Abstract: This paper engages what I term Abject Ontology, twinning together theories of embodiment and prosthesis in order to explore abjection as a mode of knowledge and being. My theory of Abject-Ontology has three major claims: first, the body is not discrete, nor does it exist without extensions, prosthetics, or relation to objects. Abject-ontology rejects the traditional psychoanalytic framework of the Self which asserts that subjects become subjects through marking themselves as distinct from others. In its place, the second claim of abject-ontology asserts that abject-subjects engage in self-making through connectivity and a blending between self and other. The third and final claim of abject-ontology is that abject-subjects do not experience a singular self, but one of variability. I will engage more specifically in an analysis of how the dehumanizing traps of trans embodiment offer a multiplicity of selfhood, not only a negated selfhood. Indeed, abject-ontology argues for a self-making outside the model of the Human.
I begin by rejecting the notion of the Subject, utilizing Sylvia Wynter’s work in Black Metamorphosis. I then lay bare the falsity of the subject/object binary in thinking with various gender and disability scholars, meditating specifically on the function of the Dildo. I explore how the abject-subject position allows for a fruitful subject/object collapse in Cameron Awkward-Rich’s “Essay on the Awkward/Black/Object.” I then think through the ways in which trans identity creates of a multitude of selves through Lena Nsomeka-Gomes’s short auto-biographical story “When I Was A Little Girl.” Finally, I imagine abjection as a force that not only stands to reduce and objectify, but as a mode of self-knowledge through Toni Morrison’s novel Sula.
Bio: Sam Davis is a trans critical theorist, literary scholar, filmmaker, and musician. His research is at the intersection of Trans studies, Black studies, and Disability studies, with a focus on the relationship between social abjection and prosthesis. His auto-ethnographic documentary thesis, In Our Own Words: On Being Trans at Smith (2017) has received various awards, including the Valeria Dean Burgess Stevens Prize at Smith College, as well as being the Feature Film at GLAAD’s Spring Film Festival in 2018. Sam is currently a doctoral candidate at UMass Amherst in the English department. He received his MA from Columbia University in 2020 and his BA from Smith College in 2017.
Abstract: Rather than frame homelessness as a byproduct of racism, or race as a predictor of housing instability—as is common in public health analyses—this essay casts the contemporary criminalization of homelessness as successor to the white supremacist legislation of the Jim Crow era. During this period, vagrancy laws emerged as a means of arresting the mobility of freedpeople and racializing transience within the United States. While the attempt to cast Blacks-in-motion as vagrants quelled white anxieties about this recently emancipated labor force, it created a subsequent panic for ruling class whites: Black fixity.
These paradoxical reactions and later policies, penalizing both motion and stillness, work to functionally outlaw the existence of a racialized other. While this presentation focuses predominantly on this cycle as it pertains to Black Americans (formerly enslaved and born free) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, I foreground indigenous scholarship and decolonial theory, so as to illustrate state-sanctioned erasure as a recurring trope of American history. In addition to violent, gratuitous corporeal harm, the white supremacist design of enclosure-and-displacement aims to enact a socio-political death, wherein the civic lives and laboring rights of Native and Black Americans are stymied. The right to mobility—which I define as the right to self-determination: to both move oneself and resist removal—therefore, has become a central tenet of constitutional law, encampment advocacy, and Native and Black liberation movements.
I examine the precarity of both Black fixity and Black movement in the life of Frank Money, the protagonist of Toni Morrison’s 2012 novel, Home. While Frank’s existence is a liminal one—a straddling between hyper-visibility and in-visibility—Frank is unwilling, or perhaps refuses, to comprehend the literal and figurative signs of his exclusion from public life. Through the act of a literal exhumation, Home resists socio-political death, reclaims the right to mobility, and reinserts Black life into public space and the American archive.
Bio: Janell Tryon is a second-year doctoral student in the Department of English at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, with a concentration in American Studies. She holds a Master of Public Health degree from University of California, Berkeley and has worked for the San Francisco and New York Departments of Health. Her work traces the racist and xenophobic history of vagrancy laws and contemporary housing policy within the United States, as well as the role of public health institutions in forced displacement, policing, and confinement. Her research foregrounds spatial and Black Marxist methodologies, citizenship theory, queer theory, and ecocriticism. In both her critical and creative practices, she turns to the literary and visual arts for examples of resistance to state-mandated institutionalization and housing normativity.
Abstract: With the rise of the middling classes in the eighteenth century, the culture of sensibility emerged, which sentimentalized the body and established a correspondence between the body and heart. This culture finds its anchorage in the white body, which consequently marginalizes bodies of color as not or less capable of feeling, thus asserting white supremacy. Maria Edgeworth’s novel Belinda (1801), written in the context of the sentimental culture encountering the expanding British empire, represents various sentimental bodies. Existing scholarship notes Edgeworth’s ambivalence to racism reflected in her configuring the Creole, Mr. Vincent, as “animal-spirited” and his black servant, Juba, as superstitious. Examining Lady Delacour’s rouged white face in tandem with Juba’s unpainted black face, however, I propose, reveals Edgeworth’s challenge to white supremacy in capability and complexity of feeling. By displaying that the white face may affect sentiments while the black face expresses sincere feelings, Edgeworth critiques the culture of sensibility that results in racial hierarchy and artificiality.
In the novel, Lady Delacour, an aristocratic lady of the world, has two faces, one for “home” and the other for “abroad”. In the public eyes, her face glowing with rouge is lively with rich sentiments, but at home, when the powder and rouge are washed off, her face is sapped of expression. Her rouged face is thus represented as a social mask that affects emotions to sustain popularity in the fashionable society. Her performance is informed by the rules that encode the body into sentimental meanings. Edgeworth points out the overdetermined nature of these rules by showing Lady Delacour’s failure at interpreting Belinda’s true feelings under their guidance. By contrast, Juba, without knowledge of such rules, is represented as fully capable of feeling and expressing true affections. Although Juba’s black face awes the white gaze that consequently neglects his sentiments, his nuanced feelings are rendered visible through Belinda’s lens. Such plot featuring a white face of artificiality and a black face of transparency and sincerity challenges the white presumption that blackness is an impenetrable mask that hides the truth. Edgeworth, in this way, critiques the culture of sensibility whose rigid rules disregard true feelings due to color and lead to artificiality. Moreover, in rendering Juba’s feelings visible via his body, Edgeworth comes into dialogue with contemporary painters like Joseph Wright of Derby who represents bodies of color that manifest nuanced sentiments, which sheds light on an anti-racist trend in the late eighteenth-century imagination of sentimentality.
Bio: Xinyuan Qiu is currently a PhD candidate from the department of English at Binghamton University. Her research interests include body and sentimentality in eighteenth-century British fiction, gender, sexuality, and queer studies, as well as book history. She also conducts interdisciplinary study of visual art and literary criticism. Pronouns: she/her
Abstract: Claude McKay has been celebrated as the first major poet and radical consciousness of the Harlem Renaissance since his 1919 poem, “If We Must Die,” gave voice to the “militant spirit” of the New Negro. McKay’s ability to capture the ethos of Harlem through his commitment to black nationalism and his political and aesthetic experimentation further cemented his connection to the movement. Consequently, early scholarly considerations of McKay and his oeuvre focus on the significance thereof to the sociohistorical contexts of the United States without duly considering the complicated politics presented by his colonial, migrant identity. McKay longed for the world to appraise him as an artist, but as a black Jamaican writing in the United States (and across the globe), he was often seen as a mere political representative—a “Negro” spokesperson or ambassador—rather than a poet. To put it plainly, McKay’s contemporaries and decades of scholars thereafter were more concerned with how they might advance the political aims of their immediate cultural moments through their readings of McKay’s life and work than they were with understanding his aesthetic convictions that were unarguably impacted by the cultural hybridity of his island home. My research recenters McKay’s literary origins in the Caribbean and reads his autobiographical framing of his own work against the framing provided by his reading audience to reveal the forces that enable and/or coerce black Caribbean authors and their works to become African American. Acknowledging McKay as a forefather of Caribbean-American literature clarifies some of the enduring questions in McKay criticism by situating McKay’s work at the interstices between several national and transnational literatures. This reframing reveals the ways in which African American literature has subsumed black cultural production in and around the United States, reconceptualizing African American literature as inherently modern, migratory, worldly, and transnational.
Bio: Lindsay Peart is an English PhD candidate at Rutgers University. As a wife, mother, and former high school English teacher, she brings her personal experience as well as her knowledge of black, brown, and/or disenfranchised communities to bear in her studies. Her current research focuses on representations of black Caribbean-American writers in American literary criticism, interrogating how identity formation and racialization are impacted by critical reception and the demands of racial uplift.