2023–24 Grant Recipients
- Early Modern Critical Race
- Aesthetics and Politics in Critical Theory: Totalities, Ruptures, Forms
- Queer of Color Disabilities Studies Reading Collective
EARLY MODERN CRITICAL RACE
Over the past two years, scholars of Critical Race Theory have vitally reshaped the academy's understanding of early modernity. Among other works, Noemie Ndiaye's Scripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race (2022), Urvashi Chakravarty's Fictions of Consent: Slavery, Servitude, and Free Service in Early Modern England (2022), Miles Grier's Inkface: Othello and White Authority in the Era of Atlantic Slavery (2023), and Emily Weissbourd's Bad Blood: Staging Race Between Early Modern England and Spain (2023) have all taken on the interdisciplinary task of understanding race as a socially constructed concept across languages and cultures. Confronting the so-called "Age of Discovery" and the beginnings of the transatlantic slave trade, these works not only show the importance of demystifying race in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries but also the ways in which those constructions continue to underpin our current structures of power.
Curiously, most of these recent or forthcoming texts use drama and performance as the springboard for their studies of early modern racial logic. This observation becomes even more curious knowing that earlier texts in the field, e.g. Kim Hall's Things of Darkness (1995) and the collection Women, 'Race,' and Writing in the Early Modern Period (ed.Margo Hendricks, Patricia Parker, 1993), analyzed a much broader selection of forms like lyric poetry, prose fiction, and philosophy. What is it about drama, then, that has become a particularly compelling vector for contemporary studies on the topic? Is it simply its significance as the primary mode of entertainment during the period that gives drama its meaning-making power? Does performance help underscore the performativity or construction of race itself? Or is it something else?
These questions, among others, will guide our group as we read these newly released texts alongside publications that have become foundational to the field, such as Geraldine Heng's The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (2018). Additionally, our group will discuss pedagogical pieces, such as selections from Dadabhoy and Mehdizadeh's Anti- Racist Shakespeare (2023), to inform and add nuance to our approaches in the classroom.
In our research on literature, visual culture, and history, we approach our objects of study from interdisciplinary lenses. From indigenous studies to gender and sexuality studies, each of us brings unique theoretical perspectives to this collaboration. While our primary texts center performance, our secondary readings take their methodological approaches from a wide range of fields including history, philosophy, Black feminism, and cultural studies.
With the support of The Institute for Comparative Modernities, this reading group will equip us with deeper understandings of race as a technology of power in the early modern period. We look forward to capitalizing on this exciting moment in scholarship to critically examine how early modernity - and the way we study it - has always been bound to the construction of race.
Members
Miranda G. Castro—Department of Literatures in English
Rocío Corral García—Department of Literatures in English
Margaux Delaney—Department of Literatures in English
Laura Francis—Department of Literatures in English
Montse Chenyun Li—Department of Romance Studies, Spanish
Austin J. Raetz—Department of History
Colin Stragar-Rice—Department of Literatures in English
Riccardo Samà—Department of Romances Studies, Italian
Sara Stamatiades—Department of Literatures in English
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Aesthetics and Politics in Critical Theory: Totalities, Ruptures, Forms
If there is any silver lining to the increasing slashing of art and humanities budgets across institutional levels alongside legislative efforts to suppress certain kinds of cultural and intellectual activity, it is that this alarming trend serves to reassert the connection between art and politics in our moment of socioeconomic and climatological crisis. The need to figure the link between aesthetic forms and social realities remains as one of the central problematics of critical and cultural studies. As the process of cultural production is once again imperiled, the need to reexamine this relationship acquires new valence and urgency. The interrelation of aesthetics and politics has been theorized as mimetic or contradictory, or a permutation of both, but in all cases critics posit a formal connection between the work of art and the facts of sociopolitical life. Thus, in the words of Jacques Rancière,“[t]he important thing is that the question of the relationship between aesthetics and politics be raised at this level, the level of the sensible delimitation of what is common to the community, the forms of its visibility and of its organization” (18).
In this reading group, we will examine how thinkers across three theoretical traditions, broadly defined as Marxist critique, post-structuralism, and “strategic formalism” (Levine), interrogate the intersection between aesthetics and politics. We will investigate the relationship between totality and rupture, abstraction and particularity with special attention to form. In so doing, we may follow Caroline Levine’s articulation of a formalism that is “deconstructive in that it acknowledges the political perils of abstractions, of binaries, of apparently transhistorical forms, while also presuming that we cannot do without them” (“Strategic” 633). We will consider how the three conceptual foci—totalities, ruptures, forms—are positioned in relationship to each other. How do these concepts emerge as useful categories for theorizing across the spectrum of politics, aesthetics, literature, philosophy, history, and political economy? What is the relationship between social, political, and literary structures? How can we understand the connections between material and cultural forms? What are the crosscurrents among the different ways of thinking about these questions?
This reading group aims to engage its members in interdisciplinary and collaborative research across the humanities with the understanding that intellectual work does not occur in silos, and that theory has extensive applications across fields and disciplines. We bring together students from the Departments of Literatures in English, Comparative Literature, German Studies, and Romance Studies to explore how these theoretical constellations can inform our individual research.
Members
Maria Al-Raes—Department of Literatures in English
Connie Perez-Cruz— Department of Comparative Literature
Daniella Prieto— Department of Romance Studies
Aditi Shenoy—Department of Literatures in English
Martina Villalobos—Department of German Studies
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QUEER OF COLOR DISABILITIES STUDIES READING COLLECTIVE
How does disability as a methodology reorient the way we read race, gender, sexuality, class, and other social formations across different geographies? In the last decade, growing scholarship in queer and crip studies has configured theoretical interventions that attend directly to vulnerability, state-sanctioned precarity, interdependency, and alterity. This body of work moves beyond literature that pathologizes disability as an abnormality or situates disability solely within the narrow empiricism of medicine. In this newer formulation, disability studies unsettles normative social, cultural, and political formations. It reveals how institutions operate to produce exclusive ideas of bodies and being. It unveils how normative politics of the body arrive from myriad legacies of colonization and racialization; legitimate a discriminatory respectability politics; subsume capitalist accumulation under logics of productivity and cognition; concretize gender norms in hetero- and homo- normativity. In the midst of many interventions of disability studies, our working group intends to explore what Jina B. Kim argues crip-of-color critique can achieve: “shifting disability from noun—an identity one can occupy—to verb: a critical methodology” (2017). Following this suggestion, our Reading Collective draws across disciplines to read for disability as a critical positioning that provides insights to the institutionalization of difference. In works of history, essayistic nonfiction, speculative fiction, science studies, poetry, cultural studies, and anthropology, the bibliography we have gathered provides an expansive ground for reading disability as a contemporary methodology. With this set of authors, we ask: how do we read across boundaries imposed by area studies, literary genre, and academic disciplines to theorize the coalitional potentials of disability studies? To begin, we examine the norms of able-bodiedness, heterosexuality, and cognitive capacity which have attended ongoing histories of colonization (Corañez Bolton 2023; Chen 2023). We then turn our attention to place, nature, and the modes of production which undergird the formation of these bodily norms (Livingston 2005; Moran-Thomas 2019). In this space, we shift to literary and visual humanities to ask what orientations are needed to move towards radical systems of repair (Alland, Sandra, ed. 2017; Peipzna-Samarasinha 2018 & 2022). Within these readings, the fraught discursive spaces in which bodies are constructed takes us to disability scholarship that foreground gender and sexuality (Awkward-Rich 2022; Kim 2017). Finally, a commitment to embodied knowledge takes us to works that provincialize epistemologies of sight and vision (Ballestero 2019). As with the scholars in our bibliography, the members of this Reading Collective are oriented to different fields of study, spanning anthropology, history, science & technology studies, and creative writing. We will query across our divergent interests and empirical research how and what it means to locate disability in normative practices – that is to say, in everyday life.
Members
Alena Zhang—Department of Science and Technology Studies
Charlie Wang — Department of History
Yui Sasajima—Department of Anthropology
Maz Do— Creative Writing Program
Vishal Nyayapathi — Department of Science and Technology Studies
Nia Whitmal— Department of Anthropology
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