Abstract: This paper explores the concept of racialized geographies outlined by Katherine McKittrick and puts it in conversation with Michelle M. Wright's understanding of epiphenomenal time in South African writer K. Sello Duiker's Thirteen Cents (2000). Drawing from Black Marxism and Achille Mbembe’s and Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s discussions of the compartmentalization of life and timespace under the racist and capitalist system this paper will begin by exploring the novel's child protagonist's engagement with space and his own positionality, paying close attention to the entanglement or untangling of the “who I am” and the “where I am.” Precisely because the paper will dwell on the relation between subject, spacetime, and the sociopolitical and racial dynamics that arise from this encounter in the streets of Cape Town, my analysis will also revolve around the agency that the subject has in their own positionality; in other words, we will be asking ourselves: is the subject positioning themself in timespace or is the individual thrown into it by someone or something else?
In this discussion of the individual's agency in the face of their own dispossession and displacement, Cedric Robinson's understanding of historical materialism and his Afrofuturistic view of the Black Radical tradition will allow me to analyze the transnational and transhistorical networks, roots/routes and maps that the apocalyptic ending of Thirteen Cents creates in order to connect past and present, here and there, now, then and later.
Bio: Alejandro Beas Murillo is a Spanish PhD student in the English department at UMass Amherst. His research draws from Marxist, Black Marxist, trans* and queer theory to analyze the interaction between subject and spacetime in speculative fiction, as well as the ways in which the individual's interiority is a source of rebellion and fermentation of alternative futures and (geo)graphies. He received his MA in American Studies from Instituto Franklin UAH-UCM (2018) and his BA in English from Universidad Complutense de Madrid (2017).
Abstract: Through looking at Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies (1405) and Monique Wittig’s Les Guérillères (1969) as texts with a conversant genealogy across the six centuries that separate them, my paper addresses questions of gendered space, language, and materiality. Tracing the generative ways spatial imaginaries are employed in these two texts, this paper offers imaginative frameworks toward how feminist interventions in architecture can – and already do – shape textual and artistic concerns. In each of these books, Wittig and de Pizan seek to materially build a space of refuge, an enactment of freedom through the text for variously and particularly defined subjects; one that Wittig calls les elles (translated as “the women”), and de Pizan calls “women of noble spirit.” How might we name the various relationships of embodied place in The Book of the City of Ladies and Les Guérillères? If we let queer historiography and longing have its way, what becomes possible if we invent Les Guérillères as building The Book of the City of Ladies? What stories about the gender/ed self do both these projects, set centuries apart, tell us? I offer the term “desire path” at the closing of this paper as a resonant modality plucked from urban planning colloquia that speaks to the connective speculative capacities of Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies and Monique Wittig’s Les Guérillères. The trans-historical premise of this paper speaks to the conference’s concerns toward speculative architectures forged across uneven spatio-temporalities, and the ways in which texts offer us speculative – and hence, real – spaces to live outside of empires.
Bio: Sarah Ahmad was born in Delhi and grew up across the Indian subcontinent. She has been a graduate student in the women’s history and writing programs at Sarah Lawrence College, taught in the CUNY Start program, and was the 2018–19 Editorial Fellow at Poets & Writers. She is assistant editor at Guernica (poetry) and Conjunctions, a reader at Poetry, and a PhD student in literature at the UMass–Amherst where she works on feminist-queer architextures in contemporary queer-diasporic literature, and writes in-between poem-prose beings.
Abstract: The representation of sexual tourism in film and literature often (if not always) depicts dancefloors as spaces of sexual encounters and transactions constructing a recognizable pattern in the Global North to Global South migratory movement in which the tourist as a migrant relates to the dancefloor as a transactional space, a place where she or he will pick up a local sex worker for sexual and sometimes romantic services. In this article, I will argue that the migrant is seduced by movement across borders – specifically, by sexual tourism – because the nomospheric elements of the dancefloor in the Global South allow for the sexual and romantic gratification of the tourist whereas the dancefloor of the North does not or, at least, the space is not so strongly characterized as a transactional one.
Bio: Nefeli Forni Zervoudaki is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts Amherst with a Graduate Certificate in Film Studies. Her main interests are migration studies and representations of gender and sexuality, the effects of film on society, and the interaction between literature and film.
Abstract: Through Butler’s Kindred, numerous tensions are raised around the notions of accessibility, disability, equality and inclusion exposing the crisis of black futures. My analysis focuses on the way that disability informs Dana’s experiences in the context of slavery, her positioning in the contemporary discourse of neo-liberalism and her positioning in the prospective future. Very few scholars perceive Dana’s subjectivity as an actual state of being that carries value both materially as well as metaphorically. The materiality of disability has not constituted part of the larger discourse of the American slave system. Through rendering disability both figuratively and materially, I establish a connection between the past, the present and the future. The different figurations of space and time exposed through Dana’s time travelling help conceptualize her accessibility in different structures. Previous scholarship has been extensively focusing on the origin and legacy of trauma, inflicted on the black female body of the twentieth century, however there has been too little, if any criticism in relation to the active construction of black female subjectivity, located at the level of the body. I wish to explore how spectacles of violence against black female bodies function in the wider political imagery of the twenty-first century. The physical and psychological displacement of Dana, as a black female body exposes her traumatization and the difficulties she faces in order to reclaim her subjectivity in a society burdened by a history of violence and exploitation. Kindred could be analyzed in a way that asserts the continuity of African-American trauma, the perpetuation of systematic racism in USA and the crisis of blackness in the future.
Bio: Marietta Kosma is a second year DPhil student in English at the University of Oxford at Lady Margaret Hall. Her academic background includes a master in English from JSU and a master in Ancient Greek Theater from the University of the Aegean. Her research interests lie in twentieth-century American literature, post colonialism and gender studies. She has published articles, interviews and reviews in Cambridge Scholars Publishing, H-Net, Cherwell and Transatlantica among others.