Rebecca S Oh | University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (original) (raw)
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Peer-Reviewed Publications by Rebecca S Oh
ISLE Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2022
This is a prepublicaiton draft. Please see the journal website for the final version. Apocalypse... more This is a prepublicaiton draft. Please see the journal website for the final version.
Apocalypse is commonly thought of as a world-ending future event. However, for racialized peoples whose futures have been sacrificed to institutions like colonialism and capitalism, apocalypse has already occurred and becomes available to realism; apocalypse most approximates the referential experience of being made futureless. Following Fredric Jameson’s description of realism as a genre that offers the possibility of knowledge, and taking Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People as an example, I submit that apocalyptic realism makes apocalypse knowable as a form of historically produced expendability. But I also argue that in apocalyptic realism worldending includes minor forms of endurance and agency.
ariel: A Review of International English Literature, 2023
This is a prepublication draft. Please see ARIEL's journal's website for the final version. This... more This is a prepublication draft. Please see ARIEL's journal's website for the final version.
This article examines how two structuring forms, infrastructure and genre, facilitate and distribute affects of hopeful futurity in Chibundu Onuzo's 2017 novel Welcome to Lagos. I argue that genre acts as the infrastructure of infrastructure, an underlying connective logic that shapes how infrastructures are encountered and perceived. In turn, infrastructures materialize generic expectations about the world. Welcome to Lagos' comic form, which aestheticizes contingency and fortune, shapes the way characters relate to informal infrastructures like underbridges and abandoned buildings. Such discarded spaces reinforce a view of the city as a space rife with opportunity. In contrast to more pessimistic views of the postcolonial city, Welcome to Lagos' comedy and infrastructure foreground how access to resources and materials are unpredictably distributed, in turn making feelings of hopeful or open futurity more available to the urban poor. Ultimately, I argue that affects like hope index the lived force of genre and infrastructure as structuring forms, and that genre and infrastructure are useful for theorizing postcolonial affect.
Modern Fiction Studies, 2020
This is a pre-publication draft. Please see the journal's website for the final publication. I... more This is a pre-publication draft. Please see the journal's website for the final publication.
In the face of world-ending narratives including extinction, sea level rise, and climate change, I argue that Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner’s Iep Jaltok, Keri Hulme’s Stonefish, and Kiribati’s climate adaptation plan Migration with Dignity produce new models for imagining futurity. Jetñil-Kijiner’s poems historicize Pacific extinction narratives, Hulme’s short stories produce readers capable of recognizing the new reality of climate change, and Migration with Dignity, when read through science fiction theories of utopia and dystopia, critique Westphalian statehood. Together these works resist hegemonic narratives of Pacific futurelessness to produce the future as a terrain of contingent epistemological contest rather than a foreclosed prediction.
Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies , 2019
This is a prepublication draft. Please see the journal website for the final published manuscript... more This is a prepublication draft. Please see the journal website for the final published manuscript.
This essay explores political relations and practices of claim-making between Indian citizens and the state in the aftermath of the Bhopal gas explosion of 2–3 December 1984. While not discounting the transnational dimensions of environmental problems across the Global South, nor postcolonial fatigue with the nation-state, it argues survivors remain invested in the state for redress and continue to engage with it through forms of claim-making that center on the injured body. It does so by examining the rhetoric of survivor testimony and legal documents about the 1989 settlement, as well as Indra Sinha’s novel Animal’s People (2007). I argue survivor testimonies mobilize bodily pain to both hail and revise promises of government welfare enshrined in legal documents surrounding the Bhopal case, while the novel moves beyond the revision of welfare as a shared category of political legibility. Animal’s People posits that post-disaster terms of political relation arise from the citizenry themselves as they articulate the unruliness of their toxified bodies, specifically characterized as non-human assemblages. This essay argues these accounts reenvision the role of the state in toxic redress and environmental harm, and turn citizen strategies of survival into suggestions for better forms of postcolonial governance.
Conference Presentations by Rebecca S Oh
Conference paper given at the Cultural Studies Association annual meeting 2014. Not for citation ... more Conference paper given at the Cultural Studies Association annual meeting 2014. Not for citation or circulation.
Conference paper given at ASLE 2017. Not for circulation or citation.
Book Reviews by Rebecca S Oh
American Literary History , 2020
The ALH Online Review, Series XXIV
Papers by Rebecca S Oh
Pacific Historical Review, 2021
MFS Modern Fiction Studies, 2020
Abstract:In the face of world-ending narratives including extinction, sea level rise, and climate... more Abstract:In the face of world-ending narratives including extinction, sea level rise, and climate change, I argue that Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner’s Iep Jaltok, Keri Hulme’s Stonefish, and Kiribati’s climate adaptation plan Migration with Dignity produce new models for imagining futurity. Jetñil-Kijiner’s poems historicize Pacific extinction narratives, Hulme’s short stories produce readers capable of recognizing the new reality of climate change, and Migration with Dignity, when read through science fiction theories of utopia and dystopia, critique Westphalian statehood. Together these works resist hegemonic narratives of Pacific futurelessness to produce the future as a terrain of contingent epistemological contest rather than a foreclosed prediction.
Interventions
This essay explores political relations and practices of claim-making between Indian citizens and... more This essay explores political relations and practices of claim-making between Indian citizens and the state in the aftermath of the Bhopal gas explosion of 2–3 December 1984. While not discounting the transnational dimensions of environmental problems across the Global South, nor postcolonial fatigue with the nation-state, it argues survivors remain invested in the state for redress and continue to engage with it through forms of claim-making that center on the injured body. It does so by examining the rhetoric of survivor testimony and legal documents about the 1989 settlement, as well as Indra Sinha’s novel Animal’s People (2007). I argue survivor testimonies mobilize bodily pain to both hail and revise promises of government welfare enshrined in legal documents surrounding the Bhopal case, while the novel moves beyond the revision of welfare as a shared category of political legibility. Animal’s People posits that post-disaster terms of political relation arise from the citizenry themselves as they articulate the unruliness of their toxified bodies, specifically characterized as non-human assemblages. This essay argues these accounts reenvision the role of the state in toxic redress and environmental harm, and turn citizen strategies of survival into suggestions for better forms of postcolonial governance.
ISLE Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2022
This is a prepublicaiton draft. Please see the journal website for the final version. Apocalypse... more This is a prepublicaiton draft. Please see the journal website for the final version.
Apocalypse is commonly thought of as a world-ending future event. However, for racialized peoples whose futures have been sacrificed to institutions like colonialism and capitalism, apocalypse has already occurred and becomes available to realism; apocalypse most approximates the referential experience of being made futureless. Following Fredric Jameson’s description of realism as a genre that offers the possibility of knowledge, and taking Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People as an example, I submit that apocalyptic realism makes apocalypse knowable as a form of historically produced expendability. But I also argue that in apocalyptic realism worldending includes minor forms of endurance and agency.
ariel: A Review of International English Literature, 2023
This is a prepublication draft. Please see ARIEL's journal's website for the final version. This... more This is a prepublication draft. Please see ARIEL's journal's website for the final version.
This article examines how two structuring forms, infrastructure and genre, facilitate and distribute affects of hopeful futurity in Chibundu Onuzo's 2017 novel Welcome to Lagos. I argue that genre acts as the infrastructure of infrastructure, an underlying connective logic that shapes how infrastructures are encountered and perceived. In turn, infrastructures materialize generic expectations about the world. Welcome to Lagos' comic form, which aestheticizes contingency and fortune, shapes the way characters relate to informal infrastructures like underbridges and abandoned buildings. Such discarded spaces reinforce a view of the city as a space rife with opportunity. In contrast to more pessimistic views of the postcolonial city, Welcome to Lagos' comedy and infrastructure foreground how access to resources and materials are unpredictably distributed, in turn making feelings of hopeful or open futurity more available to the urban poor. Ultimately, I argue that affects like hope index the lived force of genre and infrastructure as structuring forms, and that genre and infrastructure are useful for theorizing postcolonial affect.
Modern Fiction Studies, 2020
This is a pre-publication draft. Please see the journal's website for the final publication. I... more This is a pre-publication draft. Please see the journal's website for the final publication.
In the face of world-ending narratives including extinction, sea level rise, and climate change, I argue that Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner’s Iep Jaltok, Keri Hulme’s Stonefish, and Kiribati’s climate adaptation plan Migration with Dignity produce new models for imagining futurity. Jetñil-Kijiner’s poems historicize Pacific extinction narratives, Hulme’s short stories produce readers capable of recognizing the new reality of climate change, and Migration with Dignity, when read through science fiction theories of utopia and dystopia, critique Westphalian statehood. Together these works resist hegemonic narratives of Pacific futurelessness to produce the future as a terrain of contingent epistemological contest rather than a foreclosed prediction.
Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies , 2019
This is a prepublication draft. Please see the journal website for the final published manuscript... more This is a prepublication draft. Please see the journal website for the final published manuscript.
This essay explores political relations and practices of claim-making between Indian citizens and the state in the aftermath of the Bhopal gas explosion of 2–3 December 1984. While not discounting the transnational dimensions of environmental problems across the Global South, nor postcolonial fatigue with the nation-state, it argues survivors remain invested in the state for redress and continue to engage with it through forms of claim-making that center on the injured body. It does so by examining the rhetoric of survivor testimony and legal documents about the 1989 settlement, as well as Indra Sinha’s novel Animal’s People (2007). I argue survivor testimonies mobilize bodily pain to both hail and revise promises of government welfare enshrined in legal documents surrounding the Bhopal case, while the novel moves beyond the revision of welfare as a shared category of political legibility. Animal’s People posits that post-disaster terms of political relation arise from the citizenry themselves as they articulate the unruliness of their toxified bodies, specifically characterized as non-human assemblages. This essay argues these accounts reenvision the role of the state in toxic redress and environmental harm, and turn citizen strategies of survival into suggestions for better forms of postcolonial governance.
Conference paper given at the Cultural Studies Association annual meeting 2014. Not for citation ... more Conference paper given at the Cultural Studies Association annual meeting 2014. Not for citation or circulation.
Conference paper given at ASLE 2017. Not for circulation or citation.
American Literary History , 2020
The ALH Online Review, Series XXIV
Pacific Historical Review, 2021
MFS Modern Fiction Studies, 2020
Abstract:In the face of world-ending narratives including extinction, sea level rise, and climate... more Abstract:In the face of world-ending narratives including extinction, sea level rise, and climate change, I argue that Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner’s Iep Jaltok, Keri Hulme’s Stonefish, and Kiribati’s climate adaptation plan Migration with Dignity produce new models for imagining futurity. Jetñil-Kijiner’s poems historicize Pacific extinction narratives, Hulme’s short stories produce readers capable of recognizing the new reality of climate change, and Migration with Dignity, when read through science fiction theories of utopia and dystopia, critique Westphalian statehood. Together these works resist hegemonic narratives of Pacific futurelessness to produce the future as a terrain of contingent epistemological contest rather than a foreclosed prediction.
Interventions
This essay explores political relations and practices of claim-making between Indian citizens and... more This essay explores political relations and practices of claim-making between Indian citizens and the state in the aftermath of the Bhopal gas explosion of 2–3 December 1984. While not discounting the transnational dimensions of environmental problems across the Global South, nor postcolonial fatigue with the nation-state, it argues survivors remain invested in the state for redress and continue to engage with it through forms of claim-making that center on the injured body. It does so by examining the rhetoric of survivor testimony and legal documents about the 1989 settlement, as well as Indra Sinha’s novel Animal’s People (2007). I argue survivor testimonies mobilize bodily pain to both hail and revise promises of government welfare enshrined in legal documents surrounding the Bhopal case, while the novel moves beyond the revision of welfare as a shared category of political legibility. Animal’s People posits that post-disaster terms of political relation arise from the citizenry themselves as they articulate the unruliness of their toxified bodies, specifically characterized as non-human assemblages. This essay argues these accounts reenvision the role of the state in toxic redress and environmental harm, and turn citizen strategies of survival into suggestions for better forms of postcolonial governance.