Revolutionizing American Studies

Dear Everyone:

We hope this finds you all enjoying the turn toward spring.  Elizabeth Maddock Dillon’s visit in March was terrific, and we’re grateful to her for catalyzing a thoroughly engaging day of discussions, and Khalil Gibran Muhammad, who made the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture such an inviting space for us.  We remain, of course, grateful to all of those who make RevAmStudies possible — President William Kelly and Sandy Robinson and Kathleen Stolarski in particular in his office; the Advanced Research Collaborative and especially Alida Rojas; the Center for the Humanities; and Chris Eng and Cambridge Ridley-Lynch, our collaborators on this initiative.

We’re excited to be looking forward to several events in April, including FRED MOTEN’s visit on Friday, 12 APRIL.  The Helen L. Bevington Professor of Modern Poetry at Duke University, Fred Moten works in black studies at the intersection of performance, poetry and critical theory. He is author of numerous books and articles including Arkansas (Pressed Wafer Press, 2000), Poems (with Jim Behrle) (Pressed Wafer Press, 2002), In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (University of Minnesota Press, 2003), I ran from it but was still in it. (Cusp Books, 2007), Hughson’s Tavern (Leon Works, 2008) and B Jenkins (Duke University Press, 2010).

PLEASE NOTE THE TIME CHANGE FOR THE SEMINAR, which will be held from 12:00-1:00 instead of our usual time slot, but in our usual space (room 8201.01).  We will be discussing “The Touring Machine,” by Fred Moten; also, interview with Edouard Glissant (in conversation with Manthia Diawara); “Will Sovereignty Ever Be Deconstructed?” by Catherine Malabou;  “New Spheres of Transnational Formations,” by Kamari Clarke; “Black in Time,” by Michelle Wright; “Response by Author,” by Kamari Clarke.  (the readings are available on our Academic Commons group site; if you’re not a member of the Academic Commons, please feel free to drop a note to either of us for a copy of the readings.)

Professor Moten’s lecture, at 4pm in room  8201.01, is titled “Notes on Passage: Anepistemology, Paraontology, Insovereignty.”  In this talk, Fred Moten considers what the thought, or the mode of study, of the refugee might be able to teach us about life beyond or over the edge of personal/political sovereignty. More specifically, this lecture addresses his interest in what a kind of stateless thinking, a thinking that remains in (middle) passage, still has to offer Afro-diasporic studies and, more broadly, the study of modernity in the Atlantic World.

Professor Moten’s visit caps a week that will begin with THE UNIVERSITY BEYOND CRISIS, a symposium we are cosponsoring on Monday, 8 April, from 11a-6p in the Skylight Room (9th floor), which is designed to occasion collaborative critical discussion that thinks beyond the rhetoric of crisis to ask, what is, or what ought to be, the relationship of the university to the common good?  How might we envision and work toward the realization of a university that addresses that relationship and in the process, address the idea of the “common good”?  What alternatives to defensive postures might be elaborated toward these ends?  And, what other ends might we elaborate?  Please see http://revolutionizingamericanstudies.commons.gc.cuny.edu/the-university-beyond-crisis-monday-8-april-2013/ for more information.

We want also to make note of yet another event we are cosponsoring that week, a roundtable discussion organized around Roderick A. Ferguson’s (a RevAmStudies alum!) Reorder of Things: The Universities and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference.  This event will be held in the Performance Studies space at NYU (721 Broadway, Room 612) on Tuesday, 9 April, at 3:30p.  The roundtable features our own Patricia Clough, along with Tavia Nyong’o (NYU) and Laura Kang (UC Irvine).  There will be a reception and book signing to follow (a limited number of copies will be available for sale at the rate of $15 each).  Information about this event will circulate separately.

As always, all of our events are free and open to the public.

This will be a fabulous week for RevAmStudies — do come join us if you can!

Happy spring wishes to you all –
best,
Kandice & Duncan

Dear All:

Hope this finds you very well. We’re looking forward to a day in conversation with Elizabeth Maddock Dillon — please join us! Friday, 8 March, 12:30-2:00p seminar in room 8201.01 and a lecture at 4p, details about all below. Hope to see many of you next week!

For the seminar, please read the following, which are uploaded as files to the Academic Commons RevAmStudies group; please drop an email to either Duncan or Kandice if you have trouble accessing those files:

”John Marrant Blows the French Horn,” from the collection Early African American Print Culture in Theory and Practice, ed. Lara Cohen and Jordan Stein (UPenn, 2012);
”Coloniality, Performance, Translation,” soon to appear in the forthcoming collection Transatlantic Traffic and (Mis)Translations, ed. Robin Peel and Daniel Maudlin (UPNE, 2013); and,
”Obi, Assemblage, Enchantment,” soon to appear in the inaugural issue of the journal J-19 in a roundtable on ”enchanted criticism” that Nancy Bentley organized.

The title of the 4pm lecture is: ”Pre-Occupation and the Performative Commons.”

This talk considers the long history of commoning as a mode of both occupying land—living in common—and achieving political representation as a people or political ”commons.” Tracing a link between the enclosure of the commons in 16th-18th century England and the seizure of land from Native peoples in the Americas, the paper explores the history of the expropriation of common land from the people, and subsequent efforts to rematerialize the political force of the common people in acts of performance. Turning to theatrical performance, the paper considers the aesthetics of commoning in plays such as John Gay’s ”The Beggar’s Opera” and concludes with discussion of the contemporary Occupy Movement as a performative commons.

Elizabeth Maddock Dillon is Professor of English at Northeastern University where she teaches courses in the fields of early American literature, transatlantic print culture, and Atlantic theatre and performance. At Northeastern, she is also the Co-Founder and Co-Director of the NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks. She is the author of The Gender of Freedom: Fictions of Liberalism and the Literary Public Sphere (Stanford University Press, 2004) which won the Heyman Prize for Outstanding Publication in the Humanities at Yale University. She has published widely in journals on topics from aesthetics, to the novel in the early Atlantic world, to Barbary pirates. She is the Co-Director of the Futures of American Studies Institute at Dartmouth College and the former the chair of the American Literature Section of the Modern Language Association. She currently serves on the editorial boards of Early American Literature and PMLA. Her new book, New World Drama: Performative Commons and the Atlantic Public Sphere, 1649-1849, is forthcoming from Duke University Press and she is co-editing, with Michael Drexler, a volume of essays on early American culture and the Haitian Revolution.

Dear Everyone:

Welcome to February 2013! We have a great semester coming up in RevAmStudies, one that started with yesterday’s lecture by Christopher Looby, and that continues next week with Matthew Frye Jacobson’s visit — please join us on Friday, 8 February! We will also look forward to seeing many of you at events we are cosponsoring on 14, 19 and 22 February. Please see below for further details on all of these events. The schedule for the remainder of the semester’s programming is also below, fyi. All events are free and open to the public.

As always, feel free to holler with queries or whatnot.

And as always, we gratefully acknowledge Graduate Center President William Kelly’s support as well as that of his office; the Advanced Research Collaborative, and the Center for the Humanities.

All best,
Kandice & Duncan
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8 FEBRUARY:

William Robertson Coe Professor of American Studies & History at Yale University, Matthew Frye Jacobson is the current president of the American Studies Association. He is the author of numerous books including What Have They Built You to Do?: The Manchurian Candidate and Cold War America (with Gaspar Gonzalex, 2006); Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America (2005); Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917 (2000); Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (1998); and Special Sorrows: The Diasporic Imagination of Irish, Polish, and Jewish Immigrants in the United States (1995). His teaching interests are clustered under the general category of race in U.S. political culture 1790-present, including U.S. imperialism, immigration and migration, popular culture, and the juridical structures of U.S. citizenship.

The seminar will be from 12:30-2 in room 8201.01 (the president’s conference room). We will discuss “Where we Stand: US Empire at Street-Level and in the Archive,” Professor Jacobson’s Presidential Address to American Studies Association Annual Meeting, as well as the presidential addresses by past ASA presidents Amy Kaplan, Janice Radway, and Mary Helen Washington.  Cambridge Ridley Lynch, one of our RevAmStudies collaborators, will act as the discussant for this session.

At 4p in the same room, Professor Jacobson will be offering a lecture titled “The Historian’s Eye: Interpreting the ‘Post’ of ‘Post-Civil Rights’ in Obama’s America.” Historian’s Eye (www.historianseye.org) is a multimedia documentary project devoted to the peculiar compound of hope and despair that makes up the current political and social climate in Obama’s America. Beginning as a modest effort to capture in photographs and interviews the historic moment of our first black president’s inauguration in early 2009, the project has evolved into an expansive archive of some 4000+ photographs and an audio archive that would fill nearly two days of non-stop listening. Materials collected from across the country address the Obama presidency, the ’08 economic collapse and its fallout, two wars, the raucous politics of healthcare reform, the emergence of a new right-wing formation in opposition to Obama, the politics of immigration, Wall Street reform, street protests of every stripe, the BP oil spill, the Occupy movement, natural disasters in the south and northeast, and the controversy over a proposed Muslim community center in lower Manhattan and the escalation of anti-Muslim sentiment nationwide. The project seeks to trace out the fate of “our better history,” in Obama’s own phrase, in affecting and telling photographs and in the recorded voices of ordinary people, as the nation faces unprecedented challenges with a president at the helm who is inspirational to some, fully unnerving to others.

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14 FEBRUARY — WEB DuBois, Slavery, and the Atlantic Imaginary (we happily co-sponsor this Center for the Humanities, Difference & the Humanities event)

Join professors Eric Lott, Jennifer Morgan, and Jeffrey Ferguson at 3p in the Skylight Room (9100) as they assess the impact of W.E.B. Du Bois’s work—including his seminal texts The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the U.S., 1638–1870 and Black Reconstruction—on the development of American studies, African American studies, and Atlantic studies. The panel will be followed by a roundtable discussion in which participants will explore “The General Strike,“ a chapter from Dubois’s Black Reconstruction. Please see http://centerforthehumanities.org/events/W-E-B-Du-Bois-Slavery-and-the-Atlantic-Imaginary for more information.

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19 FEBRUARY: (we happily co-sponsor this Center for Place, Culture & Politics event)

At 6:30p, Professor Moon-ho Jung will present a talk titled “Subversive Histories: Race, National Security, and Empire Across the Pacific.” This lecture will critique standard narratives of Asian American and U.S. history that tend to treat Asian Americans as “immigrants” deserving or striving for inclusion (citizenship) in the U.S. nation-state. By exploring how Asians came to be racialized and radicalized subjects of the U.S. empire before World War II, it will seek to reframe our notions of movements across the Pacific. In particular, the talk will trace the historical origins of the national security state, the heart and soul of the U.S. empire, to a series of U.S. “foreign” and “domestic” policies targeting Asians on both sides of the Pacific.

Moon-Ho Jung is Associate Professor and the Walker Family Endowed Professor of History at the University of Washington. He is the author of Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), which received the Merle Curti Award from the Organization of American Historians and the History Book Award from the Association for Asian American Studies.

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22 FEBRUARY: (we happily co-sponsor this PhD Program in English, Friday Forum event)

Ivy Wilson, of Northwestern University, will be presenting a lecture titled “Hieroglyphs of the African Diaspora: Black Popular Culture and Nonce Transnationalism,” at 4p in Room 4406 (the English program lounge). While important strands of black diaspora theory privilege notions of translation or syncretism as an effort to locate the analogous points of convergence to correlate disparate experiences, this talk examines key moments in black cultural production where the correlative link between the U.S. and Africa can only be rendered legible through what might be called an associative ambience. More specifically, by tracing the traffic of Egyptian iconography from Frederick Douglass (in the nineteenth century) to Erykah Badu (in the early twentieth-first century), this talk seeks to limn the meanings of an ambient subjectivity as a form of a black transnational identification.

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8 MARCH:

Elizabeth Maddock Dillon is Professor of English at Northeastern University where she teaches courses in the fields of early American literature, transatlantic print culture, and Atlantic theatre and performance. At Northeastern, she is also the Co-Founder and Co-Director of the NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks. She is the author of The Gender of Freedom: Fictions of Liberalism and the Literary Public Sphere (Stanford University Press, 2004) which won the Heyman Prize for Outstanding Publication in the Humanities at Yale University. She has published widely in journals on topics from aesthetics, to the novel in the early Atlantic world, to Barbary pirates. She is the Co-Director of the Futures of American Studies Institute at Dartmouth College and the former the chair of the American Literature Section of the Modern Language Association. She currently serves on the editorial boards of Early American Literature and PMLA. Her new book, New World Drama: Performative Commons and the Atlantic Public Sphere, 1649-1849, is forthcoming from Duke University Press and she is co-editing, with Michael Drexler, a volume of essays on early American culture and the Haitian Revolution.

seminar, 12:30-2, 8201.01: “John Marrant Blows the French Horn,” from the collection Early African American Print Culture in Theory and Practice, ed. Lara Cohen and Jordan Stein (UPenn, 2012);
“Coloniality, Performance, Translation,” soon to appear in the forthcoming collection Transatlantic Traffic and (Mis)Translations, ed. Robin Peel and Daniel Maudlin (UPNE, 2013);
“Obi, Assemblage, Enchantment,” soon to appear in the inaugural issue of the journal J-19 in a roundtable on “enchanted criticism” that Nancy Bentley organized.

lecture, 4-6, 8201.01: “Pre-Occupation and the Performative Commons.”

This talk considers the long history of commoning as a mode of both occupying land—living in common—and achieving political representation as a people or political “commons.” Tracing a link between the enclosure of the commons in 16th-18th century England and the seizure of land from Native peoples in the Americas, the paper explores the history of the expropriation of common land from the people, and subsequent efforts to rematerialize the political force of the common people in acts of performance. Turning to theatrical performance, the paper considers the aesthetics of commoning in plays such as John Gay’s “The Beggar’s Opera” and concludes with discussion of the contemporary Occupy Movement as a performative commons.

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8 April: The University Beyond Crisis, a daylong symposium featuring Tita Chico, Roderick Ferguson, Laura Hyun Yi Kang, and Siobhan Somerville among others — details TBA.

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12 APRIL:

The Helen L. Bevington Professor of Modern Poetry at Duke University, Fred Moten works in black studies at the intersection of performance, poetry and critical theory. He is author of numerous books and articles including Arkansas (Pressed Wafer Press, 2000), Poems (with Jim Behrle) (Pressed Wafer Press, 2002), In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (University of Minnesota Press, 2003), I ran from it but was still in it. (Cusp Books, 2007), Hughson’s Tavern (Leon Works, 2008) and B Jenkins (Duke University Press, 2010).

seminar, 12:30-2, 8201.01: “The Touring Machine,” by Fred Moten; also, interview with Edouard Glissant (in conversation with Manthia Diawara); “Will Sovereignty Ever Be Deconstructed?” by Catherine Malabou; “New Spheres of Transnational Formations,” by Kamari Clarke; “Black in Time,” by Michelle Wright; “Response by Author,” by Kamari Clarke.

lecture, 4-6, 8201.01: “Notes on Passage: Anepistemology, Paraontology, Insovereignty”

In this talk, Fred Moten considers what the thought, or the mode of study, of the refugee might be able to teach us about life beyond or over the edge of personal/political sovereignty. More specifically, this lecture addresses his interest in what a kind of stateless thinking, a thinking that remains in (middle) passage, still has to offer Afro-diasporic studies and, more broadly, the study of modernity in the Atlantic World.

We have a fabulous spring line up of visitors, seminars, events, etc. — take a look! Come join us! (All events are free and open to the public; details etc. will be posted as each event draws near. Thank you, GC President William Kelly; the Advanced Research Collaborative; and the Center for the Humanities!)

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30 January, Christopher Looby

lecture, 4:00-6:00 PM, Room 8201.01

Christopher Looby, Professor of English and Director, Americanist Research Colloquium, UCLA

The Literariness of Sexuality: or, How to Do the (Literary) History of (American) Sexuality

Historians of sexuality rely heavily on literary evidence. Why should this be so? My argument is that sexuality is essentially a literary phenomenon. Following La Rochefoucauld’s maxim that “people would never have fallen in love if they had never heard of love” I contend that people would never have had sexualities if novelists and other hadn’t invented them. My evidence is drawn from American novels of the long nineteenth century, chiefly from Charles Brockden Brown’s 1799-1800 Memoirs of Stephen Calvert (in which the protagonist declares that reading a certain book made him what he is, “a thing of mere sex”) and from Charles Warren Stoddard’s 1903 For the Pleasure of His Company: A Tale of the Misty City, Thrice Told, which self-reflexively aligns literary innovation and sexual self-invention in multiple ways.

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8 February — Matthew Frye Jacobson

William Robertson Coe Professor of American Studies & History at Yale University, Matthew Frye Jacobson is the current president of the American Studies Association. He is the author of numerous books including What Have They Built You to Do?: The Manchurian Candidate and Cold War America (with Gaspar Gonzalex, 2006); Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America (2005); Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917 (2000); Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (1998); and Special Sorrows: The Diasporic Imagination of Irish, Polish, and Jewish Immigrants in the United States (1995). His teaching interests are clustered under the general category of race in U.S. political culture 1790-present, including U.S. imperialism, immigration and migration, popular culture, and the juridical structures of U.S. citizenship.

Seminar, 12:30-2, 8201.01: “Where we Stand: US Empire at Street-Level and in the Archive,” Matthew Frye Jacobson Presidential Address to American Studies Association Annual Meeting; also, presidential addresses by Amy Kaplan, Janice Radway, and Mary Helen Washington.

Lecture, 4-6, 8201.01: “The Historian’s Eye: Interpreting the ‘Post’ of ‘Post-Civil Rights’ in Obama’s America.”

Historian’s Eye (www.historianseye.org

) is a multimedia documentary project devoted to the peculiar compound of hope and despair that makes up the current political and social climate in Obama’s America. Beginning as a modest effort to capture in photographs and interviews the historic moment of our first black president’s inauguration in early 2009, the project has evolved into an expansive archive of some 4000+ photographs and an audio archive that would fill nearly two days of non-stop listening. Materials collected from across the country address the Obama presidency, the ’08 economic collapse and its fallout, two wars, the raucous politics of healthcare reform, the emergence of a new right-wing formation in opposition to Obama, the politics of immigration, Wall Street reform, street protests of every stripe, the BP oil spill, the Occupy movement, natural disasters in the south and northeast, and the controversy over a proposed Muslim community center in lower Manhattan and the escalation of anti-Muslim sentiment nationwide. The project seeks to trace out the fate of “our better history,” in Obama’s own phrase, in affecting and telling photographs and in the recorded voices of ordinary people, as the nation faces unprecedented challenges with a president at the helm who is inspirational to some, fully unnerving to others.

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14 February — DuBois event (co-sponsor, details TBA)

19 February — Moon Ho Jung (co-sponsor, details TBA)

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8 March — Elizabeth Maddock Dillon

Elizabeth Maddock Dillon is Professor of English at Northeastern University where she teaches courses in the fields of early American literature, transatlantic print culture, and Atlantic theatre and performance. At Northeastern, she is also the Co-Founder and Co-Director of the NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks. She is the author of The Gender of Freedom: Fictions of Liberalism and the Literary Public Sphere (Stanford University Press, 2004) which won the Heyman Prize for Outstanding Publication in the Humanities at Yale University. She has published widely in journals on topics from aesthetics, to the novel in the early Atlantic world, to Barbary pirates. She is the Co-Director of the Futures of American Studies Institute at Dartmouth College and the former the chair of the American Literature Section of the Modern Language Association. She currently serves on the editorial boards of Early American Literature and PMLA. Her new book, New World Drama: Performative Commons and the Atlantic Public Sphere, 1649-1849, is forthcoming from Duke University Press and she is co-editing, with Michael Drexler, a volume of essays on early American culture and the Haitian Revolution.

seminar, 12:30-2, 8201.01: “John Marrant Blows the French Horn,” from the collection Early African American Print Culture in Theory and Practice, ed. Lara Cohen and Jordan Stein (UPenn, 2012);
“Coloniality, Performance, Translation,” soon to appear in the forthcoming collection Transatlantic Traffic and (Mis)Translations, ed. Robin Peel and Daniel Maudlin (UPNE, 2013);
“Obi, Assemblage, Enchantment,” soon to appear in the inaugural issue of the journal J-19 in a roundtable on “enchanted criticism” that Nancy Bentley organized.

lecture, 4-6, 8201.01: “Pre-Occupation and the Performative Commons.”

This talk considers the long history of commoning as a mode of both occupying land—living in common—and achieving political representation as a people or political “commons.” Tracing a link between the enclosure of the commons in 16th-18th century England and the seizure of land from Native peoples in the Americas, the paper explores the history of the expropriation of common land from the people, and subsequent efforts to rematerialize the political force of the common people in acts of performance. Turning to theatrical performance, the paper considers the aesthetics of commoning in plays such as John Gay’s “The Beggar’s Opera” and concludes with discussion of the contemporary Occupy Movement as a performative commons.

————————————-

8 April: The University Beyond Crisis, a daylong symposium featuring Tita Chico, Roderick Ferguson, Laura Hyun Yi Kang, and Siobhan Somerville among others — details TBA.

————————————-

12 April: Fred Moten

The Helen L. Bevington Professor of Modern Poetry at Duke University, Fred Moten works in black studies at the intersection of performance, poetry and critical theory. He is author of numerous books and articles including Arkansas (Pressed Wafer Press, 2000), Poems (with Jim Behrle) (Pressed Wafer Press, 2002), In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (University of Minnesota Press, 2003), I ran from it but was still in it. (Cusp Books, 2007), Hughson’s Tavern (Leon Works, 2008) and B Jenkins (Duke University Press, 2010).

seminar, 12:30-2, 8201.01: “The Touring Machine,” by Fred Moten; also, interview with Edouard Glissant (in conversation with Manthia Diawara); “Will Sovereignty Ever Be Deconstructed?” by Catherine Malabou; “New Spheres of Transnational Formations,” by Kamari Clarke; “Black in Time,” by Michelle Wright; “Response by Author,” by Kamari Clarke.

lecture, 4-6, 8201.01: “Notes on Passage: Anepistemology, Paraontology, Insovereignty”

In this talk, Fred Moten considers what the thought, or the mode of study, of the refugee might be able to teach us about life beyond or over the edge of personal/political sovereignty. More specifically, this lecture addresses his interest in what a kind of stateless thinking, a thinking that remains in (middle) passage, still has to offer Afro-diasporic studies and, more broadly, the study of modernity in the Atlantic World.

Dear Everyone:

We hope this message finds you all well, and finds you having fared well through the storm and its aftermath.  So much has transpired since we last wrote, and since we last gathered for a RevAmStudies event — coming together again will be, as always, restorative!  It was terrific to see some of you in Puerto Rico for the American Studies Association conference last week.  Many, we saw at the awards ceremony where the inaugural Angela Davis Award for Public Scholarship was bestowed upon Ruth Wilson Gilmore — clearly, the ideal match between award and awardee, and the standing ovation (two of them!) as the award was given attests to the broad recognition of the significance and impact of Professor Gilmore’s work — congratulations, Ruthie!

As always, we want to thank Grad Center President William Kelly for his sustaining support as well as that of his office; and the Advanced Research Collaborative at the Graduate Center and the Center for the Humanities for their vital efforts on behalf of this initiative.  We’re also grateful to J. Kēhaulani Kauanui for bringing her insights and incisiveness and her expansive generosity to us last month, and to Cambridge Ridley-Lynch and Chris Eng, our student colleagues.

We are very much looking forward to seeing many of you at next week’s RevAmStudies seminar and lecture (both on Friday, 30 November), featuring Hester Blum, whose work and visit provide us the terrific opportunity to think about and through the rubric of “oceanic studies” as a frame for Americanist scholarship.  Professor Blum is Associate Professor of English at the Pennsylvania State University and Interim Associate Director for the Penn State Institute for the Arts and Humanities. Her first book,The View from the Mast-Head: Maritime Imagination and Antebellum American Sea Narratives (University of North Carolina Press, 2008), received the John Gardner Maritime Research Award; she has also published a critical edition of William Ray’s Barbary captivity narrative Horrors of Slavery (Rutgers University Press, 2008). A founder of C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, she is at work on a new book called Polar Imprints: The Print Culture of Arctic and Antarctic Exploration.  We are very pleased that she will be with us.

The details of the events — free and open to the public — are below, and the readings may be found on the Center for the Humanities RevAmStudies site: http://centerforthehumanities.org/seminars/revolutionizing-american-studies.

We wanted also to share information about upcoming opportunities at the Graduate Center, made possible by the Mellon Committee on Globalization and Social Change, to engage Lisa Lowe, Professor of English at Tufts University, who will be offering a lecture on 4 December at 4:30p titled “Archives of Liberalism: The Intimacies of Four Continents.”  Please seehttp://globalization.gc.cuny.edu/ for more information.

RevAmStudies goes on winter hiatus after next week’s events.  For spring 2013, we have conjured a line-up that includes Matt Jacobson (8 February), Elizabeth Maddock Dillon (March 8), and Fred Moten (12 April).  In the works are also a possible 30 January event (details TBA), and on 8 April, we will be co-sponsoring a daylong symposium on “The University Beyond Crisis” — stay tuned for more information!

We wish you all a lovely break and again, look forward to seeing you next week!
Best,
Kandice & Duncan

[Chris posted what is below; I snuck in to add photos and retitle the entry so that it better reflects the work he did...blog administrator's prerogative.  KC]

J. Jack Halberstam’s work continually challenges us to imagine alternative ways of living, thinking, being, and wanting. This is no different in The Queer Art of Failure. Writing in his distinctive style that effortlessly combines elegance, humor, sophistication, passion, and intellectual generosity, Halberstam calls for a critical reconsideration of failure: as a queer art, as anti-disciplinary historiographical method, as a politics of disorientation, as struggle, and as a creation of alternative worlds. In a way, the various texts we have here today participate in this project.  In dialogue with one another, they manifest the formation of solidarity that the Invisible Committee articulates, one that coheres around points of resonance, opening up possibilities for thinking and strategizing through the generative multiplicity of failure.  Let us trace some of these resonances.

1) The Rhythms and Temporalities of Success and Failure

We are invited to explore how the order of things materializes through rhythms. The Invisible Committee reframes “Empire” as “a rhythm that imposes itself, a way of dispensing and dispersing reality. Less an order of the world than its sad, heavy and militaristic liquidation” (13). Halberstam illuminates how these rhythms—its concurrent ordering and liquidation of worlds—keep beat with the temporalities of success and failure, imposing narratives about ways of living, defining the parameters of what is possible or impossible, desirable and undesirable, good and bad.  “Practicing failure” then insistently questions how these temporalities work to uphold material conditions of inequity and construct arbitrary criteria for belongingness. As Halberstam proposes: “The queer art of failure turns on the impossible, the improbable, the unlikely, and the unremarkable. It quietly loses, and in losing it imagines other goals for life, for love, for art, and for being” (88).

2) Figurations of Failure and Conditions of (Un)belonging

Secondly, these texts connect the imperative to “imagine other goals” by mobilizing failure as a historiographical method.  Collectively exploring “an archive of failure,” they follow Halberstam’s provocative inquiry: “what happens when failure is productively linked to racial awareness, anticolonial struggle, gender variance, and different formulations of the temporality of success” (92). Seeing the capitalist economy as the producer of crisis, this archive refuses the criminalization and pathologization of the dispossessed, the poor, the racialized, and the unemployed as perpetuated under narratives of success and demands of individual responsibility. Fatima El-Tayeb challenges the myth of racelessness that constructs a “white” European identity, arguing that “ethnicization” is a tool of differentiation that figures Europeans of color as perpetually migrant and alien. For those figured as failure, performing citizenship is not enough when they are predetermined as those who do not belong, the foreign threat to a putatively raceless, white European identity. These forms of estrangement project them as the failures, the delinquents in opposition to citizenship that must be dealt with. How do we dismantle this fantasy projected by the lure of citizenship and belonging? How do we reject the desire to be the proper, good citizen when it is an ideal position of privilege secured against the chronic precariousness of others?

3) Negativity and the Antisocial— Politics versus the Political

These pieces caution against the dangers of concretizing identity in efforts to claim belonging and garner state recognition.  At a talk last March, professor Halberstam urged us to keep queerness within its disorientation by refusing to let it settle as a knowable identity based on sexuality. In re-examining the career of Gabriela Mistral, Licia Fiol-Matta precisely shows the dangers of a celebratory claiming of sexual difference, charting the unheroic histories in which queerness as identity becomes complicit with projects for state nationalism, which resonates with current discussions of homonormativity, homonationalism, and pinkwashing. We need to reject intelligibility, embrace failed citizenship, to keep queerness in disorientation, mobilizing it as not identity but politics. The task of negativity and the antisocial turn within queer theory then, Halberstam argues, is not to turn away from politics, but rather reject the terms by which politics has been and is sustained.  He argues: “Negativity might well constitute an antipolitics, but it should not register as apolitical” (108). In facing the rhetoric of austerity that demands that we all suffer, the demand for work and productivity until the body literally wears away, when precariousness is a systemic condition of being, how can we harness feelings of anger and rage to channel the practices of “self-shattering” and “other-shattering” as both political and ethical strategies for survival (110)?

4) Alternative Solidarities, Massive Experimentations

How can we allow for the openings and conditions for such shattering? El-Tayeb tracks how Europeans of color shatter the differentiating tool of ethnicization through a radical queering of identity that is postethnic.  Assembling through resonant experiences of alienation, these groups come together to make the uninhabitable spaces to which they are consigned livable. They participate in cultural practices and activist projects that challenge the structural conditions undergirding differential outcomes of success and failure. The thoughts and actions performed by these figures of failure— the delinquents, the protestors, rioters, scholars, and activists—are immensely threatening indeed, for they reveal “[t]hat an act could have made sense according to another consistency of the world than the deserted one of Empire” (17). Professor Halberstam illuminates how and why queer theory should be committed toward these other consistencies. In his words, a queer theory that foregrounds failure is one that chooses to reject the safety net of institutionality in favor of taking risks and creating openings. It acknowledges the need to fail to follow disciplinary protocols in order to make other rhythms possible. There is a need to reject politics proper and engage on our own terms, to protest the insufficiency and violence of “rhythms of life” orientated around empire, family, and work, and that measure individual success or failure based upon the ability to conform to these rhythms. These are the possibilities we see in alternative cultural and disciplinary practices, community formations, struggles, affinities, and spectacular inhabitations of failure. Collectively, these texts invite us to think through the following assertion behind The Coming Insurrection: “In reality, the decomposition of all social forms is a blessing. It is for us the ideal condition for a wild, massive experimentation with new arrangements, new fidelities” (42).  How can we use failure to collectively imagine new arrangements and fidelities both inside and outside academia?  How may the project of revolutionizing American Studies participate in creating the spaces for such “massive experimentation”?