Publications & Research Plans

Publications

Peer-Reviewed Articles

“The Ruth in (T)ruth: Redactive Reading and Feminist Provocations to History in M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!” in d i f f e r e n c e s : A Journal of Feminist Cultural Criticism, vol. 30, no. 2, March 2019, pp. 1-29.

Gervasio - The Ruth in (T)ruth.pdf

“The Power of the Weak Signifier: Wordsworth’s Lucy in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace and Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy” in Modern Language Studies, vol. 47, no. 2, Winter 2018, pp. 36-57.

Gervasio - Power of the Weak Signifier [Compressed File].pdf

“Siting Absence: Feminist Photography, State Violence, and the Limits of Representation” in Women Mobilizing Memory, edited by Marianne Hirsch, Jean Howard, Ayşe Gül Altınay, & Banu Karaca, Columbia University Press, 2019, pp. 258-276.

Gervasio - Siting Absence.pdf

“The Memory of Words,” English Language Notes (ELN), Special Issue on “Memory, Amnesia, Commemoration,” Duke University Press, Nov. 2019 (Invited contribution, under review).

Book Reviews

“Why Boys Must Cry,” review of The Fishermen by Chigozie Obioma for Public Books, Nov. 15, 2015. Republished in The Guardian, Nov. 24, 2016.

Public Writing

"Where is My Warrior Goddess?: The Search for a Mentor in Graduate School," a blog post on the power of mentorship for the Modern Language Association's Connected Academics Program
“An Uncommon Core,” contribution to Virtual Roundtable on Engaged Scholarship & Teaching for Public Books, Sept. 18, 2017.
"Graduate Students Deserve a Healthcare Plan with Teeth," op-ed protesting the university's sudden cancellation of dental care for graduate students, Columbia Spectator, Jan. 30, 2017

Creative Writing

“Missing Persons,” poetry for Descant 42.4 (Winter 2011): pp. 40-43.

Conferences

Public Presentations

Memory Studies Association

2019 | “Siting Absence: Feminist Photography, State Violence, and the Limits of Representation”

Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present

2018 | “A Decolonial Feminist Approach to the Impossibility of Justice in Roberto Bolaño’s Mexico”

American Comparative Literature Association

2019 | "New Hegemonies from Below?: Why Decolonial Memory Needs to Center Peripheries (in the Plural)"
2018 | “Feminine (In)visibility and Domestic (Dis)order in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s ‘The Arrangements'”
2016 | “The Normalization of Violence in Roberto Bolaño’s Embodied Politics"
2015 | “Breaking Law and Language from Inside the System: M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!”
2014 | “Collapsing the Margins of Social Difference: Degenerate Bodies and Social Capital in Roberto Bolaño"

Northeast Modern Language Association

2018 | “Trans Heroines in ‘Jew-maica:’ The Intersectional Afterlives of Michelle Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven”
2017 | "Invisible Legacies of Violence: Femicide, Homophobia & the Holocaust in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666"
2015 | “Letting the Specter Speak: J.M. Coetzee, Jamaica Kincaid, and the Reincarnation of Wordsworth’s Lucy in Giving Voice to Systemic Suffering"

National Women’s Studies Association

2016 | “Hypervisible, Yet Voiceless: The Truth of Women’s Absence in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666”
- Convened panel on “The Absent Witness: Feminist Testimony & Decolonial Ethics”

British Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies Conference

2016 | “Spectral Narrative and Historical Revision in Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones and Boubacar Boris Diop’s Murambi: The Book of Bones”

Association for Theatre in Higher Education

2013 | “Queer Mummies and Muscle Memory: Embodied Politics at Play in Hunter Reynolds’ ‘Live’ Art"

On-Campus Talks

2015 | “Intersecting Race, Place, and Memory on a Walk through Harlem” at the Women Mobilizing Memory: Collaboration and Co-resistance Conference
2014 | “Siting Memory in Santiago” at the University Seminar on Cultural Memory

Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Programs

2012 | “Abortive Instincts and Infanticidal Fantasies: The Limits of Futurity in Jamaica Kincaid’s Autobiography of My Mother” at the Mellon Mays Graduate Conference
2009 | “‘And Who Do You Say I Am?’: Incoherencies & Identities in Dambudzo Marechera’s Black Sunlight” at the Mellon Mays Mid-Atlantic Regional Conference

Future Plans

Book in Progress

Arts of the Impossible: Revising History in an Authoritarian Era

This project names the many diverse interventions on conventions of narrative, literary form, and representation that contemporary, politically conscious authors are making to contest authoritarian violence from Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and South Asia (1997-present). Specifically, I look at how Caryl Phillips' The Nature of Blood (1997), Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost (2000), Edwidge Danticat's The Farming of Bones (1998), and Roberto Bolaño's 2666 (2008), among other minor works, reconfigure historical archives and various canons (literary, religious, legal). Their intervention aim to negotiate an ethics for representing state violence that may transform discourses pre-determining human rights in repressive societies. Using an interdisciplinary decolonial feminist framework, I call these writers’ endeavors to reframe collectively traumatic history “arts of the impossible,” which defy the alleged unrepresentability of atrocity to secure justice and forestall impunity. I compare representations of wide-ranging human rights crimes including forced disappearance, the Holocaust, genocide, and femicide— crimes exemplifying what I term “ontological erasure.” At stake in ontological erasure are not simply lost perspectives from multiply marginalized victims, like women and queer people of color, but the very possibility of citizenship and the will to dissent that state recognition enables. To resist the threats that the authorization of these crimes poses to political freedom, these writers, I argue, reinvent evidentiary forms historically suppressed by authoritarian states, including court transcripts, testimonies, forensic reports, and national archives. They also intersperse these positivistic documents with literary and artistic intertexts. Their multidisciplinary intertextuality pushes the boundaries of what counts as “evidence” in acts of state violence that are uniquely determined by erasure. In doing so, they also imagine new methods for remembering past atrocities without compromising recognition for stigmatized minorities in the future.

*Please note that this is an active work in progress; specific texts and rationales for including them may shift or be added as the project matures.

Planned Projects

Postcolonial Horror: Specters of Structural Violence in Non-Western Literature & Film

How are world writers and filmmakers utilizing conventions of horror in the West— including shock, supernaturalism, gore, and psychological realism— to derange viewers’ relationships to everyday life? Can horror capture controversial themes like war, genocide, and other human rights crimes without exploiting violence? Or does horror merely objectify human suffering to reproduce sexist, racist, homophobic, and xenophobic stereotypes? I articulate and relate structures of violence lingering after colonialism to diverse, interconnected systems of oppression that include mass incarceration, poverty in the developing world, the timelessness of rape culture, and transatlantic slavery. I examine both the limits and the unexplored potential of supernatural motifs, such as ghosts, zombies, aliens, witches, vampires, demons, and psychopaths, to represent the inhumanity so normal across heteropatriarchal societies around the world today. Texts include: Manuel Puíg's The Kiss of the Spider Woman; Lauren Beukes' The Shining Girls; Dambudzo Marechera's Black Sunlight; Jewelle Gomez's The Gilda Stories; Marlon James' The Book of Night Women; Nnedi Okorafor's Binti series; Neill Blomkamp's District 9; C.J. Obasi's Ojuju, and Frances Bodomo's Afronauts.

Decolonial Perspectives on Postmodern Masculinities

Perhaps it's no secret that traditional masculinity is in crisis, but it is remarkable that heteropatriarchal standards for being in the world have differed so marginally across wide-ranging cultural contexts and historical periods. In this ambitious study, I chart the taken-for-granted preeminence of heteropatriarchy, a neologism for the combined forces of heteronormativity and patriarchy, in global civil society. I explore the fears of impotency and obsolescence that have come to characterize what I call "postmodern masculinity"-- the frail, anxious, indefensible shadow of machismo that has become a default state for male protagonists in contemporary fiction from Africa and the Caribbean. Universal standards for white cosmopolitan masculinity, an ambivalent archetype, warp men’s relationships to their own gender identities even in largely non-white parts of the world. I focus on four different heteropatriarchal types to investigate how counter-hegemonic masculinities risk being reduced to stereotypes for postmodern dysphoria, patriarchal anxiety, and moral malaise. First, I trace the development of the patriarch as magistrate and overlord in J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) and Disgrace (1999). Then I examine the paradox of the “educated slave” in gendered terms through a woman’s travel journal in Caryl Phillips’ Cambridge (St. Kitts, 1992). I then turn to the stereotype of the “crazed indigent” in Chigozie Obioma’s The Fishermen (Nigeria, 2015), examining why young boys are simultaneously so entranced and terrified by a homeless man in their compound. I end with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's short story, “The Arrangements” (2016), which reflects on Donald Trump’s then-theoretical election to the White House; her critique of Trump’s masculinity complex underscores the precarity of men’s desires for authority even within a supposedly indomitable world power like the U.S.

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