Fall 2024 Teaching: Virginia Woolf (Grad Seminar)
Short Description:
Virginia Woolf is a towering figure of the modern novel. She is also a highly influential and accomplished essayist and philosopher, whose arguments continue to be influential to feminism, queer studies, medical humanities, and critiques of militarism, imperialism, and industrialized capitalism to the present day. This course will do a deep dive into Woolf's fiction and nonfiction, from her early short stories to major novels like Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Orlando, as well as long nonfiction essays, including A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas. Attention will be paid to Woolf's engagement with major historical events (the two World Wars, the advent of women's suffrage, and colonialism/Empire) as well as her literary milieu (the Bloomsbury movement). Various critical lenses for reading Woolf's writing will be introduced at appropriate moments, including feminist and queer theory, psychoanalysis, and medical humanities scholarship, especially linked to Woolf's representations of mental illness (depression, bipolar disorder).
Virginia Woolf, "Thunder at Wembley" (1924)
It is nature that is the ruin of Wembley; yet it is difficult to see what steps Lord Stevenson, Lieut.- General Sir Travers Clarke, and the Duke of Devonshire could have taken to keep her out. They might have eradicated the grass and felled the chestnut trees; even so the thrushes would have got in, and there would always have been the sky. At Earl’s Court and the White City, so far as memory serves, there was little trouble from this source. The area was too small; the light too brilliant. If a single real moth strayed in to dally with the arc lamps he was at once transformed into a dizzy reveller; if a laburnum tree shook her tassels, spangles of limelight floated in the violet and crimson air. Everything was intoxicated and transformed. But at Wembley nothing is changed and nobody is drunk. They say, indeed, that there is a restaurant where each diner is forced to spend a guinea upon his dinner. What vistas of cold ham that statement calls forth! What pyramids of rolls! What gallons of tea and coffee! For it is unthinkable that there should be champagne, plovers’ eggs, or peaches at Wembley. And for six and eightpence two people can buy as much ham and bread as they need. Six and eightpence is not a large sum; but neither is it a small sum. It is a moderate sum, a mediocre sum. It is the prevailing sum at Wembley. You look through an open door at a regiment of motor-cars aligned in avenues. They are not opulent and powerful; they are not flimsy and cheap. Six and eightpence seems to be the price of each of them. It is the same with the machines for crushing gravel. One can imagine better; one can imagine worse. The machine before us is a serviceable type, and costs, inevitably, six and eight-pence. Dress fabrics, rope, table linen, old masters, sugar, wheat, filigree silver, pepper, birds’ nests (edible, and exported to Hong Kong), camphor, bees-wax, rattans, and the rest—why trouble to ask the price? One knows beforehand—six and eightpence. As for the buildings themselves, those vast, smooth, grey palaces, no vulgar riot of ideas tumbled expensively in their architect’s head; equally, cheapness was abhorrent to him, and vulgarity anathema. Per perch, rod, or square foot, however ferro-concrete palaces are sold, they too work out at six and eightpence.
But then, just as one is beginning a little wearily to fumble with those two fine words—democracy, mediocrity—nature asserts herself where one would least look to find her—in clergymen, school children, girls, young men, invalids in bath-chairs. They pass, quietly, silently, in coveys, in groups, sometimes alone. They mount the enormous staircases; they stand in queues to have their spectacles rectified gratis; to have their fountain pens filled gratis; they gaze respectfully into sacks of grain; glance reverently at mowing machines from Canada; now and again stoop to remove some paper bag or banana skin and place it in the receptacles provided for that purpose at frequent intervals along the avenues. But what has happened to our contemporaries? Each is beautiful; each is stately. Can it be that one is seeing human beings for the first time? In streets they hurry; in houses they talk; they are bankers in banks; sell shoes in shops. Here against the enormous background of ferro-concrete Britain, of rosy Burma, at large, unoccupied, they reveal themselves simply as human beings, creatures of leisure, civilization, and dignity; a little languid perhaps, a little attenuated, but a product to be proud of. Indeed, they are the ruin of the Exhibition. The Duke of Devonshire and his colleagues should have kept them out. As you watch them trailing and flowing, dreaming and speculating, admiring this coffee-grinder, that milk and cream separator, the rest of the show becomes insignificant. And what, one asks, is the spell it lays upon them? How, with all this dignity of their own, can they bring themselves to believe in that?
But this cynical reflection, at once so chill and so superior, was made, of course, by the thrush. Down in the Amusement Compound by some grave oversight on the part of the Committee several trees and rhododendron bushes have been allowed to remain; and these, as anybody could have foretold, attract the birds. As you wait your turn to be hoisted into mid-air, it is impossible not to hear the thrush singing. You look up, and discover a whole chestnut tree with its blossoms standing; you look down, and see ordinary grass, scattered with petals, harbouring insects, sprinkled with stray wild flowers. The gramophone does its best; they light a horse-shoe of fairy lamps above the Jack and Jill; a man bangs a bladder and implores you to come and tickle monkeys; boatloads of serious men are poised on the heights of the scenic railway; but all is vain. The cry of ecstasy that should have split the sky as the boat dropped to its doom patters from leaf to leaf, dies, falls flat, while the thrush proceeds with his statement.
And then some woman, in the row of red-brick villas - outside the grounds, comes out and wrings a dish-cloth in her backyard. All this the Duke of Devonshire should have prevented.
The problem of the sky, however, remains. Is it, one wonders, lying back limp but acquiescent in a green deck-chair, part of the Exhibition? Is it lending itself with exquisite tact to show off to the best advantage snowy Palestine, ruddy Burma, sand-coloured Canada, and the minarets and pagodas of our possessions in the East? So quietly it suffers all these domes and palaces to melt into its breast; receives them with such sombre and tender discretion; so exquisitely allows the rare lamps of Jack and Jill and the Monkey-Teasers to bear themselves like stars. But even as we watch and admire what we would fain credit to the forethought of Lieut.- General Sir Travers Clarke, a rushing sound is heard. Is it the wind or is it the British Empire Exhibition?
It is both. The wind is rising and shuffling along the avenues; the Massed Bands of Empire are assembling and marching to the Stadium. Men like pincushions, men like pouter pigeons, men like pillar-boxes pass in procession. Dust swirls after them. Admirably impassive, the bands of Empire march on. Soon they will have entered the fortress; soon the gates will have clanged. But let them hasten! For either the sky has misread her directions or some appalling catastrophe is impending. The sky is livid, lurid, sulphurine. It is in violent commotion. It is whirling water-spouts of cloud into the air; of dust in the Exhibition. Dust swirls down the avenues, hisses and hurries like erected cobras round the corners. Pagodas are dissolving in dust. Ferro-concrete is fallible. Colonies are perishing and dispersing in spray of inconceivable beauty and terror which some malignant power illuminates. Ash and violet are the colours of its decay. From every quarter human beings come flying—clergymen, school children, invalids in bath-chairs. They fly with outstretched arms, and a vast sound of wailing rolls before them, but there is neither confusion nor dismay. Humanity is rushing to destruction, but humanity is accepting its doom. Canada opens a frail tent of shelter. Clergymen and school children gain its portals. Out in the open, under a cloud of electric silver, the bands of Empire strike up. The bagpipes neigh. Clergy, school children, and invalids group themselves round the Prince of Wales in butter. Cracks like the white roots of trees spread themselves across the firmament. The Empire is perishing; the bands are playing; the Exhibition is in ruins, For that is what comes of letting in the sky.
Slides for #DH Conference (George Mason University, 8/7/24)
I'm presenting at the DH conference in Washington, DC, with the same group I have been working with on the "Responsible Datasets in Context" grant this past year.
New Article: "The Modernist Archive Gap: Black Writers and Canonicity in the Digital Era"
I have a new article out -- making points I have made in various ways before ("Beyond the Archive Gap"), but here designed for inclusion in a volume focusing overwhelmingly on Anglo-American modernism.
"The Modernist Archive Gap: Black Writers and Canonicity in the Digital Era" Published in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Modernist Archives, July 2024.
Introduction:Modernist studies has been moving deeper into the archives, with much recent scholarship drawing on artifacts connected to the lives of early 20th-century authors. Primary documents, including personal papers, manuscripts, and paratextual elements have become essential to modernist studies scholarship, evidence of what, in the proposal for the current volume, is referred to as ‘a growing interest in fresh types of archival sources and evidence that can recontextualize modernist writing and artistic practices.’ Unfortunately, the archival turn has not necessarily helped to advance the process of making modernist studies more geographically inclusive or more racially diverse, a goal associated with the advent of the “new modernist studies” in the 1990s, and continuing with the interventions of Susan Stanford Friedman and many others in the 2000s. Rather, at times, the archival turn has reified the existing white Anglo-American modernist canon, though this apparent conservatism with respect to coverage might be an artifact of availability rather than intentional retrenchment: there are vast stores of archival material catalogued and available for many established modernist writers, and typically less material available for Black writers from the period or writers who were (or are) colonial subjects. In some cases, archival material for Black writers exists, but was neglected by collectors and librarians for many years. An example along these lines might be the Anne Spencer (1882-1975) papers, which remained essentially uncatalogued after the author’s death at her residence in Lynchburg, Virginia until 2008, when the collection was acquired by the University of Virginia. The thirty-three year gap between the death of a major Harlem Renaissance poet and the acquisition of her papers by a major research library might be telling. That said, with many other authors, no significant archival material has been preserved. These various gaps and omissions constitute a phenomenon I have elsewhere referred to as the ‘Archive Gap.’ The Archive Gap remains an issue both with print and digital archives, though the latter concern might be the more pressing one as it is being reproduced in the present moment.
Here, the aim is to begin by describing the digital archive gap as it exists in the field of modernist studies, with an emphasis on how African American writers in particular have been absent from digital archive projects and left out of many important emerging conversations about genre and canonicity. Secondly, I will argue for a series of concrete steps that might be taken to mitigate the archive gap going forward, in a range of projects created for different constituencies. Of particular importance is the construction of annotated digital collections to make writings by a broad range of authors accessible to the next generation of readers, particularly in high school and college classrooms. Such projects might go a long way towards correcting the imbalance in the syllabi of modernist literature courses, a correction that would be the starting point for any real and sustained revisioning of the modernist canon. Secondarily, the creation of rich, scholarly digital editions dedicated to both established Black authors like Langston Hughes and Claude McKay, and to lesser-known figures, might be of value. Finally, the creation of corpora dedicated to Black writers and writers from the colonial world could also be seen as part of this project: the creation of new digital archives specifically for quantitative textual analysis.
Teaching Woolf in an Age of Distant Reading (Slides for Woolf Society Conference, June 2024)
I'm speaking at the International Virginia Woolf Society Conference in Fresno, California, on Saturday 6/8. Here are my slides for the talk.
New Article: "Catachresis at the Origin": Names and Power in Toni Morrison's Fiction
I have a new article on Toni Morrison out in South Central Review, a peer-reviewed journal connected to the SCMLA branch of the MLA. It's part of a special issue on Morrison.
The article is here.
The abstract for the essay is as follows:
Toni Morrison’s fiction is replete with characters who carry nicknames, who rename themselves, or are renamed by others. Some misnamings carry the stories of histories of marginalization and oppression—as with the “drunken yankee” responsible for the naming of Macon Dead in Song of Solomon. Morrison’s characters also rename themselves to resist the legacy of American slavery and institutionalized racism. What ties Morrison’s namings, misnamings, and renamings together is the sense that there is no path to the recovery of true names for many African American people. The consequence is not powerlessness; rather, the “catachresis at the origin” that Gayatri Spivak refers to is intuited organically by many Morrison characters, who embrace misnaming and rename themselves as a mode of claiming self-ownership. Catachresis may begin as rhetorical violence imposed from without, but in Toni Morrison’s fiction, it can end as an opportunity to assert power, autonomy, and a boundless creativity.
If you would like to read this article, but don't have access to this journal on Project Muse, please let me know and I can send you the PDF.
African American Periodical Poetry 1900-1928: a Dataset
Presentation at the University of Washington, May 20, 2024
Spring 2024 Teaching: New Course on AI, Science Fiction w/ a hands-on element
English 386: Spring 2024
Black Mirrors: Science Fiction, AI, and Ethics
Instructor: Professor Amardeep Singh (“Deep”)
Mondays and Wednesdays, 12:10-1:25 (Drown 019)
This course will survey 20th- and 21st-century science fiction and film with an emphasis on representations of Artificial Intelligence. Though many think of this as a topic especially relevant to the present moment, in fact, writers and filmmakers have been considering AI in various ways since the late 1800s. For the present course, we will focus on contemporary science fiction representations of AI by writers like Martha Wells, Kazuo Ishiguro, Sean Michaels, and Jeanette Winterson. We'll also look closely at how AIs have been represented in contemporary media, in shows like Black Mirror and films like Her and Ex Machina. What are the ethical issues surrounding the creation and use of AIs? What tools do scientists, philosophers, and social theorists offer us to help make sense of the rapidly changing landscape regarding AI? What are some likely benefits of new AIs based on Large Language Models, and what might be some of the dangers?
Required books
Death of an Author (Kindle ebook novella. Not available in paperback.)
Martha Wells, Murderbot Chronicles 1: All Systems Red
Martha Wells, Murderbot Chronicles 2: Artificial Condition
Sean Michaels, Do You Remember Being Born? (2023)
Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun (2021)
Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein (2019)
Short stories, poetry, and select non-fiction reading
I Am Code: An Artificial Intelligence Speaks. Poems by code-davinci-002
Ted Chiang, “The Lifecycle of Software Objects”
Joy Buolamwini, “Unamasking AI” (excerpts)
Meredith Broussard, “Artificial Unintelligence: How Machines Misunderstand the
World”
Emily Bender, “On the Danger of Stochastic Parrots” (2021)
Lee et al. “Do Language Models Plagiarize?” (2022)
Films and Media
Black Mirror (selected episodes dealing with AI)
Her (2013)
Ex Machina (2019)
M3GAN (2022)
Goals and Outcomes:
Students will read and analyze a body of contemporary fiction that engages with themes of AI and ethics directly. Students will also watch a certain number of films and television show episodes on this theme. These texts and films help us imagine how we might use AI in our everyday lives, how our lives might be changed by it, and what some of the dangers are.
Students will gain familiarity with contemporary conversations about artificial intelligence, including especially generative AI. A particular area of interest is the ethics entailed in the construction of large language models (which frequently use large volumes of copyrighted materials), and the possible dangers entailed in the misuse of AI, especially for women, LGBTQ+ people, and people of color.
Students will consider how people in the humanities, including scholars of literature as well as creative writers, might use generative AI productively and affirmatively, and in ways that assist the labor of thinking and writing – not replace it.
Students will gain hands-on experience using various new generative AI models based on accounts given by successful published writers who have used generative AI in their writing process. An additional possible outcome: we will attempt to create fine-tuned versions of open-source chatbots that are trained on limited corpora that we create. (We may get help from folks outside of the English department to do this last one.)
Scholarly Activities: 2023 in Review
1. I was on a grant. Last year, the most interesting news for me was probably the grant I am a part of, "Responsible Datasets in Context."
The grant is split between five different universities and is funded by the Mozilla Foundation. The total grant award is $150,000, of which Lehigh University will be getting around $25,000. The lead PI on the grant is Melanie Walsh of the University of Washington. We'll be working on the grant outputs this coming spring (2024), so expect to hear more about it soon.
2. I wrote a new article. I also wrote an article for a journal that was accepted for publication after peer review. The article will be appearing in spring 2024. The article is called "Catachresis at the Origin: Names and Power in Toni Morrison's Fiction." The article will be appearing in South Central Review. This will be my first ever published article on Toni Morrison's fiction.
I'm hoping it will be part of a book project -- perhaps my next book will be called Catachresis: Names and Power. The idea is to take this concept of Spivak's and deploy it as a helpful way of thinking about naming, renaming, and misnaming in postcolonial and decolonial contexts. It's a "Spivakian" book, but not necessarily a book about Spivak per se. Other chapters from it might include an earlier piece I wrote for South Asian Review on Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake, and a chapter on Mahasweta Devi's stories.
3. Article #2. I wrote a chapter called, "The Modernist Archive Gap: Black Writers and Canonicity in the Digital Era" for the Bloomsbury Handbook of Modernist Archives. This chapter builds on earlier work I've been doing for several years around a phenomenon I call the "Archive Gap" (see my earlier article, "Beyond the Archive Gap"). In my digital projects, I am strongly invested in addressing and attempting to rectify the archive gap; here, the focus is specifically on how that plays out for modernist studies and early 20th century African American writing.
3. At the MSA conference.
I gave a talk at the Modernist Studies Association in Brooklyn in November. I was on a panel honoring the late, great University of Wisconsin professor Susan Stanford Friedman; my brief remarks for that roundtable are here. Overall, I had a great time at this year's MSA -- the conference continues to be incredibly vibrant and rich.
4. At the MLA convention. It was part of 2024, but I just gave a talk at the MLA, as part of a Banned Books roundtable. My brief remarks for that roundtable are here.
5. Guest lecture on Claude McKay. I did a guest lecture at Germantown Friends School on Claude McKay. The focus was on McKay as an African diasporic writer and as a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance. I also talked a little about his novel Romance in Marseille, which was finally published in 2021. The slides for that talk are here.
6. I did a guest lecture on Mira Nair's Salaam Bombay! at Viola Lasmano's film class at Rutgers University in New Brunswick in October 2023. The slides for that guest lecture are here.
7. In the spring I co-taught a graduate course on "Theories of Literature and Social Justice." As part of that, I wrote up a fairly comprehensive 'explainer' on Gayatri Spivak's "Can the Subaltern Speak?" That explainer has been read more than 1500 times on my blog, and a PDF version of it has been read 700 times on Academia.edu.
Ongoing projects
I continued to work on a large digital project, African American Poetry: a Digital Anthology. I had a small internal grant on the project (FRG), which I used to hire a graduate research assistant, Miranda Alvarez, to work with me over the summer. Miranda mainly worked on the Arthur Schomburg author page on the site. Schomburg is an especially interesting figure -- someone who was an Afro-Puerto Rican immigrant in New York who would come to be at the center of the Harlem Renaissance. He is a key figure in African American literary history, who also remained interested in race and politics in the Hispanophone Caribbean throughout his career, as his various writings show.
More generally, the "Anthology" continues to grow -- it now features more than 90 full-text books of poetry, digital editions of several poetry anthologies, and a considerable collection of periodical poetry as well.
One important new facet of the site is the introduction of some quantitative analysis -- I've begun to assemble datasets to quantify African American poetry published during the period in question. An overview of that new quantitative element is here.
In the late summer, I submitted the project as a whole to Modnets for peer-review and indexing. The peer review led to some helpful feedback, and I am working on revisions that are still in progress.
The usage of the site is quite good -- my Analytics tracker suggests that the site has about 13,000 visitors a month during the school year (September-May), with a spike during Black History Month.
What Would Toni Morrison Say? Censorship in the 2020s (for MLA 2024)
I'm giving a talk at this year's MLA Conference on a roundtable on "Banned Books." Below is the text of my presentation.
Title: "What Would Toni Morrison Say? Censorship in the 2020s"
The most commonly censored speakers and writers in the U.S. are people from marginalized groups whose voices and arguments threaten state authority or the status quo. Books by Toni Morrison, especially The Bluest Eye and Beloved, regularly appear on the American Library Association’s annual “10 Most Challenged” Lists, with The Bluest Eye in particular catching the attention of ban-oriented groups over the past few years. (The Bluest Eye, a book published in 1970, was on the 13 most challenged books of 2022, alongside very contemporary recent books like Gender Queer and All Boys Aren't Blue.)
As I have been teaching courses on Toni Morrison's fiction to undergraduates at Lehigh, I've wanted to bring the ban campaigns to their attention, and possibly construct assignments inviting students to investigate the claims against Morrison's novels. It's a pretty familiar English paper assignment structure: what is the argument against Morrison in these complaints, and how would you respond? This has proved to be difficult, as the complainants don't actually present arguments as such. One of the people who filed a complaint against The Bluest Eye, Amber Crawford of the St. Charles Parents’ Association in Wentzville, Missouri, simply listed “pediphilia [sic], incest, rape” as a sufficient reason. Not an argument -- just some bullet points. Crawford’s objection, like many others that have appeared around the U.S. in recent years often following cookie-cutter formulas pasted from the same lists online, reduces Morrison's complex narrative to these three words as evidence of its "obscenity." Since none of the complainants in the thousands of school board censorship events have actually read any of the books they’re censoring, their complaints don't really constitute teachable moments.
If they did read the novel, they might after all be troubled: what’s troubling in The Bluest Eye is actually its portrayal of young Black girls coming of age in a midwestern town at a time of total mass media and institutional erasure of Black bodies and experiences. What’s really unsettling about the book is the way it tells the story of a child desperate to be loved, to be cared for – and who never finds that love. What is the impact of these painful messages on young people? What is the right age to read The Bluest Eye? That might be an interesting conversation to have; too bad we can't have it.
Dana A. Williams historicized the present wave of censorship as part of a backlash against African American progress: “After the Black Lives Matter movement, after the 1619 Project, after the election of Barack Obama, any major moment in history where you see progress of people of color—Black people in particular—backlash will follow…” Morrison herself thought there was a connection. As she put it in her 2009 essay, “Peril,” “Efforts to censor, starve, regulate and annihilate us are clear signs that something important has taken place.”
As we see a flood of right-wing censorious legislation, it is hard not to think that any indications that “something important has taken place” in recent years have been overwhelmed by that backlash. Arguably, the wave of local school districts banning particular Toni Morrison books has been superseded by a massive wave of state-level laws banning any potentially sensitive topics related to race, gender, or sexuality at all. Ten states have passed such laws, and there have been more than 100 separate bills introduced across 33 different states. The language of state laws like the one passed in Oklahoma remains vague (“not one cent of taxpayer money should be used to define and divide young Oklahomans about their race or sex”), but they are interpreted by local school districts in very specific ways that lead to the banning of books by Black authors or that deal with race or racism from the curriculum.
Morrison was consistent throughout her career in supporting the rights of writers to be controversial, and to leave the reader troubled and unsettled. In her essay “Peril” from 2009, from the collection Burn This Book, she talked about the way censorship aims to impose statist language on the population:
Writers—journalists, essayists, bloggers, poets, playwrights—can disturb the social oppression that functions like a coma on the population, a coma despots call peace; and they stanch the blood flow of war that hawks and profiteers thrill to. (Toni Morrison, "Peril")
It is hard to read this and not wonder what Morrison would say about the “blood flow of war” of our own era, of the vast curtain of censorship that has been descending on college campuses over the use of certain words or phrases related to Palestinians. Here’s more from Morrison:
The thought that leads me to contemplate with dread the erasure of other voices, of unwritten novels, poems whispered or swallowed for fear of being overheard by the wrong people, outlawed languages flourishing underground, essayists’ questions challenging authority never being posed, unstaged plays, canceled films—that thought is a nightmare. As though a whole universe is being described in invisible ink. (Toni Morrison, "Peril")
Back in 1996, Morrison also wrote a powerful defense of a novel she clearly felt ambivalent about, Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. As is well-known, that novel has sometimes been banned or pulled from curricula on account of Twain’s language. For Morrison, the use of the n-word in the book was never the problem, and she clearly condemned the efforts to have the book banned for that reason:
It struck me as a purist yet elementary kind of censorship designed to appease adults rather than educate children. Amputate the problem, band-aid the solution. A serious comprehensive discussion of the term by an intelligent teacher certainly would have benefited my eighth-grade class and would have spared all of us (a few blacks, many whites — mostly second-generation immigrant children) some grief. ("This Amusing, Troubling Book")
All of this sounds like an incredibly apt description of what state legislatures are doing in their own ham-fisted censorship efforts. (One does wonder, again, what Morrison would think about the idea of new editions of Twain where racial slurs have been swapped out – where the word “slave” is used instead of the word Twain himself used?)
Morrison's most profound discussion of the perils of censorship was perhaps her moving, challenging Nobel Prize speech from 1993. Here she tells a parable of a blind woman and young people who come to her to test her – is the bird in our hands living or dead? Her response, as many of you will remember, is: “I don’t know whether the bird you are holding is dead or alive, but what I do know is that it is in your hands. It is in your hands.” Morrison goes on to interpret the bird in the inquisitors’ as language – what will we do with it? Will we let it live? Will we kill it just to win the rhetorical point?
Some of Morrison’s most thoughtful and moving arguments against censorship from her entire career follow. For reasons of time, here are just a few of the best lines:
The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties for menace and subjugation. Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. . . . Sexist language, racist language, theistic language – all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas. (Toni Morrison, Nobel Lecture, 1993)
I’ve often wondered what prompted this ferocious critique of censorious language at the moment when Morrison was at the pinnacle of her career. I haven’t found that point of inspiration – but perhaps Morrison was speaking to us, 30 years in the future? Today’s school board book banners and state legislators banning discussions of race as “divisive” are doing exactly what Morrison describes. They are enacting, through erasure, the violence of a statist narrative in which racism and slavery were minor historical incidents, not a defining story. What would Toni Morrison say? Well, in this case, we know – because she said it all too plainly in 1993.
Slides: Claude McKay -- a Diasporic Writer in the Harlem Renaissance
In Honor of Susan Stanford Friedman
Susan Stanford Friedman passed away this past spring at the age of 79. She was an inspiring figure and I considered her a friend and mentor, particularly in my work on modernism in South Asia. If you're unfamiliar with her career, a look at this brief obituary at the University of Wisconsin might be a place to start. I'll be speaking at a roundtable at this year's Modernist Studies Association conference in her honor. Below is a draft of the text of my brief talk.
A Transformational Figure -- Brief Remarks for Susan Stanford Friedman Roundtable, MSA 2023
Amardeep Singh, Lehigh University
The work of Susan Stanford Friedman’s that has been most widely cited according to Google Scholar is not one of her many books focused specifically on Modernism, but her 1998 book on transnational feminism, Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter. Mappings has an astounding 1200 citations on Google Scholar, as compared to 460 hits for Planetary Modernisms, and about 300 citations each for her two books on H.D. Admittedly, the number of citations is one among many indications of influence; given that, what might it tell us? While we are here to honor and recognize Susan Friedman’s extraordinary contributions to modernist studies, to my eye, the success of Mappings might be evidence that the MSA as a conference and professional organization only represents a small slice of the conversations with which Susan Friedman was engaged. She was also committed to the community of broadly interdisciplinary, transnational feminist scholarship, where she will also, I suspect, be thought of as a generational figure.
I spent some time revisiting both Mappings and Planetary Modernisms while thinking about my comments for this roundtable. One immediate observation is that both are first and foremost definitional explorations. Mappings aims to test whether and how feminist scholarship can assimilate what were then about two decades of postcolonial and intersectional thought, and still be understood as feminism. Here's a brief passage:
“In its advocacy of dialogic negotiation, Mappings polemically suggests that the time has come to reverse the past pluralization of feminisms based on difference, not to return to a false notion of a universal feminism that obliterates difference but rather to reinvent a singular feminism that incorporates myriad and often conflicting cultural and political formations in a global context.” – Susan Stanford Friedman, Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter (1998)
Friedman’s answer, as the passage above indicates, was emphatically yes – and what’s more, she believed feminists should continue to use “feminism” in the singular, even as they radically expanded their field of engagement and challenged their unthinking Eurocentric biases. Among other things, insofar as patriarchy and the domination of cis-men remain a fact of life worldwide, we will continue to need transnational feminism, even if articulated along the lines of strategic essentialism.
Will we also continue to need “modernism”? In the Introduction to Planetary Modernisms, Friedman references how the method and aims of Mappings informed her subsequent attempt to perform the same transformational redefinition of “Modernism” – and also notes that it turned out to be a much more difficult project. Her first engagement along those lines was the 2002 essay “Definitional Excursions,” but there were many more: over the course of the subsequent fifteen years, Friedman published dozens of essays and chapters, and gave many, many talks that attempted to articulate a truly inclusive, non-Eurocentric planetary modernism. To follow the entirety of her train of thought is beyond our scope for this brief presentation, but suffice it to say that Friedman did not replicate the rhetorical gesture of assimilation and accommodation she confidently asserted in Mappings.
“Planetary Modernisms rejects an additive approach to global modernisms and promotes instead a transformational one, a fundamental rethinking on a planetary scale in the longue durée as a necessary framework to fulfill the transnational turn in modernist studies and to prepare ourselves to survive and thrive in the still-unfolding modernities of the twenty-first century.” –Susan Stanford Friedman, Planetary Modernisms (2015)
The expanded map has mattered to me personally, as the kind of modernism I have often wanted to discuss is part of that expanded map, specifically modernism in South Asia. It's a complex problem, as avant-garde and formally experimental writing movements generally emerged a bit later in South Asia (the 1950s and 60s), and sometimes appeared to be operating on a 'diffusionist' emulation of Euro-American modernism. South Asian writers of the 1930s tended to be much more committed to social realism -- under the umbrella of the Progressive Writers Movement. Then you have towering late-Victorian Bengali figures like Rabindranath Tagore (and his sister, Swarnakumari Devi) -- were they modernists? And of course the small number of Indian writers like Mulk Raj Anand and Ahmed Ali who spent time in the UK and published books with the support of London editors and publishers. When was modernism in South Asia? How would we define it? Are we sure we need to use the word modernism at all, since South Asian writers themselves rarely did? Susan Friedman’s work didn’t necessarily answer all of these questions, though it did make them legible to the broader modernist studies community, and I'm grateful for that.
I first met Susan Friedman in the fall of 2002. I was a first-year faculty member at Lehigh University, and I had the temerity to organize a conference on H.D. in the author’s hometown of Bethlehem, PA, on a shoestring budget and with little in the way of administrative support. Working with my colleagues in my home department and with support from folks like Madelyn Detloff and the H.D. Society email list, I invited Susan Friedman to be the keynote – and she actually came! I quickly brushed up as much as I could on her work to write the introduction for the keynote, and to have semi-intelligent things to say over meals in Bethlehem. I'm sure in retrospect that that introduction was not terribly impressive, but I was so relieved when she acknowledged it later with characteristic terseness: "You're a quick study."
Susan Friedman came to Lehigh to speak twice more over the years, first as part of our Literature and Social Justice speaker series in 2012, and then for our considerably fancier second H.D. conference in 2015. In subsequent meetings at those events, and in our many meetings and meals over the years at the MSA and the MLA, I started to feel less like an upstart "quick study" and more like a middle-aged peer. I started to think of Susan Friedman as a forever colleague -- someone I could expect to stop and talk to at MSA and other conferences every year, no appointment necessary. I'm sad those conversations are now over, but I'm very glad to have gained so much from her over the years.