[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”?

[It was such a crazy honor to introduce J. Jack Halberstam at the Revolutionizing American Studies talk she gave at the CUNY GC English Program. A big thanks to Kandice and Duncan for inviting me. What follows is the text, with a couple of edits.]

This summer, I simultaneously created and joined an imaginary collective called “Queer Damage.” The goal of this imaginary collective is to understand what kind of superpowers result from the will to less-power, the practice of illegibility, the acceptance of economic struggle, the taste for open perversion in literary, political, and physical forms, the experience of past and future as true darknesses, and the avoidance of recognition. I find myself running my covert make-art-teach-learn operation with the expectation that everyone is or will be queer in the “damage” of their lived lives. And while I might know a few of my reasons for these values, I am grateful to J. Jack Halberstam for elaborating my context.

There is something queer about lavishing one’s intellectual juices on the art and culture of the near present, and locating the grounds and the will for manifesto on just about anything. Jack has been laboring to image the queer in text since the beginning of her career. Female Masculinity is, for me and many other students of the queer, a book that influenced my living, thinking, and writing through its clear call for an understanding of the critical queer feminist problems, obligations, and energies produced by the desire for and disappearances of butch dykes past and present. I found a lot of lived damage and failure in this book, enough, arguably, to extend to every gender. If transfolk made plain the cultural refusal to allow for a third—and fourth, and fifth and so on—term, the dominant culture of cisgendered people (homos and heteros included) made the failed terms of their containment of their own explosive material more explicit.

Most recently, in The Queer Art of Failure, Jack proposes a number of important questions for we academics who are living and working in an ostensible twilight. For instance: How do antidisciplinarity and the conscious refusal of capitalist aesthetic/affective values suggest new avenues of work, new ways to expand the Venn between the intellectual and the public and to bridge activism and scholarship? How can we extend and make use of researches which explore how queer figures have
been implicated in fascist and nationalist projects? How does failure as a subject and a modality make a powerlessly powerful proposal for new freedoms of thought, for a re-envisioning of the purpose of education and a revitalization of the social contract? What kinds of aesthetic/affective fantasies sustain the passive politics of the nominally “progressive,” socially normative, working wealthy?

Jack’s scholarship has been actively involved in contributing to the creation of a contemporary queer archive and rolling theoretical framework that opens up the project of acknowledging the assumptions and exclusivities of those preexisting. His work demonstrates how affect theory has become the delivery system for cultural critique in a moment full of forces laboring to recognize both the continued need for and the limits of identity politics. Jack’s work also makes a case for the theoretical-performative ekphrasis and plot summary as ode and antidote to the capitalist intoxicities of popular media, film most recognizably. Her interdisciplinarity is an invocation of the sharpest and most humane kind of negative capability.

(Jack invites us to acknowledge the ways that in looking to invest our intellectual energies in mining the “culturally or historically significant” text or in locating our seat in the theater of a particular “canon,” academics are giving up the possibilities of the kinds of shifting micro-onto-epistemologies that might afford and proliferate the freedoms we desire.)

And now, we have Halberstam’s Gaga: the figure whose casting of the multitudes as monsters through her music, propaganda, and Facebook feed proposes fresh performance politics for self and relation.

It is difficult to imagine that it will ever be safe, let alone equally available to all as an option, to choose to be unprofessional and unsavvy, to refuse the tax benefits of marriage, to hang out of one’s blouse, to vibrate between pronouns, to be undisciplined in the face of insecure knowledges and knowledge practices whose temporary
stabilities are only ever fantasies, to revolt, court anarchy. But Jack is working hard to make sure that we know that we can and do anyway.

J. Jack Halberstam is Professor of English at the University of Southern California. Halberstam is the author of five books — Female Masculinity, The Drag King Book, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives, and most recently The Queer Art of Failure and Gaga Feminism. Halberstam teaches in Gender Studies and American Studies and Ethnicity at USC and is currently writing and reading about new ways of unbeing human. 

Save the dates! RevAmStudies starts up again on 7 September; a terrific line up for the fall! We’ll update as more info rolls in. Happy end of summer, all!

RevAmStudies Fall 2012 Schedule of Events [as of 23-Aug-12]

7 September – J. Jack Halberstam
Public Lecture: 4p, English Program Lounge, Room 4406

Title: GOING GAGA: ANARCHY, CHAOS AND THE WILD

In this talk, Halberstam pulls forward the idea of “Low Theory” from his book, The Queer Art of Failure, and use it to frame new work on feminism, revolt and Lady Gaga. Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender and the End of Normal offers some examples of Gaga Feminism from new political movements to eclectic animated films like Fantastic Mr. Fox and through odd, new forms of anarchistic and improvised rebellion. Throughout, Halberstam encourages the search for theory and politics in odd corners on behalf of a different way of thinking about knowledge, gender politics, culture and transformation.

Seminar: 12p, President’s Conference Room (8201.01)
Readings: 1) Introduction to European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe  by Fatima El Tayeb (Univ of Minnesota press, 2011); 2) Selections from The Coming Insurrection by The Invisible Committee (NY and Paris: Semiotexte, 2009); 3) Licia Fiol Matta, “Introduction” to A Queer Mother for the Nation: The State and Gabriel Mistral (U of Minnesota Press, 2002); and, 4) chapter 3, “The Queer Art of Failure” from Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure (Duke UP 2012).

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14 September – Christopher Ianinni

Christopher Iannini is an associate professor of English at Rutgers University.  He is a specialist in colonial and nineteenth century American literature, with strong interests in the history of science, Caribbean studies, and Atlantic studies.  Widely published in numerous critical journals, he is the author of Fatal Revolutions: Natural History, West Indian Slavery, and the Routes of American Literature (UNC Press, 2012).

Public Lecture: 4p, English Lounge (Room 4406.3)

“Bartram’s *Travels* and the Natural History of West Indian Slavery”

This talk is drawn from Iannini’s recently published book Fatal Revolutions: Natural History, West Indian Slavery, and the Routes of American Literature (UNC Press, 2012). Broadly described, the book traces the relationship between two dramatic transformations in the history of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world–the growth of the West Indian plantation as a new kind of social institution and economic engine, and the rise of natural history as a new scientific discipline, intellectual obsession, and literary form. Iannini argues that these transformations were inextricably linked and that together the established fundamental conditions for what we might call “the practice of letters” in the colonial Americas. This talk provides a case study within this longer history by focusing on William Bartrams *Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida* (1791), long considered a foundational text for early American nature discourse.

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19 October – J. Kēhaulani Kauanui

Public Lecture: 4p, Location TBA
Title: Hawaiian Indigeneity and the Contradictory Politics of Self-Determination

J. Kēhaulani Kauanui is an Associate Professor of American Studies and Anthropology at Wesleyan University.  She earned her PhD in History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 2000. Kauanui is the author of Hawaiian Blood: Colonialism and the Politics of Sovereignty and Indigeneity, published by Duke University Press, 2008. She is currently writing her second titled, Thy Kingdom Come? The Paradox of Hawaiian Sovereignty, which is a critical study on gender and sexual politics and the question of indigeneity in relation to state-centered Hawaiian nationalism.  Kauanui is the sole producer and host of a public affairs radio program, “Indigenous Politics: From Native New England and Beyond,” which is syndicated through the Pacifica radio network. She is also a member of The Dream Committee, an anarchist radio collective that produces a radio program called Horizontal Power Hour.  From 2005-2008, Kauanui was part of a six-person steering committee that worked to co-found the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) for which she also served as an acting council member, then as an elected member of the inaugural council from 2009-2012.

This lecture will explore the contestation over indigeneity and

self-determination in the controversy over the state-drive push for a
federally recognized Native Hawaiian Governing Entity within US domestic
policy, the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, as well as
the Hawaiian Kingdom restoration movement.

Seminar: Details TBA

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30 November – Hester Blum

Public Lecture: 4p, President’s Conference Room (8201.01)

Title: Oceanic American Studies

In the wake of the transnational or hemispheric “turn” in U.S. literary studies, we might ask what happens if our scholarly perspective is reoriented from the perspective of the sea. If methodologies of the nation and the post-nation have been land-locked, how would an oceanic turn allow us to explore new ways of thinking about familiar and unfamiliar texts in pre-1900 U.S. literature? “Oceanic American Studies” considers more specifically the unexplored possibilities that the Arctic and Antarctic regions offer to hemispheric or transnational conversations, as well as to more recent calls to reorganize critical thinking from a planetary perspective.

Seminar: 12p, President’s Conference Room (8201.01)
Readings: “The Prospect of Oceanic Studies,” PMLA 125.3; “John Cleves Symmes and the Planetary Reach of Polar Exploration” American Literature Vol. 84, No. 2 (June 2012); “The News at the Ends of the Earth: Polar Periodicals” (work in progress)

Dear Everyone:

If you’re able to join us at Slattery’s (http://slatterysmidtownpub.com/) for a celebratory happy hour drink at 4p on Thursday, 10 May, we could thank you in person for your participation in the RevAmStudies initiative this year. And, realizing this message goes out all too late, we know you may not be able to take up this invitation, so we want to thank you all in this fashion as well.

We’ve had a remarkable year of collective hard thinking, infused with quite a bit of laughter and a great deal of generosity, to advance the work of thinking in and through American studies with an eye toward, as Eric Lott put it during his visit with us, deploying “revolution” as an intellectual strategy. Ten scholars representing vital lines of critical inquiry visited with us as part of this initiative in AY2011-12: Roderick Ferguson (U of Minnesota, American Studies); Priscilla Wald (Duke U, English, ASA President 2011-12); Leti Volpp (U of California Boalt College of Law; co-sponsored with the Mellon Committee on Globalization and Social Change); Anne McClintock (U Wisconsin, Madison, English); Jodi Melamed (Marquette U, English); Bruce Burgett (U Washington, Bothell, Interdisciplinary Studies); Glenn Hendler (Fordham U, English and American Studies); Nayan Shah (UC San Diego, History); Eric Lott (U Virginia, English); Chandan Reddy (U Washington, Seattle, English; co-sponsored with the Policed! seminar series of the Center for the Humanities). We also collaborated with the NYU Department of Social and Cultural Analysis on the “Multiple Futures of Gender and Sexuality Studies” panel, and sponsored student participation in the Baltimore American Studies Association Meeting. We have, in short, had a lively year.

Throughout the year, we have been appreciatively struck by the ways that the discussions at the seminars often focused on methodology and professionalization, and they modeled the kind of critical generosity that, in our view, characterizes the best ways of inhabiting the academy. This is, we know, not only a function of the visitors, but is also very much an indication of the openness of all who participated, and we are grateful.

We remain also deeply grateful to GC President William Kelly, whose substantive and material commitment to this effort has been important in ways that cannot be overstated; to Sandy Robinson in the President’s office, for her enormous patience and exceptional effectiveness in helping us realize the initiative programming, and to the President’s office more broadly as well; to the Center for the Humanities, and especially its director, Aoibheann Sweeney, for her engaged support of this endeavor, and the Center’s Sam Starkweather, who has been instrumental in keeping us going; and very much to Christopher Eng and Cambridge Ridley Lynch, our student collaborators, for their colleagiality and good humor.

As we look ahead to next year, we are still getting our proverbial ducks in a row. Among the different events we hope to offer include a session focused on critical pedagogies; one organized around the 20th anniversary of the publication of Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic; events that push us to reflect critically on the temporal and spatial protocols by which American studies are framed; and in concert with the American Studies Certificate Program, a session devoted to grant-writing. Though much remains to be planned, we are exceptionally pleased to be able to announce that our kick-off lecture and seminar session is scheduled for FRIDAY, 7 SEPTEMBER, and will feature Professor J. JACK HALBERSTAM — details to be announced toward summer’s end. Please save the date!

As always, we’re happy to hear from you as to suggestions for programming, both in content and kind.

We hope to see you on Thursday, and in any event, offer our best wishes for a smooth end of year and a terrific summer.

Best,
Kandice & Duncan