James Bliss | Tulane University (original) (raw)
Papers by James Bliss
WSQ, 2024
Recent works in and around Black feminist and queer studies have explored the figure of unbearabl... more Recent works in and around Black feminist and queer studies have explored the figure of unbearable life through different forms of forgetting. A forgetting attends every act of conceptual or cultural invention, but forgetting also marks a range of cognitive deteriorations in and around experiences of disability, death, and dying. Working between the discourses of afro-fabulation, afropessimism, and Black feminism, the article details the ways every act of invention is also a form of forgetting, and every instance of loss is also a form of creativity. Afro-fabulation, as one name for a Black queer mode of invention, is at once a mode of creating bearable forms of life from abjection, and a form of forgetting. In their shared attention to cognitive deterioration and death as forms of loss, Black feminism and afropessimism open space for reckoning with the impermanence and indeterminacy central to the Black radical tradition.
Feminist Formations, 2016
Feminist Theory, 2023
The present contribution reflects on the stakes of Robyn Wiegman's Object Lessons (2012) in the w... more The present contribution reflects on the stakes of Robyn Wiegman's Object Lessons (2012) in the wake of a long era of austerity in American higher education. It reflects further on the history of discourses on the relationship between the practice of criticism and radical politics.
Feminist Studies, 2021
The essay explores the themes of 'defense,' 'redemption,' and 'care,' in recent work in Black fem... more The essay explores the themes of 'defense,' 'redemption,' and 'care,' in recent work in Black feminist and queer studies. The piece engages with recent books by Jennifer C. Nash, Stephen Best, Amber Jamilla Musser, and Kara Keeling. It begins with an exposition of 'theory' as a contemporary genre of academic writing, and closes with the figure of 'invention' in contemporary theorizations around Blackness and antiblackness.
Feminist Formations, 2020
This article presents reflections on the contemporary academic workplace from two junior scholars... more This article presents reflections on the contemporary academic workplace from two junior scholars working with Black feminism in interdisciplinary contexts. We reflect on our own interactions with two Black feminist “classics” Conditions V: The Black Women’s Issue (1979), co-edited by Lorraine Bethel and Barbara Smith, and Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (1983), edited by Barbara Smith, and consider the challenges of teaching Black feminism in the classroom. We discuss both our experiences as education professionals working within and against hostile institutions, and our experiences in the classroom. We explore the dynamics of teaching Black feminist theorizing in an increasingly financialized and securitized environment, where our students’ desires for economic security index a worsening precarity they share with us. In the face of these desires for security, we explore what of the Black feminist tradition resists any reduction to the brutalizing logics of racial capitalism.
Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International, 2019
From a reading of the published diary writings of Beverly Smith, Black lesbian feminist activist ... more From a reading of the published diary writings of Beverly Smith, Black lesbian feminist activist and member of the Combahee River Collective, this piece explores common ground between psychoanalytic theorizations of mourning and desire and histories of Black lesbian feminism.
This article offers a reading of the spatial politics of Black feminist theorizing to examine rec... more This article offers a reading of the spatial politics of Black feminist theorizing to examine recent critiques of intersectionality produced under the heading of “assemblage theory,” especially in the work of Jasbir Puar. I argue that these critiques reductively produce intersectionality as a spatial metaphor that locates and fixes compound subjects, a fixing complicit with the work of the national security state. Intervening in these critiques of intersectionality, the article traces alternative theorizations of spatiality and subjectivity internal to Kimberlé Crenshaw’s work, extending them through Hortense Spillers’s theorization of the interstice as the nonsite of the Black female subject. In this rereading of Crenshaw through Spillers, I explore how intersectionality belongs not only to a tradition of Black feminist theorizing on particularity and compoundedness but to a tradition of Black feminist theorizing on placelessness, singularity, and absence. Rather than bolster oppressive institutions through liberal models of inclusion, Black feminism names a monstrous potential to disrupt and to disappear within institutional space.
Feminist Formations, 2016
Many scholars deploy the term corporate university to describe a set of shifts within higher educ... more Many scholars deploy the term corporate university to describe a set of shifts within higher education, including the ubiquity of market logics and outcomes assessment in administration, the mounting student-debt crisis, the growth of adjunct labor, the ethic of market-driven learning, and the branding of the university. Indeed, many argue that the corporatization of the university disproportionately affects fields like women's studies that are already precariously situated in the university. As many feminist and queer scholars critique the corporate university, women's studies has created its own institutional forms (including graduate certificates, master's programs, and PhD programs) and has an institutional life that includes the circulation of feminist analytics (for example, intersectionality, transnational, and
The Black subject in Lee Edelman’s queer negativity is explored here as both absent from and prod... more The Black subject in Lee Edelman’s queer negativity is explored here as both absent from and productive of its most radical critiques of futurity. The essay attempts to read a different queer negativity within the tradition of Black feminist theorizing.
Teaching Documents by James Bliss
This is the class I've taught the most at Tulane. I'm always exploring how to sequence and paid t... more This is the class I've taught the most at Tulane. I'm always exploring how to sequence and paid texts, and I try to gauge which readings are challenging students productively and which readings students just won't engage with. Sometimes with those latter readings I just have to find better ways to teach them, better ways to get students into the text. And sometimes it's better to find another text.
My 'technology analysis' class this semester has the same basic units as past iterations: introdu... more My 'technology analysis' class this semester has the same basic units as past iterations: introductions to critical media studies, science and technology studies, and political economy; then reframing those fields with particular attention to dynamics of race, gender, sexuality, and ability; and recent work on surveillance, computing, and financialization. This semester I decided to include Adrian Daub's book What Tech Calls Thinking because it fits in really well with the concerns of students in past versions of the class.
This is an update of an intro-level class I taught at Irvine. Here it's an advanced undergraduate... more This is an update of an intro-level class I taught at Irvine. Here it's an advanced undergraduate seminar. The opening weeks cover some of the conceptual and historical background for contemporary theorizing on antiblackness. The latter half of the class engages with that contemporary work with an eye toward getting a sense of the breadth and complexity of theorizations of race.
In the previous iteration of the course, I learned a lot about where my students experienced diff... more In the previous iteration of the course, I learned a lot about where my students experienced different types of resistance to the course materials. I revised the reading schedule to continue to challenge students in useful ways and moved away from some of the material that felt counterproductive for the students. That's always the gambit with teaching about the politics of culture. I also wanted to expand the ways the class engaged with transnational and postcolonial feminisms. Surprisingly, a lot of energy went into re-imagining the class from MWF to TTh--a sneaky bit of logistics!
In this iteration of the class, I had a much better sense for the rhythm of the semester and how ... more In this iteration of the class, I had a much better sense for the rhythm of the semester and how different units could flow into each other. In the previous semester, I took note of texts that had a lot to say to each other and revised my reading schedule to accentuate those resonances. This class had much higher enrollments than the previous iteration, which changed the nature of the conversations in the classroom. I was glad to have the previous semester's experience with the reading because it helped give more structure to our larger conversations (the previous semester had much more space for discovery, for wandering around the texts). As an aside, the readings for this class and the conversations in the room helped me formulate the arguments I made in my forthcoming essays "The Sea Birds, Still" and "Learn Futility."
This course taught me a lot about a student population I was working with for the first time. For... more This course taught me a lot about a student population I was working with for the first time. For this class, I decided to lean into the overlap between cultural studies and critical ethnic studies. I also did a lot of work developing and fine tuning my 'Uneven U' assignments. There was definitely a learning curve for me and the students, but a number of students described feeling more confident with reading and writing academic prose by the end of the term.
This teaching assignment ('technology analysis') was right at the edge of my wheelhouse. My engag... more This teaching assignment ('technology analysis') was right at the edge of my wheelhouse. My engagement with science and technology studies has occurred mainly through my editing and consulting work. For this course, I wanted to introduce students to important work in STS and political economy while also keeping an eye on what scholars in Black studies, disability studies, and feminist and queer studies have had to offer for the political economy of contemporary technology.
This version of the course makes greater use of Black feminist historiography. In the past, the u... more This version of the course makes greater use of Black feminist historiography. In the past, the unit on Angela Davis, Assata Shakur, and the Combahee River Collective would include a gloss of Black women's social and political organizing across the 20th century. This year, I decided to move that unit to right after the midterm and use the middle part of the course to examine different facets of that history. The course moves from the 1970s back to the turn of the 20th century before returning to the present.
OVERVIEW This course is an interdisciplinary introduction to important historical, cultural, lite... more OVERVIEW This course is an interdisciplinary introduction to important historical, cultural, literary, and political issues concerning African Americans. Through critical readings of literary, historical, and critical texts, this course provides an overview of the historical and cultural experiences of African Americans from before the 15th century to today. Beginning with a conceptual overview of slavery as a distinct relation of domination, students will proceed to examine the emergence of modern racial slavery and the retrenchment of racial oppression following the formal abolition of slavery. With special focus on Black feminist, queer, and trans* activism, the course will explore struggles for social transformation and resistance by African Americans in the United States.
WSQ, 2024
Recent works in and around Black feminist and queer studies have explored the figure of unbearabl... more Recent works in and around Black feminist and queer studies have explored the figure of unbearable life through different forms of forgetting. A forgetting attends every act of conceptual or cultural invention, but forgetting also marks a range of cognitive deteriorations in and around experiences of disability, death, and dying. Working between the discourses of afro-fabulation, afropessimism, and Black feminism, the article details the ways every act of invention is also a form of forgetting, and every instance of loss is also a form of creativity. Afro-fabulation, as one name for a Black queer mode of invention, is at once a mode of creating bearable forms of life from abjection, and a form of forgetting. In their shared attention to cognitive deterioration and death as forms of loss, Black feminism and afropessimism open space for reckoning with the impermanence and indeterminacy central to the Black radical tradition.
Feminist Formations, 2016
Feminist Theory, 2023
The present contribution reflects on the stakes of Robyn Wiegman's Object Lessons (2012) in the w... more The present contribution reflects on the stakes of Robyn Wiegman's Object Lessons (2012) in the wake of a long era of austerity in American higher education. It reflects further on the history of discourses on the relationship between the practice of criticism and radical politics.
Feminist Studies, 2021
The essay explores the themes of 'defense,' 'redemption,' and 'care,' in recent work in Black fem... more The essay explores the themes of 'defense,' 'redemption,' and 'care,' in recent work in Black feminist and queer studies. The piece engages with recent books by Jennifer C. Nash, Stephen Best, Amber Jamilla Musser, and Kara Keeling. It begins with an exposition of 'theory' as a contemporary genre of academic writing, and closes with the figure of 'invention' in contemporary theorizations around Blackness and antiblackness.
Feminist Formations, 2020
This article presents reflections on the contemporary academic workplace from two junior scholars... more This article presents reflections on the contemporary academic workplace from two junior scholars working with Black feminism in interdisciplinary contexts. We reflect on our own interactions with two Black feminist “classics” Conditions V: The Black Women’s Issue (1979), co-edited by Lorraine Bethel and Barbara Smith, and Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (1983), edited by Barbara Smith, and consider the challenges of teaching Black feminism in the classroom. We discuss both our experiences as education professionals working within and against hostile institutions, and our experiences in the classroom. We explore the dynamics of teaching Black feminist theorizing in an increasingly financialized and securitized environment, where our students’ desires for economic security index a worsening precarity they share with us. In the face of these desires for security, we explore what of the Black feminist tradition resists any reduction to the brutalizing logics of racial capitalism.
Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International, 2019
From a reading of the published diary writings of Beverly Smith, Black lesbian feminist activist ... more From a reading of the published diary writings of Beverly Smith, Black lesbian feminist activist and member of the Combahee River Collective, this piece explores common ground between psychoanalytic theorizations of mourning and desire and histories of Black lesbian feminism.
This article offers a reading of the spatial politics of Black feminist theorizing to examine rec... more This article offers a reading of the spatial politics of Black feminist theorizing to examine recent critiques of intersectionality produced under the heading of “assemblage theory,” especially in the work of Jasbir Puar. I argue that these critiques reductively produce intersectionality as a spatial metaphor that locates and fixes compound subjects, a fixing complicit with the work of the national security state. Intervening in these critiques of intersectionality, the article traces alternative theorizations of spatiality and subjectivity internal to Kimberlé Crenshaw’s work, extending them through Hortense Spillers’s theorization of the interstice as the nonsite of the Black female subject. In this rereading of Crenshaw through Spillers, I explore how intersectionality belongs not only to a tradition of Black feminist theorizing on particularity and compoundedness but to a tradition of Black feminist theorizing on placelessness, singularity, and absence. Rather than bolster oppressive institutions through liberal models of inclusion, Black feminism names a monstrous potential to disrupt and to disappear within institutional space.
Feminist Formations, 2016
Many scholars deploy the term corporate university to describe a set of shifts within higher educ... more Many scholars deploy the term corporate university to describe a set of shifts within higher education, including the ubiquity of market logics and outcomes assessment in administration, the mounting student-debt crisis, the growth of adjunct labor, the ethic of market-driven learning, and the branding of the university. Indeed, many argue that the corporatization of the university disproportionately affects fields like women's studies that are already precariously situated in the university. As many feminist and queer scholars critique the corporate university, women's studies has created its own institutional forms (including graduate certificates, master's programs, and PhD programs) and has an institutional life that includes the circulation of feminist analytics (for example, intersectionality, transnational, and
The Black subject in Lee Edelman’s queer negativity is explored here as both absent from and prod... more The Black subject in Lee Edelman’s queer negativity is explored here as both absent from and productive of its most radical critiques of futurity. The essay attempts to read a different queer negativity within the tradition of Black feminist theorizing.
This is the class I've taught the most at Tulane. I'm always exploring how to sequence and paid t... more This is the class I've taught the most at Tulane. I'm always exploring how to sequence and paid texts, and I try to gauge which readings are challenging students productively and which readings students just won't engage with. Sometimes with those latter readings I just have to find better ways to teach them, better ways to get students into the text. And sometimes it's better to find another text.
My 'technology analysis' class this semester has the same basic units as past iterations: introdu... more My 'technology analysis' class this semester has the same basic units as past iterations: introductions to critical media studies, science and technology studies, and political economy; then reframing those fields with particular attention to dynamics of race, gender, sexuality, and ability; and recent work on surveillance, computing, and financialization. This semester I decided to include Adrian Daub's book What Tech Calls Thinking because it fits in really well with the concerns of students in past versions of the class.
This is an update of an intro-level class I taught at Irvine. Here it's an advanced undergraduate... more This is an update of an intro-level class I taught at Irvine. Here it's an advanced undergraduate seminar. The opening weeks cover some of the conceptual and historical background for contemporary theorizing on antiblackness. The latter half of the class engages with that contemporary work with an eye toward getting a sense of the breadth and complexity of theorizations of race.
In the previous iteration of the course, I learned a lot about where my students experienced diff... more In the previous iteration of the course, I learned a lot about where my students experienced different types of resistance to the course materials. I revised the reading schedule to continue to challenge students in useful ways and moved away from some of the material that felt counterproductive for the students. That's always the gambit with teaching about the politics of culture. I also wanted to expand the ways the class engaged with transnational and postcolonial feminisms. Surprisingly, a lot of energy went into re-imagining the class from MWF to TTh--a sneaky bit of logistics!
In this iteration of the class, I had a much better sense for the rhythm of the semester and how ... more In this iteration of the class, I had a much better sense for the rhythm of the semester and how different units could flow into each other. In the previous semester, I took note of texts that had a lot to say to each other and revised my reading schedule to accentuate those resonances. This class had much higher enrollments than the previous iteration, which changed the nature of the conversations in the classroom. I was glad to have the previous semester's experience with the reading because it helped give more structure to our larger conversations (the previous semester had much more space for discovery, for wandering around the texts). As an aside, the readings for this class and the conversations in the room helped me formulate the arguments I made in my forthcoming essays "The Sea Birds, Still" and "Learn Futility."
This course taught me a lot about a student population I was working with for the first time. For... more This course taught me a lot about a student population I was working with for the first time. For this class, I decided to lean into the overlap between cultural studies and critical ethnic studies. I also did a lot of work developing and fine tuning my 'Uneven U' assignments. There was definitely a learning curve for me and the students, but a number of students described feeling more confident with reading and writing academic prose by the end of the term.
This teaching assignment ('technology analysis') was right at the edge of my wheelhouse. My engag... more This teaching assignment ('technology analysis') was right at the edge of my wheelhouse. My engagement with science and technology studies has occurred mainly through my editing and consulting work. For this course, I wanted to introduce students to important work in STS and political economy while also keeping an eye on what scholars in Black studies, disability studies, and feminist and queer studies have had to offer for the political economy of contemporary technology.
This version of the course makes greater use of Black feminist historiography. In the past, the u... more This version of the course makes greater use of Black feminist historiography. In the past, the unit on Angela Davis, Assata Shakur, and the Combahee River Collective would include a gloss of Black women's social and political organizing across the 20th century. This year, I decided to move that unit to right after the midterm and use the middle part of the course to examine different facets of that history. The course moves from the 1970s back to the turn of the 20th century before returning to the present.
OVERVIEW This course is an interdisciplinary introduction to important historical, cultural, lite... more OVERVIEW This course is an interdisciplinary introduction to important historical, cultural, literary, and political issues concerning African Americans. Through critical readings of literary, historical, and critical texts, this course provides an overview of the historical and cultural experiences of African Americans from before the 15th century to today. Beginning with a conceptual overview of slavery as a distinct relation of domination, students will proceed to examine the emergence of modern racial slavery and the retrenchment of racial oppression following the formal abolition of slavery. With special focus on Black feminist, queer, and trans* activism, the course will explore struggles for social transformation and resistance by African Americans in the United States.