Professor Lillian-Yvonne Bertram and Hoa Nguyen ’91 Receive Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists
They’re among four poets internationally to receive the award.
When Andrew Johnson rose to the presidency after Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, African Americans were optimistic that Johnson would pursue aggressive federal policies for Black equality. Just a year earlier, Johnson had cast himself as a “Moses” for the Black community. Frederick Douglass, the country’s most influential Black leader, increasingly doubted the president was sincere in supporting Black citizenship. In a dramatic meeting between Johnson and a Black delegation at the White House, the president and Douglass came to verbal blows over the fate of Reconstruction. Their animosity only grew as Johnson sought to undermine Reconstruction and conciliate leaders of the former Confederate states.
On 25 March 2017 at 9:17 in the morning Ross Goodwin sat down behind the wheel of his pen to begin driving his novel. This essay reads 1 the Road, a 20,000-word token of narrative fiction produced by digital sensors affixed to an automobile driven from New York to New Orleans (the route taken by Jack Kerouac), whose outputs are filtered through an artificial intelligence technology called a neural net to produce the text. "It was nine-seventeen in the morning, and the house was heavy," it begins. Later, it produces this utterance: "It was a strange thing." This strange thing, which is to say this strange text, is, I argue, a boutique literary exemplar of the most widely read (and written) category of texts in the world today, as algorithms perform not speech acts but speculative or "spec" acts--what Felix Guattari forecast three decades ago as "machines speaking to machines." What happens when we listen in, as Goodwin's novel permits us to do? I propose ways of reading these spec acts through new formalist alternatives to historicism, old and new.
ABSTRACT: The mass digitization of nineteenth-century periodicals and keyword-based searching algorithms have produced new ways of read-ing Pauline E. Hopkins in the twenty-first century. Our essay brings an experiment in digital stylistics together with traditional methods of authorial analysis to investigate an unexplored facet of Hopkins’s authorship and com-positional style. Hopkins is well-known for her penchant for pseudonyms. She contributed many unsigned editorials to the Colored American Magazine, and it was not unusual for issues to feature her work alongside articles and fiction that she penned as Sarah A. Allen and J. Shirley Shadrach. Might Hopkins have also published under other, as yet unattributed pen names? This essay takes as its case study a writer identified as S. E. F. C. C. Hame-doe or Hammedoe, a purported Professor of “F.G.S.I.,” who remains one of the most enigmatic of regular Colored American Magazine contributors.
Forthcoming.
The worldwide mobilizations of Black Lives Matter (BLM) during the COVID-19 pandemic dramatically shifted the discourses of anti-Blackness, race, and racialization in the global public sphere. In the wake of the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets, risking infection to protest systemic racism and mourn the Black men and women killed by police and white vigilantism. These mobilizations insisted on a public reckoning with anti-Blackness as a foundational and structural fact of Black life.
Read "Black Lives Matter, W. E. B. Du Bois’s World Color Line, and the Question of Relation"
Special issue on Post-9 11 fiction.
Special Issue: The Postcolonial Novel, Post-9/11 Part Two
GUEST EDITOR: Gaurav Desai
pp. 20-35
Published in Composition Studies 49.3 (2021), pp. 200-203.
Edited by Grace Dillon, Isiah Lavender III & Taryne Taylor, Routledge Books.
This essay explores the complicated visions of alternative postracial futures in N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season and Chang-Ra Lee’s On Such a Full Sea; wherein race, as we recognize and represent it in our current trajectory, is dismantled, renamed, and reshaped to suit a different human society. This is not to say that these societies feature no racial distinctions, but rather that the legible signifiers we recognize in real-world constructions of race are ‘re-raced’ (made illegible in light of new signifiers) for the fictional alternative. I compare Lee’s subtle framing of unnamed difference with Jemisin’s explicit reframing of caste order, and argue that both authors invoke experiences of oppression and injustice to gesture to the impossibility of a postracial utopia while still suggesting the potential for new, as-yet unrecognizable racial categories.
The 2019 Science Fiction Research Association (SFRA) annual conference was a reorientation of the field’s priorities, interrogating the significance of putting indigeneity and indigenous theory at the centre of SF literary critique. Moreover, the conference insisted that indigeneity never belonged out of the limelight, and perhaps never quite left the hearts and minds of those writers and readers that shaped past and present works. It is this attentiveness to history and eagerness for transformation which gave rise to the conference theme, 'Facing the Future, Facing the Past: Colonialism, Indigeneity, and SF’.