Research & Innovation

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.

Learn more about The Failed Promise.

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.

Read "Spec Acts: Reading form in Recurrent Neural Networks"

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.

Read “The Hopkins-Hamedoe Identity"

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’.