In What Was African American Literature? Kenneth
Warren provides a concise historical context for defining and understanding
African American literary production and, moreover, provocatively announces its
death. For him, African American literature was specifically “a
postemancipation phenomenon that gained its coherence as an undertaking in the
social world defined by the system of Jim Crow segregation, which ensued after
the nation’s retreat from Reconstruction” (1). While acknowledging that his
contention that African American literature has eroded since the “legal demise
of Jim Crow” goes against much of the scholarship in African American and
transatlantic studies, which “has sought to justify taking a longer historical
view of African American literary practice,” Warren nevertheless asserts that
“[t]o insist that African American literature ‘was’ is [also] to raise the
question of what all of this ongoing production ‘is’” (3, 4). His research is
animated by the belief that there have been fundamental sociopolitical and
cultural changes that contest claims that “Jim Crow has not ended” and by
extension “equally pernicious manifestations of racism” exist today; Warren argues
that even though racism has not disappeared, pointing out its endurance “is not
to make a particularly profound social observation or to engage in trenchant
political analysis” (5). For him, historical periodization of African American
literature functions as a valuable interpretive tool that allows us not only to
recognize “some of the factors that almost unavoidably oriented African
American literary practice during the Jim Crow era,” but also enables us to examine
the critical possibilities that open up if we recognize that African American
literature “was” (9-10).
Academics Speak
Tuesday, August 7, 2012
Friday, August 3, 2012
Theory Review: Lee's Semblance of Identity (2012)
Lee, Christopher. The Semblance of Identity: Aesthetic
Mediation in Asian American Literature. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2012.
In The Semblance of Identity Christopher
Lee examines the ongoing debate in Asian American studies over identity
politics and its political efficacy; he claims that rather than presenting “an
argument for or against identity and identity politics,” his “aim is to explore
the consequences of the ‘post-identity’ turn” (3). Lee approaches the issue of
identity (and post-identity) in Asian American studies by tracing what he
describes as “the ‘idealized critical subject,’” a figure that “operates throughout
Asian American literary culture and cultural criticism as a means of providing
coherence to oppositional knowledge projects and political practices” (4). By working
through Theodor Adorno’s conception of “aesthetic semblance” as “the kinds of
knowledge that artworks offer by virtue of their appearance and illusory
coherence,” Lee establishes a parallel between aesthetics and identity (17). He
tracks the idealized critical subject as an aesthetic figure that manifests in
Asian American literary productions and demonstrates in the unraveling of the
form and content of these texts the “theoretical structures of race and
identity” (17). Ultimately, while Lee’s work does demonstrate how
representations of Asian American identity have always been unstable, his focus
on the idealized critical subject reveals how despite its flaws, identitarian thinking
continues to persist even amidst the proliferation of anti- and post-identity
discourses.
Thursday, July 19, 2012
Theory Review: Ahmed's The Promise of Happiness (2010)
Ahmed, Sara. The Promise of Happiness. Durham: Duke
UP, 2010.
In The Promise of
Happiness Sara Ahmed examines the connection between our conception of
happiness and what constitutes the “good life.” She argues that certain ideas
and objects, for instance, marriage, family, and heterosexual intimacy, are
perceived as “happy objects” that contain the promise of future happiness.
These objects, Ahmed reveals, exist even in “the absence of happiness by
filling a certain gap; we anticipate that the object will cause happiness, such
that it becomes a prop that sustains the fantasy that happiness is what would
follow if only we could have ‘it’” (32). For her, these happy objects embody
the good life; they demarcate the kind of life we should strive for, such that
happiness becomes tied to acquiring the right or proper objects and unhappiness
to anything that deviates from this norm. Ahmed’s research deals precisely with
those individuals and groups that are figured as deviant because they are
already perceived as unhappy and/or attempt to seek happiness in unexpected
objects; by concentrating her study around figures such as the “feminist
killjoy, unhappy queer, and melancholic migrant,” she conveys the necessity of
dissociating our conception of happiness from what is unquestionably “good” and
examines the “‘unhappy archives’” each figure embodies as a way of illuminating
alternative modes of living (17).
Tuesday, July 10, 2012
Theory Review: Berlant's Cruel Optimism (2011)
Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke UP, 2011.
In Cruel Optimism Lauren Berlant reveals that
despite deteriorating social, economic, and environmental conditions, people
still remain attached to fantasies of the "good life"; her research examines
how such fantasies have survived even when conditions for survival are
increasingly compromised under postwar neoliberal restructuring. She
posits “cruel optimism” as a relational dynamic whereby individuals remain
attached to “compromised conditions of possibility” or “clusters of promises”
embedded in desired object-ideas even when they inhibit the conditions for
flourishing and fulfilling such promises (24, 23). For Berlant, optimism is a
formal or structural feeling, such that an “optimistic attachment is invested
in one’s own or the world’s continuity, but might feel any number of ways,” including not optimistic at all (13).
In other words, maintaining attachments that sustain the good life fantasy, no
matter how injurious or cruel these attachments may be, allows people to make
it through day-to-day life when the day-to-day has become unlivable. Berlant is
essentially concerned with conditions of living or the state of the “present,”
which she describes as structured through “crisis ordinariness,” and turns to
affect and aesthetics as a way of apprehending these crises; by tracking the
various impasses we face today, she suggests that it becomes possible to
recognize that certain “genres” are no longer sustainable in the present and
that new emergent aesthetic forms are taking hold, alternative genres that
allow us to recognize modes of living not rooted in normative good life
fantasies.
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