Year-End Celebration

On May 8, 2015, Comp Lit faculty and students honored graduating B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. students. Recent graduates and their families  gathered to enjoy food and conversation at the end of the year celebration. Graduate Director Professor Andrew Parker and Acting Undergraduate Director Professor Ben Sifuentes-Jáuregui recognized the graduating students and wished them luck in their future endeavors.

 

2014-2015 Brown Bag Lunch Series

Comparative Literature’s Brown Bag Lunches highlight faculty research throughout the year. During a series of brief lunchtime meetings, faculty and students gather for presentations by faculty members about recent research projects. These presentations, along with graduate student potlucks, provide an opportunity for members of the Comp Lit community to gather together and learn about their colleagues’ research.  The 2014-2015 series featured:

Professor Ousseina Alidou – September 23

Professor Ben Sifuentes-Jáuregui – October 21

Professor Yolanda Martinez-San Miguel – November 18

Professor Preetha Mani – April 15

Professor Elin Diamond – April 22

Professor Anjali Nerlekar – April 28

Scholars Gather to Contemplate Radicalism, Revolution, and Freedom in the Caribbean

By: Carolyn Ureña, Fourth Year PhD Candidate & Rafael Vizcaíno, First Year PhD Student

For two days in mid-April, Rutgers faculty, graduate students, and guest scholars of the Caribbean gathered together for the first annual Critical Caribbean Studies Symposium. The conference theme, “Radicalism, Revolution, and Freedom in the Caribbean,” inspired conversations around slavery, diasporic identity, transnational politics, radical historiography, creolization, language, ethics, and love in the Caribbean imaginary, served as a testament to the growing interest in and import of scholarship on the region at Rutgers and beyond.

Critical Caribbean Studies (CCS) began in 2011 as an initiative spearheaded by Professors Nelson Maldonado-Torres (LHCS & Comparative Literature) and Michelle Stephens (English & LHCS), who applied for a grant through the President’s Office to fund projects and events that promote scholarship on the Caribbean. The conference was organized by Professors Carter Mathes (English) and Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel (LHCS & Comparative Literature), both of whom emphasized the value of creating spaces for such conversations to take place. With this in mind, Mathes announced plans to expand CCS into an advanced institute through which larger scale projects, including a graduate certificate in Critical Caribbean Studies, would become possible. Audience members were very excited by this sneak peek and eagerly anticipate forthcoming news on this front.

CCS symposium photo 2The symposium began with a brief screening of “Contra las Cuerdas” (Against the Ropes), a documentary film about race in Cuba—the first of its kind— and a Q&A session with Cuban filmmaker Amílcar O. Cárdenas. The first day also included a graduate student panel on reimagining Caribbean Studies from a contemporary political and diasporic perspective. The second day included presentations by invited guests as well as Rutgers graduate students. Professor Zita Nunes (English and Comparative Literature, University of Maryland), analyzed the multiple lived experiences of James Bertram Clarke, who wrote about the experience of racism in nine different countries under several different names so as to advance a transnational anti-racist struggle. Carolyn Ureña, Fourth Year PhD Candidate, served as a respondent for Professor Nunes’s presentation.

ccs symposium photo 3

Professor Ada Ferrer (History, New York University), presented her latest research on revolution in the early 19th century Caribbean, with a particular focus on a now-lost book of illustrations and other difficult to decipher symbols created by black Cuban revolutionary José Antonio Aponte. By focusing on the “negative presence” of the book, Ferrer’s work aims to explore the contingency of the archive and its role in revolutionary intellectual history. Professor Don E. Walicek (English, University of Puerto Rico), presented a paper on creolization in Anguilla. Despite being a marginal colony due to not having a plantation system, Professor Walicek argues that creolization still had an important role in the linguistic life of Anguilla. Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel (LHCS & Comparative Literature), as respondent, interrogated whether Maroon communities in Anguilla could also be seen as sources of creolization. The last panel of the conference was composed by Nidia Bautista (Third Year PhD Student in Political Science), who presented an analysis of the location of the intellectual within a community, paying attention to issues regarding the ethics of scholarship, and Carolyn Ureña, who presented a chapter of her dissertation on Toni Morrison and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Rafael Vizcaino served as moderator and Professor Carter Mathes (English) was the respondent.

 

Overall, the symposium offered an exciting opportunity for scholars to share their work and engage in energizing discussions about the past, present, and future of the field, solidifying Critical Caribbean Studies as a space where students interested in the Caribbean can find support and collaboration beyond their own disciplinary boundaries.

Comparative Literature’s Biennial Conference: “The People of the Book, People of Books”

By: Gabriele Lazzari, First Year Ph.D Student

On April 23rd and 24th 2015, the Program in Comparative Literature hosted its biennial international conference at Alexander Library Pane Room. The general topic of the event was the relation between literature and religion. The conference was the culmination of a seminar, offered during the spring semester, in which graduate students had the opportunity to prepare for the conference by reading and discussing the works of the invited speakers. The seminar was taught by Professor E. Efe, who also organized the conference by drawing together scholars from different countries and cultural backgrounds, whose research has focused on the complex entanglement between literature and religion.

After the welcome address by Professor James Swenson, Dean of Humanities, Professor Efe introduced the series of subtopics of the conference, perfectly condensed in the title “The People of the Book, People of Books:” people as communities who live by the book (the religious book), or by books; that is to say, the chosen people versus the modern readers of books in general. But also national, secular, and religious communities built on what remains fundamentally literary. Finally, real people created by books—as in the case of the “Orientals”—and fictional characters created by real people. As Professor Efe remarked, the conference was thought as an opportunity to delve into these questions and into their multiple historical and political connections from different perspectives.

dialogue conference 3

The keynote talk was delivered by Professor Gil Anidjar (Columbia University), who presented a paper titled “Sparta and Gaza (What Have They to Do with One Another?).” The paper was part of Anidjar’s future project, which stems from the surprising absence in literary and religious scholarship of “weaponology,” that is to say, a science of weapon. Drawing from religion, philosophy, and literary theory, Anidjar discussed the weapon in its complex stratifications of meaning: a weapon as a tool, as both the doer and the deed, as a means and a medium of description—words as weapons—and destruction. From the first Biblical murder of Cain to the wall of Gaza, Anidjar explored the question of what a weapon is, where it begins and where it ends, how it can be conceived as proper of man, in all its oblique and diversified materialization. Rather than from the perspective of vulnerability, Anidjar’s provocative talk was meant to be a reflection on how the human constitutes itself through offensive and aggressive practices.

Professor Emily Apter (New York University) presented an essay titled “Theopolital Fragments: Auerbach, Benjamin, Derrida, De Man” in which she engaged with the conundrum of sacred language as something un-understandable, hence untranslatable. Starting from the notion of “theotropic allegory,” a concept invented by De Man to indicate sacred figurative language, Apter focused on the theorization of figural language by Auerbach and on De Man’s reading of Benjamin’s essay “The Task of the Translator.” Through an acute analysis of secular and religious language and of Benjaminian messianism and nihilism as commented by De Man, Apter’s talk demonstrated the relevance of a theotropism, of the unintelligible and the untranslatable in opposition to the supposed transparency of secular and utilitarian language.

Professor Amon Raz-Krakotzkin (Ben Gurion University) delivered the third and last talk of the first day (“The Bible, the Oral Torah and the Messiah”), in which he discussed another potential kind of Messianism, based on the Mishnah, which established an imagined community of the Jewish Law: most importantly, a community that rejected nationalism for a peculiar notion of exile within the land. Through the articulation of this counter-Messianism (without a Messiah), Raz-Krakotzkin proposed it as an alternative to Zionism, that is to say, to the Christianization and secularization of Messianism that continues to prove its complicity with colonialism.

The first day was concluded by a vibrant roundtable, in which the speakers were joined by Talal Asad (CUNY). The questions raised during the day became an occasion to discuss their relevance for contemporary conflicts, not only in the Middle East. Although everyone agreed on the impossibility to think of the sovereign state without the sovereign subject, different opinion on whether the absence of the sovereign can still be imagined contributed to a fecund and stimulating conversation.

dialogue conference 2

The second day of the conference, April 24th, coincided also with the 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide, as Professor Marc Nichanian (Sabanci University) pointed out before giving his lecture, titled “The Subject and the Survivor.” The discussion that concluded the precedent day and the remembrance of one of the several catastrophes of modernity constituted the background of Nichanian’s talk, in which he expounded upon the figure of the survivor after the revolution of the subject (between Rousseau and Kant), which gave birth to the formation of the modern sovereign individual. By reading George Bataille’s oeuvre vis-à-vis Maurice Blanchot’s The Madness of the Day, Nichanian called for a phenomenology of the survivor. In particular he contrasted the survivor as a witness—and a sovereign subject—to the absolute survivor, who withdraws from its own sovereignty by refusing to speak and to offer its testimony to the historian or the philologist. This last man, this absolute survivor, fictionalized in Blanchot’s novel, was proposed by Nichanian as a strictly literary alternative to the modern ways of commemorating genocides and catastrophes.

Professor Sarah Hammerschlag (University of Chicago), in her talk titled “Literature and the Political-Theological Remains,” investigated the intersections of philosophy, literature, and politics in Derrida, suggesting that his work offers a literary alternative to political theology by proposing a form of politics that rejects sovereignty. By focusing on two essays collected in the book Rogue, Hammerschlag identified literature as a practice able to divest itself of authority, as an interruption of sovereignty, and as a suspension of violence.

The following roundtable, in which the speakers answered several questions from professors and students participating in the conference, delved into questions of sacralization and secularization in their substantial political implications. The discussion of art (and literature) as the condition of mythology and, vice versa, mythology as the origin of art, cemented the connection already examined in the precedent day between the religion of art, the birth of sovereignty, and the national state.

The two day conference proved to be a successful attempt to put in dialogue scholars from different disciplines around a core topic—literature and religion—that allowed for diverse directions of inquiry. Thanks to the acute reflections of the speakers and to the attentive response of the public, the conference demonstrated the importance of understanding the religious basis of modern subjectivity and contemporary politics, as well as the decisive role of literature within the complex dynamics of their interaction.

Welcome to Rutgers Comp Lit’s online magazine!

Staffed and maintained by our graduate students, the magazine will bring you up to speed on what’s been happening in the program … nearly as quickly as it happens! Think of it as a kind of a newsletter, only much more nimble. We’ll feature news items, stories, links, plenty of photos, and, from time to time, excellent student essays in a section called Exit 9, the title of our former print journal. And twice a year we’ll be printing selections from the magazine for readers who prefer that medium.

So bookmark this page and check it often for updates. Or simply add us to your RSS feeds. Send your feedback to our founding digital coordinator, third-year grad student Shawn Doherty, who is responsible for everything you see and read here: RutgersCompLitMagazine@gmail.com.

Andrew Parker, Graduate Program Director

Tango and Conflict: Learning Outside the Classroom with Past Today

By: Shawn Doherty, Third Year Ph.D. Student

Professor Richard Serrano’s signature course Past Today: Why Conflicts Endure exposes students to a multi-media approach for analyzing global conflicts through literature, film, music, architecture, and visual art. On February 24, students gathered for an even more interactive experience: a tango lesson.

tango photo 2

In the course’s unit on Argentina, students learned about tango as a way of approaching the longstanding conflict between Buenos Aires and the rest of Argentina. In their tango lesson, students had the opportunity to practice this challenging dance style. Mariela Thompson, a dance instructor with Rutgers Recreation, demonstrated proper form and led the students through the foundational steps of tango. Students switched partners throughout the evening in order to continue to develop their skills. The students who attended this extra-credit event enjoyed an evening of music, dancing, and socializing with their classmates.

tango photo 3

Thompson also explained the culture of dancing tango in a milonga, such as how to ask someone to dance, who leads and who follows, and how those norms have changed over time. In the following classes, the students who attended the event were able to share with their classmates more information about how practicing tango changed their understanding of the tango music they were studying and also how it helped them interact more concretely with a conflict that seems far removed from many of their lives.

As a signature course, Past Today attracts a broad range of students to think about how conflicts are represented and remembered through a Comparative Literature perspective. This event marked a highlight in a semester-long exploration of how a critical analysis of art and literature can help students in a variety of disciplines understand past and present conflicts.