I'm on session 385 at the MLA this year, with my collaborators on the "Responsible Datasets in Context" grant I received last year. Here are my slides.
385 Educating at the Intersection of Data Science and Humanities through Ethical and Responsible ContextsModernist Studies Association 2024: A few notes
I was recently at the Modernist Studies Association Conference in Chicago. I've been going to the conference on and off for many years (going back to the early 2000s?). Lately, I've been going there to present on materials relevant to my digital projects. If interested, slides from my presentation are here.
I'm not going to try and give a comprehensive account of what I saw and did at MSA, but below are a few highlights. Overall, the vibe was good -- despite the wild week in US politics, everyone seemed eager to talk about their research. Indeed, in a few cases (especially with some of the material related to queer and trans writers), it seemed like there was a more intense relevance in light of the growing anti-trans tendency in public discourse.
Saturday Keynote: Nella Larsen's Passing
It was fun to have the Saturday keynote be a screening of the 2021 Netflix adaptation of Passing, followed by a panel discussing it. The film was great (I hadn't seen it!), and the panel discussion following, with Rafael Walker, Pardis Dabashi, and Cyraina Johnson-Roullier, was lively and enlightening. My main takeaway from the panelists was that the film is a pretty faithful adaptation of the novel, but it's more optimistic about love and less pessimistic about the affect of racism on personal relationships than Larsen's book.
Queer and Trans Writing
Panel attended: Transing modernism/queering modernism
Jaime Harker, University of Mississippi
Chris Coffman, University of Alaska, Fairbanks
Aaron Stone, University of Virginia
Mat Fournier, Ithaca College Marquis Bey, Northwestern University
Marquis Bey, Northwestern University
This was a standout panel. Papers on Bryher, Virginia Woolf's Orlando, Djuna Barnes' Nightwood, and more
The idea of thinking about Bryher as a trans figure seems especially worthwhile. Also, the paper on Orlando mentioned some recent adaptations of the novel, including a film called Orlando: My Political Biography as well as a 2019 opera adaptation by Olga Neuwirth.
There were also a couple of papers that were theoretical / auto-theory interventions on the concept of dysphoria, and the concept of gender itself (memorable phrase: "from gender dysphoria to gender euphoria").
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At another panel I attended, I saw another paper dealing with trans issues -- Michael Mayne of Denison University. He had rewritten parts of his paper at the last minute to reflect the results of the election. (In recent years, 664 anti-trans bills have been proposed by state legislatures. In the recent election, 41% of the ads for Trump were anti-Trans ads.
The Well of Loneliness is increasingly being read as a trans novel (including by scholars like Jack Halberstam and Leslie Feinberg). Mayne's emphasis was on the idea of transness as abjection in Hall's novel. He also mentioned Julia Serano's idea of "Effemimania" (a term I hadn't heard before), and Susan Stryker's idea of the prospect of trans writers reclaiming the "monster."
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At another panel, Pamela Caughie gave a presentation on "Bloombsury's Gender Politics," where she alluded to the painter Dora Carrington, who was not quite trans, though she did engage in some transgressive gender play, and who was certainly queer and polyamorous (key line: "How I hate being a girl! Tied with female encumbrances and hanging flesh").
Caughie also mentioned many other writers who were new to me, including Rosamund Lehmann (Dusty Answer, 1927), and Denton Welch (Maiden Voyage, 1943).
Early Postcolonials
For many years, the MSA has been a welcoming place for people doing work on what we might think of as "early postcolonial" literature (1950-1980, roughly). This is the era of people like Naipaul and Lamming, Khushwant Singh, Mulk Raj Anand, C.L.R. James, etc.
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On the panel where I presented, Ben Fried gave a paper on the relationship between V.S. Naipaul and his publisher, Andre Deutsch. Deutsch was a Jewish immigrant who fled from German-occupied Europe. Deutsch and Diana Athill worked together to form a new publishing house (Allan Wingate), which published Naipaul and many other postcolonial writers. Throughout his early career, Naipaul struggled with the tension of being a highly culturally grounded writer at a time when publishers were looking for "universal" appeal.
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On another panel, I saw a paper by Rochona Mojumdar of the University of Chicago. She was interested in the dialogue between Mrinal Sen's early 1970s "Calcutta Trilogy" and radical Latin America in the "Third Cinema" movement -- specifically, Fernando Solanas' revolutionary classic, La Hora de Los Hornos (The Hour of the Furnaces), and Sen's Padatik (1973). There's an interesting moment of borrowing or appropriation in Sen's film -- where he takes the exact footage of police beating protestors that also appears in Solanas' film.
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I also attended this panel:
R28. Mediating Empire: Comparative Colonialisms, Comparative Media Studies
Chair: Jessica Berman, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Daniel Morse, University of Nevada, Reno
Stephen Pasqualina, University of Detroit-Mercy
Abhipsa Chakraborty, SUNY Buffalo
Nasia Anam, University of Nevada, Reno
This was another standout panel, with papers on radio adaptations of Raja Rao's Kanthapura, CLR James' broadcasts on the BBC, and more. Recent scholarship on the BBC's radio broadcasts has really expanded our understanding of how postcolonial literature emerged as a new formation during and after World War II.
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On Sunday morning, I was in a Digital Humanities Seminar, on "Modernism in/and as Data." It was a fun and productive discussion.
Turning to Toni Morrison in a Time of Trump
Toni Morrison has a short essay called “Racism and Fascism,” an excerpt from a speech she gave at Howard University in 1995. Here is the first part of it:
Let us be reminded that before there is a final solution, there must be a first solution, a second one, even a third. The move toward a final solution is not a jump. It takes one step, then another, then another. Something, perhaps, like this:
(1) Construct an internal enemy, as both focus and diversion.
(2) Isolate and demonize that enemy by unleashing and protecting the utterance of overt and coded name-calling and verbal abuse. Employ ad hominem attacks as legitimate charges against that enemy.
(3) Enlist and create sources and distributors of information who are willing to reinforce the demonizing process because it is profitable, because it grants power and because it works.
(4) Palisade all art forms; monitor, discredit or expel those that challenge or destabilize processes of demonization and deification.
(5) Subvert and malign all representatives of and sympathizers with this constructed enemy.
(6) Solicit, from among the enemy, collaborators who agree with and can sanitize the dispossession process.
(7) Pathologize the enemy in scholarly and popular mediums; recycle, for example, scientific racism and the myths of racial superiority in order to naturalize the pathology.
(8) Criminalize the enemy. Then prepare, budget for and rationalize the building of holding arenas for the enemy-especially its males and absolutely its children.
(9) Reward mindlessness and apathy with monumentalized entertainments and with little pleasures, tiny seductions, a few minutes on television, a few lines in the press, a little pseudo-success, the illusion of power and influence, a little fun, a little style, a little consequence.
(10) Maintain, at all costs, silence. (Source)
How might this help us as we prepare for a second Trump presidency?
I see it as a helpful set of warnings – what we should be on guard against – but also a reminder.
It’s a reminder that European fascism and American institutionalized racism weren’t actually that different. In some ways, the “first solution” Morrison outlines – the creation of an internal enemy, which was demonized, criminalized, and studied in pseuodscientific ways, and then subjected to intense, spectacular group violence – that is as American as apple pie. This was lynching. This was the one-drop rule. This was Tulsa and Springfield, East St. Louis and Selma. So there's a precedent for this in America -- a distinctly American style of fascism with a quaint-sounding name ("Jim Crow").
But there are also warnings in Morrison’s list of new areas of focus; this is what we should be looking out for in a second Trump administration. Today, fascism need not look and sound like a man with a mustache screaming into a microphone in front of a massive crowd of brownshirted supporters. In the social media era, fascism can look like a racist meme on TikTok that people chuckle at on their phones while sitting on the toilet.
We know from the campaign who their favorites are: 1) racialized “illegal immigrants,” 2) queer and transgender folks.
Let’s look at this image again:
Notice that it’s not enough to simply say “there are illegal immigrants who commit crimes, and we should deal with that.” For Trump, it’s important to show the faces of the villains on stage -- to shame and vilify them. If he could have these men physically on stage with him to be jeered at by the rabid crowd, he would absolutely do that
Remember in the campaign the time he suggested rounding up undocumented immigrants and creating a "migrant fighter" league for UFC fights? That.
And of course, remember “They’re eating the cats, they’re eating the dogs” from the debate in August? Fascist movements demonize minoritized communities by fixating on what they eat or don’t eat. They also invent vicious lies about those communities out of whole cloth and convince millions to believe in those lies.
As Morrison says in “Racism and Fascism,” “Reward mindlessness and apathy with monumentalized entertainments and with little pleasures, tiny seductions…” I am sure the guy who made this YouTube video thought he was criticizing Trump. The millions who chuckled at the video on their phones? Not so much.
The other villains of Trump's campaign were queer and transgender people. Something like 40% of all of Trump's TV advertisements in swing states were focused on an anti-trans campaign, with images like this one:
I'm sure we'll see more of this in the weeks to come: distorted images of queer and trans people put forward to elicit revulsion and disgust from mainstream viewers.
Finally, note Morrison's #10: "Maintain, at all costs, silence." Silence has already been the rule for Donald Trump's many enablers and apologists. There is nothing he could say or do that would lead his followers to criticize him or disown him. They are loudly silent. But that does not have to be true for the rest of us.
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)
Virginia Woolf, "Thunder at Wembley." Published in The Nation and the Athenaeum, June 28, 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.
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
Generative AI and the Future of Writing: a Few Meditations
There's considerable excitement about generative AI in humanities academia at the moment, with the launching of a new Duke University Press-hosted journal, Critical AI, and a new dedicated grant from the NEH on Humanities Research Centers on Artificial Intelligence. In some ways, the buzz over generative AI seems comparable to the buzz a decade ago over Digital Humanities, which brought fresh ideas and methods to the humanities, and seemed to be growing apace (though mostly outside of core humanities departments). That said, it remained somewhat of a niche activity with a certain ceiling of engagement.
The engagement with generative AI seems to be different. For one thing, the technical challenges involved in doing text analysis or computational stylistics are not present with generative AI; anyone can use ChatGPT or Gemini, and millions of people already are. Second, the utility of the technology is obvious and immediate (even if it too might be overstated in certain ways, both positively and negatively). To my mind, it seems important for humanities scholars, writers, and artists to engage with generative AI constructively but also skeptically. What are some possible ways the technology could assist us with existing research problems and questions? What are some new questions or problems it might allow us to ask?
Here, I'll take on just one of the many questions I've been thinking about with respect to generative AI: What might generative AI mean for the future of writing? If generative AI works as its supporters are advertising (or comes to work that way soon, as the available products proliferate and are continually refined), won't creative writers across a broad spectrum of creative areas be inclined to use it, perhaps not to replace creative labor, but at least to augment it in certain ways?
Along these lines group of writers have been thoughtfully experimenting with generative AI to achieve particular effects. In a class on representing AI I'm teaching this spring, I recently assigned a trio of published texts that do some version of this, Stephen Marche's Death of an Author, the collection of poems called I Am Code, and Sean Michaels' novel Do You Remember Being Born? How successful are these experiments?
Both of the novels in the group are set in the present moment, and prominently feature tech companies as agents in the plot. In Michaels' novel, a celebrated elderly poet is hired by a tech startup on the verge of unveiling a powerful new AI companion to jointly author a long poem with a generative AI fine-tuned to her own poetic style. In Death of an Author, we meet an eccentric billionaire who aims to create an AI replica of a celebrated novelist named Peggy Firmin. This commonality is of course not an accident -- and indeed, much of the coverage of the current generative AI boom is linked in some way to its corporate culture and its charismatic executives.
Death of an Author is described by its developer/author Stephen Marche as containing text that is 95% generated by a variety of generative AI platforms, including ChatGPT, Cohere, and Sudowrite. The choice of a murder mystery is an obvious one for a first experiment with generative AI -- detective fiction is well-known as being structured around strong and identifiable genre constraints, even as well-known writers in the genre often deviate from those constraints.
The novel as written is replete with literary and theoretical Easter Eggs, from the title (clearly a reference to Roland Barthes' Death of an Author), to the many references to writers like Edgar Allen Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle one finds in the story (the protagonist in the novel is named Gus Dupin [after the detective in Poe], who is the author of a work of literary criticism called The Purloined Author [another reference to Poe], and the plot as a whole borrows its essential skeleton from Doyle's "The Problem of Thor Bridge")
One of the limitations in the believability of the story in Death of an Author is its overly optimistic sense that AI replicas can be even remotely equivalent to the actual persona and being of a human being (in the story, Peggy Firmin first agrees to be replicated, but then has second thoughts about it). If this is ever going to be possible, it certainly isn't on the horizon with anything like the large language model-based, statistics-driven generative AI that is currently in use. (Which isn't to say that people aren't going to try. Internet sex workers are already selling AI bot versions of themselves to subscribers, and one can easily imagine a scenario where people with terminal illnesses sign up to have their speech and image captured for digital avatars that might persist after their death. One thinks of Black Mirror's "Be Right Back" episode...)
That said, there are some intriguing ideas in Death of an Author as well, gesturing toward how AI might transform fictive universes. Here, for instance, is the character Peggy Firmin in an interview from the text of the novel:
We're going to see interactive mystery bots that will allow users to solve puzzles and uncover secrets. We'll also see stories created specifically for individuals inside their experience, the ability to recreate dead relatives through AI technology. Stories where the audience doesn't even know they're stories. character who are so deeply felt that they aren't characters at all, but you become the character. It's going to be a gorgeous mess.
In effect, what Peggy Firmin is imagining here is something roughly akin to the gamification of works of fiction (which in point of fact is not so revolutionary to anyone who has played narrative-driven video games like The Last of Us). In Death of an Author, several 'characters' in the novel who only manifest via telephone or email are revealed late in the text to be bots, who have drawn the protagonist Gus Dupin into an "augmented narrative reality" mystery regarding the death of the 'author' indicated by the title.
While Death of an Author is a fine first experimental attempt at an AI-generated novel, there are a number of moments where the text seems to drift slightly off course, and the story as a whole feels strangely flat and affectless. Indeed, the best-written part of the book is probably the human-authored Afterword, where Marche makes the case for engaging in the experiment:
So little of how we talk about AI actually comes from the experience of using it. ....Like the camera, the full consequences of this technology will be worked out over a great deal of time by a great number of talents responding to a great number of developments. But at the time of writing, almost all of the conversation surrounding generative AI is imaginary, not rooted in the use of the tool but in extrapolated visions.
I tend to find this persuasive -- as I have been exploring different AI platforms and trying my own experiments in recent weeks, I've been pleasantly surprised by some of the results. We may find ways to make generative AI useful for certain specific tasks without losing what we really value in human-created art.
Another hint Marche gives relates to the possible value of generative AI in helping authors find 'heteroglossia':
I found the transformer-based AI shockingly good at what the narrative theorist Mikhail Bakhtin called heteroglossia--the novel's ability to incorporate other forms of discourse inside itself. If you ask linguistic AI to imitate a mode of speech, any mode, it can do so to an uncanny degree.
This strikes one as being potentially useful for writers who know their own voices and are comfortable in their own idiolects, but who might struggle to render compelling accounts of the voices of others.
Marche elsewhere describes the process by which he created Death of an Author using a trio of generative AI tools. However, one especially important part of the process apparently happened offline: "I worked out the plot during a long skate with my daughter and a walk with my son (better techniques than any machine)." While 95% of the text of the novel as published was generated by an AI, if the essential plot points, characters, and narrative framework were all generated by Marche it seems hard to see whether the AI really played a positive role in the novel's composition -- or whether it was, in effect, a bit of a gimmick.
In the end, the most compelling part of the story might be the way the "editors" (authors) of I Am Code describe their methodology of constructing and improving a series of very detailed prompts.
Far and away, the most compelling experiment of the three might be Sean Michaels' Do You Remember Being Born? However, by contrast to the other examples mentioned, it's probably worth noting that this is also the text that had by far the least proportion of text by generative AI.
Michaels did use a specialized version of ChatGPT weighted towards the poetry of Marianne Moore and a small array of contemporary poets to generate the poetry included in the text. While the author referred to this version of the chatbot as a 'MooreBot,' fans of Marianne Moore might observe that the actual output is not that much like Moore's poetry (the vocabulary is more constrained, and punctuation is less robust, among other things). As intriguing as some of the outputs are, they constitute a fairly small segment of the overall text.
All of the most compelling elements of the story are human-authored -- the idea of an aging poet who has achieved success, trying to learn to write in collaboration with a machine; the interest in the experience of being a parent who has had to make sacrifices in the interest of also pursuing a career as a writer; and the attempt to stick closely to one's principles at a time when tech-dominated capitalism seems to rule the world.
An especially salient passage from near the end of the book might be this one:
“My whole life I had believed that understanding myself required me to keep others at a distance, lined up on the far side of a river. That evening of counting I had not felt so certain. That evening I felt like a room with doors open, for others to explore, and that from their explorations I could start to ascertain my shape. We are not the people we think; we cannot really see who we are. Here, on Sunday in San Francisco, I had the same impression that I might unfasten the locks and lower the drawbridge, that I might not be a fortress but a space for others to pass through.”
Here, Marian Ffarmer is describing how she found a process that would actually work for her -- she found a younger poet to be a co-author and interlocutor, alongside the generative AI that had been trained on her own published writings (but which, she's discovered, is actually an entity very different from herself). Together the two humans and one machine produced a finished text that is described in Michaels' novel, but not shown directly.
To my eye, the intriguing possibility is the idea of writing where the author has fewer controls over self vs. not self in the process of creation. As we learn to write differently, perhaps with generative AI tools assisting us, we might have to imagine the writing self, as Michaels says,"not [as] a fortress but a space for others to pass through."
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.
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