Please join us on Zoom for our final event of the Spring 2021 semester as we host Mlondi Zondi for a discussion of his work-in-progress, “Domestic Servitude and the Ruse of Care,” on Friday, April 16th, at 10:00 am CST. To confirm attendance and receive a copy of the pre-circulated paper, please write to Mel Micir (mmicir@wustl.edu).

Abstract: There has been a drive in academic discourse and artistic venues towards recuperating the “heroic” status of the domestic servant. This exaltation is often in recognition of domestic servants’ tact and endurance in spaces not meant for their survival, as they admirably go through fire to provide for their families. This paper posits that this celebration reinstitutes Black domestic servants back to a position instantiated through coercion and force. As a reading of contemporary South African aesthetics, it elaborates upon opaque and non-spectacular ways in which Black women in particular are brutalized by, and forced to perpetually resist, anti-black terror within the domestic enclosure. Terms such as “care,” “mothering,” “domesticity” are all placed under critical scrutiny.

Bio: Currently an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for the Humanities at Wesleyan University, Mlondolozi (Mlondi) Zondi is a scholar and interdisciplinary artist whose research focuses on contemporary Black performance and art history. Currently, Mlondi is working on a book project titled Unmournable Void, a study of critical artistic practices that tend to the historical conditions of anti-black violence resulting from transatlantic slavery, colonialism, and apartheid. The manuscript approaches questions of matter, mourning, and ontological absence through an engagement with revolutionary Black thought, psychoanalytic theories, art history/visual studies, and dance/performance theory. Mlondi completed a PhD in Performance Studies at Northwestern University (with certificates in Critical Theory, African Studies, and Gender and Sexuality Studies). The dissertation project received support from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. Prior to attending Northwestern, Mlondi received an M.F.A in Dance as a Fulbright scholar at the University of California, Irvine; and a BA (Hons) cum laude in Cultural Studies and Performance Studies from the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal in South Africa. Mlondi’s work has been published in The Drama Review (TDR), ASAP Journal, Text and Performance Quarterly, and Propter Nos.

For our next event of the Spring 2021 semester, we will be joined by Sarah Osment, a lecturer at New College of Florida who works on 20th- and 21st-century US literature, poetry and poetics, and environmental humanities. She is a founding coeditor of Hyped on Melancholy and a breath of fresh air on Twitter. To receive the pre-circulated paper and the zoom invitation for this session, please write to Mel Micir at mmicir@wustl.edu. We hope you’ll join us!

Abstract: What is an aesthetic atmosphere? How does one account for that which seems to reside neither squarely within an artwork nor outside it? And what critical purchase might this dimension of aesthetic experience offer in a moment marked by ecological crisis? This paper takes up these questions in the context of their treatment by two contemporary poets, Lisa Robertson and Cheena Marie Lo, for whom the term functions unevenly. Tracking the figural and material registers of atmosphere in The Weather (2001) and A Series of Un/Natural/Disasters (2016), I examine the genres of relationality and precarity signaled by this notoriously elusive dimension of aesthetic experience. To read these works in light of their atmospheric qualities is to attend to the still-unfolding histories of exclusion and dispossession entangled in the air; at the same time, it captures the inevitably mediated nature of the ecosystems they represent.

Please join us on Zoom for our first event of the Spring 2021 semester as we host a discussion of Joan Lubin’s work-in-progress, “Novel Cops,” on Friday, February 12th, at 10:00 am CST. To confirm attendance and receive the pre-circulated paper we’ll be discussing, please write to Mel Micir (mmicir@wustl.edu).

Abstract: “Novel Cops” is a methodological meditation on the media regulatory systems relating the novel and the police in midcentury America. Taking my cues from Pat Parker’s poem from the early 1970s -- “In English Lit., they told me / Kafka was good / because he created / the best nightmares ever -- / I think I should / go find that professor / & ask why / we didn’t study / the S.F. Police Dept” -- this article-in-progress asks what our reading practices might look like if, instead of following D.A. Miller into the realm of discursive disciplinary power, we set out to study the nightmarish creativity of the local police forces whose ambivalent relation to their own social status impinged on literary production and reception materially, conceptually, and consequentially in historically and regionally specific ways. Parker’s poem suggestively avers that literary value discourse (appraisals of “good” authors, or “the best nightmares ever”) can confound our capacities to locate or reconcile the force of the cops in the making of the canon and its study. I turn to the SFPD’s late-1950s crusade against the Beat poets of North Beach, and to one of its particularly telling battlegrounds: the pornographic novel Sex Life of a Cop (Saber Press, 1958). Sex Life of a Cop is an illustrative case study notable for both its representation/thematization of the cops and for its active policing by the cops, the postal service, and ultimately the courts, over the course of a decade of pivotal transformations in obscenity law. While the novel represents exclusively heterosexual sex and is clearly intended for a straight audience, it was published and distributed by homophile organizers in the Mattachine Society, revealing a tangled web of identitarian displacements and connected histories illuminated by the midcentury media systems that both facilitated and regulated the dissemination of subcultural, countercultural, and revolutionary discourses.

Bio: Joan Lubin is a visiting scholar at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University. She received her PhD in English at the University of Pennsylvania, and previously was Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Science & Literature at Cornell, and John Money Fellow for Scholars of Sexology at the Kinsey Institute. She is completing a book project, "Pulp Sexology," about the imprint of quantitative sexology on postwar literature and culture, and starting another, "Social Science Fictions," about the construction of science fiction as an object of literary critical attention and feature of English department curricula. Her research has appeared or is forthcoming in Post45, Women & Performance, New Literary History, and First Mondays. She is the editor of a special issue of Social Text, "Sexology and Its Afterlives," forthcoming this September.

We welcome Olivia Cosentino, who received her BA in Spanish and Latin American Studies from WashU before earning her PhD from Ohio State University, back to (virtual) campus for a discussion of her work-in-progress.

ABSTRACT: In the realms of both fiction and non-fiction, Mexican filmmakers have begun to push back against the hyper-aestheticized, “subjective” violence (Žižek 2007) that permeates contemporary print and media culture. This article is interested in the affective potency of a lack of sensationalism in cinematic explorations of violence, an inherent response to the graphic violent imaginary sustained by popular media like Narcos (GIT, 2015-7), Narcos: Mexico (GIT, 2018- ), City of God (Meirelles and Lund, 2002), and Amores perros (González Iñárritu, 2001). David Pablos’ fictional Las elegidas (The Chosen Ones, 2015) and Tatiana Huezo’s nonfiction Tempestad (2016) masterfully engage violence in Mexico without recreating it onscreen. Using a stylistic technique that I call the “disjuncture,” created formally by the jarring mismatch of visual and sonic elements, Las elegidas and Tempestad open affective circuits and expose viewers’ bodies to the virtual. Mobilizing Deleuzian and Massumian affect theory, I propose that these moments of the virtual offer spectators an embodied, ethics-driven understanding of the paradoxes of systemic, “objective” violence and quotidian impunity. This analysis engages disparate debates on affect, slow cinema, and the ethics of representing violence within both film and media studies and Mexican cultural studies, gesturing towards a growing constellation of “slower” Mexican cinema that portrays 21st century violences in innovative ways.

BIO: Olivia Cosentino recently completed her Ph.D. in Latin American Cultural and Literary Studies at The Ohio State University and is an Instructor of Spanish at the University of South Carolina. Her research focuses on aspects of affect, gender, spectatorship, and stardom in post-Golden Age and contemporary Mexican cinema and culture. Olivia has published with The Velvet Light Trap, iMex, and Journal of Cinema and Media Studies and has contributed chapters to The Routledge Companion to Gender, Sex and Latin American Culture and Domestic Labor in 21st Century Latin American Film. Her co-edited volume on the “lost” 1960s-80s Mexican cinema is under review at the University of Florida Press.

To receive the pre-circulated paper and the zoom invitation for this session, please write to Mel Micir at mmicir@wustl.edu. We hope you’ll join us!

During this workshop, we will be discussing a work-in-progress by Sarah Chihaya (title TBA). Sarah Chihaya earned her BA in English and French at Yale University and her PhD in Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley. She specializes in contemporary British and American fiction, and also works on twentieth- and twenty-first century French, German, and postcolonial Anglophone literatures. Her other research and teaching interests include film, narrative theory, adaptation, and genre fictions. She is currently at work on her first monograph, Begin Again: Rewriting Contemporary Fiction, which examines the role of rewriting in the British novel from 1980 to the present, in works by Peter Ackroyd, Kate Atkinson, A.S. Byatt, Ian McEwan, W.G. Sebald, Zadie Smith, and others. She is also editing and co-writing a collaborative volume, Collective Criticism: Reading Elena Ferrante (forthcoming from Columbia UP), with Merve Emre (Oxford University), Katherine Hill (Adelphi University), and Jill Richards (Yale University). With English Department colleagues Joshua Kotin and Kinohi Nishikawa, she organized “The Contemporary: Literature in the 21st-Century,” a major conference held at Princeton in 2016. Chihaya’s other recent writing can be found in Alluvium, ASAP/Journal, C21: Journal of 21st Century Writing, Modern Fiction Studies, Contemporary Literature, Public Books, Jezebel, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. She is the editor of Contemporaries at Post45. 

Please join us for breakfast and a lively discussion. As always, to receive more information and/or a copy of the essay to be discussed, please contact Melanie Micir (mmicir@wustl.edu).

During this workshop, we will be discussing Sarah Ensor’s work-in-progress, “Queer Half-Lives and the Poetics of Fallout.” Ensor is Assistant Professor in the Department of English and the Program in the Environment at the University of Michigan. She is currently at work on two book projects, Spinster Ecology: Rethinking Relation in the American Literary Environment, which considers how the figure of the spinster – and a spinsterly literary aesthetic – can help both to identify and to remedy the theoretical impasses that divide queer theory from ecocriticism, and Terminal Regions: Queer Environmental Ethics in the Absence of Futurity, which takes a range of queer practices characterized by temporariness and provisionality as inspiration for a model of environmental care that brackets questions of longevity and allows us to glimpse the immanent ethical possibilities of the present. Her work has been published in the ecocriticism special issue of American Literature, the pedagogy special issue of American Literature, Environmental Humanities, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, and the edited collection Against Life. With Susan (Scott) Parrish, she is co-editor of the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Environment. From 2012-2017, she was Assistant Professor of English at Portland State University in Portland, OR.

Please join us for breakfast and a fantastic discussion in 201 Umrath Hall. As always, please contact Melanie Micir (mmicir@wustl.edu) for more information and/or for a copy of the pre-circulated essay to be discussed.

In this seminar, we will be discussing "Cures from Within," an in-progress chapter of Anjuli Raza Kolb's current book project. Professor Kolb joins us from Williams College, where she teaches colonial and postcolonial literature. Her current book project considers historical and discursive points of connection between the discipline and narratives of epidemic, and the practices and representations of anti-colonial insurgency and terrorism in Europe, North Africa, and South Asia. She is also completing a collection of poems called Janaab-e Shikva, after the Pakistani poet Iqbal. 

Please join us for lunch and a fantastic discussion in 201 Umrath Hall. As always, please contact mmicir@wustl.edu to confirm attendance and receive a copy of the paper.

In this seminar, we will be discussion two works-in-progress: Cynthia Barounis's "The Biopolitics of Camp" and Julie Elman's "The Disability Politics of Zootopia: Mobility, Choice Feminism and the Rehabilitation of the Police." Coffee and pastries will be served. To confirm attendance and receive a copy of the essays, please contact mmicir@wustl.edu. 

Cynthia Barounis is a lecturer in the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Washington University in St. Louis where she teaches courses in queer theory, masculinities, and feminist disability studies. Her book, Vulnerable Constitutions: Queerness, Disability, and the Remaking of American Manhood, is forthcoming from Temple University Press.  In it, she explores the influence of sexual science on twentieth century American literary culture. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in GLQ, Women's Studies Quarterly, the Journal of Visual Culture, the Journal of Modern Literature, and others. Her current book project uses crip theory and biopolitics to revisit the camp aesthetic. She holds a PhD in English from the University of Illinois at Chicago. 

Julie Passanante Elman received her Ph.D. in American Studies from the George Washington University in 2009. She is currently Assistant Professor of Women's & Gender Studies at the University of Missouri. She previously served as Lecturer of Television Studies/Media Theory at University College Dublin (Republic of Ireland) and Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow of Gender and Sexuality Studies in New York University's Department of Social & Cultural Analysis. Elman’s research focuses broadly on disability studies; feminist and queer theory; science studies; and U.S. media and cultural history. Her monograph, Chronic Youth: Disability, Sexuality, and US Media Cultures of Rehabilitation (Social & Cultural Analysis Series, NYUP, 2014) shows how the representational figure of the teenager became a cultural touchstone for shifting notions of able-bodiedness, heteronormativity, and neoliberalism in the post-sexual liberation era. By analyzing how adolescence increasingly became represented as a disability, the book reveals how the teenager became a lynchpin for a US culture of perpetual rehabilitation and governmentality. She is currently working on a second monograph, Wearable You: Technology, Our Bodies, Ourselves, a cultural history of wearable technology that examines how disability, race, class, gender, and sexuality shape cultural ideas about the relationship among technology, health, and good citizenship. 

In this seminar, we will discuss Angela Naimou's Salvage Work: U.S. and Caribbean Literatures amid the Debris of Legal Personhood (Fordham University Press, 2015), which won the ASAP Book Prize in 2016. We will be joined by J. Dillon Brown, Associate Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis. To confirm attendance and receive a copy of the book, please contact mmicir@wustl.edu. 

In this seminar, we will be discussing two works-in-progress: Ignacio Sánchez Prado's "Fernanda Melchor: The Aesthetics of Latin Americanist Fiction in the Age of Late Neoliberalism" and Rachel Greenwald Smith's "Fuck the Avant Garde." Coffee and pastries will be served. To confirm attendance and receive a copy of the essays, please contact mmicir@wustl.edu.