Research & Innovation

2017 Winner of the Adelaide Bender Reville Prize for Short Fiction

These poems alternate between spare, psychological explorations and more expansive descriptions of difficult terrain: the Sahara, Egyptian ruins, and the dry riverbeds of the Skeleton Coast in the title sequence. The goal is to read what is truly there, as if we are all wrecks and deserts, to understand our dislocation from the forces that have made us and the sources that might feed us. What is buried is both violence and clarity, ‘like a fault deep in the ground // with its / inexact though statistically measurable need // to relieve stress over time.’ The vistas and profundities are Jamesian here, the poems scrupulous in their exploration of ethical weights and balances.

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A little over a year later, in the summer of 2015, Rick Famuyiwa’s film Dope, executively produced by Williams, was released to rave reviews. Although these two events appear disparate, this article asserts that the film is a cinematic interpretation of Williams’s ideation. By highlighting the movie’s aesthetic nods to hip-hop—clothing, paraphernalia, music, and casting—as forms of nostalgia, and reading the protagonist’s preoccupation with attending Harvard as a form of cultural amnesia reminiscent of rhetoric from bygone cultural movements, the piece questions, what is the “new” that constitutes blackness? In like manner, does the arrival of such a category suggest that “the old black” no longer exists, or does it maintain a paradigmatic influence which stands to impart a lesson on culture and history to the “new”?

th and 21st century African American and Black diaspora literature with research interests in cities, cultural memory, socio-linguistics and global Black identity.

Each fall, the Crab Orchard Review sponsors an open competition for poetry manuscripts; the winners are then published in the series the following fall. Each spring, the journal chooses a manuscript for their First Book Award as well as an editor’s selection. These manuscripts are then published the following spring.

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Rather than a condition to which to aspire, the undocumented immigrant demonstrates what can be gained by remaining in the shadows of recognition. Using Mosquito's attention to interethnic coalition building between African Americans and Latinos both in the U.S. and abroad, this paper proposes that we read the novel for what it might say about the failures, and not the promises, of recognition for these populations. In so doing, I extend the project of looking to African American literature as a necessary and valuable source for powerful and enduring representations of immigration, as well as critiques of the methods and objectives of immigrant rights movements.

College Park, MD, April 1–2, 2017

Last summer I decided to assign Ted Chiang’s The Lifecycle of Software Objects in the graduate course I was getting ready to teach. The title notwithstanding (Chiang earns his living as a technical writer) the book is a science fiction novella set in a near future when artificial digital life forms—digients—are cultivated and commodified as human companions. Eventually, invoking a Citizens United–like legal precedent, individual digients incorporate themselves to claim the legal status of people. The book was a good fit for a course on the human and the nonhuman, especially in the semester when Arrival, a film based on another Chiang story, was due to hit theaters.