Zakiyyah Iman Jackson <\/strong>is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Southern California. Her research explores the literary and figurative aspects of Western philosophical and scientific discourse and investigates the engagement of literature and visual culture with the historical concerns, knowledge claims, and rhetoric of Western science and philosophy. Her first book, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World<\/em>,was published by New York University Press in May 2020 as part of the Sexual Cultures <\/em>series. Becoming Human<\/em> argues that key African American, African, and Caribbean literary and visual texts generate conceptions of being and materiality that creatively disrupt a human-animal distinction that persistently reproduces the racial logics and orders of Western thought. <\/em>She is currently at work on her second book, tentatively titled, \u201cObscure Light: Blackness and the Derangement of Sex-Gender.\u201d It argues that antiBlackness constitutes the bedrock of modern logics of sex-gender and meditates on how its terrorizing vertical orders might be toppled by the transfiguring potentialities of Blackness. Ultimately, the project provides a critique of biocentrism (or biological reductionism and determinism) and elucidates the indistinction of sex-gender and race. Her essays have appeared in Feminist Studies<\/em>, Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Science<\/em>, Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience<\/em>, South Atlantic Quarterly (SAQ)<\/em>, e-flux<\/em>,and twice in Gay and Lesbian Quarterly (GLQ). <\/em>Her articles can be found on her website: zakiyyahimanjackson\/scholarship. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Plenary 1: <\/strong><\/p>
Citation, Appropriation, and Abolition<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Eugenia Zuroski <\/strong>is an Associate Professor of English at McMaster University. She is the author of the book, A Taste for China: English Subjectivity and the Prehistory of Orientalism<\/em> (Oxford University Press, 2013), which argues that chinoiserie played an integral role in the formation of modern English subjectivity. Tracing a shift in the relationship between English selves and \u201cthings Chinese\u201d from the Restoration through the early nineteenth century, this study shows how both orientalism and privatized subjectivity take shape through cultural processes of disavowing earlier ideals, including cosmopolitanism and aristocratic power. In addition to her teaching and research, she serves as editor of the journal Eighteenth-Century Fiction<\/em>, winner of the 2017 CELJ Voyager Award. The recipient of a SSHRC Insight Grant, she is currently completing the book, A Funny Thing: The Undisciplined Eighteenth Century<\/em>, which argues for <\/em>the emergence of politically relevant forms of \u201cfunniness\u201d in eighteenth-century literature, aesthetics, and subjectivity. Her first chapbook of poetry, Hovering, Seen<\/em>, was published by Anstruther Press in 2019. Her essays have appeared in The Rambling, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Eighteenth-Century Studies<\/em>, and Journal18<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Kerry Sinanan <\/strong>is Assistant Professor at the\nUniversity of Texas at San Antonio. She is now completing her monograph, Myths\nof Mastery: Traders, Planters and Colonial Agents 1750-1833<\/em>, for The University of North\nCarolina Press. This book examines the writings in various genres by slave\ntraders and slave owners from the mid-eighteenth century up to British\nemancipation (1834). Myths of Mastery<\/em> situates itself within the related\nareas of eighteenth-century studies and critical race theory to focus\nspecifically on the articulation of mastery and selfhood within a range of\nwritings produced by British enslavers. In 2010 she co-edited the volume, Romanticism,\nSincerity and Authenticity<\/em> with Tim Milnes (Palgrave Macmillan) and is\ncurrently working on another edited collection on Jane Austen. Her public\nwriting has appeared in 18thCenturyCommon<\/em>,\nthe Age of Revolution<\/em>, and Romantic Circles Unbound<\/em>. Her essays\nhave appeared in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Women: a Cultural\nReview<\/em>, and Green Leaves: The Journal of the Barbara Pym Society<\/em>. She is Secretary\/treasurer for the\nEarly Caribbean Society.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Matt Sandler <\/strong>is the program director for the MA in American Studies at Columbia University’s Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race. His book, The Black Romantic Revolution: Abolitionist Poets at the End of Slavery <\/em>(Verso 2020) shows how nineteenth-century Black writers borrowed from the Romantic traditions to imagine what freedom might mean in the Civil War era. His work has appeared in African American Review<\/em>, Atlantic Studies<\/em>, Byron Journal, Callaloo<\/em>, Comparative Literature<\/em>, European Romantic Review<\/em>, and the L.A. Review of Books<\/em>, among other places. He is also co-chair of the Columbia University Seminar in American Studies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Plenary 2:<\/strong><\/p>
Black Studies In and Around Romanticism<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Bakary Diaby<\/strong> is an Assistant Professor of English at Skidmore College. His work ranges over Trans-Atlantic Romanticism and Eighteenth-Century Literature, Aesthetic Theory, Critical Race Studies, and Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science. He is currently at work on two book projects. The first book explores the interplay among romantic literature, enlightenment aesthetics, and the idea of vulnerability and is tentatively titled \u201cSensing Meaning: Aesthetics and Vulnerability in the Romantic Period.” The second, titled \u201cAnatomy of Critique,\u201d looks at methodological debates in aesthetics and the literary arts in the eighteenth century and the last forty years. His essays have appeared in Symbiosis: A Journal of Transatlantic Literary and Cultural Relations<\/em>, European Romantic Review, and The Keats-Shelley Journal. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Annette Joseph-Gabriel<\/strong> is an Assistant Professor of\nFrench in the department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University\nof Michigan. Her research and teaching focus on francophone Caribbean and\nAfrican literature, with interdisciplinary specializations in Afro-diasporic\nliterary and cultural movements, and slavery in the French Atlantic. She\nis particularly interested in the ways that people of African descent in the\nfrancophone world have contributed to notions of citizenship and freedom on a\nglobal scale. Her first book, Reimagining Liberation: How Black Women\nTransformed Citizenship in the French Empire<\/em>, mines published writings and\nuntapped archives to reveal the anticolonialist endeavors of black women in the\nFrench empire. It shows the ways that their activism and thought challenged\nFrance’s imperial system by shaping forms of citizenship that encouraged\nmultiple cultural and racial identities. She is currently at work on a second\nbook that examines notions of freedom in enslaved people\u2019s life writing in\nFrench. Her essays have appeared in Beyond Bergson: Examining Race and\nColonialism through the Writings of Henri Bergson<\/em>, Eighteenth-Century Studies<\/em>, Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal\nof Criticism<\/em>, and Slavery & Abolition: A Journal of Slave and\nPost-Slave Studies<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Nicole N.<\/strong> <\/strong>Aljoe<\/strong> is the Director of the\nAfricana Studies Program and Associate Professor of English and Africana\nStudies at Northeastern University. Her fields of specialization are\neighteenth- and nineteenth-century Black Atlantic Literature, the Slave Narrative, Postcolonial Studies,\nand the eighteenth-century British Novel. She is the project convener and\nco-director of the digital humanities project, Early Caribbean Digital Archive,and director of the Early Black Boston Digital Almanac. She is currently\nworking on two books<\/s> projects: \u201cA Secret History of the Sable Venus:\nNegotiations of Race, Sentiment, and Gender in the Long 18th<\/sup>\ncentury\u201d and \u201cDo You Remember the Days of Slavery: The Neo-Slave Narrative in\nContemporary Caribbean Cultural Production.\u201d Her recent publications\ninclude \u201cCaribbean Slave Narratives\u201d in The\nOxford Handbook of African American Slave Narratives<\/em> and \u201cThe\nLong Song<\/em> of the Caribbean Colonial Archive: Reading \u2018The Memoir of\nFlorence Hall\u2019\u201d in American Literary History<\/em>. She is co-editor of Journeys of the Slave Narrative in the Early\nAmericas<\/em>, University of Virginia Press, 2014 and co-editor of Literary Histories of the Early Anglophone\nCaribbean: Islands in the Stream, <\/em>Palgrave MacMillan, 2018.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In the spirit of Moten’s undercommons, we have arranged a keynote address and two plenary collaborations. Keynote Zakiyyah Iman Jackson is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Southern California. Her research explores the literary and figurative aspects of Western philosophical and scientific discourse and investigates the engagement of literature and visual culture with the historical […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":432,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":4,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-4","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.mtholyoke.edu\/blsandr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.mtholyoke.edu\/blsandr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.mtholyoke.edu\/blsandr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.mtholyoke.edu\/blsandr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/432"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.mtholyoke.edu\/blsandr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4"}],"version-history":[{"count":21,"href":"https:\/\/commons.mtholyoke.edu\/blsandr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":185,"href":"https:\/\/commons.mtholyoke.edu\/blsandr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4\/revisions\/185"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.mtholyoke.edu\/blsandr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}