Research & Innovation

In progress.

[Volume in progress.]

This chapter tracks the emergence of modern Black nationalism in the mid-twentieth century and exposes how it is a discourse concerned with redefining both racial and gender identity. Paying particular attention to the work of Black women writers, the essay illustrates how the interface of literature and politics under the aegis of Black nationalism becomes a space for exploring and disrupting gender ideologies. Gender politics provides a foundation for some articulations of Black nationalism through the hierarchical rhetoric of the ‘promise of protection’, in which women ostensibly trade safety for social power and agency. Through an analysis of Alice Walker’s short story collection In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women (1973), the essay illuminates the artistic engagement of nationalist thought and showcases the danger and falseness of the promise of protection, showing both the potential and limits of the influential social logic of nationalism.

Eds. Matthew C. Augustine, Giulio J. Pertile, and Steven N. Zwicker (Oxford University Press, 2022).

This essay argues that Andrew Marvell's Last Instructions to a Painter should be read as a critique and an evasion of knowingness--of the feeling of contented possession that stands in for knowledge and so renders thinking superfluous. The poem suggests that sexuality is a domain of human experience from which ideologies of self-evidence draw affective strength. Marvell holds up for comparison two ignominious experiences of knowing incuriosity: the conventionalized version of sexual pleasure in which desire is simply and conclusively gratified and the form of pseudo-understanding in which you seem to discover what in fact you presuppose. On the basis of Marvell's diagnosis and rejection of a culture of incuriosity, he casts a suspicious gaze on his own practice of political satire, which depends on thoughtless sexualization. Finally, Marvell seeks an escape from the realm of self-evidence in an experience of hyperbolic naïveté in which everything everyone assumes--about, in the first place, sexuality, but also about everything else--melts into air.

It argues that the novel employs and challenges recognizable Civil Rights and Black Power discourses of social change to destabilize institutionalized racism and socio-economic discrimination and to begin to imagine untested paths to resistance. The chapter also considers how Greenlee uses espionage to reconfigure familiar political ideals and modes of leadership and to explore how the imagined integration of the CIA becomes a device for critiquing employment discrimination and the state’s half-hearted deployment of affirmative action. It closes by showing how spy training and spycraft offer Greenlee opportunities to rethink the connections among gender, sexuality, and revolution, while additionally illustrating how heterosexual masculinity dominates the space of the revolutionary. Through the frame of espionage, Greenlee reimagines Black identity and activism.

Editors: Julia Lupton and Donovan Sherman.

Cambridge University Press, forthcoming fall 2022.

This essay identifies and anatomizes a cruel rite of friendship. In 1 Henry IV, Hal bullies Falstaff by inducing him to fail. Yet the play frames Hal’s comic brutality as an expression of fondness. Because Hal understands Falstaff’s failures as occasions for self-display, he also sees them as opportunities to savor what is distinctive about his friend’s personality. Hal also interprets Falstaff’s ineptitude as evidence of stuckness and thus of the durability of his character. For his part, Falstaff’s readiness to perform shamelessness seems to lower the stakes of his ongoing humiliation; he is habituated to helplessness. The essay concludes by considering some of the reasons for which Shakespeare might have chosen to narrate the development of trust against the contrastive background of ethical obligation. In a speculative mode, I suggest that any ethical program that does not prioritize the leveling of hierarchy over the inculcation of virtue—any ethical program that is not also (and, indeed, primarily) a politics—will inevitably remain bound up with social subordination. As long as virtue is not the object of collective negotiation but rather an imposition from on high, it will encourage confused and abusive responses such as Hal’s bid for solidarity in wildness. It is telling that Shakespeare locates the resistance to virtue even in the very person who benefits most from the values it reproduces.

Nat McGartland and Shannon Neal will bring Book Arts workshops to the Teens Action Group at the Hyattsville Branch this Spring. By bringing tools, materials, and touchable examples to our workshops, we aim to make Book Arts accessible following the CAARES principles of equity and equal access. Workshops will include: letterpress printing, book binding, paper making, creating bookmarks and postcards, and engaging with reading and writing through experimental poetry. These workshops aim to build leadership skills, creative confidence, artistic skills, and engagement with the humanities outside of a test-based environment.

Considered by some to be the greatest novel of the twenty-first century, Helen DeWitt’s brilliant The Last Samurai tells the story of Sibylla, an Oxford-educated single mother raising a possible child prodigy, Ludo. Disappointed when he meets his biological father, the boy decides that he can do better. Inspired by Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, he embarks on a quixotic, moving quest to find a suitable father. The novel’s cult-classic status did not come easy: it underwent a notoriously tortuous publication process and briefly went out of print.

Lee Konstantinou combines a riveting reading of The Last Samurai with a behind-the-scenes look at DeWitt’s fraught experiences with corporate publishing. He shows how interpreting the ambition and richness of DeWitt’s work in light of her struggles with literary institutions provides a potent social critique. The novel helps us think about our capacity for learning and creativity, revealing the constraints that capitalism and material deprivation impose on intellectual flourishing. Drawing on interviews with DeWitt and other key figures, Konstantinou explores the book’s composition and its history with Talk Miramax Books, the publishing arm of Bob and Harvey Weinstein’s media empire. He argues that The Last Samurai allegorizes its troubled relationship with the institutions and middlemen that ferried it into the world. What’s ultimately at stake in Ludo’s quest is not only who might make a good father but also how we might fulfill our potential in a world that often seems cruelly designed to thwart that very possibility.

Forthcoming: Fall, 2022.

This essay aims to understand the relationship between feeling and attention in gendered experiences of evaluative perception. Juxtaposing Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” with ancient and early modern descriptions of laughter, humor, and comedy, I develop a new reading of this poem in which unserious or gratuitous attention is identified with gender subordination. Marvell’s poem confuses the hierarchy of significance on which comic misogyny depends. I conclude by identifying some of the cultural-historical reasons that the scene of heteroerotic encounter makes sense as a point of departure for Marvell’s experiment in levity.

This article articulates how an epistemology of ignorance structures the postcolonial metropolitan critic’s knowledge about a particular fraught state in India, Assam. Using the term agnotology, coined by Robert Proctor, rather than agniology, it examines two novels, Missing by Bengali writer Sumana Roy and The House with a Thousand Stories by Assamese novelist and poet Aruni Kashyap, to show that, despite their crucial differences in form, style, and narration, both novels use a locally inflected English language to tell stories about how rumor and gossip destroy families and communities living in the shadow of insurgencies and state violence. The Anglophone metropolitan postcolonial critic’s often-shallow knowledge about a region, its literature and deep politics, and their many rationalizations about why it is so, dovetails with the manner in which lies, exaggerated and fake news, shape and produce what counts as knowledge in these Indian Anglophone novels. Both works evoke the failure of a poetics and politics of familial and extrafamilial relations to underline how death and the disappearance of women from families, from society, and from the news enable a comparison of the inventive engagements with gender to understand the relationship of ignorance to truth.