Panelists: Olivia Barry, Mitia Nath, and Alejandro Beas Murillo
This panel foregrounds questions of genre, audience, and narrative design to explore how they inform our engagements with our respective texts and projects. Since each of us employs tools and methods of analysis specific to our archive, we draw attention to the reasons these methods are suited to our particular projects. In the following summaries we present a brief glimpse of our current work with a thrust on its methodological orientation.
Alejandro will demonstrate how his dissertation project repurposes the notions of sovereignty and salvage as methods with which to read the work of contemporary Afro-Caribbean women writers. Drawing from Dionne Brand’s own use of sovereignty and salvage as praxes of creative and intellectual independence, as well as theoretical tools to approach the work of other Black women from the Caribbean, Alejandro argues that a method built around both concepts pushes us beyond heteropatriarchal notions of resistance and emancipation as cultural repair. Olivia’s project uses literary analysis and criticism to propose a dramaturgical method that orients contemporary dramaturgy for early modern performance through mobility and disability. Thus in balancing two genres–literature (drama) and theater (performance)–Olivia’s method engages two audiences: literary critics and contemporary theater practitioners. Her writing navigates these genres and audiences through use of both close reading and imagined performance. Mitia’s section reads Sarnath Banerjee’s graphic novel All Quiet in Vikaspuri (2015), arguing that in its narrative design and organization, the text parodies archives of the urban that aim to represent the city through a focus on notable events and significant figures. Drawing on recent critiques of the archive, and discussions on the graphic novel, this section explores the significance of engaging with the archive through analytical tools offered by literary criticism.
In sum, this panel’s diversity of texts and methodological approaches offers an insight into current engagements with their respective disciplines, in addition to illuminating new interdisciplinary trajectories emerging from literary studies.
Panelists: Jade Yeen Onn, Manasvini Rajan, Meenakshi Nair
This panel brings together three in-progress interdisciplinary projects that each bring together a wide range of texts and emerge from a broadly shared methodological foundation of postcolonial thinking. In doing so, we take up María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo and Nick Caverly’s suggestion that interdisciplinarity emerges from what one’s project requires as opposed to static disciplinary locations to collectively consider the methodological affordances and tensions of employing interdisciplinarity as a method. At the same time, we consider how our methods and methodologies are being shaped by both the impetus of our research as well as its exigence within the context of: the areas exam, the prospectus, and the dissertation. In considering our methods, we also reflect on the politics of it all – our projects, postcolonial/decolonial studies, and ourselves as scholars and graduate students.
Panelists: Johannes Shephard, Chris Costello, Daniel Amaral
To begin thinking through the axiomatics of methodology as an object of analysis, would require an initial illusory negation of finitude, a de-finition, which would claim to isolate the component we are interested in, method, from its judgement and legislation, -ology. Yet this definition, in its analytic de-cision of a reflexive term, rather than negates, must sublate (aufgehoben) the law of judgement to the register of judging method, rather than considering methods of judgement. Hence, any consideration of method is also a methodological judgement. Encountering this aporia, this site of non-passage along our path, it might be useful to define method. From the Greek meta-middle, midpoint, intra, and hodos, path, route, road, means, we can observe that our topos is, at the very least, etymologically the account of an itinerary from A to B, without any consideration of A or B proper. That is to say, this terrain is precisely between but not inclusive of that which lies between beginnings and endings, origins and destinations, causes and effects. Thus, we are interested in carefully examining the ways in which practices, utterances, inscriptions, and perceptual nonsense demarcate the subliminal boundaries which form the asymptotic border between the exterior polarity of A.)(←→)(B. Approaching this topos from the perspective of queer critical cartography, postcolonial literary studies, and radical empiricism, we hope to foster a conversation that critically examines the practices and means we employ to make sense of, to produce a capacity to sense, otherwise senseless and unreasonable worlds. In so doing, we examine texts like Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, a contemporary reimagining of Orwell’s 1984 as Julia, and queer American poetry.
This panel takes as its focus the relationship between questions of method and methodology and transnational, understood broadly, subjects and texts. Through our projects, we consider how to bring questions of transnational methodologies to our research, and how transnational approaches trouble and shift how we understand our own fields of research as they currently exist. Specifically looking at questions of circulation across space– geographic and digital– we will consider how mobility reshapes how we read experience, subjectivity, and race across time.
Opening with a focus on methodology broadly, we consider commonalities in our approaches to our individual archives in order to interrogate what happens when the field requires a new methodological approach. For instance, our first presentation interrogates the figure of the biracial child in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. A quick check of any of the major academic databases (JSTOR, etc) leaves biracial theory out of the larger conversation of critical race theory. Therefore, in addition to creating a new methodological framework with which to understand a gap in the theoretical scholarship, we also come to understand how transnational feminism informs our work individually and as a whole.
From this, the second presentation will shift to thinking about the tensions of bringing academic methodologies to the novel and what the convergence of the critical and creative as a writing practice and process allows us to read about how we understand place and the postcolonial in relation to the panel’s larger focus on circulation, mobility, and reading the transnational.
The final presentation focuses on transnational research methods in studies of rhetoric, exploring how they are part of a necessary intervention in the field which allows for more responsible engagement with contemporary feminist and digital rhetorical exchanges in public discourse. Though our presentation is largely focused on transnational feminism as a framework, our approach to methodology interrogates how the mobility of bodies, knowledges, identities, rhetorics, and works of fiction come together to inform new, experimental methods of meaning-making.
This panel brings together various methodological processes that realize counter-narrativizations to regimes of surveillance: stories of survival often hiding in plain sight.
Jeremy Geragotelis’s project focuses on the performative apprehension of migrant movement to and from Greece from the early 20th century to the present. Using both creative and critical performance-based methodologies, Geragotelis strives to historicize Greece’s relationship to modernity and Western Europe by accounting for the narrativization of its vexed national identity as on the periphery of European domination; migrant subjects’ visibly invisible movement in the Eastern Mediterranean materializes this process of historicization and national self-conception.
Phoebe Glick’s project examines imprisonment and militarism as spatial technologies of capital and crisis. Her approach draws from narratives by colonized, criminalized, and pathologized subjects to theorize the modern prison as a form of colonial warfare which expanded dialectically in response to radical social movements of the 1960s. Such accounts demystify imprisonment and reveal it as a tactic of not only physical containment, but as an impetus to pacify and exterminate insurgent knowledges and structures of feeling. Ultimately, the project intends to advance an understanding of the limits of the carceral archive and the variant possibilities of departure from state epistemological control.
Saadia Peerzada’s project looks at the passbook photo and family card in Sizwe Bansi is Dead, a 1972 apartheid-era play devised by John Kani, Winston Ntshona and Athol Fugard. The play is engaged with the alienation and separateness of being a black man under apartheid but is also always engaged in the connection that chips at man’s ossification. Using Glissant’s Poetics of Relation to read Sizwe, the paper arrives at an understanding of practices of being human that exceed legal personhood.
Pooja Shah’s analysis focuses on the material composition of Mangapwani Slave Chamber’s architecture and uses photography as a medium of engaging with carceral structures beyond carceral configurations of mobility and access. Shah suggests an extension of frameworks of the surveillant gaze to include the implications of enfleshing a site of violence through an attention to its architecture. She focuses on how the presence of coral in the walls of the slave chamber shares a significant relationship with Indian Ocean waters, thus offering varying metaphysical and affective registers of movement critical to an engagement with the relationship between water and the structures of confinement.