Graduate Student Colloquium Series: Ana Baginski

 

The first colloquium for winter quarter will be held Tuesday, February 25th at 1:00 pm in HIB 246. Below is an abstract of the introduction to Ana’s dissertation:

What constitutes the unity of a place, if not the determination of its limits? Critics, writers, and theorists have turned to the “regional” as a source of specificity, authenticity and historicity. Regional rigor is meant to provide both a groundedness and universality to literary texts. This value has been appealing to writers and critics in the Californias over the 20^th century as a way to push back on market-driven categorizations of genre from the narco-crime novel in Tijuana to frontier and border lit to “multicultural” poetry in the Bay Area. In this presentation of the introduction to my dissertation, I will consider how regional thought acts as a supplement to disciplinary and political contradictions. In the Californias, where historical progress is imagined abridged and accelerated – Alta California wasn’t a slave state and so doesn’t bear the same burden of historical guilt, Baja California was “peacefully” conquered by missionaries rather than by military violence and the colonial and revolutionary institutions which followed elsewhere – these histories, of slavery and of conquest, are nevertheless found by contemporary writers in the local topography, in the very soil.

 

Graduate Student Colloquium Series: Aubrey Tang

 

The first colloquium of the Winter quarter will be held Tuesday, January 8th, 12-3pm in HIB 246. Below is the abstract for her presentation:

This chapter questions how cinema, as a visual medium, can paradoxically call the ocular-centric perceptual habits of the modern man into question. It looks at the movies Loving You (1995) and Blind Detective (2013), directed by Hong Kong’s commercial film director Johnnie To, and examines how the senses of hearing, smelling and tasting circumstantially compensate for blindness. Both films are set in a postmodern Hong Kong where the urban sensorium is saturated, intercepting rather than availing the dwellers’ comprehension of the city. To better understand Hong Kong’s social reality, the characters relegate their familiar types of sense perception and follow sensory approaches normally considered nonsensical. In the end, they all accomplish a new and insightful perception of the city, as well as of their own lives. This chapter is based on the theories by the works of Georg Simmel and other urban studies to foreground what Simmel refers to as the “overwhelming social forces,” meaning the attack on the city dwellers’ mental lives brought on by the sensory stimuli a city offers.¹ It attempts to extend this idea by specifically looking athow commercial cinema as a mass entertainment medium responds to the ocular-centric social forces, and argues that in a postmodern situation, visual perception will be challenged, even in visual media, such as the cinema. As a result, a new perception of the city will arise with a focus on other sense perceptions in film, resulting in a synesthetic viewing experience.

¹ Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” The City Cultures Reader, edited by Malcolm Miles and Tim Hall, with Iain Borden (New York: Routledge, 2000), 13.

Graduate Student Colloquium Series: Karen Jallatyan and Michael Berlin

The first colloquium of the fall quarter will be held Tuesday, November 27th, 12-3 PM in HIB 246. Below are the abstracts for the presentations.

 

 

Michael Berlin, “The Poetry of Origins: Odes, Recantation, and Literary History”

Though long the subject of literary history and theory, the ode has remained hard to define. Arguing that the ode has no direct antecedent in Western antiquity, I trace how from this rootless beginning, the ode came to speak both to the origins of poetry and of language itself. Tying the development of the ode to that of literary criticism, I situate the ode as a product of the modernity against which it has been posed. Attentive to how the ode mediates the historical past and poetic present, I show how it maps Europe’s changed sense of history, remade by ideologies of rationalism predicated on racialized slavery and colonialism. In so doing, I examine how the reading practices the ode has engendered continue to shape the teaching of poetry and establish hierarchies of literary value.

Rather than a chapter, Michael will be sharing his application materials for the ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship and the Short-term Fellowship Program at the Huntington Library.

 

---

 

“Diaspora Armenian Poetry and the Art of Living Differently Together”

“Our fatherland slipped away; it slid from under our feet, hurling us into the sea. But what better way to learn to swim.”

— Nigoghos Sarafian, 1929.

“The one who comes after poetry, its survivor, like the one escaping from an untellable catastrophe, and the diaspora belong to the same exteriority.”

— Krikor Beledian, 2010.

Contemporary mass human migrations oftentimes result from catastrophes. It should hardly come as a surprise that the dispersed communities (de)forming in their wake undergo an essential crisis of identity by being unable to come to terms with the haunting past. The possibility of this impossibility is the dawn of the post-catastrophic. Meanwhile, there is a new and heterogeneous environment to relate to or not. The Anglophone multiculturalism debate (at its peak in the 1990s) and its afterlives largely informing our discourses of diversity, however, tend to either take the essentializing impasse of assuming stable preexistent identities as encountering each other in a public sphere tacitly conditioned by a universalist Western worldview or accept the essentially political and emergent nature of coexistence, without being able to follow through the critical opportunities that ensue.   

In this presentation, I will analyze poetry written in the Armenian diaspora in the past century to trace a poetics of survival and suggest ways in which it can reinvigorate discourses of living differently together. The material presented is from the introduction to my dissertation on postwar diaspora Armenian literature and film.

Please RSVP (mpberlin@uci.edu + kjallaty@uci.edu) to receive copies of the materials discussed.

Graduate Student Colloquium Series: Anandi Rao and Parisa Vaziri

The second and final colloquium of the fall quarter will be held Monday, December 4, 500-700pm in HG 1002. Below are the abstracts for the presentations.

Parisa Vaziri, “Transmitting Coherence: Creaolization and the Problem of AfroAsian Being”

When we invoke the concept of culture(s), we inadvertently project the thought of self-contained entities that remain more or less stable and self-sufficient over time. Even when we understand and explicitly frame this self-containment as fictive, manufactured, and/or ever-evolving and fluid, language limits the possibilities for undoing this particular conceptualization of culture as a static ideality—not motionless, but ontogenic. This limitation appears especially sharply in the study of the “creole.” In this excerpt from a dissertation chapter, I seek to undertake ways of thinking the “creole” as exemplary of the problems of culture, race and identity without recirculating the oppositional formulas of essence and pollution, purity and dilution, isolation and fusion. Using the example of a “syncretic” Shi’a ritual performed in the Southern provinces of Iran on the border of the Persian Gulf, I ask how the characterization of creolization sustains notions of self-coherence assumed to be self-evident and historically ratified.

Because Arab, African, Indian, East Asian, Portuguese, and Persian influences have shaped the maritime communities of the Persian Gulf over the course of thousands of years, “creolization” is one term scholars have begun using to understand the communal practices in this region. Looking at a 1970 experimental documentary by an Iranian filmmaker which documents one such practice (Nasir Taqvai’s Arb’ain) I ask, first, how audiovisual modes of documentation refract historical information in ways that reduplicate or illustrate the problem of historicity itself, or the “being historical” quality of facts; second, I ask how the imagination of the creole, whether in its celebrated or denigrated modes, sustains the space of the ideal—of historicity itself, and the possibility of culture(s) that historical tradition and transmission makes possible.

 

Anandi Rao, “Seeing a Foreign World: Translation, Comparative/World Literature and Notions of the ‘Foreign’ in and through Fouad Laroui’s ‘Dislocation’”

What would it be like, he asked himself, a world where everything was foreign?

—Fouad Laroui, “Dislocation”

This question is the first line of Emma Ramadan’s translation of Fouad Laroui’s short story “Dislocation.” In the story, Maati, a Moroccan who is fluent in French, and living in Utrecht with his Dutch wife, begins with this question which serves as a trigger for his existential anxieties and the relationship between language, body and place. Like Maati, Laroui too, is a Moroccan who now lives in the Netherlands, so the “foreign”-ness expressed in the question is a lived statement for both the author and the narrator. The question connects something called “a world” with what is “foreign.” Taken on its own, outside the context of the story, this question seems to have only one answer. The world that the narrator is dreaming up is impossible, because “everything” cannot be “foreign.” “Foreign” needs its other, be it “domestic” in geopolitical terms or “native” when we think about peoples, tongues or languages. This binary, and the racial politics that underlies it, is at the heart of any discussion on translation, especially as it is configured in “Western” theories of translation, which in turn informs our discipline, and the way in which “world literature” has been configured in recent years. My presentation will attempt to unsettle this binary.

Graduate Colloquium Series: Laura Hatch and Rose DuCharme

The first CL grad colloquium of the 2017-18 academic will be held Tuesday, October 17, 2017, 500-700pm in HG 1002. Below are abstracts for the presentations.

Laura Hatch, “Placing a Nightingale in the Fig Tree: Translating Augustinian Love through Petrarch’s Lyric in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde”

In his epic romance Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer translates Petrarch’s sonnet 123 from Italian into Middle English and places it inside his text as though the main character Troilus creates the lyric verse from his own imagination. In this paper, I look at the effects of Chaucer translating Petrarch not only in terms of how this translates Italian, continental notions of conventions of love into Middle English (verifying Chaucer as a romance poet), but also at how the presence of the translated sonnet and its poetic heritage introduces issues of anxiety about authoring one’s relation with a mortal beloved and with the divine, the stakes of creation of the self in poetry, and how prosimetrum as a form might offer a way to think through the implications of love in the midst of conversion.

Rose DuCharme, “Gertrude Stein’s Personal Objects and Deviant Forms”

The field of disability studies poses a critique of how disability is set aside from the normative and categorized as deviance in need of correction. At the same time, scholars of disability have argued that literary narratives are enhanced by discourses surrounding disability, even while displacing the lives of disabled people from adequate representation. As an abstracted work of poetry that does not include disabled people (or any people), Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons poses a further problem in relation to disability studies because it allegedly describes the everyday objects of the home that we might presume to be immediately accessible, yet Stein’s language and representation of her objects refuses accessibility in reading and interpretation. Through a reading of Tender Buttons, I will engage with what Stein’s elaboration of descriptions of subjective objects reveals about the status of the person, how space is inhabited and material objects are accessed through the subjectivity of the speaker, and how the affective and queer resonances of Stein’s objects arise from their states of de-formation. These aspects of Tender Buttons rely upon a categorization of deviance from the normative and limitations of physical access and ability that are also at issue in the field of disability studies.

 

If you would like to participate in the CL grad colloquium in winter 2017 or spring 2018, please email jgoebel[at]uci.edu.

Graduate Student Colloquium Series: Nat Murphy and Jamie Rogers

 

The second colloquium of the spring quarter, and the last of the 2016-17 academic year, will be held Thursday, May 18, 1130am to 100pm in HIB 246. Below are the abstracts for the presentations.

Nat Murphy, “Confronting the Human Contradiction: Overcoming Hierarchical Behavior in Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis Trilogy”

I will be presenting a chapter draft from my dissertation. The dissertation project focuses on theorizing radical social change through utopian literature, particularly the works of Octavia Butler and Kim Stanley Robinson. In the chapter I will be presenting from, I set up the general problematic of struggling against hierarchical institutions without inadvertently replacing them with institutions marked by a different set of hierarchies. I will do so with an analysis of Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis Trilogy, focusing on her concept of the Human Contradiction. This contradiction states that a result of human evolutionary history is the equal capacity for intelligence and hierarchical behavior. This is a contradiction on Butler’s account because, while intelligence can be used in order to combat hierarchy as such, it is more often used in the service of disastrous hierarchical behaviors and social formations.

Key concepts that I will analyze in this presentation are the socially and politically salient traits of the alien Oankali who are at least rhetorically opposed to hierarchical behavior; the limits of conceptualizing the Oankali as either colonizers or a vanguard party and, instead, conceptualizing the Oankali as a utopian horizon that will ultimately force human beings to move beyond ‘humanity’; and finally, the categorization of human characters as either traitors (to humanity) or resistors, and how the political valence of these designations changes depending on whether we interpret the Oankali as colonizers, a vanguard, or as a utopian horizon.

Jamie Rogers, “Black Feminist Thought and its Affective Flights”

In the late 1960s, Black feminists such as Audre Lorde and June Jordan began developing theories of affect that foregrounded racial and gendered configurations as necessarily conditioning human and non-human relationality, long preceding what is now known as the “affective turn” in critical theory. Focusing on Lorde’s well-known speech, “Uses of Anger,” and Jordan’s lesser-known work on urban design, this paper serves in part as an exposition of this intellectual labor. At the same time, it interrogates the “structures of feeling” as they relate to the conspicuous under-citing of Black feminists and their contributions within the narrated genealogy of affect theory.

 

Graduate Student Colloquium Series: Ana Baginski and Robert Barrett

The first colloquium of the spring quarter will be held Thursday, April 27 at 630pm in HG 1002. Below are the abstracts for the presentations.

Ana Baginski, “Sociality and Spatiality of Comparison: Imagining National Identity in 20th century Mexican and American Poetry”

Text from Myriam Moscona’s Negro Margil, image from Les Figues Press

Ana is currently preparing for her exams, which will concentrate on the intersections and missed connections between poetic movements in the U.S. and Mexico in the 20th century. She will present a few thoughts about the work of poets like George Oppen, Hart Crane, José Vasconcelos and more recent writers like José Vasconcelos and Sara Uribe in order to think about ways in which race and national identity and the U.S.-Mexico relation has worked to activate and deactivate certain modes of access to location and history that might be claimed for poetry. Also at stake are the politics of translation, publication and circulation, and questions about how to think about social space in the 21st century. Ana will present some points of intersection that have come up in her lists, and a few potential arguments. Please come share your experience on comparing literatures, and ask any and all questions!

Robert Barrett, “‘…Devoid of Educational Value, and Without Artistic, Literary, Historical, or Scientific Value’; UCI and the Difficulties of Queer Cultural Transmission—a Case Study”

Prior to the 1958 Supreme Court Decision One, Inc. v. Olesen, printed matter with any homosexual content was routinely censored by the U.S. Postal Service, inhibiting the circulation of gay and lesbian cultural productions. It was common then for gay men to hand-type erotic stories and circulate them amongst their circle of friends, an act that bound individuals together and created communities through shared desires. Additionally, the inevitable changes and adaptations that occurred in the stories as they circulated, like a pornographic game of “telephone,” result in an erotic palimpsest, imbued with the particularities of countless gay men. J. Brian’s all-male pornographic film Seven in a Barn (1971), the first feature length, all-male pornographic film in sync sound, was based on such a story; “Seven in a Barn circulated in handwritten and typed versions throughout the midcentury (before later appearing in official form as a booklet in the late 1960s and then even later a hardcore film)” (Strub 131).

On March 9^th, 1972, Orange County Sheriffs and the University of California, Irvine (UCI) Police seized J. Brian’s Seven in a Barn prior to a scheduled screening as “part of a Panel on Pornography in which legal and psychological professionals discussed explicitly sexual films” (Johns). In a letter sent to the president of the Gay Students Union, UCI Chancellor Daniel G. Aldrich wrote; “’Seven in a Barn’ can be characterized as hard core pornography, devoid of educational value, and without artistic, literary, historical, or scientific merit” (Aldrich, qtd in Johns). And yet, despite Aldrich’s declaration, the film and its source material clearly demonstrate a queer social energy, to use Stephen Greenblatt’s terminology, functioning as a manifestation of acculturation and queer cultural transmission.

This paper will explore the censorship and social energy of Seven in a Barn. By examining value judgments placed on all-male pornographic material, and looking at the historic trace of the film and its source material through the lens of cultural transmission, I hope to trouble the devaluing of queer cultural productions, and point to the labor required to bring queer studies into the university.

Works Cited

Johns, Jim. “Ban the ‘Barn’ Remains Live Issue.” New University (UCI), Vol. 4 No. 36 (April 4, 1972). Web.

Strub, Whitney. “Indexing Desire: The Gay Male Pornographic Video Collection as Affective Archive.” Out of the Closet, Into the

Archives: Researching Sexual Histories. Eds. Amy Stone and Jaime Cantrell. Albany: SUNY Press, 2016. 125-147. Print.

Graduate Student Colloquium Series: Philip Anselmo and Jon-David Settell

The second colloquium of the winter quarter will be held Wednesday, February 22, 2017 at 5pm in HG 1002. Below are the abstracts for the presentations.

Philip Anselmo

“Paranoiac Space: Riots, Race, and Legislating Borders in the American City”

The genre of the legislative hearing relies on bureaucratic modes of procedure and quasi-public appeals to a nationalist form of rationality in order to sanction its activities. It is an epistemologically closed space where evidence and testimony constitute fact by their mere inclusion within the process. In this paper I analyze several exchanges between legislators and elected officials that took place as part of a series of hearings by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations on the race riots of 1967 and 1968. I argue that this legislative discourse, which takes shape around the “problem” of the riots, assumes a paranoiac construction of space and a desire to maintain the national domestic as exempt from a violence which only ever appears as a threat to the integrity of that space. On the one hand, we find a politics that is incapable of allowing for the position of the structurally oppressed. On the other hand, we see a fear take shape that this other space, outside of the proper domain of the national domestic, infects and corrupts its interiority.

Jon-David Settell

“Lazarillo’s Hunger: Subversion, Marx’s Lumpenproleteriat, and the Picaresque”

In the 16^th c. Spanish novel Lazarillo de Tormes, hunger propels the young protagonist upward through increasingly higher levels of Spanish society. Lázaro, homeless and starving, steals, begs, and robs to fill his stomach; he has long been considered the original pícaro, model for the contested category of picaresque literature. In this paper, I argue that Lazarillo is a politically radical text, one that exemplifies the primitive accumulation stage of capitalism at the same time as it subverts its official discourses. To do this, I first situate my reading of Lazarillo within what Raymond Williams, in Keywords, has called the historical significance of realism and the ways it made “social and physical reality (in a generally materialist sense) the basis of literature, art and thought” (262). I then turn to corporeality in Lazarillo, using what Mikhail Bakhtin calls grotesque realism and its comic representation of the lower bodily stratum, to interrogate Marx’s formulation, viz. the lumpenproletariat, of the pícaro’s political inviability. Ultimately, I will argue that Lazarillo suggests multiple strategies of resistance from below to capitalist subjection and the bourgeois subject.

Graduate Student Colloquium Series: James Goebel and Chris Malcolm

The first colloquium of the winter quarter will be held Thursday, January 26, 2017 at 4pm in HG 1002. Below are the abstracts for the presentations.

James R. Goebel, “Neoliberal Environmentalism: Value | Speed | Sacrifice”

This presentation is an excerpt from the first chapter of my dissertation, Sustainable Subjects: Capitalist Energetics and the Problem of Material Exhaustion. In this chapter, I document and analyze a complex set of debates that emerged around the development of utility-scale solar facilities on public lands in the southwest deserts following the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. While the chapter includes an analysis of the narrative constructions and rhetorical maneuvers of both proponents and opponents of these developmental projects, this presentation will focus on the former in order to understand how state and private interests have shaped the current discourse and politics of sustainability. I argue that the rhetorical appropriation of “sacrifice,” in the sense in which it has been used in twentieth and twenty-first century American environmental politics, produced a narrative closure which presented profound difficulties for the task of constructing a counter-narrative as the neoliberal project could now market itself as an environmental project. I conclude this presentation with a consideration of the sort of gendered and racialized subjective formations produced by this closure.

Chris Malcolm, “Tar Sands and the Management of Dispossession”

How does development proceed? And what happens, in the imagination of development, to its casualties? If contemporary resource extraction, in both Canada and the United States, remains tied to a notion of “interest”—national, or profit—who is the beneficiary of this interest and who pays the cost? Such questions are acutely present in settler-colonial states whose histories of dispossession are inseparable from a history of those who are ongoing beneficiaries of that dispossession. This paper argues that the resistance to the manifestation of such a history, requires a certain theory and operation of management which appears so as to modulate, hold, or pacify that antagonism. What violence does the settler-colonial state do when its activity seems to be increasingly marked by consultation, negotiation, and reconciliation, on the one hand, and land-use and land-management on the other? In this paper I read environmental assessments and regulatory documents of the Alberta Tar Sands, to uncover a theory of management. One which regulates not only how land is seen as useable, and thereby exploitable, but also reveals how the violence of the state is manifest as managed. As a genre, environmental assessment demarcates where effects begin and end and polices the boundary of what counts as a claim. In so doing, it thereby proliferates temporal and spatial terminations that are the very basis of a colonial logic.

Announcing the Graduate Student Colloquium Series

I am very excited to announce the beginning of a graduate student colloquium series in the department of Comparative Literature at UC Irvine. I’ve designed this website for the purpose of a record, to announce paper titles with abstracts, post photos of and flyers for the events, etc.

To make this announcement more exciting, we have the schedule for the winter, spring, and fall quarters of 2017.

Winter 2017

• Week 3 — James Goebel and Chris Malcolm
• Week 6 — Philip Anselmo and Jon-David Settell

Spring 2017

• Week 3 — Ana Baginski and Robert Barrett
• Week 6 — Nat Murphy and Jamie Rogers

Fall 2017

• Week 3 — Laura Hatch and Kirsty Singer
• Week 6 — Daniel Carnie and Willie Chase
• Week 9 — Anandi Rao and Parisa Vaziri

Specific times and dates will be announced as we get closer to the event. If you would like to participate in future colloquia, please contact James Goebel at JGoebel@uci.edu. Students at any stage in the program are welcome to present.