Michelle Stephens - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Michelle Stephens
Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, Nov 1, 2016
Brathwaite, and others have sought to locate a distinctive Caribbean aesthetic, however, they oft... more Brathwaite, and others have sought to locate a distinctive Caribbean aesthetic, however, they often came up against linguistic barriers. Their motives are elucidated by Kelly Baker Josephs: "Caribbeanness is not some insubstantial, inexplicable connection between the people living in the region; rather, it is specifically based in a shared experience. The sharing may not be conscious, but the idea is to make it conscious, to protect it by stating/naming it." 4 Recognizing that Caribbean diversity is undeniable, we nonetheless argue that the visual arts are uniquely equipped to bridge the region's language and cultural divides. By employing the archipelago as an analytical framework for understanding contemporary art of the insular Caribbean, we locate correlations in the visual aesthetics across the different linguistic regions whose creators are often unaware of their synchronicities. While recent exhibitions of Caribbean art have largely embraced the narrative of heterogeneity itself as an organizing principle, such diversity often underscores the linguistic divisions, imperial histories, and contemporary conditions that separate the different areas in the Caribbean from each other. 5 Through our approach, hispanophone, francophone, anglophone, Dutch, or Danish origins and the particular traits of each linguistic region become less relevant, for the goal is to identify the continuities and junctures between experiences of the islands and their diasporic communities. 6 An archipelagic vision of the Caribbean, therefore, holds in tension, and in relation, the points of fracture and fragmentation as well as connectivity and shared histories that organize the region. This view is ruled less by the visual logic of difference-one thing is not like the other and is therefore unique-and more by a logic of analogy, whereby the very strategies, themes, and mediums engaged by contemporary Caribbean visual artists encourage a recognition of unexpected mirrorings and inevitable unities across Caribbean spaces and bodies.
Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 2022
ABSTRACT Both the poet Claudia Rankine, in her 2020 collection Just Us, and the psychoanalyst Lau... more ABSTRACT Both the poet Claudia Rankine, in her 2020 collection Just Us, and the psychoanalyst Lauren Levine, in “Interrogating race, shame and mutual vulnerability: ‘Overlapping and interlapping waves of relation,’” recount the outcomes of dyadic conversational experiments regarding race. For Rankine, the experiment is to approach white male strangers with an inquiry into their experience of white privilege. For Levine it is to adapt the psychoanalytic frame of the analyst as listener to initiate a more personal discussion of the experience of race within the analytic mixed-race dyad. In both experiments, a tensile field of relational racialization opens up between the pair in the dyad, a field that is neither simply composed of the black/ white dichotomy nor of multiple, variable, acts of racialization isolated from each other. Instead, such conversations reveal a field of relational racialization that subjects all the people in the encounter. Levine both argues for the need for such encounters, and demonstrates how they may require expansions in clinical technique for the relational analyst who feels the need to deal squarely with race.
Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 2021
ABSTRACT This article is a reflection on the significance of the Black Lives Matter movement in r... more ABSTRACT This article is a reflection on the significance of the Black Lives Matter movement in relation to the psychoanalytic movement in the United States. To understand the profound resonance of the phrase “Black lives” requires a retracing of the history of modern Western understandings of the human, as they have been expressed through the psychoanalytic subject’s relationship to the human body and, metonymically, the skin. Frantz Fanon’s prescient observations in his mid- 20th-century work, Black Skin, White Masks, continue to resonate as a theorization of the relationship of Blackness to unacknowledged narratives that shape the psychoanalytic tradition. This article historicizes and theorizes the racialization of the skin, specifically, in relationship to psychoanalytic thinking on the human, and contrasts the latter with a Black feminist genealogy that centers on this most charged question of our contemporary moment: What is the meaning of Black life?
Journal of American Studies, 2019
Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, 2019
Archipelagic American Studies, 2017
Departing from conventional narratives of the United States and the Americas as fundamentally con... more Departing from conventional narratives of the United States and the Americas as fundamentally continental spaces, the contributors to Archipelagic American Studies theorize America as constituted by and accountable to an assemblage of interconnected islands, archipelagoes, shorelines, continents, seas, and oceans. They trace these planet-spanning archipelagic connections in essays on topics ranging from Indigenous sovereignty to the work of Edouard Glissant, from Philippine call centers to US militarization in the Caribbean, and from the great Pacific garbage patch to enduring overlaps between US imperialism and a colonial Mexican archipelago. Shaking loose the straitjacket of continental exceptionalism that hinders and permeates Americanist scholarship, Archipelagic American Studies asserts a more relevant and dynamic approach for thinking about the geographic, cultural, and political claims of the United States within broader notions of America. Contributors Birte Blascheck, J. Michael Dash, Paul Giles, Susan Gillman, Matthew Pratt Guterl, Hsinya Huang, Allan Punzalan Isaac, Joseph Keith, Yolanda Martinez-San Miguel, Brandy Nalani McDougall, Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo, Craig Santos Perez, Brian Russell Roberts, John Carlos Rowe, Cherene Sherrard-Johnson, Ramon E. Soto-Crespo, Michelle Ann Stephens, Elaine Stratford, Etsuko Taketani, Alice Te Punga Somerville, Teresia Teaiwa, Lanny Thompson, Nicole A. Waligora-Davis
New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids, 2016
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-No... more This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported (cc-by-nc 3.0) License.
Small Axe, 2016
Brathwaite, and others have sought to locate a distinctive Caribbean aesthetic, however, they oft... more Brathwaite, and others have sought to locate a distinctive Caribbean aesthetic, however, they often came up against linguistic barriers. Their motives are elucidated by Kelly Baker Josephs: "Caribbeanness is not some insubstantial, inexplicable connection between the people living in the region; rather, it is specifically based in a shared experience. The sharing may not be conscious, but the idea is to make it conscious, to protect it by stating/naming it." 4 Recognizing that Caribbean diversity is undeniable, we nonetheless argue that the visual arts are uniquely equipped to bridge the region's language and cultural divides. By employing the archipelago as an analytical framework for understanding contemporary art of the insular Caribbean, we locate correlations in the visual aesthetics across the different linguistic regions whose creators are often unaware of their synchronicities. While recent exhibitions of Caribbean art have largely embraced the narrative of heterogeneity itself as an organizing principle, such diversity often underscores the linguistic divisions, imperial histories, and contemporary conditions that separate the different areas in the Caribbean from each other. 5 Through our approach, hispanophone, francophone, anglophone, Dutch, or Danish origins and the particular traits of each linguistic region become less relevant, for the goal is to identify the continuities and junctures between experiences of the islands and their diasporic communities. 6 An archipelagic vision of the Caribbean, therefore, holds in tension, and in relation, the points of fracture and fragmentation as well as connectivity and shared histories that organize the region. This view is ruled less by the visual logic of difference-one thing is not like the other and is therefore unique-and more by a logic of analogy, whereby the very strategies, themes, and mediums engaged by contemporary Caribbean visual artists encourage a recognition of unexpected mirrorings and inevitable unities across Caribbean spaces and bodies.
Studies in Gender and Sexuality
Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society
Modern Fiction Studies, 2004
The study highlights the contradictions inherent in, and the lack of coherence of, the politics o... more The study highlights the contradictions inherent in, and the lack of coherence of, the politics of Frenchness in Algeria. That flaw stems from the hidden desire to monopolize power for the European settler populations who are all made French citizens, to the detriment of the majority made ...
Modern Fiction Studies, 2004
Levander/A Companion to American Literary Studies, 2011
Toward a Transnational Frame, 2007
A Companion to the Modern American Novel 1900–1950, 2009
Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, 2010
American Quarterly, 1998
... Researchers in the social sciences focus less on the cultural fluidity encouraged by transnat... more ... Researchers in the social sciences focus less on the cultural fluidity encouraged by transnationalism, and more on an analysis of the Michelle Stephens is completing her doctorate in American studies at Yale University. American Quarterly, Vol. 50, No. ...
Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, Nov 1, 2016
Brathwaite, and others have sought to locate a distinctive Caribbean aesthetic, however, they oft... more Brathwaite, and others have sought to locate a distinctive Caribbean aesthetic, however, they often came up against linguistic barriers. Their motives are elucidated by Kelly Baker Josephs: "Caribbeanness is not some insubstantial, inexplicable connection between the people living in the region; rather, it is specifically based in a shared experience. The sharing may not be conscious, but the idea is to make it conscious, to protect it by stating/naming it." 4 Recognizing that Caribbean diversity is undeniable, we nonetheless argue that the visual arts are uniquely equipped to bridge the region's language and cultural divides. By employing the archipelago as an analytical framework for understanding contemporary art of the insular Caribbean, we locate correlations in the visual aesthetics across the different linguistic regions whose creators are often unaware of their synchronicities. While recent exhibitions of Caribbean art have largely embraced the narrative of heterogeneity itself as an organizing principle, such diversity often underscores the linguistic divisions, imperial histories, and contemporary conditions that separate the different areas in the Caribbean from each other. 5 Through our approach, hispanophone, francophone, anglophone, Dutch, or Danish origins and the particular traits of each linguistic region become less relevant, for the goal is to identify the continuities and junctures between experiences of the islands and their diasporic communities. 6 An archipelagic vision of the Caribbean, therefore, holds in tension, and in relation, the points of fracture and fragmentation as well as connectivity and shared histories that organize the region. This view is ruled less by the visual logic of difference-one thing is not like the other and is therefore unique-and more by a logic of analogy, whereby the very strategies, themes, and mediums engaged by contemporary Caribbean visual artists encourage a recognition of unexpected mirrorings and inevitable unities across Caribbean spaces and bodies.
Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 2022
ABSTRACT Both the poet Claudia Rankine, in her 2020 collection Just Us, and the psychoanalyst Lau... more ABSTRACT Both the poet Claudia Rankine, in her 2020 collection Just Us, and the psychoanalyst Lauren Levine, in “Interrogating race, shame and mutual vulnerability: ‘Overlapping and interlapping waves of relation,’” recount the outcomes of dyadic conversational experiments regarding race. For Rankine, the experiment is to approach white male strangers with an inquiry into their experience of white privilege. For Levine it is to adapt the psychoanalytic frame of the analyst as listener to initiate a more personal discussion of the experience of race within the analytic mixed-race dyad. In both experiments, a tensile field of relational racialization opens up between the pair in the dyad, a field that is neither simply composed of the black/ white dichotomy nor of multiple, variable, acts of racialization isolated from each other. Instead, such conversations reveal a field of relational racialization that subjects all the people in the encounter. Levine both argues for the need for such encounters, and demonstrates how they may require expansions in clinical technique for the relational analyst who feels the need to deal squarely with race.
Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 2021
ABSTRACT This article is a reflection on the significance of the Black Lives Matter movement in r... more ABSTRACT This article is a reflection on the significance of the Black Lives Matter movement in relation to the psychoanalytic movement in the United States. To understand the profound resonance of the phrase “Black lives” requires a retracing of the history of modern Western understandings of the human, as they have been expressed through the psychoanalytic subject’s relationship to the human body and, metonymically, the skin. Frantz Fanon’s prescient observations in his mid- 20th-century work, Black Skin, White Masks, continue to resonate as a theorization of the relationship of Blackness to unacknowledged narratives that shape the psychoanalytic tradition. This article historicizes and theorizes the racialization of the skin, specifically, in relationship to psychoanalytic thinking on the human, and contrasts the latter with a Black feminist genealogy that centers on this most charged question of our contemporary moment: What is the meaning of Black life?
Journal of American Studies, 2019
Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, 2019
Archipelagic American Studies, 2017
Departing from conventional narratives of the United States and the Americas as fundamentally con... more Departing from conventional narratives of the United States and the Americas as fundamentally continental spaces, the contributors to Archipelagic American Studies theorize America as constituted by and accountable to an assemblage of interconnected islands, archipelagoes, shorelines, continents, seas, and oceans. They trace these planet-spanning archipelagic connections in essays on topics ranging from Indigenous sovereignty to the work of Edouard Glissant, from Philippine call centers to US militarization in the Caribbean, and from the great Pacific garbage patch to enduring overlaps between US imperialism and a colonial Mexican archipelago. Shaking loose the straitjacket of continental exceptionalism that hinders and permeates Americanist scholarship, Archipelagic American Studies asserts a more relevant and dynamic approach for thinking about the geographic, cultural, and political claims of the United States within broader notions of America. Contributors Birte Blascheck, J. Michael Dash, Paul Giles, Susan Gillman, Matthew Pratt Guterl, Hsinya Huang, Allan Punzalan Isaac, Joseph Keith, Yolanda Martinez-San Miguel, Brandy Nalani McDougall, Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo, Craig Santos Perez, Brian Russell Roberts, John Carlos Rowe, Cherene Sherrard-Johnson, Ramon E. Soto-Crespo, Michelle Ann Stephens, Elaine Stratford, Etsuko Taketani, Alice Te Punga Somerville, Teresia Teaiwa, Lanny Thompson, Nicole A. Waligora-Davis
New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids, 2016
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-No... more This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported (cc-by-nc 3.0) License.
Small Axe, 2016
Brathwaite, and others have sought to locate a distinctive Caribbean aesthetic, however, they oft... more Brathwaite, and others have sought to locate a distinctive Caribbean aesthetic, however, they often came up against linguistic barriers. Their motives are elucidated by Kelly Baker Josephs: "Caribbeanness is not some insubstantial, inexplicable connection between the people living in the region; rather, it is specifically based in a shared experience. The sharing may not be conscious, but the idea is to make it conscious, to protect it by stating/naming it." 4 Recognizing that Caribbean diversity is undeniable, we nonetheless argue that the visual arts are uniquely equipped to bridge the region's language and cultural divides. By employing the archipelago as an analytical framework for understanding contemporary art of the insular Caribbean, we locate correlations in the visual aesthetics across the different linguistic regions whose creators are often unaware of their synchronicities. While recent exhibitions of Caribbean art have largely embraced the narrative of heterogeneity itself as an organizing principle, such diversity often underscores the linguistic divisions, imperial histories, and contemporary conditions that separate the different areas in the Caribbean from each other. 5 Through our approach, hispanophone, francophone, anglophone, Dutch, or Danish origins and the particular traits of each linguistic region become less relevant, for the goal is to identify the continuities and junctures between experiences of the islands and their diasporic communities. 6 An archipelagic vision of the Caribbean, therefore, holds in tension, and in relation, the points of fracture and fragmentation as well as connectivity and shared histories that organize the region. This view is ruled less by the visual logic of difference-one thing is not like the other and is therefore unique-and more by a logic of analogy, whereby the very strategies, themes, and mediums engaged by contemporary Caribbean visual artists encourage a recognition of unexpected mirrorings and inevitable unities across Caribbean spaces and bodies.
Studies in Gender and Sexuality
Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society
Modern Fiction Studies, 2004
The study highlights the contradictions inherent in, and the lack of coherence of, the politics o... more The study highlights the contradictions inherent in, and the lack of coherence of, the politics of Frenchness in Algeria. That flaw stems from the hidden desire to monopolize power for the European settler populations who are all made French citizens, to the detriment of the majority made ...
Modern Fiction Studies, 2004
Levander/A Companion to American Literary Studies, 2011
Toward a Transnational Frame, 2007
A Companion to the Modern American Novel 1900–1950, 2009
Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, 2010
American Quarterly, 1998
... Researchers in the social sciences focus less on the cultural fluidity encouraged by transnat... more ... Researchers in the social sciences focus less on the cultural fluidity encouraged by transnationalism, and more on an analysis of the Michelle Stephens is completing her doctorate in American studies at Yale University. American Quarterly, Vol. 50, No. ...