Joshua Lam | Michigan State University (original) (raw)
Papers by Joshua Lam
boundary 2
This is a review essay of Letters to the Future: Black WOMEN / Radical WRITING (2018), an antholo... more This is a review essay of Letters to the Future: Black WOMEN / Radical WRITING (2018), an anthology of innovative and cross-genre writing produced primarily in the twenty-first century. Edited by the poets and essayists Erica Hunt and Dawn Lundy Martin, the book collects poetry and prose by thirty-five Black women, particularly poets, including LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, Duriel E. Harris, Robin Coste Lewis, Harryette Mullen, Akilah Oliver, M. NourbeSe Philip, Claudia Rankine, and Evie Shockley, as well as artists such as Adrian Piper and Kara Walker. The essay first assesses the framing and organization of the book in terms of its professed radicalism—a term that encompasses formal innovation and radical politics while eliding the differences between them. This portion of the essay contextualizes the book by examining its relationship to recent scholarship on race and poetry in general and innovative Black poetry in particular. The essay then turns to a major through line of the antho...
Edinburgh University Press eBooks, Sep 30, 2022
boundary 2, Nov 1, 2022
In the last two decades, African American poets working in innovative and avant‐garde forms have ... more In the last two decades, African American poets working in innovative and avant‐garde forms have produced poetry focused upon the theme of racial objectification. Individual and collaborative projects by Dawn Lundy Martin, Duriel E. Harris, and Ronaldo V. Wilson, who write and perform together as the Black Took Collective, practice what this article calls a poetics of thingification: a poetry that draws attention to language's capacity for reification in general and for racial objectification in particular. Drawing upon thing theory and recent scholarship on race and avant‐garde poetry, this article focuses on Dawn Lundy Martin's poetics in order to demonstrate how poets combine innovative techniques with racial stereotypes to scrutinize hegemonic expectations at the level of poetic form, especially within the tradition of African American poetry. Rather than adopting the humanizing rhetoric and lyrical modes of conventional African American poetry, these poets use the trope of the objectified Black body to deconstruct linguistic processes of racial reification from within.
boundary 2, 2022
In the last two decades, African American poets working in innovative and avant‐garde forms have ... more In the last two decades, African American poets working in innovative and avant‐garde forms have produced poetry focused upon the theme of racial objectification. Individual and collaborative projects by Dawn Lundy Martin, Duriel E. Harris, and Ronaldo V. Wilson, who write and perform together as the Black Took Collective, practice what this article calls a poetics of thingification: a poetry that draws attention to language's capacity for reification in general and for racial objectification in particular. Drawing upon thing theory and recent scholarship on race and avant‐garde poetry, this article focuses on Dawn Lundy Martin's poetics in order to demonstrate how poets combine innovative techniques with racial stereotypes to scrutinize hegemonic expectations at the level of poetic form, especially within the tradition of African American poetry. Rather than adopting the humanizing rhetoric and lyrical modes of conventional African American poetry, these poets use the trope of the objectified Black body to deconstruct linguistic processes of racial reification from within.
The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism and Technology, 2022
While Frederick W. Taylor’s “scientific management” and Fordist modes of industrial production ar... more While Frederick W. Taylor’s “scientific management” and Fordist modes of industrial production are common touchstones for scholarship analyzing modernist responses to technology, the subject of race is often ignored in such discussions. Drawing on contemporary social histories of labor that demonstrate how scientific management grew out of plantation slavery, intersected with pseudo-scientific studies of race, and developed “race management” techniques (David Roediger, Elizabeth Esch), this chapter analyzes literary representations of factory labor and scientific management in the 1930s. The essay focuses on scenes of factory labor Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World," Richard Wright’s experimental first novel "Lawd Today!" and his memoir "Black Boy," and Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man." Through their attention to the dehumanizing mechanization of the body in factory settings, as well as the racial dynamics of labor and management strategies, these novels reveal how management, bodily discipline, and surveillance intersected with the ideology of white supremacy, ultimately helping to produce and reproduce categories of whiteness.
The Palgrave Handbook of Magical Realism in the Twenty-First Century, 2020
Lam offers a reevaluation of the relationship between magical realism and postmodernism, revealin... more Lam offers a reevaluation of the relationship between magical realism and postmodernism, revealing the stakes of these categories for African American literature. Focusing on the novels of Ishmael Reed, this chapter demonstrates how postmodern frameworks tend to elide the political and decolonial ramifications of Reed’s fiction. Lam analyzes how Reed uses tropes such as black magic, hoodoo, Voodoo, and conjure in order to develop a syncretic and satirical aesthetic that exposes the metaphysical, ontological, and structural violence that has plagued the West’s ‘others.’ The chapter focuses on Reed’s novels Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down and Mumbo Jumbo, and also considers Reed’s editorial work, which encompasses the Black Arts Movement and black avant-garde poetry and poetics. The chapter closes with a consideration of Reed’s contemporary fiction and drama, including Conjugating Hindi and his criticisms of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton: An American Musical, in order to assess Reed’s political potential in the twenty-first century.
Journal of Foreign Languages and Cultures, 2018
Journal of Foreign Languages and Cultures is published twice yearly (June and December) by Hunan ... more Journal of Foreign Languages and Cultures is published twice yearly (June and December) by Hunan Normal University Press. The main areas of interest are foreign literatures and cultures, translation studies, critical theory, and innovative pedagogy. The journal is especially interested in interdisciplinary and experimental approaches to humanities scholarship, ideas, and practices.
ArtLeaks Gazette #5: Patriarchy Over & Out. Discourse Made Manifest, 2019
https://art-leaks.org/artleaks-gazette/
ArtLeaks Gazette, 2019
ArtLeaks Gazette #5: “Patriarchy Over & Out. Discourse Made Manifest” brings together contributio... more ArtLeaks Gazette #5: “Patriarchy Over & Out. Discourse Made Manifest” brings together contributions that analyze concrete practices and campaigns, and which engage theoretically and intersectionally with relevant issues related to queer, trans, feminist, first nations, racial, and economic justice. The diverse contributions in this issue – including poetry, petitions, lyrics, visual art, activism, manifestoes, and critical essays – confront nationalist discourses, colonial violences, orthodox regimes, misogynist cultural and political programs, crises of identity politics, and the remaining legacies of white supremacy, considering not only overall conditions in the artworld but also local specificities. While the contributions are diverse in their political and cultural scope, their common target remains toxic patriarchy in all its nefarious manifestations. The writers, musicians, artists, activists, filmmakers, and poets featured in this issue envision and demand a different reality and future. To summon Planningtorock’s words from All Love’s Legal (2014): “I don’t want to wait, patriarchal life, you’re out of date.”
The gazette includes contributions by: Planningtorock, Judith Goldman, Susanne Sachsee, Ashon Crawley, Kim Bode, Magdalena Zurawski, Nitasha Dhillon, Ana Grujić, Bridget Daria O’ Neill, Mickey Harmon, Joshua Lam Jasmina Tumbas, Divya Victor, Scene & Heard, Nosotras Proponemos, Erika Balsom & Elena Gorfinkel, Shanté Paradigm Smalls, We are sick of it, Imani Henry, Betty Yu, Mimi Thi Nguyen, Paris Henderson, Boineelo Cassandra Mouse, Amanda Fayant, Van Tran Nguyen, Selma Banich, Nina Gojić, Ena Jurov & Tajana Josimović, Fred Moten & Corina L. Apostol, LaKisha Simmons, Matt Applegate & Andrew Culp, Shannon Woodcock, Chiara Bonfiglioli, Danai Anagnostou, Katja Kobolt & Anna Ehrenstein, Alyssa Schwendener, Tanya Loughead, Mima Simić
Editorial and layout: Corina L. Apostol, Rena&Vladan, with guest editor Jasmina Tumbas
Journal of Foreign Languages and Cultures, 2018
Political coverage of the US presidential election of 2016 involved numerous theories about the m... more Political coverage of the US presidential election of 2016 involved numerous theories about the motivations of Donald Trump’s supporters. These theories were often tied to racial and socioeconomic demographics, and based in speculations about racism and prejudice. Some of the rhetoric in these speculations, such as Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” analogy and the informal term “Trumpen Proletariat,” echoes political rhetoric found in Marxist discussions of the lumpenproletariat, a social class characterized by abject poverty, ideological ambivalence, and criminality. In the US, the lumpenproletariat was a subject of great importance to a small number of Depression-era writers, including the African American novelist Richard Wright, whose novels Native Son and Lawd Today! documented and analyzed the fascinating contradictions of race, class, prejudice, and political ideology. This essay asks what Wright’s depictions of the lumpenproletariat can teach us about contemporary political rhetoric in general, and about the intersections of race and class prejudice in particular. It argues that Wright’s refusal to politically abject the ignorant and alienated lower classes can teach us much today about the limits of current US political discourse.
William James Studies, 2017
Encyclopedia of Cultural Theory
Primarily known as a philosopher and historian, Michel Foucault was an intellectual and activist ... more Primarily known as a philosopher and historian, Michel Foucault was an intellectual and activist whose writings have been influential in many disciplines, including psychology, criminology, literary and cultural theory, political science, and the history of medical and social sciences. The constantly shifting foci of his critical investigations and his unorthodox methodologies present considerable difficulties to those who would identify him with theoretical schools such as structuralism, post-structuralism, or postmodernism-labels he rejected. Neither a traditional philosopher nor historian, Foucault wrote texts that can nevertheless be read as critical histories that ask provocative philosophical questions, and which sometimes question the very contours of philosophy. He once described his critical project as taking place "at the outer limits of philosophy, . . . in the direction of a future philosophy" (1997, 42). His works and posthumously published lectures have come to wield enormous influence across the humanities and social sciences, and have been formative in discourses such as new historicism, queer theory, feminism, critical race theory, and the study of biopolitics.
Encyclopedia of Cultural Theory
Written by Joshua Lam (b. France, 1859(b. France, -d. 1941 Henri Bergson was a French philosopher... more Written by Joshua Lam (b. France, 1859(b. France, -d. 1941 Henri Bergson was a French philosopher of wide repute, whose ideas influenced writers and thinkers well beyond the purview of philosophy, including literature, visual art, psychology, theology, and the sciences. His writings and lectures were enormously popular during his lifetime, and he received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927. His writings were especially important for modernist literature, and for the philosophy of pragmatism, particularly that of William James. Though his influence waned after his death, new generations of thinkers have reintroduced his ideas about agency, affect, embodiment, and temporality into new contexts, such as phenomenology, affect theory, film theory, new media, and cultural studies.
College Literature, 2018
This essay examines the trope of racial objectification in Chesnutt’s “conjure tales” by analyzin... more This essay examines the trope of racial objectification in Chesnutt’s “conjure tales” by analyzing figures in his short fiction who are either described as, or are literally transformed into, black objects. While scholars have traditionally focused on Chesnutt’s depiction of “hoodoo” and folk belief in the conjure tales, this essay argues that Chesnutt’s “black objects” collectively signify his concerns about the limitations placed upon African American autonomy in the Reconstruction era. As such, these figures help us reassess Chesnutt’s complex relation to “uplift” ideology, which privileges representations of black agency and empowerment, and has long been troubled by Chesnutt’s deployment of stereotype in the tales. Ultimately, this essay argues that Chesnutt’s treatment of objectification contributes to contemporary discussions of objecthood and embodiment in black literary and cultural theory, providing a venue for conceptualizing resistance outside of dominant models of agency and subjectivity.
Journal of Modern Literature, 2016
Aldon Lynn Nielsen and Lauri Ramey’s anthology _What I Say: Innovative Poetry by Black Writers in... more Aldon Lynn Nielsen and Lauri Ramey’s anthology _What I Say: Innovative Poetry by Black Writers in America_ seeks to expand the contours of contemporary American and African American poetry by collecting the work of twenty-nine experimental black poets published since the late 1970s. Placing well-known innovators like Nathaniel Mackey, Harryette Mullen, and Claudia Rankine alongside many younger poets, the anthology presents an impressive array of formal experimentation in order to dispel canon-centric notions of aesthetic conservatism in post-war African American poetry. By privileging poetries that use conceptual, philosophical, visual, and appropriative techniques, the collection also implicitly challenges current views of contemporary avant-garde poetry as an overwhelmingly white endeavor. Seeking to re-map the inheritance of an interracial, cross-arts modernism, What I Say makes a crucial contribution to contemporary poetry and poetics by emphasizing the wide range of forms and content present in innovative black poetries.
This essay considers Pauline Hopkins’s _Of One Blood: Or, the Hidden Self_ (1902-03) in the histo... more This essay considers Pauline Hopkins’s _Of One Blood: Or, the Hidden Self_ (1902-03) in the historical context of psychological automatism. The essay links the history of psychical and psychological research to the novel’s critique of the post-slavery nation by tracing the novel’s references to writings by Alfred Binet and William James, on one hand, and the history of mesmerism and vodou, on the other. Drawing connections between the discourses of mesmerism, spiritualism, and hysteria, Hopkins’s novel uses the trope of automatism to recall the repressed memory of slavery. This essay analyzes the novel’s depiction of African Americans in entranced states of hypnosis and possession, arguing that Hopkins uses the figure of the “black automaton” to dramatize a crisis of agency for African Americans in the wake of abolition. Hopkins’s insistence on dramatizing mechanical mindlessness and liminal states of consciousness exposes her investment in exploring the social limitations placed upon black agency. The novel ultimately prioritizes a politics of cultural memory over racial “uplift” ideologies. Disclosing a darker and more deterministic element of automatism than W.E.B. Du Bois’s “double consciousness,” this essay demonstrates how the figure of the black automaton provides an uncanny lens through which the complex legacies of slavery, miscegenation, and historical trauma can be witnessed.
An Editorial Introduction to issue 10 of theory@buffalo (an interdisciplinary journal of theory a... more An Editorial Introduction to issue 10 of theory@buffalo (an interdisciplinary journal of theory and criticism).
boundary 2
This is a review essay of Letters to the Future: Black WOMEN / Radical WRITING (2018), an antholo... more This is a review essay of Letters to the Future: Black WOMEN / Radical WRITING (2018), an anthology of innovative and cross-genre writing produced primarily in the twenty-first century. Edited by the poets and essayists Erica Hunt and Dawn Lundy Martin, the book collects poetry and prose by thirty-five Black women, particularly poets, including LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, Duriel E. Harris, Robin Coste Lewis, Harryette Mullen, Akilah Oliver, M. NourbeSe Philip, Claudia Rankine, and Evie Shockley, as well as artists such as Adrian Piper and Kara Walker. The essay first assesses the framing and organization of the book in terms of its professed radicalism—a term that encompasses formal innovation and radical politics while eliding the differences between them. This portion of the essay contextualizes the book by examining its relationship to recent scholarship on race and poetry in general and innovative Black poetry in particular. The essay then turns to a major through line of the antho...
Edinburgh University Press eBooks, Sep 30, 2022
boundary 2, Nov 1, 2022
In the last two decades, African American poets working in innovative and avant‐garde forms have ... more In the last two decades, African American poets working in innovative and avant‐garde forms have produced poetry focused upon the theme of racial objectification. Individual and collaborative projects by Dawn Lundy Martin, Duriel E. Harris, and Ronaldo V. Wilson, who write and perform together as the Black Took Collective, practice what this article calls a poetics of thingification: a poetry that draws attention to language's capacity for reification in general and for racial objectification in particular. Drawing upon thing theory and recent scholarship on race and avant‐garde poetry, this article focuses on Dawn Lundy Martin's poetics in order to demonstrate how poets combine innovative techniques with racial stereotypes to scrutinize hegemonic expectations at the level of poetic form, especially within the tradition of African American poetry. Rather than adopting the humanizing rhetoric and lyrical modes of conventional African American poetry, these poets use the trope of the objectified Black body to deconstruct linguistic processes of racial reification from within.
boundary 2, 2022
In the last two decades, African American poets working in innovative and avant‐garde forms have ... more In the last two decades, African American poets working in innovative and avant‐garde forms have produced poetry focused upon the theme of racial objectification. Individual and collaborative projects by Dawn Lundy Martin, Duriel E. Harris, and Ronaldo V. Wilson, who write and perform together as the Black Took Collective, practice what this article calls a poetics of thingification: a poetry that draws attention to language's capacity for reification in general and for racial objectification in particular. Drawing upon thing theory and recent scholarship on race and avant‐garde poetry, this article focuses on Dawn Lundy Martin's poetics in order to demonstrate how poets combine innovative techniques with racial stereotypes to scrutinize hegemonic expectations at the level of poetic form, especially within the tradition of African American poetry. Rather than adopting the humanizing rhetoric and lyrical modes of conventional African American poetry, these poets use the trope of the objectified Black body to deconstruct linguistic processes of racial reification from within.
The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism and Technology, 2022
While Frederick W. Taylor’s “scientific management” and Fordist modes of industrial production ar... more While Frederick W. Taylor’s “scientific management” and Fordist modes of industrial production are common touchstones for scholarship analyzing modernist responses to technology, the subject of race is often ignored in such discussions. Drawing on contemporary social histories of labor that demonstrate how scientific management grew out of plantation slavery, intersected with pseudo-scientific studies of race, and developed “race management” techniques (David Roediger, Elizabeth Esch), this chapter analyzes literary representations of factory labor and scientific management in the 1930s. The essay focuses on scenes of factory labor Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World," Richard Wright’s experimental first novel "Lawd Today!" and his memoir "Black Boy," and Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man." Through their attention to the dehumanizing mechanization of the body in factory settings, as well as the racial dynamics of labor and management strategies, these novels reveal how management, bodily discipline, and surveillance intersected with the ideology of white supremacy, ultimately helping to produce and reproduce categories of whiteness.
The Palgrave Handbook of Magical Realism in the Twenty-First Century, 2020
Lam offers a reevaluation of the relationship between magical realism and postmodernism, revealin... more Lam offers a reevaluation of the relationship between magical realism and postmodernism, revealing the stakes of these categories for African American literature. Focusing on the novels of Ishmael Reed, this chapter demonstrates how postmodern frameworks tend to elide the political and decolonial ramifications of Reed’s fiction. Lam analyzes how Reed uses tropes such as black magic, hoodoo, Voodoo, and conjure in order to develop a syncretic and satirical aesthetic that exposes the metaphysical, ontological, and structural violence that has plagued the West’s ‘others.’ The chapter focuses on Reed’s novels Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down and Mumbo Jumbo, and also considers Reed’s editorial work, which encompasses the Black Arts Movement and black avant-garde poetry and poetics. The chapter closes with a consideration of Reed’s contemporary fiction and drama, including Conjugating Hindi and his criticisms of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton: An American Musical, in order to assess Reed’s political potential in the twenty-first century.
Journal of Foreign Languages and Cultures, 2018
Journal of Foreign Languages and Cultures is published twice yearly (June and December) by Hunan ... more Journal of Foreign Languages and Cultures is published twice yearly (June and December) by Hunan Normal University Press. The main areas of interest are foreign literatures and cultures, translation studies, critical theory, and innovative pedagogy. The journal is especially interested in interdisciplinary and experimental approaches to humanities scholarship, ideas, and practices.
ArtLeaks Gazette #5: Patriarchy Over & Out. Discourse Made Manifest, 2019
https://art-leaks.org/artleaks-gazette/
ArtLeaks Gazette, 2019
ArtLeaks Gazette #5: “Patriarchy Over & Out. Discourse Made Manifest” brings together contributio... more ArtLeaks Gazette #5: “Patriarchy Over & Out. Discourse Made Manifest” brings together contributions that analyze concrete practices and campaigns, and which engage theoretically and intersectionally with relevant issues related to queer, trans, feminist, first nations, racial, and economic justice. The diverse contributions in this issue – including poetry, petitions, lyrics, visual art, activism, manifestoes, and critical essays – confront nationalist discourses, colonial violences, orthodox regimes, misogynist cultural and political programs, crises of identity politics, and the remaining legacies of white supremacy, considering not only overall conditions in the artworld but also local specificities. While the contributions are diverse in their political and cultural scope, their common target remains toxic patriarchy in all its nefarious manifestations. The writers, musicians, artists, activists, filmmakers, and poets featured in this issue envision and demand a different reality and future. To summon Planningtorock’s words from All Love’s Legal (2014): “I don’t want to wait, patriarchal life, you’re out of date.”
The gazette includes contributions by: Planningtorock, Judith Goldman, Susanne Sachsee, Ashon Crawley, Kim Bode, Magdalena Zurawski, Nitasha Dhillon, Ana Grujić, Bridget Daria O’ Neill, Mickey Harmon, Joshua Lam Jasmina Tumbas, Divya Victor, Scene & Heard, Nosotras Proponemos, Erika Balsom & Elena Gorfinkel, Shanté Paradigm Smalls, We are sick of it, Imani Henry, Betty Yu, Mimi Thi Nguyen, Paris Henderson, Boineelo Cassandra Mouse, Amanda Fayant, Van Tran Nguyen, Selma Banich, Nina Gojić, Ena Jurov & Tajana Josimović, Fred Moten & Corina L. Apostol, LaKisha Simmons, Matt Applegate & Andrew Culp, Shannon Woodcock, Chiara Bonfiglioli, Danai Anagnostou, Katja Kobolt & Anna Ehrenstein, Alyssa Schwendener, Tanya Loughead, Mima Simić
Editorial and layout: Corina L. Apostol, Rena&Vladan, with guest editor Jasmina Tumbas
Journal of Foreign Languages and Cultures, 2018
Political coverage of the US presidential election of 2016 involved numerous theories about the m... more Political coverage of the US presidential election of 2016 involved numerous theories about the motivations of Donald Trump’s supporters. These theories were often tied to racial and socioeconomic demographics, and based in speculations about racism and prejudice. Some of the rhetoric in these speculations, such as Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” analogy and the informal term “Trumpen Proletariat,” echoes political rhetoric found in Marxist discussions of the lumpenproletariat, a social class characterized by abject poverty, ideological ambivalence, and criminality. In the US, the lumpenproletariat was a subject of great importance to a small number of Depression-era writers, including the African American novelist Richard Wright, whose novels Native Son and Lawd Today! documented and analyzed the fascinating contradictions of race, class, prejudice, and political ideology. This essay asks what Wright’s depictions of the lumpenproletariat can teach us about contemporary political rhetoric in general, and about the intersections of race and class prejudice in particular. It argues that Wright’s refusal to politically abject the ignorant and alienated lower classes can teach us much today about the limits of current US political discourse.
William James Studies, 2017
Encyclopedia of Cultural Theory
Primarily known as a philosopher and historian, Michel Foucault was an intellectual and activist ... more Primarily known as a philosopher and historian, Michel Foucault was an intellectual and activist whose writings have been influential in many disciplines, including psychology, criminology, literary and cultural theory, political science, and the history of medical and social sciences. The constantly shifting foci of his critical investigations and his unorthodox methodologies present considerable difficulties to those who would identify him with theoretical schools such as structuralism, post-structuralism, or postmodernism-labels he rejected. Neither a traditional philosopher nor historian, Foucault wrote texts that can nevertheless be read as critical histories that ask provocative philosophical questions, and which sometimes question the very contours of philosophy. He once described his critical project as taking place "at the outer limits of philosophy, . . . in the direction of a future philosophy" (1997, 42). His works and posthumously published lectures have come to wield enormous influence across the humanities and social sciences, and have been formative in discourses such as new historicism, queer theory, feminism, critical race theory, and the study of biopolitics.
Encyclopedia of Cultural Theory
Written by Joshua Lam (b. France, 1859(b. France, -d. 1941 Henri Bergson was a French philosopher... more Written by Joshua Lam (b. France, 1859(b. France, -d. 1941 Henri Bergson was a French philosopher of wide repute, whose ideas influenced writers and thinkers well beyond the purview of philosophy, including literature, visual art, psychology, theology, and the sciences. His writings and lectures were enormously popular during his lifetime, and he received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927. His writings were especially important for modernist literature, and for the philosophy of pragmatism, particularly that of William James. Though his influence waned after his death, new generations of thinkers have reintroduced his ideas about agency, affect, embodiment, and temporality into new contexts, such as phenomenology, affect theory, film theory, new media, and cultural studies.
College Literature, 2018
This essay examines the trope of racial objectification in Chesnutt’s “conjure tales” by analyzin... more This essay examines the trope of racial objectification in Chesnutt’s “conjure tales” by analyzing figures in his short fiction who are either described as, or are literally transformed into, black objects. While scholars have traditionally focused on Chesnutt’s depiction of “hoodoo” and folk belief in the conjure tales, this essay argues that Chesnutt’s “black objects” collectively signify his concerns about the limitations placed upon African American autonomy in the Reconstruction era. As such, these figures help us reassess Chesnutt’s complex relation to “uplift” ideology, which privileges representations of black agency and empowerment, and has long been troubled by Chesnutt’s deployment of stereotype in the tales. Ultimately, this essay argues that Chesnutt’s treatment of objectification contributes to contemporary discussions of objecthood and embodiment in black literary and cultural theory, providing a venue for conceptualizing resistance outside of dominant models of agency and subjectivity.
Journal of Modern Literature, 2016
Aldon Lynn Nielsen and Lauri Ramey’s anthology _What I Say: Innovative Poetry by Black Writers in... more Aldon Lynn Nielsen and Lauri Ramey’s anthology _What I Say: Innovative Poetry by Black Writers in America_ seeks to expand the contours of contemporary American and African American poetry by collecting the work of twenty-nine experimental black poets published since the late 1970s. Placing well-known innovators like Nathaniel Mackey, Harryette Mullen, and Claudia Rankine alongside many younger poets, the anthology presents an impressive array of formal experimentation in order to dispel canon-centric notions of aesthetic conservatism in post-war African American poetry. By privileging poetries that use conceptual, philosophical, visual, and appropriative techniques, the collection also implicitly challenges current views of contemporary avant-garde poetry as an overwhelmingly white endeavor. Seeking to re-map the inheritance of an interracial, cross-arts modernism, What I Say makes a crucial contribution to contemporary poetry and poetics by emphasizing the wide range of forms and content present in innovative black poetries.
This essay considers Pauline Hopkins’s _Of One Blood: Or, the Hidden Self_ (1902-03) in the histo... more This essay considers Pauline Hopkins’s _Of One Blood: Or, the Hidden Self_ (1902-03) in the historical context of psychological automatism. The essay links the history of psychical and psychological research to the novel’s critique of the post-slavery nation by tracing the novel’s references to writings by Alfred Binet and William James, on one hand, and the history of mesmerism and vodou, on the other. Drawing connections between the discourses of mesmerism, spiritualism, and hysteria, Hopkins’s novel uses the trope of automatism to recall the repressed memory of slavery. This essay analyzes the novel’s depiction of African Americans in entranced states of hypnosis and possession, arguing that Hopkins uses the figure of the “black automaton” to dramatize a crisis of agency for African Americans in the wake of abolition. Hopkins’s insistence on dramatizing mechanical mindlessness and liminal states of consciousness exposes her investment in exploring the social limitations placed upon black agency. The novel ultimately prioritizes a politics of cultural memory over racial “uplift” ideologies. Disclosing a darker and more deterministic element of automatism than W.E.B. Du Bois’s “double consciousness,” this essay demonstrates how the figure of the black automaton provides an uncanny lens through which the complex legacies of slavery, miscegenation, and historical trauma can be witnessed.
An Editorial Introduction to issue 10 of theory@buffalo (an interdisciplinary journal of theory a... more An Editorial Introduction to issue 10 of theory@buffalo (an interdisciplinary journal of theory and criticism).