Tag Archives: Comp Lit Students

Comparative Literature Alumni Reunion

by  Amanda González Izquierdo

On November 8, 2019, the program in Comparative Literature at Rutgers University hosted its first alumni reunion. The chair of the program, Andrew Parker, organized a lunch that brought together faculty, current undergraduate and graduate students, and undergraduate and graduate alumni.

The lunch began with a few words from Dr. Parker welcoming everyone and speaking to how moving it was to see alumni come back to campus, which he described as a testament to the impact that their time at Rutgers has had on their professional and personal lives. Then, everyone in the room briefly introduced themselves, and we learned that the student body that has made up the program from its beginnings has included people representing all parts of the world, including Pakistan, China, Mexico, and Canada. Dr. Parker then proceeded to introduce two notable guests: Barbara Lee, Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs, and Barry Qualls, Professor Emeritus of English and former Dean of Humanities in the School of Arts and Sciences. They both spoke about how the campus has changed since some of the alumni graduated, highlighting the caffeine molecule sculpture in front of the chemistry building in Busch campus and the Sojourner Truth apartments in the College Ave campus. They also both spoke about the importance of the humanities, the passion that Comparative Literature students exhibit for literature and language, and how the program is characterized by its continuous crossing of boundaries.

After the talks, everyone started to form or join conversation groups around the room. Some people were getting to know each other for the first time, while others were reconnecting. In these conversations, we learned about what alumni have been up to since their graduations. Some of those who earned their PhD at Rutgers have retired after fulfilling careers in the professoriate, while others hold teaching positions at universities throughout the US, including neighboring colleges like Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, NJ. A great number of the undergraduate alumni are in the process of applying to graduate school, considering PhD programs in Comparative Literature and Women and Gender Studies. It was wonderful to witness the meetings between current graduate students and undergraduates who were in their classes semesters ago. One senior undergraduate told fourth-year PhD candidate, Rudrani Gangopadhyay, that he will be writing his thesis on a work he first read in a class she taught.

The lunch was also a wonderful opportunity to catch up with fellow current graduate students. Since all of our research interests are so diverse, and since many people are already past the coursework phase, it becomes difficult to see each other as often as we would like to. It was great to talk to people in their final years of the program about how their dissertations are shaping up and new interests that are emerging during the writing process. PhD candidates also kindly offered advice to those who have just started teaching or will begin soon on how to handle the nerves of being in front of a class, how to create a syllabus, and how to moderate discussions. We also spoke about the biennial graduate student conference which will be taking place on April 3-4, 2020 in conversations that touched upon our collective excitement for the theme, plans on how to move forward, and the stresses and felicities of getting to the point of publishing the call for papers.

The reunion lunch was a wonderful way to catch up with old friends, meet new people, and talk about our interests and plans. It will certainly not be the last time the program organizes such an event bringing together former and current Comparative Literature students.

NEW GRAD STUDENT PROFILES, FALL 2019

Rutgers Comp Lit is thrilled to introduce the two students of this year’s incoming cohort: Sneha and Xingming.

Sneha Khaund attended St. Stephen’s College in Delhi for her undergraduate degree in English Literature. Following her studies in Delhi, she moved to London to study for an MA in Comparative Literature at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). As a Commonwealth Scholar at SOAS, she explored how multilingualism is a productive lens from which to think about world literature. She looks forward to developing these interests at Rutgers by focusing on eastern India. Prior to joining Rutgers, Sneha worked in the publishing industry and hopes to combine her interest in writing for popular media with her academic training.

Xingming Wang’s research interests lie in modern and contemporary Chinese literature, with theoretical concerns centering on animal studies, environmental humanities, and trauma and memory studies. He was born in Xuzhou, a city renowned for the culture of Han Dynasty, ancient battlefields, and heavy industry, where his critical awareness of historical memory and environmental protection has taken root and grown into an academic passion. At Soochow University, Xingming majored in English and focused on trauma in modernist literature, especially the works of Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. He was also fascinated by the novels of Charles Dickens and thus ventured into a close reading of Nineteenth-century British literature. Meanwhile, he got affiliated to Jingwen College, an institute accommodating students from fifty different majors and endorsing interdisciplinary academic projects, where he honed his research skills. After that, Xingming went to Nanjing University for graduate study in English language and literature. While working on his M.A. thesis on critical animal studies, he took courses outside the English Department and found his interests gravitating towards animals in modern Chinese literature. At Rutgers, Xingming hopes to probe how representations of animals engage with the discourse of “human” and how literary animals embody a site of testimony to the painful moments in modern Chinese history.

Welcome, Sneha and Xingming!

“Listening to Foreignness”: Coco Xu on the infrastructure and circulation of Chinese radio plays in the 1980s

 

by Mònica Tomàs White

How is the perception of foreignness constructed through the broadcast of radio plays? Relatedly, how does radio—as a medium of mass cultural communication and an artifact with a particular material and institutional history—affect the production and reception of these radio plays in 1980s China? These were the two main concerns animating Coco Xu’s April 15th colloquium on the history and politics of what she calls “radio plays”: literary radio broadcasts that include translated world radio dramas, adaptations of 19th-century European novels, and edited, dubbed film recordings.

Following Naoki Sakai’s theory of “heterolingual address”, Xu argues that translation as intersubjective communication is key to both comprehending foreign literature and developing a cultural imagination of unknown “others”. According to Xu, sound “allow[s] listeners to be at once removed from the world of imagination and transported into [a] fictional land”, where they can “live out an indirect experience in another time and another life”. Radio plays are thus an excellent subject for an investigation of translation and cultural imagination. 1980s China, where radio plays juxtapose “19th century Europe […] with 1940s’ America, and a story from contemporary West Germany is followed by another that’s set in a futuristic China”—but all characters somehow speak perfect Mandarin Chinese—is a particularly messy, candid, and thus generative moment to explore.

Xu began her talk with a concise history of the development of the genre and medium in China, where radio was introduced alongside cinema in the early 20th century. Early recordings—postdating decades of unrecorded live transmissions—were largely obliterated in the Cultural Revolution, which did away with 90% of foreign music recordings. Post-revolutionary reform policies called for a new supply of programming to fill in the void; accordingly, by the 1980s over 70 regional and local radio stations were producing 600-700 radio dramas each year. The very first stereo radio drama was an adaptation of Alexander Pushkin’s 1833 fairy tale “The Tale of the Fisherman and the Fish”, broadcast by Guangdong Radio in 1981. How did such adaptations of European literature form a cultural imagination of the west, and how might this have served as a strategic tool in the ideological debates of the early 1980s?

To answer this question, Xu offered an illustrative close reading of Vanina Vanini, a popular early-80s radio drama adapted from Stendhal’s 1829 novella of the same title. Both the novella and the adaptation tell the story of the fraught relationship between the titular protagonist and her lover Missirilli, a carbonaro in a nationalist plot to liberate Italy from Austrian overlords. However, where Stendhal paints a nuanced picture of Vanina’s inner struggles, the radio drama portrays her obsession with Missirilli as springing from “pure love”, rendering her and her allies vulgar and cartoonish.  Indeed, Stendhal’s scheming, self-serving Vanina becomes simple-minded and naïve in the adaptation: where

as the former finally accepts her rejection, returns to Rome and moves on, the latter ends pathetically attending to a furious Missirilli, who excoriates her—in the drama’s very last line—as “cursable Vanina Vanini!” Xu notes that while Stendhal’s sympathies quite obviously lie with Missirilli, whose role in turning Vanina into a desperate “monster” he conveniently overlooks, the 1980s adaptation takes this patriarchal perspective even further: the ending in particular “highlights how woman—especially woman corrupted by the most dangerous sentiment of people of the social, cultural and especially class that Vanina stands for—is the hindrance of the righteous cause and the root cause for Missirilli’s failed revolutionary ambitions”.

This first taste of Xu’s project, which “explores the translation of foreignness through a close reading of radio plays that portray exotic places and foreign cultures”, builds upon the theoretical basis she developed in her work on translation as loving imagination, presented at “Love in Translation”, the Rutgers Comparative Literature graduate conference of Spring 2018. Her completed study aims to fill a gap in both radio studies and contemporary Chinese literary studies, but (as demonstrated by an enthusiastic Q&A session) her work will undoubtedly also be of interest to comparatists and cultural studies scholars working in many traditions. Thank you and congratulations, Coco!

Decoloniality Workshop: “Fucking with [The] Family: The Queer Promise in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions”

by María Elizabeth Rodríguez Beltrán with notes by Haruki Eda and Rafael Vizcaíno, and pictures by Rafael Vizcaíno

At the beginning of the Spring semester, on February 19th, 2019, Comparative Literature PhD student Thato Magano shared with the Decoloniality Workshop audience their soon-to-be published paper[i],“Fucking with [The] Family: The Queer Promise in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions.”  In it, Thato highlighted the importance of Nervous Conditions as a critical feminist text that “negotiates the seemingly inescapable bind of inter- and intra- cultural patriarchal prescriptions,” and emphasized its significance within Black studies, African Literature and postcolonial studies.

Thato builds up on the work of Susan Andrade and Tendai Marima, and challenges previous readings that describe the main character and narrator of the novel, Tambu, as heterosexual and as representative of the nation. Thato instead argues that Tambu and her cousin Nyasha, with whom she holds an intimate relationship, exist as “queer subjects not synchronous with national reproductive time.” The article places them as figures that “rearticulate sexual politics” and radicalizes queer politics. Thato centers the queer subject within the often-restrictive political discourse of black experience, and analyses how lesbian desire within Nervous Conditions opposes the family as social norm. Through its exploration of Tambu and Nyasha’s relationship, “Fucking with [The] Family” proposes a reading of “incest as a queer emotion, affect and aesthetic that can be instrumental in destabilizing heteronormative nationalist desires in postcolonial literatures.”

In the Q&A section, audience members were interested in exploring with Thato the cultural limitations of incest, the distinction between queer identity and queer politics, and the relationship between queerness and spirituality. Students who work on Caribbean Literature asked about the relationship that Thato sees between African epistemologies and those of the Caribbean where literary queerness is usually analyzed through a spiritual lens. To this inquiry Thato answered that spirituality is often used as mediation (or mediating tool) for talking about queer intimacies, “my investment is to try to produce two subjects who can stand in their own terms… my resistance is against the premise that queer sexuality can only emerge in a cultural context (e.g. mythology, culture, spirituality), but that cultural context privileges heterosexual production and national time…so these sorts of mediations that queer subjectivity can only hinge upon is what I am resisting.”

The conversation continued outside of the meeting room, as Thato’s fascinating paper brought up more questions and conversation topics. Thato’s paper and the presentation successfully met its goal, to examine Nervous Conditionsas a text that “negotiates escaping heteronormative conventions of Black female subjectivity”, and “make[s] legible alternative modes of caring and belonging within the nation” outside the heteronormative construction of the family. This paper allowed a richer understanding of queerness and brought to light many of the assumptions that exist when reading about relationships among black women. Congratulations to Thato Magano on a wonderful presentation!

[i]It has been accepted for publication by the Research in African Literatures Journal (RiAL).

Puerto Rican Blackness through a Cuban Lens: A Colloquium Presentation by María Elizabeth Rodríguez Beltrán

by Phil Yakushev

Comparative Literature hosted its first colloquium on April 1, when María Elizabeth Rodríguez Beltrán presented “Puerto Rican Blackness through a Cuban Lens” and contextualized this talk within her dissertation-in-progress. María Elizabeth’s project seeks to challenge what she identifies as a common tendency in studies of African diasporas—a centering of Anglophone spaces which, in turn, leaves the Spanish Caribbean at the periphery of this field. Her presentation, structured around two 19thcentury Spanish Caribbean texts, not only directly resisted this dynamic of African diaspora studies but also showed how love practiced by black and mix-raced women, as agents, can challenge the constraints of the nation and establish community.

María Elizabeth used two works to build her case: Puerto Rican playwright Alejandro Tapia y Rivera’s La Cuarterona, and Cuban novelist Ciriollo Villaverde’s Cecilia Valdés. These texts share several similarities, making them useful for a comparatist who traces how literary characters and black subjectivities in the Caribbean were shaped by their recognized relationship to slavery and how these recognitions effected social relations. Both works were written in the late 19thcentury by authors who were renowned in their spaces; their plots proceed around racially ambiguous female characters of African descent who fall in love with white men in times of slavery; both feature incest; and, perhaps curiously, both works are set in Habana. María Elizabeth used the latter similarity to illustrate the complex relationship between black subjectivities in the Spanish Caribbean, the family and the nation, and love and incest. Tapia most probably did not set his play in Cuba out of ignorance of how race operated on his own island, and María Elizabeth summarized the scholarly debates around question of setting. As she argued, Rivera places La Cuarterona in Cuba to present the “audience with a transnational perspective that allows for connections between isolated spaces and bring to light a pressing issue,” that of blackness and slavery.

For María Elizabeth, this transnational perspective is vital. Overall, she “seeks to study blackness as a way of being that centers relationships and community, instead of addressing the nation which has established modes of love that constrain black subjects.” Both nation and language act as constraints even in the study of African diasporas, with conventional approaches being less willing to engage with black experiences in the Spanish Caribbean and Brazil, where myths of “racial democracy and mesizaje are foundational and place an impediment” to a conventional discourse on blackness in which slavery is critical. María Elizabeth’s work, then, seeks to push African diaspora studies in at least three ways: broadening scholarship beyond Anglophone spaces, exploring the role of the nation in constructing racial ideology within the Spanish Caribbean itself, and showing how black and mixed-race women characters can challenge the dominance of the nation and its foundational unit, the family, by building their own communities. While love, in the texts María Elizabeth is working with for her dissertation, often takes on forms often identified as perverse—such as incest—she was careful to stress that, for characters in these literatures, love often does not ultimately fail. Rather, love becomes a way to form relationships among colonized communities, with instances of unconventional love creating “cracks on the concrete of coloniality, as fissures that challenge to break the colonial version of the family unit.”

After discussing these texts and introducing her analytical frames, María Elizabeth previewed the rest of her dissertation, and its themes and structure. The project, as a whole, will juxtapose and compare the black subjectivities produced, and reproduced, in literatures of the Hispanic and Anglophone Caribbeans. Other chapters in her work will explore Michelle Cliff’s Abeng and the limits of creole solidarity in Jamaica, as well as Tiphanie Yanique’s Land of Love and Drowningand how love and relationships in the Virgin Islands can function outside of the colonial-sexual matrix. María Elizabeth hopes that her comparatist approach will not only expand African diaspora studies beyond the Anglophone but, relatedly, disrupt a potentially paralyzing centrality of slavery within the field. As she said, “Despite the long-lasting damage that slavery has left on peoples of the Afro-Diaspora, our ability to love affirms our ways of thriving, our ways of moving forward, and beyond, trauma as framework.” As a whole, then, María Elizabeth’s work seeks to highlight how literature can unleash the ability of love to serve as praxis and “heal the wounds of enslavement.”  Her colloquium presentation provided a powerful and fascinating preview of this critical endeavor.

Global Africa, Migration, Literature, and the Arts

by Joseph Sepulveda

On March 28th, I attended “Global Africa, Migration, Literature, and the Arts”, a three-day symposium held at Rutgers University. I will focus in this blog post on two parts of the Global Africa conference that I witnessed. The first is a collective presentation led and written by Thato Magano entitled “Cacophonous Cognates: A Hybrid”, which he performed alongside Alexandria Smith and Paulina Barrios. The performance was also accompanied by the drumming of Roger Noguerol, with technical support from Gabriel Bámgbóṣé and Yuanqiu Jiang. The second part is the keynote lecture by the Glissantian Manthia Diawara, whose focus was a mediation on the importance of returning to the philosophy of Èdouard Glissant for our current moment.

I listened to the performance piece “Cacophonous Cognates” not in order to try to understand it but to feel it as poetry. The choral qualities of the pieces that Thato Magano assembled reflected on our cosmic being, blackness, colonialism, love and endurance. The work transmitted what it meant to attend to the suffering and love of black people. Magano cited Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake, and in many ways the piece felt and communicated what it means to love blackness under conditions of its undoing. It spoke about a longing for the textures, beauty, and luminance of blackness; it honored the ancestors and black mothering; it limned in its multivocality the possibility of becoming, gesturing toward our collective and unbridled transformation.

After the performance, I listened to Manthia Diawara’s reflections on  Édouard Glissant and the poet-philosopher’s singularity— for Diawara Glissant is a philosopher who breaks from filiation, and he emphasized Glissant’s sans père(ness), his distance from Western philosophy of monotheism and root-identity (identité-racine), of an essential totalitarian Western understanding of being, in favor of a world in Relation. But beyond highlighting Glissant’s eminence, Diawara’s speech resonated with the earlier performance in a number of ways. For Diawara, Glissant is a poet whose poetic concepts touch on and illuminate a world not of self/other opposition but of an extension of the self in relation to the Other. This is the essence of Relation. Moreover, Diawara pointed to another key Glissantian concept that resonated with Thato Magano’s performance: the ethics of opacity. While opacity can be understood as a failure to reveal or make oneself transparent, for Glissant the right to opacity is crucial to identity and to resisting the will to dominate. It becomes crucial therefore, to paraphrase Diawara, to not only take note of one’s own opacity to oneself but to grant to others the impossibility of ever fully comprehending. This failure, however, should not be the cause of despair but should open the way to creating a different collective world beyond possessive drives to conquer and control what can be or exist.