Abstract: In Saidiya Hartman’s “Venus in Two Acts,” the neutrality and objectivity of the historical archive is scrutinized in favor of an affective bond with the victims of white supremacist violence. John Greyson’s film Proteus (2003) similarly attacks the archive, crafting a narrative based on 18th century Dutch South African court records which succinctly describe the proceedings of a sodomy trial involving a Khoekhoe man and his Dutch South African lover. Hartman and Greyson search for truths that transcend the oppressive language of the archive but are simultaneously forced to contend with the fact that the archive is the only force that tethers us to these narratives in the first place. Hartman is conscious about the impossibility of her task, positing an alternative history but ultimately withdrawing it, while Greyson queers and distorts the archive for his own ends. Hartman zeros in on one little girl, treating her story with empathy and care, while Greyson reinvents his characters to conform to 21st century notions of identity.
Bio: Michael Kowalchuk is currently pursuing a PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is especially interested in the political culture of the Left and its aesthetic and literary ramifications. Michael's primary research topic centers on the ideological cross-pollination that occurred between French and Latin American Marxists during the 1960s and 1970s — particularly those who studied under Louis Althusser. Michael primarily employs feminist, queer and Marxist methodologies in his work. Leveraging his academic/professional background in architecture, he understands the interrelationship between visual culture, aesthetics, space, and political power. He is a native English speaker and fluent in French, with a conversational knowledge of Spanish and Italian.
Abstract: This is an ongoing project of unmooring, a creative process of reconstruction and remembrance that engages the difficulty of a family archive of carceral documents and therapeutic writing. Specifically, I examine my father’s narrative attempt to “recover” from addiction, incarceration, and fugitivity in the 1970s-1980s. Enacting a mode of associational research, I examine this writing as a case study of the “recovery narrative,” produced and performed within institutional enclosures and therapeutic contexts. “Recovery,” I propose, is a concept, practice, and probable style that may raise discrepant inquiries and disorienting problems for literary and theoretical study. Recovery narrative writers, storying in precarious borderlands and unstable temporalities for ambiguous audiences and incentives, may be undertheorized cultural, political participants.
Bio: Katie Bradshaw is a Ph.D. student of Literature, Criticism, and Textual Studies at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville with degrees in Cultural Studies and Documentary Film. She broadly researches 20thC to contemporary texts through narrative and critical theory. Katie’s essay “‘There is nothing magic about it’: W. E. B. Du Bois’s Speculations in Black Life (Insurance)” will be published in the forthcoming collection Black Speculative Fiction and the Afrodiaspora: Afrofuturist Feminisms and Other Perspectives with Lexington Books.
Abstract: This piece conducts a transhistorical examination of queerness, as well as the epistolary form, particularly through the lens of critical temporality studies. My sourcework is especially focused on the letters of Hildegard of Bingen, and those between Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok. I will also be cross-referencing letters such as those of Michael Field, a collection of medieval letters between women by Anne Crawford, and those between the Ladies of Llangollen as well as Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West. With regard to secondary source material, I will be utilizing key excerpts from texts such as The Queer Art of Failure by Jack Halberstam, How Soon Is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time by Carolyn Dinshaw, and Medieval Futurity: Essays for the Future of a Queer Medieval Studies by Will Rogers and Christopher Michael Roman, to explore the (queered) temporality of the epistolary form, as well as queer temporality more broadly. Through this study, I intend to explore letters as a vehicle for queerness, particularly to work to reconstruct queer histories, and contribute to the debunking of the myth that queer people are a twentieth-century phenomenon. The acknowledgement of the queer potential of the aforementioned letter collections is crucial to fostering academic (and personal) connections among the queer community, which has had to cope with having an inaccessible, buried and often wholly erased, queer history.
Bio: I am completing my Master’s in English at Binghamton University through the 4+1 BA/MA program. My research interests lie at the intersection between the medieval and Renaissance periods; I am particularly invested in exploring gender and sexuality studies, critical temporality studies, postcolonial studies, and performance studies. I have showcased three (inter)national conference presentations in the past year engaging with topics within British and American literature including race, gender, sexuality, and temporality. I most recently published an academic article entitled, “A Seventeenth-Century Air History in Conversation with Antony and Cleopatra,” with Alpenglow: Binghamton University Undergraduate Journal of Research and Creative Activity.
Abstract: National boundaries based on ‘Imagined Communities’ have delineated identity, culture, and politics in South Asia. Over the recent years ties between these nations have been marred with conflict, amidst rising violence against minorities in the respective countries. In this paper, I underline the role of digital spaces as well as literature to act as a site of counter hegemonic discourses on memory and historiography, capturing the facade of politics which often envelops interdisciplinary readings of what constitutes the ‘idea of Pakistan’? Does one use the referential point of Choudhry Rahmat Ali coinage of the term in 1933, or does one record the birth of the Pakistan in M. A. Jinnah’s transformation of the ‘Two nation theory’ into a political reality? How does one map the changes in the connotations behind the label of ‘being’ a Pakistani citizen? Under the Western gaze, Pakistan is stereotyped as both ‘Oriental’ and ‘fundamentalist’, perpetuating problematic notions on the region, isolating it from a broader understanding, linked to its neighbours geographically, culturally and linguistically. Reading the popular Instagram page, Purana Pakistan founded by Laraib Chaudhary, one is able to chart out the various shifts in history that have challenged the monolithic ideology of Pakistan. The page becomes a space of alternative history, recording and archiving historical evidence of various changes in Pakistani society, symbolic of the plurality in identity, that over military coups and subsequent violence, have been pushed to the margins, away from public memory. I argue that Purana Pakistan transcends national boundaries, engaging in dialogue with viewers across the border, weaving a more inclusive idea of Pakistan, linking it to the past by excavating material memory to create a digital site, encapsulating important histories of Pakistan, than a censored, prescriptive model history as a whole. In the same manner, Everyday Pakistan founded by Anas Saleem acts as a similar intervention through the virtual world to deconstruct one dimensional images of Pakistan, showcasing everyday life of regular citizens, living in harmony, whilst respecting each other’s faith. Through this study I articulate questions of agency, politics and the role of memory, which continue to reform and reshape the very ‘idea of Pakistan’ that has been appropriated by those in power post 1948, at times ‘Othering’ communities located within Pakistan.
Bio: Jaya Yadav is a PhD scholar at the University of Delhi, working on contemporary South Asian Literature. She received her Bachelor's and Master's as well as M.Phil from the University of Delhi. She possesses a deep interest in the interdisciplinary aspect of literature and its role in questions of identity, history and politics. She is an Assistant Professor at the Department of English at Janki Devi Memorial College in New Delhi and also works as a Senior Editor at Strife Blog and Journal, Department of War Studies, KCL.