All posts by Gabriele Lazzari

Comp Lit Alumni: Vaughn Anderson

Vaughn Anderson graduated in 2015 with a dissertation titled “Disappearing Acts: Octavio Paz, John Cage, Haroldo De Campos, and the Silent Turn in Contemporary Poetry.”

Since I lugged my last suitcase of books back to Alexander Library almost a year ago (my final act of closure), I’ve spent a lot of time writing and thinking about graphic musical notation. This so-called “eye music” was a brief fad in the 60s and early 70s. Composers, painters, and poets created scores where any act of musical interpretation first demands formal analysis of visual elements and close reading of text, often in several languages. Performance requires multiple competencies. And what I quickly discovered, when I sat down to piece together a critical bibliography about these works, is that almost nobody has written about them. Everyone seems to assume that this is someone else’s area of specialty.

This is what’s made my formation as a scholar unique: not that I’m more widely competent, but that I’m more comfortable venturing outside and between my areas of concentration. Throughout my time in Comp Lit, I was allowed and encouraged to change. I started as a scholar of urban studies, and then moved to science fiction. At various points my passions included eco-criticism, literary translation, graphic novels, intermedia, and avant-garde poetics. I took grad courses in Spanish, Portuguese, Art History, and any number of other cross-listed disciplines. Eventually I wrote a dissertation that focused on hemispheric American poetic networks during the Cold War, but it drew life and inspiration from all these other areas. I take pride in trying to wear my entire hat collection all at once, and I’m glad I surrounded myself with people who thought this was a good look for me.

 

[Cover image: a score from Cornelius Cardew’s Treatise Handbook, 1967]

Urban (De)Coloniality and Literature: A Retrospective

By: Rafael Vizcaíno and Jeong Eun Annabel We

On March 3, 2016, the graduate students of the Rutgers University Program in Comparative Literature held their biennial conference. This year’s conference, titled “Urban (De)Coloniality and Literature,” sought to push back against what we (the co-chairs) thought was a limited reception of the project of decoloniality within literary studies (e.g. that the project is geographically restricted to the Americas, temporally restricted to the 15th and 16th centuries, and heavily dependent on Hispanophone contexts). We also wanted to uphold comparative literature as an institutional space within the U.S. university where divergent forms of knowledge production can meet to analyze a specific issue of social relevance. The conference participants brought together ethnic studies, women and gender studies, area studies, philosophy, history, anthropology, religious studies, indigenous studies, as well as literary and cultural studies. They were invited to focus on an aspect of coloniality that in our view remains understudied: the coloniality of the city, as reflected in patterns of gentrification, mass surveillance, and the criminalization of racialized populations.

The first panel, “Remapping the Urban and Reclaiming Lives,” examined different decolonial imaginaries emerging from urban settings, ranging from San Francisco’s Mission district’s Chicanx public art, French-colonial plantation cities and Maroon utopianism, and Canada’s settler-colonial urban space unsettled by the Idle No More movement of First Nations peoples. Cynthia García (Stanford), Fadila Habchi (Yale), and Allyse Knox (Stony Brook) challenged the colonial intensifications of these urban spaces and offered for our analysis the multiple media through which a decolonial reclamation of the city might take place. As the panel’s discussant Professor Dinzey-Flores (Rutgers) highlighted, the physicality and materiality of space serves as a necessary context to analyze this endeavor.

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The second panel, “Genealogy and Decolonial Epistemology,” brought together different trajectories that have inspired decolonial work: Native kinship and intimacy, the moment of Pachakuti (rupture), and Black women’s creative (“demonic”) possession of space. Invigorating and also challenging other genealogies of decoloniality, Nicole Eitzen Delgado (NYU), Gabe Sanchez (Albany), and Alexandria Smith (Rutgers) demonstrated the contribution of wide ranging theoretical and practical sources to decolonial thought. Comp Lit’s very own Professor Yolanda Martinez-San Miguel (Rutgers) was this panel’s discussant. Raising the methodological question of comparison vs. relationality, she urged us to attend to the fundamental opacity in this epistemic endeavor.

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The third panel, “The Anthropological of the Inter-Space” further reflected on interdisciplinarity as the discussion focused on how anthropological subjects get created in in-between-spaces. Spaces considered were the New World, Okinawa’s military bases, and taxi dance halls in the 1920’s U.S.A. Dana Francisco Miranda (Connecticut), Ariko Shari Ikehara (Berkeley), and Monica Stanton (Princeton), pushed one another to address different time periods and modalities of control and invention in inter-spatial contexts. Professor Carter Mathes (Rutgers) traced “Man as the glue to anthropological normativity” in all three papers and offered additional contexts to consider, such as the (super/sub)human otherness of racialized subjects, as seen recently in Darren Wilson’s description of Michael Brown.

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The last panel, “(De)Colonial (Ab)use of the Theological and the Spiritual,” both credited and challenged secular and non-secular foundations of decoloniality. Lucas de Lima (UPenn), Foster J. Pinkney (UChicago), and Daniel José Camacho (Duke), traced queer, anti-violent, and indigenous deployments of liberation theology and spiritual practices. Their papers illustrated the importance of furthering a critique of both secularism and of theology’s complicity with coloniality in a global and comparative/relational perspective. Professor Carlos Decena (Rutgers) offered an intense and provocative discussion on the limits of theologies of liberation and the need to further look at their often covered over queer underside.

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Professor José David Saldívar (Stanford) was the conference’s keynote speaker. His talk, “Negative Aesthetics and Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” proposed that a negative aesthetic found in Díaz’s work helps explain the global presence of U.S. ethnic literature. Professor Saldívar began by sharing his on-site research in New Jersey since Díaz himself lived in Parlin, NJ, and attended Rutgers College as an undergraduate. Rutgers Comp Lit graduate students Carolyn Ureña and Enmanuel Martinez offered responses to Professor Saldivar’s talk. The ensuing discussion touched on Dominican Republic’s place within the modern/colonial world as well as the relation between the concepts of americanity and coloniality.

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The critically interdisciplinary exchange the conference generated reflexively encourages us to expand the theoretical frameworks of comparative literature as a discipline. Moreover, it urges us to expand the scope of decoloniality as a critical-intellectual project connected to social movements throughout the world. As Rutgers celebrates its 250th year anniversary, the themes of this conference also speak to Rutgers’ own colonial history and the ongoing gentrification of New Brunswick. Committed to various communities and projects, the conference presenters and participants were able to use this conference as an occasion to share research and insights across disciplinary boundaries and physical distance. The conference gave all of us a glimpse of the exciting work of emerging scholars, work that speaks to many of our current predicaments and signals a new generation of researchers who seek to challenge existing modes of thought and stimulate new conceptual frameworks and social movements.

We would like to once again express our deepest gratitude to all presenters, organizers, discussants, administrators, and university staff, without whom the conference could not have materialized. The same goes for our sponsors: The Rutgers Graduate Student Association, The Centers for Global Advancement and International Affairs, The Program in Comparative Literature, The Department of Latino and Caribbean Studies, The Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, The Advanced Institute for Critical Caribbean Studies, and The Department of African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian Languages and Literatures.

 

 

 

 

 

David Scott Lecture: “Michael Manley and Political Will”

By: Shawn Gonzalez

On February 26, the Rutgers Advanced Institute for Critical Caribbean Studies (RAICCS) celebrated its new status as an institute with the inaugural Sylvia Wynter distinguished lecture. Carter Mathes opened the event by discussing the new status of RAICCS. Dean Peter March also delivered a welcome message. Then, the audience watched a video about the history of the institute, which provided an overview of its programs including research, teaching, postdoctoral fellowships, and visits from scholars, artists, and performers. The video also outlined future directions for the center, including its upcoming graduate certificate.

David Scott, professor of Anthropology at Columbia University, presented his lecture “Michael Manley and Political Will.” The lecture focused on Michael Manley’s book Politics of Change: A Jamaican Testament published in 1974, during his first term as Prime Minister of Jamaica. Although this text is usually read in light of Manley’s later career, Scott urged the audience to set aside the familiar lens of tragedy. Instead, he focused on how Manley constructs his political will in this text and argued that an attention to political will is valuable in our current political climate which seems so distant from Manley’s. He ended the lecture by considering this earlier age as an intellectual inheritance. He asked the question of how we can both claim and be claimed by this inheritance.

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David Scott in conversation with Yarimar Bonilla and Carter Mathes

After the lecture, Yarimar Bonilla and Carter Mathes responded to Scott’s presentation. Bonilla drew connections between the political moment Scott described and three other contexts: Guadeloupe in 2009, Puerto Rico during recent debates about the island’s political future, and the United States during the current election cycle. Bonilla questioned how the concept of political will could inform our understanding of all three contexts. Mathes considered how Manley’s book was initially read in the United States and made connections with other figures like Martin Luther King Jr. and Peter Tosh. He also compared the narrative Manley constructs in Politics of Change to related literary representations including Sylvia Wynter’s Hills of Hebron and Marlon James’ A Brief History of Seven Killings. These responses were followed by a broader discussion with the audience.

Mellon Summer Fellowship: An Interview with Josué Rodríguez

Josué Rodríguez, 3rd year Ph.D. student, has just been awarded a Mellon Summer Fellowship to conduct pre-dissertation research in Santiago, Chile. Here is what he told us about the importance of visiting the Vicente Huidobro Foundation for his current project.

What are you going to do this summer thanks to the Mellon Summer Fellowship?

The Mellon Summer Study Grant will allow me to travel to the Vicente Huidobro Foundation in Santiago, Chile. There, I hope to analyze Huidobro’s literary journals, magazines and other collaborative texts, and trace the way they reflect and respond to avant-garde activity both across Latin America and in Europe. The networks of artists, poets, and thinkers these texts form, as well as the essays, manifestos, and poetry they circulate are important in conceiving the complex trans-Atlantic relationship between movements like French Surrealism and Huidobro’s Creacionismo.

The foundation itself performs a variety of roles in addition to being both museum and archive. It has benefitted from the membership of prominent poets like Octavio Paz and Nicanor Parra and scholars like Saul Yurkievich and René de Costa. It contains over 8,000 archived records, including manuscripts, photographs, first editions, and personal documents. Some of these documents include letters and photographs that catalog Huidobro’s relationships and with artists and intellectuals like Pablo Picasso and André Breton who are central to the avant-garde. Ultimately, through a wide variety of available materials, the Fundación makes a great effort to contextualize Huidobro and his work within his multifaceted historical and cultural milieu. I feel very fortunate to be able to visit and explore this unequaled site of research.

How do you think the Mellon Summer Fellowship will help you develop your dissertation?

Primarily, I am interested in examining how Surrealism’s conceptualization of authorship, politics, poetry, and art was appropriated, rejected, and/or otherwise reconfigured by Latin American vanguard poets in the early to mid 20th century.

As a result, at this early juncture of my research, the Mellon Summer Study Grant will allow me to begin formulating research questions for my prospectus around one of the prominent voices of Latin American vanguard poetics, the Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro. Focusing on the literary journals founded by Huidobro will help reveal the constant shifts in his aesthetic and political goals. Huidobro’s participation in avant-garde activity between 1916 and 1925 in Europe is crucial to his later re-articulation of what Latin American vanguard poetics should be in method, politics, style, and tone. As a result, studying these documents at the Foundation will provide important framing for a broader theorization of a Latin American poetic identity and its relationship to trans-Atlantic movements like Surrealism.

What professor(s) are you working with and what role did they have in helping you with shaping your research interest and/or in writing a competitive application for the Fellowship?

I have been fortunate enough to find a number of professors here at Rutgers who have influenced my thinking and continue to help develop my focus around these subjects. I am currently working with professors Marcy Schwartz and Karen Bishop from the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, and Nicola Behrmann from the German Department.

With respect to the Mellon Summer Study Grant proposal, both Karen Bishop and Andrew Parker offered very helpful advice on how best to communicate my project. Proposal writing can be a dramatic shift from other academic styles of writing, so their input and experience were instrumental in helping me clarify my goals efficiently and effectively. A warm and sincere thank you to them for all their help!

Mellon Dissertation Fellowship: An Interview with Carolyn Ureña

Carolyn Ureña, 5th year Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature and GradFund Advisor, has just been awarded a Mellon Dissertation Fellowship to complete her very promising interdisciplinary project. We asked her a few questions about her current work, her experience at Rutgers, and the application process.

 

Could you tell us a little about the topic of your dissertation and what professors you are working with?

Working at the interface of literary studies, decolonial theory, and disability studies, my dissertation draws on literature and film across a variety of genres, including fiction by Ralph Ellison, Gabriel García Márquez, Toni Morrison, and Junot Díaz, to demonstrate how literary narratives about illness and disability contribute to understanding racial formations and ameliorating colonial wounds. The dissertation develops a critical framework for understanding the ways in which a sustained encounter between critical race studies, disability studies, and the medical humanities can generate new conceptions of health and healing. I accomplish this through a reassessment of the writings of decolonial theorist Frantz Fanon, a physician who used narrative case studies and ethnography to illuminate the imbrication of race, illness, and disability. By introducing a decolonial perspective to the study of narratives of illness and disability, this project not only challenges the medical humanities and disability studies to consider the experience of race and the effects of colonialism, but also foregrounds questions of disability and illness within the fields of race theory and postcolonial studies, where they have until now received minimal scholarly attention.

Throughout my time at Rutgers, I have been very fortunate to have the opportunity to work with scholars who have encouraged me, helping my project grow in new and unexpected ways. My dissertation chair is Ann Jurecic, and my committee is comprised of Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Susan Martin-Márquez, and Michelle Stephens. Together these professors bring expertise in narratives of illness and disability, decolonial thought and Frantz Fanon, film, and trauma, and the critical feedback and unwavering support of my committee have made the dissertation writing process fun and intellectually rewarding.

 

How would you relate your dissertation project and its critical focus with the intellectual environment you found at Comparative Literature? 

I have experienced a wonderful synergy between the interests I brought to Rutgers and the way they were nurtured and developed while here. I arrived at Rutgers interest in the medical humanities and so immediately identified Ann as a potential advisor – I even emailed her before I got on campus to ask her advice on books to read! As I dove into illness narratives, I re-encountered the work of Frantz Fanon, first with Susan in her “Embodied Cinemas” course, and then again with Nelson in a course on “Caribbean Theorizing.” Re-reading Fanon in a film course centered on the body and then again in a decolonial context allowed me to develop ideas about Fanon as a doctor, phenomenologist, and cultural critic who cared deeply about healing, and in retrospect I feel that the collision of these ideas could have only happened at Rutgers. The more faculty members I engaged in my project, the stronger it became. My advice to graduate students would be to talk to as many people as possible about your project, at every stage. You never know when someone will suggest a book or article for you to read that will help shape your ideas.

 

Can you briefly describe the application process to the Mellon Dissertation Fellowship? Based on your experience, when do you think a student should apply and why?

The application for the Mellon Dissertation Fellowship consists of a 25 word “abstract” of your project, a 500-word project statement, and two letters of reference. This may seem straightforward, but as with all competitive applications, it takes a lot of thought and revision to get this genre right!

As a Fellowship Advisor at GradFund, the graduate fellowship advising office of the Graduate School-New Brunswick, I would recommend applying for dissertation completion fellowships when at least half of your dissertation is complete. This is important because in your project statement you should directly state how many chapters you have written as well as how you will complete your dissertation during the fellowship year. It is also key that your statement be legible to scholars across various fields, not just literature, and this is precisely where sharing your drafts becomes essential! I shared my drafts with my committee, with professors in Comp Lit who I knew had served on review panels in the past, and, of course, with GradFund. The fellowship advisors at GradFund are trained to read across the disciplines, and before working there I frequently took advantage of their summer mentoring programs and individual meetings to improve my grant writing skills and figure out the best time to apply – I cannot recommend them enough! By getting a variety of perspectives on your work you will have a better chance at hitting that jargon-free sweet spot.

I should also mention that the year that you apply for the Mellon Dissertation Fellowship you should also be applying to external completion fellowships, such as the Ford, the ACLS/Mellon, and, if applicable, the American Association of University Women, to name a few. These applications have deadlines in October and November, which will also put you in a good position to apply for the SAS Mellon, typically due in December. I recommend beginning the drafting process in the summer before the application deadline to ensure you have enough time to receive feedback and revise your essays multiple times. My experience at Rutgers Comp Lit has been one of genuine collaboration between colleagues, classmates, and professors, and I look forward to continuing that process during my fellowship year.

 

 

Comp Lit Alumni: Ben De Witte

We asked Ben De Witte, who has recently defended his dissertation, to share his thoughts on his doctoral experience at Comp Lit. Here is his account of the laborious but rewarding path that has led him to the dissertation, with some great suggestions for current (and future) graduate students.

 

In October 2015, I defended my dissertation “Queer Visibility on the Transatlantic Modernist Stage,” which investigates the transatlantic circulation of themes and techniques used to stage queer plots and persons in a selection of Argentinean, Spanish and U.S. modernist plays. I did not start in the Program of Comparative Literature knowing that I would write on the history of Anglophone and Spanish-language theater and performance. I did know, however, that I wanted to work on multilingual, comparative queer modernism (I had written a master’s thesis on Djuna Barnes’s expatriate novel Nightwood) and on the intertwined histories of literature and sexuality. For these reasons I applied at Rutgers, which boasts an impressive faculty in these areas. Among the various faculty members who have helped me think about my research, I certainly want to mention my dissertation committee members: Elin Diamond, who introduced me to the pleasures of modern drama scholarship, Andy Parker, who stimulated me to think of literature in tandem with philosophy, and Ben. Sifuentes-Jáuregui, who encouraged me to think of comparative literature (and queer figuration) in terms of circulation.

Although it took me all the way into my third year – when I was preparing for my Ph.D. exams – to decide that modern drama would be my main field, I am grateful for everything that I read and studied (my coursework in Comparative Literature, English, Spanish, French and Women’s and Gender Studies, and also my ever expanding multi-genre reading list) leading up to that moment. I am fortunate that our program allowed me a certain amount of time and flexibility to figure out what I really wanted to say and do. And of course, I am equally blessed that my committee helped me apply for grants, allowing me to do archival research in Buenos Aires and Madrid, and for a Mellon Dissertation Fellowship. My main piece of advice to students in the program would be: remain politic about real constraints (such as time and funding) without losing sight of what you really want to investigate; you will need your enthusiasm, wits and a lot more to finally write the dissertation. And although you can (and probably will) read up for the rest of your academic career before you ever fully “get it,” I found that jumping into dissertation chapters much more effectively stimulated my thinking and my creativity. Don’t delay too much, and instead enjoy the practice of writing.