen as an abstraction—and if American liberal political ideology, by extension, has held that the achievement of equal citizenship will require all Americans’ capitulation to an historically abstracting operation—then these writers insist upon theorizing the citizen and citizenship as historically specific, embodied, contingent, adamantly local, and socially embedded. (And for different writers, different aspects of this particularity are most important: Greenlee’s trying to theorize the citizen as historically specific; Flannery O’Connor, as local; Baldwin and Ellison, as embodied.)
o The point is that they’re imagining a citizenship that is everything but abstract—and in that project, they’re doing something that has a lot in common with the projects of communitarian-republican types like Michael Sandel and Charles Taylor (who, in responding to Rawlsian liberalism, are recapitulating Hegel’s response to Kant), feminists and multiculturalists like Iris Marion Young and Bikhu Parekh, even the late Rawls; they’re all trying to imagine forms of universal citizenship that would have space for specific bodies and places and histories and difference.
o But the writers I write about, prompted by civil rights, are attacking this problem of abstract citizenship decades earlier than any of these contemporary political theorists came upon it, and they’re getting at it simply by approaching it through the medium of the literary, the native medium of dirty specificity.
Tell us about your research program. (DJA)
o All of my research (1.) shows how literature asks major questions of social and political life and (2.) thinks with the literary about those questions as they remain relevant and urgent in our own present.
o My first project claims midcentury American literature engaged with the African American civil rights movement by turning to the question of citizenship: the question of how the state and its subjects ought to relate to one another, aesthetically mediated in imaginative works from To Kill a Mockingbird to James Baldwin’s Blues for Mister Charlie and Sam Greenlee’s black power novel The Spook Who Sat by the Door.
o My second project argues that a critical mass of contemporary American fiction is trying to represent and dramatize the problem of unsustainable demographic and economic growth but is struggling as it does so with the heteronormative drive to reproductive futurity., which is written into narrative form. So it’s a queer reading of the way the novel – novels like Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, Teju Cole’s Open City, Colson Whitehead’s Zone One – are struggling to reach this big problem, the problem of growth.
o Both these projects think centrally about how literary forms—often but not always the novel—function as spaces for political imagining, and both think about how aesthetic mediation contributes to political imagining.
o That’s the foundation of my research program, and I think it also drives great teaching. Not only are these novels beautiful and compelling in and of themselves, they are also thinking the biggest questions, the questions we come to the humanities to ask and answer: How do we live together? What is justice? What is the collective good? …etc.
How do you conceive of the relationship between literature and history? Do you think of your project as a history of something external to literature? (DJA)
o [DEFINE LITERARY HISTORY.] I’m writing a literary history. A literary history is simply the history of literature during a particular period with reference to a particular set of historical events.
o [EXPAND BEYOND LITERARY HISTORY TO LITERARY HISTORY PLUS: PRESENTISM.] I want, however, to do something more than that—a kind of enhanced literary history, what one might call “literary history plus”—by acknowledging and embracing my own (conscientious, intentional) present-interestedness.
o [GENERALIZE; NIETZSCHE.] I believe that our historical inquiries and findings are always informed by our interests in the present, and that’s a good thing: with Nietzsche, I think history has to serve the needs of the living; those needs ought to empower us to ask of history, including literary history, our own most urgent questions of social and political and human life: How can we live together? How do we live on the globe? How do we live in political community?
o [INSPIRATIONS.] That’s why I’m inspired by critics like Bruce Robbins, Larry Buell, Koritha Mitchell—by ecocriticism, by queer theory, by certain methodologies that have, in controlled and intentional ways, been unabashed about allowing the concerns of the present to inform and adjust the priorities of any inquiry into the past.
o [WRAP-UP; TEACHING.] So: literary history plus.
• Literary history, but literary history that notices: wow, these writers were answering this question in a really different way than were the political actors and advocates of their time, and the way they were answering it has something to say to the most urgent open conversations in political theory in our own time. …
• Literary history, but literary history that drives dynamic, exciting teaching—for students who come to English classes not so much for history but to ask some of the big urgent questions native to humanistic inquiry (How do we live together now? What is good government? How can we promote a common good that’s often at odds with individual interests? etc.).
• This is the kind of literary history I try to do.
What is selective statism? How is it different in authors other than Chester Himes: Flannery O’Connor, James Baldwin, etc.?
o Selective statism is the idea that a person or group might use the state selectively in the service of a particular political or social vision. It’s the idea that one can appropriate and utilize some of the powers of government while neither fundamentally transforming that government nor submitting to it completely.
o It’s a particular model of citizenship, a vision of a working relationship between the citizen and the state—and it was the model at the heart of the American civil rights movement.
o The question of the utility of that model—the question of the relationship between that nontransformative model of citizenship and radical political change, which is presumably definitionally transformative—is the question around which Chester Himes’s Harlem detective series is structured.
o It’s not the question around which the other writers about whom I write organized their works.
Where is the field of African Americanist literary studies, and how does your project contribute to it?
o African-Americanist literary studies is wrapped up right now in a debate about the relationship between (a.) the black literary tradition and (b.) the state apparatus and formal politics. This debate boils down to two questions:
• (1.) Was the collective project of African American literature a historical formation defined by the legal and political and state structures of Jim Crow—and thus now obsolete now that those structures have been dismantled?
• That’s a question asked by the scholar Ken Warren in his 2011 book What Was African American Literature?, and he’s been answered by Gene Jarrett, Sharon Holland, Rafia Zafar, Russ Castronovo, and many others, in forums in PMLA, Callaloo, American Literary History, MELUS, and other journals.
• And (2.) Regardless of what we call what’s being written now: What was the actual relationship between the African American literature of the Jim Crow and Civil Rights eras and the legal and political structures ostensibly defined and determined it?
• That’s where I intervene. My project says:
• Our answer til now has been that that literature was TURNED AWAY from those state structures and formal political structures, because they weren’t usefully available to black Americans, and invested instead in what Ken Warren has called “an indirect cultural politics.”
• What my book argues is the opposite: that that literature is actually all about the legal and political and state structures, is indeed about reimagining the possibilities of juridical citizenship. It isn’t itself trying to do politics; it’s serving as a space for political imagining.
• That’s a major revision of the way we think about the answer to that second question.
Is the citizen of the Constitution abstracted when everyone understood that citizens were property-owning white men? Wasn’t the problem that it wasn’t abstracted? [Or: Give us a narrative of the development of American citizenship from the declaration of independence through the end of the civil rights era, with reference to this thing you’re calling “abstraction.”]
o Yes—so this was a two-step process. Civil rights was in many ways about getting to universal citizenship, abstracted citizenship.
• The American Revolution had appealed to universalistic conceptions of human rights deriving from the enlightenment,
• and the Declaration of Independence therefore embraces an ideal abstract universal citizenship.
• But the Constitution of 1789 condones the institution of slavery, and thereby implicitly limits its ‘universal’ citizenship to free white persons, and really property-owning free white men.
• In many ways, the work of the next 180 years was to re-capture that Enlightenment promise of universal citizenship, of abstract citizenship: especially after
• the Naturalization Law of 1790 made a color bar within citizenship explicit by limiting the right of naturalization to “free white persons,”
• and the Dred Scott case in 1857 declared all black persons free or slave ineligible for citizenship.
• The work of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, and the work of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act in 1964 and 65, can be understood as abstracting work.
• But full citizenship is, of course, about more than pro forma legal equality, and literary art was, from early on, showing that it would also take a second transformation by which the state would have to begin to relate to its citizens not just as abstract persons but as specific, local, contingent, embodied persons.
How do you position your work within a scholarly conversation broader than African American studies?
o I’m always thinking with queer theory, insofar as queer theory is about expansive and often utopian political imagining.
o In that I’m writing a literary history, I’m with people like the Post-45 group.
o In that I’m aiming to think beyond literary history, I’m thinking with scholars like Sharon Marcus, Stephen Best, Heather Love, now the contributors to a recent issue of ALH—all of whom are looking for new methodologies, saying literary history isn’t enough.
o But whereas they’re looking for new reading methods, “surface reading”; I’m suggesting rather a kind of conscientious, limited and highly intentional presentism, wherein the present consciously informs our inquiry into our cultural history and empowers us to ask of it our own most urgent questions of social and political and human life. So my methodology is also aligned with that of ecocriticism and of, again, queer theory, both of which have been unabashed about allowing the concerns of the present to adjust the priorities of any inquiry into the past.
o Finally, I’m thinking with political theory: with Wendy Brown, Bhikhu Parekh, Will Kymlicka, Chantal Mouffe, other political theorists who are still wrestling with these problems of democratic citizenship, of universalism and particularism, of abstraction and specificity. I’m not sure it’s possible to engage political theorists in a conversation about the resources offered by the literary, but my aim is always to do interdisciplinary scholarship rigorous enough to hold up my end of the bargain.
Why look to the literary for answers to this political-theoretical question?
o I look to the literary because my question is a question abt the merits of abstraction v. specificity, contingency, particularity – and social science naturally inclines to abstraction, whereas the literary is the medium of specificity, of contingency, of particularity. I think of Durkheim, who wrote: “Only the universal is rational: the particular and the concrete baffle understanding” (The Division of Labor, 1893), and there Durkheim was betraying Durkheim’s discipline’s limits. To get beyond abstraction we might need to look to the literary.
• “In each individual thing reside innumerable properties,” Durkheim continues elsewhere, which must be handled “as do the poets and literary people who describe things as they seem to be, without any rational method.”
Who are the other literary scholars engaged with political theory? Are you interested in their work?
o I’m not terribly interested in people trying to draw connections between individual political theorists and the American literary tradition.
• Deak Nabers is trying to draw a connection between liberalism and formalism—itself a kind of abstraction. So in the original position of Rawls there’s something congenial not only to abstraction but, by extension, to literary formalism.
• Mary Esteve and Cyrus Patel have also drawn connections between Rawls and American cultural and literary history, respectively.
o But a number of other critics drawing on the American canon and outside of it have considered the limits of political universalisms and the relationship of the aesthetic to those universalisms.
• I’m thinking of Lauren Berlant writing about Imitation of Life and citizenship’s abstraction,
• Of Barbara Johnson writing about Zora Neale Hurston and theory’s universalisms,
• Of Lois Zamora writing about hemispheric American studies and what she thinks of as magical realism’s defense of particular subjectivities liberal universalisms.
• These are critics with whom I’m in dialogue.
Why hasn’t anybody else told this story before? or: Why have we focused on identity?
o Well, at the end of the period I write about, as the racial justice movement began to disinvest in the state and citizenship and as the racial justice movement transformed into an identity movement transacted largely in civil society, literature stopped theorizing citizenship and it started theorizing identity.
o Literary criticism followed, investing its energy in reading for identity and difference.
• Black Arts theorists and practitioners focused on black identity, thereby tacitly encouraging those black and white critics who came after them to adopt an identity-and-difference angle in reading texts about race and racial inequality;
• The poststructuralist critics who arrived on the academic scene to establish and concretize Black Studies in the decades thereafter—Houston Baker, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Hortense Spillers, Mae Henderson – reinforced criticism’s now-fundamental interest in identity and difference (so think of, for instance, Gates and Kwame Anthony Appiah’s 1985 Critical Inquiry manifesto “Race,” Writing, and Difference);
• And the generation of critics who came alongside and after them who weren’t writing in the black studies mold but who were writing about race, like Eric Sundquist, and those writing concurrently and thereafter about postmodernism like Madhu Dubey, Wendy Steiner, Mark McGurl, have all identified identity and difference as central themes of the literature of the midcentury.
• I think they’ve all been swayed by the fiction of the late 60s and early 70s—fiction of what I think of as the “identity era,” the immediate post-civil rights era, the Portnoy’s Complaint and The Bluest Eye and The Confessions of Nat Turner era, when fiction became very interested in identity and difference as ends in and of themselves rather than in citizenship and the state apparatus and the relationship of identity to the state and citizenship.
How do race and class work in the critical literature? (DJA)
o Well, at the end of the period I write about, literature stopped theorizing citizenship and it started theorizing identity.
o Literary criticism followed, investing its energy in reading for identity and difference.
• Black Arts theorists and practitioners focused on black identity, thereby tacitly encouraging those black and white critics who came after them to adopt an identity-and-difference angle in reading texts about race and racial inequality;
• The critics who arrived on the academic scene to establish black studies in the decades thereafter—Houston Baker, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Hortense Spillers, Mae Henderson – as they adapted and applied the insights of poststructuralist theory to the study of black literature and other American literature engaged with race, reinforced criticism’s now-fundamental interest in identity and difference (so think of , for instance, Gates and Kwame Anthony Appiah’s 1985 Critical Inquiry manifesto “Race,” Writing, and Difference);
• And the generation of critics who came alongside and after them who weren’t writing in the black studies mold but who were writing about race, like Eric Sundquist, and those writing concurrently and thereafter about postmodernism like Madhu Dubey, Wendy Steiner, Mark McGurl, have all identified identity and difference as central themes of the literature of the midcentury.
o All that work has been hugely important for producing the humanities as we know them today and for making work like mine possible to begin with. It just hasn’t yet directed our attention to the presence of this preoccupation with juridical citizenship. Nor has the revisionist wave that’s come after it, whih emphasize class and economy—much of it drive by students of Walter Benn Michaels, who want to argue that texts that purport to treat racial inequality are actually about class and economy (among the people who write about the specific texts I write about, I think of Andrew Hoberek and Richard Godden, although of course if you think beyond those texts that’s a much larger cohort).
Talk about queerness and the state/citizenship.
For me it’s really about queer theory as a space for expansive political imagining…
What’s queer about your reading of Franzen? (DJA)
o I argue that Freedom is structured around its own struggle with a heteronormative growth imperative—what Lee Edelman has called the drive to reproductive futurity.
o I argue that that struggle emerges by way of a queer figure in the novel who emerges as a kind of anti-growth Lacanian sinthome (sem-tem), a figure for the death drive, but then has to be expelled to make space for the figure of the child, reproduction, growth;
o All of which symptomatizes the novel’s and narrative form’s struggle to represent the problem of unsustainable growth, which in generally has to be violently expelled in order for narratives to be resolved within traditional heteronormative reproductive-futurist frameworks.
How does your work in queer studies relate to your work in African American studies? (DJA)
o Well, my work in African American studies is work about political imagining, and about pluralism. It’s about how African American literature has imagined how Americans might be able to live in political community, with sustained difference, under a universalist democratic liberalism. And queer theory is [define queer theory as a place for radical, capacious political imagining—including imagining of pluralistic life under democracy]. So ultimately I’ve found that I need queer theory and queer studies more broadly to do my work in African American studies, because to do political thinking I need queer theory and queer studies. It will always be part of my methodology and my teaching practice. And queer-theoretical questions explicitly organize my second project, whereas they only implicitly informed my first.
o That said, I also have an identitarian commitment to queer studies, and so my commitment to it does also have some separate sources; it springs from multiple sources, but it all feeds into one research program.
Where is queer studies now? (DJA)
o Queer studies is making space for transgender studies—a field that considers everything from why intersexed births still elicit curiosity and fear to historical perspectives on intersex and transgender to transgender experience complicates feminist and legal categories of sex, gender, and embodiment. And queer literary studies, relatedly, is trying to expand its own canon to bring in the transgender experience as mediated in literary art – not just the usual Leslie Feinberg (Stone Butch Blues, 1993) but also the writings of Jennifer Finney Boylan, Jackie Kay’s Trumpet, etc.
o And then queer studies is where queer theory is! …
What is queer theory for you? (DJA)
o Queer theory is, as it was for Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner in 1995 in “What Does Queer Theory Teach Us About X?,” a “radically anticipatory” (344) project, a project “trying to bring a world into being” (344), a project that holds out the utopian aspiration for a politics capacious enough that we can’t imagine it within our existing frameworks. It’s a space of radical possibility for world building, including radical possibility for building pluralistic life under democracy.
• In that—insofar as, because it focuses on “mismatches” between sex and gender and desire and thus breaks down the regime of the “normal,” it’s a space for radical, capacious political imagining—it’s also basically continuous with queer literature: it’s James Baldwin, it’s Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde, it’s Melvin Dixon in Love’s Instruments, it’s ACT UP and AIDS activism, it’s Tony Kushner (even as it’s the embrace of Lee Edelman’s “death drive,” even as it’s the rectum that is also the grave, it’s the space for what Prior Walter calls “more life”).
• So queer theory will always be an area of teaching priority for me, and it will always inform my research methodology—more or less depending on the project, and particularly in my second project. Because my research program and my teaching program are about literature and political imagining, and queer theory is about opening up space for radical political imagining.
Where has queer theory been? Where is it going? (DJA)
o Emerged as “queer theory” around 1991 (coin termed in 1990, solidified in 1991 with a special issue of differences) as a strain of post-structuralist theory derived from [a] gay and lesbian studies (the idea that sexuality and sex acts are natural and immutible) and [b] feminism (the idea that gender is essential).
o Foundational proponents, all building on Foucault, included Eve Sedgwick (who’d been doing it since the early 80s), Judith Butler (Gender Trouble was 1990), Leo Bersani (“Is the Rectum a Grave?,” 1987), then Michael Warner and Lauren Berlant, etc.
• You could draw in creative work by Octavia Butler and Samuel Delany, Gloria Anzaldua and Adrienne Rich, etc.
o Then you get something that is always becoming, whose death is always being proclaimed, a radically anticipatory project that occupies a time out of joint and so somehow, paradoxically, is always rising, phoenix-like, from its own ashes. Interesting threads include
o queer childhood (Kathryn Bond Stockton’s The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century [Duke, 2009])—(talk about my student)
o homonationalism (Jasbir Puar’s Terrorist Assemblages [Duke, 2007], which argues that liberal politics now incorporate certain queer subjects into the fold of the nation-state, legally recognizing them in a way that depends on the production of populations of Orientalized terrorist bodies);
o queer temporalities (Lee Edelman, No Future; Jose Esteban Munoz; Jack Halberstam; Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories [Duke, 2010])
• What’s happening with this temporality stuff? I think it’s beginning to merged in broader queer-theoretical discourse with the interest in affect, such that we’re beginning to lose track to some degree of the actual temporality question—the question that for Lee Edelman is tied up with narratology, that for Jose Munoz was tied up with Ernst Bloch’s utopian temporality, that even for Elizabeth Freeman is a temporal question, but that for someone like Sara Ahmed in The Promise of Happiness, or even for Michael Snediker, is actually more a question of affect (it’s not about futurity, it’s just about positive affect, happiness, optimism, hope). I’m interested in disaggregating the promissory from the optimistic, and I think the best work does that—indeed, I think you can look to something like the work on queer childhood for that …
o work on queer theory’s origins (you thought queer theory was suspicious of origins? think again): Lynne Huffer’s Mad for Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory (2010)—shifts the emphasis away from Foucault’s three-volume History of Sexuality to his Madness and Civilization.
Who are the major queer theorists now? (DJA)
o There are a few people who are still doing relevant philosophy into new realms that I think will retroactively become relevant to queer theory: Judith Butler (ethics, cosmopolitanism). There are a still people who have the authority to look back and take stock: Michael Warner.
o But then the people doing new work are the people in queer temporality … queer childhood … queer ecology … queer theory’s origins …
What do you mean by “the state”?
By “the state” I mean, in the Althusserian sense, the Repressive (as opposed to the ideological) State Apparatus, which Althusser abbreviates to just the State Apparatus: the courts, the military, the government, the Army, the police, the prisons, … all of the arms and echelons. I also find Weber useful here: the state is the compulsory political organization that has a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force. But I’m talking about the (Anglo-)American context, so there have to be some particular considerations: I’m also talking about the welfare state and the rights-protecting state, and a state with a federal system, where sovereignty is split between the national government and the governments of the individual states (as well as between executive, legislative, and judicial functions), rendering the entity divided against itself. The state is, to follow David Graeber, “the ‘imaginary totality’ par excellence.”
Are you saying it’s not about race or racial identity during this period? (Penn)
o Not at all. Many of the writers I write about during this period are centrally concerned with racial identity. It’s just that they’re concerned with racial identity in a way that’s quite directly connected with their concern with the structures of citizenship.
o James Baldwin, for instance, was centrally concerned with race and racial identity, and in particular in two of the texts—the essay “In Search of a Majority” and the play “Blues for Mister Charlie”—about which I write, he’s interrogating identity and difference: how do black and white inform American identity, how does American identity inform black identity and white identity, etc.
o When he and the Actors Studio staged “Blues” in 1964, he was centrally concerned with the racial identities not only of the actors on stage but of the audience members; he made a huge fuss about that first production’s ticket prices, setting them so low as to kill the production almost immediately, so that he could get an integrated audience.
o My point, though, is that for Baldwin, as for many of the writers about whom I write, an interest in racial identity is part and parcel with an interest in the mechanisms of citizenship.
o Baldwin’s focus on the racial identities of his audience members was part of an inquiry into the question of whether a democratic majority can protect the interests of a numerical minority. It was about casting the audience as an integrated democratic majority—a kind of democratic experiment. The play is an inquiry into the capacities of democratic citizenship: can a democracy protect the interests of a numerical minority?
What’s literary about your project? (Yale) (Austin)
o My project is a literary history. Its central question is a question about literature: how did literature engage with the civil rights movement, and how was it shaped by it? That’s an unanswered question.
o And the other question it asks is a question about literature, too: what does this literature have to offer us when it comes to our most urgent challenges of political and social life, and what does literature in general have to offer us with regards to those challenges?
o These are fundamentally literary questions, and this is a fundamentally literary project.
Talk about your second project.
o My second project brings together my commitments to queer studies, critical race studies, and environmental criticism.
o It takes a queer lens to post-2000 American novels to argue that a critical mass of those novels are struggling to dramatize the problem of unsustainable demographic and economic growth in the face of an affective incompatibility between anti-growth content and narrative in general and of a structural incompatibility between anti-growth content and realist narrative in particular.
o Grasping that first incompatibility—that affective incompatibility between anti-growth content and narrative in general—requires taking a queer critical perspective:
• it requires observing that narrative as such relies on the engine of what Lee Edelman has called “reproductive futurity,” the drive to reproductive growth, and that we as consumers of narrative are trained to be affectively invested in reproductive futurity (that’s of course a queer observation, insofar as it defamiliarizes a fundamentally heteronormative structural supposition);
• it requires understanding that dramatizing anti-growth content would require a queer repudiation of that drive and a queer renunciation of that affective investment in it;
• it requires recognizing those queer anti-growth figures and tropes that emerge within these novels, but also recognizing that they have to be violently expelled in order for their narratives to be resolved within traditional reproductive-futurist frameworks.
o I take this queer-theoretical perspective, and I find a critical mass of contemporary American novels formed and deformed around exactly this queer ecological dilemma—which is made even more complex by the constraints of realism in particular, which is incompatible with unsustainable demographic growth on the level of scale (it dramatizes the quotidian, the problem unfolds on the scale of the century; it dramatizes the local, the problem unfolds on the level of the global; it dramatizes the individual and interpersonal, the problem unfolds on the level of the aggregate.)
o I launched the project with a queer-theoretical reading of the anti-growth dilemma that makes Jonathan Franzen’s novel Freedom such a mixed-up book, but since then—prompted in large part by Jesmyn Ward’s Katrina novel Salvage the Bones, and by Teju Cole’s Open City—I’ve been particularly interested in case studies by authors interested in race, because I’m interested in the additional challenge introduced by trying to apprehend a global politics while also fully representing racially distributed environmental injustices. I’m beginning work on an essay on Open City right now.
