Showing papers in "Pmla-publications of The Modern Language Association of America in 2022"

Fossil Fuel Fiction and the Geologies of Race

Abstract: Abstract This essay argues for an energy literary criticism that centers the problem of the energy epoch as the problem of the color line. It does so by reading a set of novels—Helena María Viramontes's Under the Feet of Jesus (1995) and Colson Whitehead's Zone One (2011) and The Underground Railroad (2016)—as fossil fuel fictions that illuminate the conjuncture of energy and racial capitalism. These works unearth the racialized world making of extractive energy regimes by articulating energy's social production of race across the colonial histories and geographies of the Anthropocene. The entanglement of racialized bodies and hydrocarbon matter across biological, historical, and geological time scales in these novels formalizes what Kathryn Yusoff calls the “geologies of race.” Excavating the racial infrastructures scaffolding the Anthropocene's power grids, Viramontes's and Whitehead's georacial imaginations envision decolonial and abolitionist energy futures for Brown and Black lives.

Homo Alphabeticus, Glottographic Exceptionalism, and the Ethnocentric Definition of Writing

Abstract: An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.

Postcolonial Tattoos as Mnemonic Inscriptions

Abstract: CHARLES FORSDICK is James Barrow Professor of French at the University of Liverpool, where he teaches in the Department of Languages, Cultures and Film. Recent publications include a coauthored biography of Toussaint Louverture (Pluto, 2017) and the coedited Black Jacobins Reader (Duke UP, 2017). On 23 April 2017, the first round of the French presidential election led to a run-off between Emmanuel Macron, leader of the centrist party La République En Marche!, and the far-right politician Marine Le Pen. In response on the following day, on 24 April, an actor walked around the Place de la République in Paris with his body covered in tattoos. These depicted racist insults recorded by the Conseil Représentatif des Associations Noires de France, a group of associations in France representing people of African descent. This protest, entitled “the human billboard,” deployed tattooed words and images as a way of reflecting on everyday racism in the country. Inscribed—albeit in this case temporarily—on an actor’s skin, the tattoos revealed the ambivalent status of this ancient form of body modification when considered in a postcolonial frame. In the background of films that document this protest, council workers remove graffiti, both anti–Le Pen and anti-Macron, from the Monument à la République, which stands in the center of the square, a reminder of the extent to which the politically polarized context of the election—the so-called lepénisation of France—suggested the country’s troubled and incomplete negotiation of its own postcoloniality. The tattoo is situated, as this intervention suggests, between the oppressive and the transgressive, the precolonial and the postcolonial, the aesthetic and the anthropological, the ancient and the hypercontemporary. Although the campaign was associated with a social media hashtag, #jeffaceleracisme (“#ieraseracism”), the tattoo lends itself also to discussions of the powerful persistence or even indelibility of traces of the past. The human billboard was a reminder of the ways in which tattooing, along with other forms of corporeal modification such as branding, was closely associated with the oppressively racialized practices of the transatlantic traffic in enslaved Africans. At the same time, however, the inscriptions on the actor’s

The Jargon of Liberal Democracy

Abstract: REY CHOW is Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Professor of the Humanities and a former director of the Program in Literature at Duke University. She received the James Russell Lowell Prize from the MLA for her book Primitive Passions (Columbia UP, 1995). Among her more recent publications are the coedited collection Sound Objects (Duke UP, 2019) and the monograph A Face Drawn in Sand: Humanistic Inquiry and Foucault in the Present (Columbia UP, 2021). With [a] rather smug monolingual presumption, Anglophones invite everyone into English as the established contemporary linguistic frame or lingua franca, or they export that frame in a beneficent spirit. Generous imperialists, we! (Butler 7)

The Ontology of Becoming

Abstract: HODA EL SHAKRY, assistant professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago, is a scholar of twentiethand twenty-firstcentury cultural production from North Africa and the Middle East, with an emphasis on the relationship between aesthetics and ethics. Her book, The Literary Qur ʾan: Narrative Ethics in the Maghreb (Fordham UP, 2020), was awarded the MLA’s 2020 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies. Cette pensée autre, cet “encore innommable” est peut-être une promesse, le signe d’un avenir dans un monde à transformer. Tâche sans fin, sans doute. Cependant, dans la pensée (appelons-la ainsi), il n’y a pas de miracle, il n’y a que des ruptures. —Abdelkébir Khatibi, “Double critique”

Monolingualism, Dispossession, and the Biopolitics of Language

Abstract: SARAH DOWLING is the author of three books of poetry, as well as the scholarly book Translingual Poetics: Writing Personhood under Settler Colonialism (U of Iowa P, 2018). Sarah is writing about supine and prone figures in contemporary literature and teaches at the University of Toronto, in the Centre for Comparative Literature and Victoria College. Monolingualism tends to be imagined pejoratively, as a lack or a shortcoming. The current popularity of language-learning apps attests to the fact that the presence of more languages is usually considered desirable, more sophisticated, a worthy goal. After all, what kind of a person would choose not to pursue the advantages that language-learning purports to offer, whether maximized potential, broadened horizons, or increased brain function? While acquisitive approaches to language learning are sometimes criticized, there is nonetheless a loose consensus that we (whether we are individuals or scholarly fields) should strive away from the narrow confines of monolingualism. As many thinkers have now established, though, simply learning or incorporating more languages—as if that were such easy work!—does not actually provide an exit from monolingualism. This is because monolingualism is not just a numerical descriptor referring to the presence of one or the absence of many. Instead, monolingualism is a structure “that organizes the entire range of modern social life” (Yildiz 2). We cannot escape monolingualism through self-improvement or changing graduation requirements: it is a force that shapes the societies we live in, affecting how we understand subjectivities, disciplines, institutions, ethnicities, cultures, and nations. So, while there is plenty of criticism of monolingualism—as in, saying that it’s bad—there is still not enough critique of monolingualism: as in, synoptic evaluation and description of the overall effects of its historical processes. In abjuring the monolingual, we’ve left it inadequately theorized and poorly understood. I think it’s important to begin this inquiry at the local level. In my work elsewhere, I’ve endeavored to show how monolingualism structures life where I live, in the anglophone settler colonies of North

Possible Persons: Dickensian Character, Violent Play

Abstract: Abstract This essay proposes a new way of thinking about Dickens's “little” characters in The Old Curiosity Shop and Our Mutual Friend, referencing Melanie Klein's “play-technique.” Klein was the first to theorize the anxious aggressive child and to posit a complex object relating in which the damage and repair of toys mediated and modulated the unmanageability of infantile emotion. Dickensian characterization, often criticized as object-like and lacking complex interiority, can be understood to intuit the developmental dynamics that Klein would locate in interactions between the child and the thing. Dickens's increasingly interiorized protagonists are surrounded and mirrored by toylike figures that problematize the thesis of novelistic maturation, proving as essential to the depiction of a complex psychology as internal monologue or achieved Bildung.

“Un Nouvel Internationalisme Littéraire”? Dreams and Delusions of “World Literature” in Khatibi, Djaout, and Adimi

Abstract: identity for oneself. These are some of the odd, for-eign elements, some of the varieties of alterity and exposure, that the professional traveler encounters.

“Is God Still French?”: Racecraft, States of Exception, and the Creation of l'Exception Française

Abstract: CHRISTY PICHICHERO (she/her) is associate professor of French and history at George Mason University, where she also serves as the director of faculty diversity in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences. She is the author of The Military Enlightenment: War and Culture in the French Empire from Louis XIV to Napoleon (Cornell UP, 2017) and a finalist for the Oscar Kenshur Book Prize, and her recent articles on critical race theory, feminism, and African diasporic identities have appeared in Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, and H-France Salon. She is the president of the Western Society for French History. “Et si Joséphine Baker entrait au Panthéon? / What If Josephine Baker Entered the Pantheon?” In 2013, this title of the philosopher Régis Debray’s opinion piece in the newspaper Le monde was meant to be provocative, but it ended up being prescient. To the surprise of onlookers inside and outside France, on 23 August 2021 President Emmanuel Macron announced that indeed, Josephine Baker—an African American entertainer who subverted colonial tropes as she embodied them, a global anti-racist activist, and a heroine of the French Resistance during World War II—would be memorialized as a national hero in the Panthéon, one of the country’s most hallowed patriotic mausoleums. Reactions to Josephine Baker’s panthéonisation (entry into the Panthéon) in print and conversation proffer a privileged insight into the stakes and structures of l’exception française, French exceptionalism. Debates on “the Baker issue” converge on the ideological bedrock of French exceptionalism: republican universalism and the spread of Enlightenment “progress” and the Revolutionary values of liberté, égalité, fraternité. In a televised speech to the nation on 11 March 2007, the French president, Jacques Chirac, articulated the customary formulation that “France is a country unlike any other. It has special responsibilities inherited from its history and the universal values that it has helped to forge” (qtd. in Drake 187). While the jingoism, ideological suppositions, and whiff of white man’s burden of this statement may seem outmoded and far-fetched, their historical and present power must not be underestimated. How does Baker’s immortalization in the Panthéon squarewith this national dogma and its constituent forms of domination? In positive political appraisals, some hope that it represents another important

On Always Historicizing: The Dialectic of Utopia and Ideology Today

Abstract: ROBERT T. TALLY, JR., is professor of English at Texas State University. His most recent book is For a Ruthless Critique of All That Exists: Literature in an Age of Capitalist Realism (Zero Books, 2022). “Always historicize!” The two-word sentence appearing at the beginning of Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act has taken on an almost talismanic quality for many readers, evoking the insights to be found within the book in such a way as to obviate the need to read it. Undoubtedly, thousands of scholars recognize the famous “first line” without having read The Political Unconscious, much like people who recognize the first four or eight notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony without listening any further. The fundamental paradox of the phrase has been frequently cited by Jameson’s detractors, as if Jameson himself did not know that the word always denotes a transhistorical imperative, and as if he himself does not mention this fact in the very next sentence, while also noting without ostensible irony that the phrase “always historicize” would turn out to be the moral of the book. (The irony becomes increasingly apparent as one reads on and realizes that a key part of Jameson’s argument entails the injunction to eschew morals entirely.) The exaggerated significance given to this slogan by Jameson’s critics is also notable when compared to the relative lack of emphasis accorded to his conclusion, where one might expect the key takeaway of The Political Unconscious to be ultimately found. The hortatory phrase “Always historicize!” appears in the preface to The Political Unconscious, not in the main body of the text, and one could argue that it is thus not the actual beginning of the book. Given that a preface is usually understood to be a sort of hors d’oeuvre, apart from and prior to the main body of a work, it is especially odd to see a line from its text given as much attention as it has. For example, the first line of chapter 1, “On Interpretation: Literature as a Socially Symbolic Act,” is less pithy, but it certainly lets the reader know

Fossil Fuel Fiction and the Geologies of Race

Abstract: Abstract This essay argues for an energy literary criticism that centers the problem of the energy epoch as the problem of the color line. It does so by reading a set of novels—Helena María Viramontes's Under the Feet of Jesus (1995) and Colson Whitehead's Zone One (2011) and The Underground Railroad (2016)—as fossil fuel fictions that illuminate the conjuncture of energy and racial capitalism. These works unearth the racialized world making of extractive energy regimes by articulating energy's social production of race across the colonial histories and geographies of the Anthropocene. The entanglement of racialized bodies and hydrocarbon matter across biological, historical, and geological time scales in these novels formalizes what Kathryn Yusoff calls the “geologies of race.” Excavating the racial infrastructures scaffolding the Anthropocene's power grids, Viramontes's and Whitehead's georacial imaginations envision decolonial and abolitionist energy futures for Brown and Black lives.

Synchronous Coexistence and Temporal Overlay

Abstract: An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.

MLA volume 137 issue 2 Cover and Front matter

Abstract: An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. As you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

Picturesque Mediations: Adalbert Stifter, Washington Irving, and the Transfiguration of the Mundane

Abstract: Abstract This essay examines the Germanophone realist Adalbert Stifter's reception of Washington Irving. Pushing against the traditional narrative of German realism's apolitical provinciality, it argues that media technologies from the British picturesque tradition, transmitted by way of Irving, aided Stifter in obscuring his cosmopolitan and colonialist ideologies. Picturesque observational practices, which emphasized the imaginative and artistic “improvement” of reality, overlap considerably with German realist techniques of transfiguration, and Irving's and Stifter's texts both emphasize the epiphanic experience of life and art, of reality and its mediation. Linking the epistemological dimensions of both periods to early statistical thought and illustrating how the authors’ preferred genres of the sketch and study pull from the same artistic and media-historical discourse, the essay uncovers striking continuities between the Germanophone and American literary contexts, recasting German realism as fully enmeshed within the global context it seemingly disavows.

Reading Late Modern Wartime in the Anthropocene: Elizabeth Bowen's The Little Girls

Abstract: Abstract This article considers the way Elizabeth Bowen's The Little Girls (1963) continually gestures beyond its narrative present, and the consequences this has for the text's interpretation in its future—our present moment of environmental crisis. Bowen's late work is concerned with “late modern wartime”: a period when global conflicts seemed recursive, repetitious, or continuous. But this was also a wartime whose environmental impacts, by the 1960s, became enmeshed with deep geological timescales, when radionuclides were discovered to remain toxic into the far future. Tracing how Bowen grappled with anxiety about the future, from interwar culture to the Cold War, the article answers the critical injunction that we need new modes of reading in the Anthropocene by returning to the mid-century—now considered to be a key “beginning” of the Anthropogenic age. It argues that the posthuman imagination lies at the intersection between the nuclear uncanny and the anthropogenic uncanny.

Boethian Abolition

Abstract: SEETA CHAGANTI is a professor of English, specializing in medieval European literature, at the University of California, Davis. This essay triangulates three areas of focus: “rethinking exceptionalism,” a premodern European philosopher, and the abolition of modern police and prisons as instruments of racial capitalism. Readers might themselves formulate justifications for the various juxtapositional permutations. To some, American policing provides a study in this country’s exceptionalism (Hirschfield 1111–12). To others, American exceptionalism and universalism inform the interaction between domestic policing and international violence (Singh 56–61; Schrader 28–29). And whether policing registers exceptionalism as self-perception within an American sphere or elucidates that exceptionalism’s relation to the international formation of oppressive systems, premodernity plays a role in the global development of racial capitalism (C. Robinson 32–57; Kao 548), which is inextricable from carceral power. These historical and geopolitical narratives offer numerous ways to link exceptionalism, premodernity, and policing. I, however, triangulate these terms through a different method, one informed by a commitment to the abolition of the prison industrial complex (PIC), which exists symbiotically with police. First, I argue that the approach to time and causality in Boethius’s sixthcentury Consolation of Philosophy can support abolitionist objectives to dismantle modern American policing and carceral systems. To liberal sensibilities, the outlines of the PIC appear known and thus inevitable and permanent (Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? 1). An abolitionist perspective as supported by Boethian thought recognizes that the carceral system’s sequences of determinative causality are suspect. And the knowledge that our understanding of cause and determination is flawed, a Boethian framework affirms, creates an obligation to seek a different horizon, even if—or especially because—we cannot see it. In this way Boethius joins the work to move us toward a

Monolingualism, Dispossession, and the Biopolitics of Language

Abstract: An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.

“The True and Only Bones of Columbus”: Relics, Archives, and Reversed Scenarios of Discovery

Abstract: Abstract This essay examines the ceremonies surrounding the 1877 alleged finding of Christopher Columbus's remains in the cathedral of Santo Domingo. The act of exhuming a body believed to be in Spain's possession posed a challenge for the former colonial power, which was in the process of turning Columbus into a national symbol. The Spanish government forcefully denied the legitimacy of the Dominican claim, calling it a “spectacle” contrived by the nation's religious and civil authorities. Building on Diana Taylor's theoretical framework, the essay looks at the 1877 ceremonies as social performances that facilitated the transmission of deeply rooted cultural memories. Whereas the procession of the remains from the cathedral to the church repeated the ritualized gestures prescribed for the discovery and transfer of relics, the performance enacted in the cathedral upended a different “scenario of discovery”—the one enacted by Spanish conquerors when they took possession of a new territory.

MLA volume 137 issue 1 Cover and Back matter

Abstract: An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. As you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

Lesser Lessing, Onstage and Off: The Dramatic Works of Doris Lessing

Abstract: Doris Lessing is an enduringly unique example of the autodidactic writer in the twentieth century. A recipient of a spotty colonial education at best in early-twentieth-century Rhodesia, the young Lessing voraciously devoured whatever books came her way—from those her mother brought with her, or regularly ordered from the metropole, to those that circulated among farmers in the bush. She read avidly and democratically across fiction, but generally in the echelon of literature.

Waiting for Godot and the Racial Theater of the Absurd

Abstract: Abstract This essay argues that the 1957 Black-cast revival of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot stages an Africana absurd sensibility that precedes and supersedes European philosophies of absurdism. While the Continental absurd developed as a repudiation of Western reason and aspired to a universalizing assessment of the human condition, the Africana absurd is situated in the historical formation of racial slavery and colonialism. More specifically, the Africana absurd is a response to the formal meaninglessness and incoherencies of Western racial logic. Locating it within the existential and historical situation of Black theater in the Jim Crow era and attending to theatrical elements such as casting, stage props, and choreography, this essay shows how the production recasts Beckett's absurdism, metatheatricality, and antihumanism to present, rather than represent, the felt absurdity of racial modernity.

What Was to Be Done? And How? “On Interpretation” in <i>The Political Unconscious</i>

Abstract: An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.

Clipping in and out of the Trenches

Abstract: An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

General Convention Information and Services

Abstract: An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

Paradoxes of Appropriation: The Chinese Reception of The Political Unconscious in the Age of Global Capitalism

Abstract: XUDONG ZHANG is professor of comparative literature and East Asian studies at New York University, where he directs the International Center for Critical Theory. The Becoming Conscious of the Essay and the Second Birth of Lu Xun Literature, the first volume of his trilogy on the foremost writer of modern China, is forthcoming in 2022 from the Joint Publishing Co. in Beijing. The Chinese reception of Fredric Jameson has been as extraordinary as it has been paradoxical. Beginning almost simultaneously with his semester-long lecture series on cultural theory and postmodernism at Peking University in 1985, the ongoing translation of his oeuvre into Chinese has corresponded with a steadily growing appetite for theoretical sophistication and development. Even though Jameson is wellknown in many disciplines beyond literary studies, The Political Unconscious is easily the anchor of the Chinese reception of Jameson as a contemporary literary critic and theorist. Likewise, while his work on postmodernism was central to contemporary Chinese cultural debates, The Political Unconscious nonetheless constitutes a real point of departure for the “modernization” of Chinese literary and cultural analysis. And what a modernization it was! Not only does The Political Unconscious introduce all the necessary concepts, tools, and theoretical operations that helped usher in a new age of contemporary theory and criticism in China; the book sets all its conceptual and theoretical properties, capital, skills, and sophistication in motion in the most self-critical or auto-reflexive way. In The Political Unconscious, various critical traditions and theoretical discourses—the linguistic turn, Freudian psychoanalysis, hermeneutics, Walter Benjamin’s allegorical mode of reading, and so much else—are positioned next to one another and turned into an integrated operation and a singular dialectical process. As the hidden center of gravity, the book kept within its orbit all these modes of analysis and interpretation, each and every one of them coming with its own attraction, appeal, and often cult following. Indeed, the well-known