#mla13

I am late sharing some of my thoughts regarding the 2013 meeting of the Modern Language Association (short version: an amazing set of sessions this year; more thoughts can be found at my Twitter feed), but someone alerted me to this Boston Globe article covering the convention. Jeremy C. Fox at the Globe visited those sessions intersecting with the larger New England area and its rich history--and he mentioned the session "Native Literary Boston" in which I participated! Not to insult Boston at all (including the excellent Newbury Comics located near the convention site), but it makes me laugh that George Copway's insulting remarks towards the city, as quoted from my presentations, was included in the article!

The above quote, the penultimate passage of the first volume of Foucault's History of Sexuality, served as the epigraph to one of my final papers of the semester, a consideration of queer history within the context of counter-historical practice. Originally I'd planned this paper to excavate the origins of English (and American) blasphemy law during the Restoration, but I happened to read about a certain rift in queer studies between folks who might be called anti-historicists or anti-teleologists (Madhavi Menon and Jonathan Goldberg in particular) and semi-historicists or -teleologists (David Halperin, at least his recent work, and Valerie Traub, who has a big piece on this debate forthcoming in PMLA) and I thought I might have something to add to the conversation. Because this paper was for a class on early modern cultural studies, I offered a tentative counter-historical reading of Shakespeare's male-addressed sonnets that explores the implications of "pre-modern" same-sex sexual pleasure for our present, modern, discursive-identitarian formation of "sexuality." I'll be adding to and revising this paper over the next weeks and months and I hope to bring it to a conference soon.

The other paper I did to cap off the semester wasn't really a paper at all but two close readings, the first of a portion of Agamben's The Sacrament of Language, the second of Benjamin's "On Language as Such and on the Language of Man." In both readings I was primarily concerned with the authors' analysis of the possibilities that language has for political or social action; together it was an immensely generative exercise.

The remainder of January—the CUNY Graduate Center doesn't resume classes until the 28th or so—I'll be working on a paper I'm giving at the ACLA conference in Toronto in April called "Haunted Time and Aesthetic Education: Gramsci, Spivak, and Novel Ghosts," in which I seek to work out Gramsci's theory of aesthetic education, and Spivak's re-reading of it in her newest book An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization, as they might pertain to two globally engaged novels, Pamuk's Snow and Aslam's The Wasted Vigil. As I don't know Turkish, I'll probably be concentrating more on the latter novel, a fascinating geopolitical fiction set in Afghanistan during the ongoing American occupation, but shot through, sometimes literally, with ghosts of the U.S.-Soviet conflict there in the '80s, and also of the region's long heterogeneous history. The undercurrent of this paper seeks to address current questions of world literature or global literature, and who can speak through or by literature.

Hello All, below I've included the information for our panel presentation at the Modern Languages Association (MLA) 2013 conference in Boston, MA, Jan 3-6. The panel features features Dr. andre carrington, Dr. Daniel Shank Cruz, myself, and Prof. Andrea Hairston.

Our panel details can be found here and our abstracts and info follow below:

‘All Black Everything’: Speculative Futures of Blackness in Literature, Film, and Performance

  André Carrington, Daniel Shank Cruz, Shanté Paradigm Smalls, Andrea Hairston (Respondent)-->[UPDATE, 1/2/12] Unfortunately, Prof. Hairston will not be joining us.

  Part 2. Detailed description of session

  Interest in and production of Black science fiction, fantasy, and speculative literature (SF) and culture has exploded since the 1960s and 1970s when Samuel L. Delany was the only visible Black SF writer. Delany, Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, and Charles Saunders, along with Milestone Media’s black comics and graphic novels, and the aesthetic and performance movement of Afrofuturism propelled Black SF into mainstream US culture. Several critical and creative anthologies and books on Black SF, including Sheree R. Thomas’s Dark Matter series (Warner Books, 2000, 2005), Marleen S. Barr’s Afro-Future Females (Ohio State University Press, 2008), and Jeffrey Brown’s Black Superheroes (University of Mississippi, 2001), have helped to canonize and historicize Black SF writing within the African-American literary tradition, the SF and speculative fiction tradition, and modern and contemporary Anglophone literature.

  This panel explores the themes, nuances, disruptions, and dystopic ideations that preoccupy many works of Black SF. The panel is also concerned with temporality: what is the history of black speculative futures? How is it bound and unbound by material history and historiography? Finally, this panel intervenes on traditional Black SF more broadly by focusing on queer Black speculations and narratives inside of Black SF literature and culture. How are queer bodies and narratives present and absent inside preoccupations with black futurity?

   andré carrington’s paper, “Between the Marginal and the Popular,” tracks the strange career of blackness in science fiction and fantasy (SF) across media. He posits a shift in the categories of analysis that critics bring to bear on representations of race in print and visual cultures as well as a new theoretical argument for the social basis of the phenomenon of genre. Through research informed by materialist cultural criticism, archival investigations, performance studies, feminist film and media studies, and scholarship on reception and fandom, he illuminates how race thinking is made legible in cultural production through the rhetorical devices and contextualizing gestures that authors, artists, and audience members mobilize to frame the interpretation of their activity. Such uses of the meaning-making apparatus of any given medium, contributes to a set of interpretive conditions that characterize genre across media. The presentation offers re-mediation—refashioning one set of signs into a new form—as a representative example of how SF maintains and updates the conceptualizations of race it has contributed to the popular imagination. This line of inquiry works toward a critique of how race operates in the field of cultural production, complementing theories of how racialized social formations influence culture.

           Daniel Shank Cruz argues in “The Liberating Role of Nudity in Samuel R. Delany’s Non-Fiction” that black gay SF writer Samuel R. Delany’s non-fiction advocates an aesthetic of nakedness that emphasizes the beauty of the body itself rather than its adornments. This aesthetic contends that the essential element in claiming both a black self and a queer self is the naming of all bodies as good no matter what their appearances, sexual practices, ethnicity, or class origins, which are stripped away via the act of disrobing. Delany uses photographs, drawings, and explicitly visceral verbal pictures to illustrate his aesthetic throughout his oeuvre. While Delany’s body-centric fashion sense originates in his speculative fiction as a utopian fantasy, it is affirmed and theorized as a form of explicit advocacy for new sexual norms in his memoirs and literary criticism via the constant highlighting of his body. His corporeal focus is achieved through the use of photographs that depict his bodily shift from the beefcake pinup type in the 1960s (as epitomized by the frontispiece from The Motion of Light in Water) to the “bear” type in the 2000s (as epitomized by the nude photograph from a 2005 essay in Corpus), his frequent descriptions of his numerous sexual encounters throughout his work, and his illustrated memoir Bread & Wine.

    Shanté Paradigm Smalls examines themes of desire, (non)reproduction, kinship models, and temporality in relation to black queer female characters in Octavia Butler’s Fledgling (2005), Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories (1991, 2004), and Marvel Comics X-Men series Mutant X (1998-2001) and Paradise X (2000).  In her paper, “Black Death, Black Life: Queer Female Vampires in SF,” Smalls revisits apocalyptic anxieties around black birth rates, black abortion practices, and black female fecundity, positioning them against the possibility of generating progeny rather than bearing them. The three characters considered, Shori, Gilda, and Bloodstorm, either vampire or vampire-like, and therefore infertile, are compelling for their rarified characterization in SF—queer, black, female, and vampire (-like). All three create familial and intimate bonds through creative non-traditional means including polyamory, same-sex relations, and the vampiric bite. These literary works allegorize the exchange of blood, vaginal fluid, and semen, sidestepping potential consequences such as pregnancy, infection, and disease. Rather, the sexual exchanges are framed by longing, intimacy, lust, and survival. The paper contemplates logics of desire unbound by heterosexual reproduction, fear of disease, and sex-shaming. Finally, the paper thinks through the generative possibilities of these queer(ed) black female bodies as the locus of desire—how might this shift idealized femininity along racial, corporeal, bio-political, socioeconomic, and historiographical lines?

       Andrea Hairston will respond to the three paper presentations.

  andré carrington is author of Speculative Fiction and Media Fandom Through a Lens, Darkly, forthcoming from University of Minnesota Press. He has written about race and the phenomenon of genre in popular texts for Politics and Culture, the anthology Race/Class/Gender/Media, and Science Fiction Studies, and is presently undertaking research on the cultural politics of contemporary art and historical fiction in the African diaspora. As of September 2012, he is Assistant Professor of African-American Literature at Drexel University in Philadelphia.

  Daniel Shank Cruz grew up in New York City. He received his BA from Goshen College and his PhD from Northern Illinois University, and teaches English at Westminster College in Salt Lake City, Utah. His poetry and literary criticism has appeared or is forthcoming in periodicals such as Rhubarb, Tenth Muse, Crítica Hispánica, and Short Story.His scholarship focuses on LGBT literature and ethnic literatures in the U.S., which currently manifests itself in a book project on Samuel R. Delany's "pornographic" novels. Cruz is a postdoctoral fellow in the English Department at Westminster College in Salt Lake City.

  Andrea Hairston is the Louise Wolff Kahn 1931 Professor of Theatre and Afro-American Studies at Smith College. She is the Artistic Director of Chrysalis Theatre and has created original productions with music, dance, and masks for over thirty years. Since 1997, her plays produced by Chrysalis Theatre, Soul Repairs, Lonely Stardust, Hummingbird Flying Backward, and Dispatches have been science fiction plays. Archangels of Funk, a sci-fi theatre jam, garnered her a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship for 2003. Distinguished Scholarship Award for outstanding contributions to the scholarship and criticism of the fantastic. Ms. Hairston’s first novel, Mindscape, was published by Aqueduct Press in March 2006. Mindscape won the Carl Brandon Parallax Award and was shortlisted for the Phillip K Dick Award and the Tiptree Award. "Griots of the Galaxy," a short story, appears in So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Visions of the Future, an anthology edited by Nalo Hopkinson and Uppinder Mehan. Redwood and Wildfire, her second speculative novel was published by Aqueduct Press in February 2011. Redwood and Wildfire won the James Tiptree, Jr. Award.