Category Archives: Comparative Literature Events

Comparative Literature Events, Workshops and Events

“Teaching Practices in the Era of BLM” Follow-Up Q&A with Dr. Carolyn Ureña

The program in Comparative Literature and the Rutgers Advanced Institute for Critical Caribbean Studies sponsored a student-led event on February 5th, 2021, under the title “Teaching Practices in the Era of BLM.” The event, organized by María Elizabeth Rodríguez Beltrán, Paulina Barrios, Mònica Tomás, Milan Reynolds, and Amanda González Izquierdo had over 100 people attend. We were honored to have Dr. Carolyn Ureña, a Comparative Literature alumnus and now Assistant Dean for Advising at University of Pennsylvania. Along with Dr. Jonathan Daniel Rosa and Dr. Angel Jones, Dr. Ureña spoke on the ongoing importance of incorporating pedagogy that addresses systemic racism and white supremacy in educational spaces. We thank Dr. Ureña for the opportunity to share her responses to the questions that came out of that workshop and for providing such necessary theory and practice for antiracism in the classroom.

Watch a recording of the workshop here!

Dr. Rosa and Dr. Ureña, how do you see your presentations overlapping and/or diverging? What ideas sparked for you as the other presented?

Thank you for encouraging us to think about our presentations in tandem. I was particularly struck by Dr. Rosa’s illuminating example of Black Cuban-American actress Gina Torres being interviewed by the Telemundo anchor in English. This inability-to-recognize Torres as Spanish speaking, the host’s claim that they had allegedly “both” succumb to stereotypes immediately drew my mind back to my recent re-readings of Fanon on “The Black Man and Language” (of which I spoke in my presentation). I am very much interested in language as a tool of colonial violence, as a tool for accessing power, but also as a weapon for policing who and who does not belong to a particular culture. When Fanon writes about the white French doctors who talk down to their Black and Arab patients in an invented patois/gibberish, they are invoking their position of power as physicians, which shields them from sounding ridiculous since they claim to be meeting the colonized subject “where they are,” so to speak. I’m wondering what it means for the Telemundo host to have spoken her accented English in order to do the same with Torres. How is this complicated by the fact that in some ways, the star is more “powerful” than the host, since her words and image are what sell in this case?

While Dr. Ureña’s presentation centered hope and the stubbornness of idealism, this reveals the ways in which students are often so oppressed that it can be emotionally, physically and structurally devastating pulling them further away from hope. How do we think about joy, foster and encourage in a way that doesn’t rob students of the fullness and validity of their feelings?

Thank you for your question! I would like to clarify that “idealism” in Fanon is not necessarily (or not always) a happy thing, and in my writing on Fanon my aim is to show that hope does not always appear in the places or ways we expect. So when I talk about being stubborn in asserting the presence of the body, I mean this as a proactive stance in opposition to the “business as usual” attitudes that would have us ignore the complexity of the body in favor of the so-called “rational” mind. When I speak of hope in Fanon, I am drawing attention to the moment when he resigns as chief psychiatrist in Algeria, when he writes an impassioned and damning letter to the Resident Minister to reject the colonial structure (I urge everyone to read it!). Many might view this moment as Fanon “giving up,” but I argue this moment of rejection is what opens up new and unexpected opportunities (to this effect, my most recent article on this subject is titled “Hopeful Resignation”). This understanding of hope and idealism, I propose, does not rob students (or anyone who embodies it) of the feelings of anger, indignation, sadness and even momentary despair. What it does, I find, is show us a new way to understand what it means to take a stand, that anger can be quite productive — sometimes saying no, leaving a situation, literally quitting (as in Fanon’s case) can actually push against narratives of “grit” and resilience and allow us to challenge the standards for what it means to succeed, to hope, to be fulfilled.

Link to the article I mentioned: https://brill.com/view/journals/bjgs/6/2/article-p233_233.xml

I am wondering how to factor in how my body experience changes in contexts, for instance, I might feel out of place in a white American classroom, but my body experience is a privileged one in a different context internationally because of caste and class. How do I think through the first experience to listen and respond better to students who come from less privileged backgrounds?

Thank you bringing your own bodily awareness to this discussion. One of the many aspects of existential phenomenology that I find compelling is precisely that it allows us to acknowledge that our bodies are not static because we are always in relation to something/someone else. In other words, we do not exist in a vacuum, so, as you pointed out, we feel differently in our bodies depending on the environment, depending on the presence of other bodies as well. I think the activity I mentioned, the Social Identity Wheel from University of Michigan, might yield especially interesting insights if you were to complete the task with each environment in mind: which identity to do you pay most attention to in situation 1? what identity do you think others notice most, etc? Then repeat for environment 2. The idea here is that one’s growing awareness of the complexity of the experience can help us become more aware and attuned to our students’ complexity as well. Above all, as educators interested in adopting a Freirian model of problem-posing pedagogy, I would say we need to ask our students about their experiences, past and present. I would also ask your students a version of the question you asked me. As with the experience you described, the first-gen, low-income college experience can be very disorienting, and gaining a particular kind of education can make one feel alienated from one’s home (I’m reading Fanon’s “The Black Man and Language” through this lens). Likewise, for me, attending a primarily white institution as a Latina was certainly a reminder that I was one of just a few, whereas back home in the primarily Dominican neighborhood of Washington Heights in NYC, I was one among many, from an ethnic perspective.

As part of the problem-posing pedagogy, do we seek particular pedagogical structures/strategies that would also gradually bring students to their own? Do educators avail themselves of particular methods for structuring questions in the classroom?

I love that your question points to the possibility of students developing thier own pedagogical strategies — when I teach Freire, I actually tell students that just because I am aiming to build a Freirian classroom does not mean they will encounter this everywhere they go. Therefore, I want to help them become Freirian student-teachers, so that whatever classroom they enter, whatever syllabus they encounter, they feel empowered to ask themselves and their friends “what is the goal of this class? what about this is important or relevant for me, for my growth?” My point being, they don’t need anyone’s permission to bring their questions to their learning. That being said, I always talk about the importance of being strategic, as I am not throwing out the rule book that may say “these are the grading standards, this will be on the test,” since certain kinds of academic success, even traditionally construed, can open important doors; the question is, what do we do when we open them? Still, there is much more to learning the materials than memorizing and producing the right answers.

In terms of methods for structuring questions, I often find myself encouraging questions that denaturalize the presence of the text or object in the class, by which I mean, encouraging the student to put themselves in the role of the syllabus writer (i.e. teacher!) — why do you think we are STILL talking about this old/strange/boring (if that’s how it’s being received) text? What can we gain from it? What can we set aside? If it’s somehow mandated by the discipline/class/high school…. why might that be so? Answers range from utilitarian to utopian, and that’s part of the point — nothing is obvious, nothing is static, which reminds me of when Fanon writes, “Society, unlike biochemical processes, does not escape human influence.”

Oh! And I mentioned during the Q&A that literature is a great place to discuss race and difference more broadly, even simply by starting to ask questions about why particular characters were made to speak by particular authors in particular ways, and I have a recommended text for this — Toni Morrison’s short story “Recitatif,” about two young girls, one white, one black, and their repeated encounters throughout their lives. The thing is, Morrison never tells us who is white and who is black. Check it out, you won’t regret it. But you don’t have to take my word for it! (here is LeVar Burton, of Reading Rainbow and Star Trek: The Next Generation fame, reading and discussing it: https://www.stitcher.com/show/levar-burton-reads/episode/recitatif-by-toni-morrison-part-1-200144090)

What would you suggest / recommend to professor (white/black) to feel comfortable in raising racial questions in class—how to be intentional in incorporating racial issues.

For handling these kinds of discussions — whether for the first time or each new time — I am so grateful for the wealth of resources to be found at college Centers for Teaching and Learning. As educators, we really never need to do this alone. We can seek help and guidance from other educators, others who know how to start these discussions. I’ve mentioned the University of Michigan Inclusive Teaching resources (https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/inclusive-teaching/). UPenn’s Center for Teaching and Learning has some great, evidence-based resources and strategies as well (https://www.ctl.upenn.edu/Node/160, and has sponsored events about trauma-informed teaching that included representatives from Counseling and Psychological Services. If you search for resources on how to discuss the 2020 Election results, you’ll also find helpful advice that is applicable in this context.

Even after reading through these kinds of materials, we may continue to feel unsure, and my thinking at the moment is that true learning happens when we stretch ourselves beyond our comfort zone. I believe the commitment must come before the comfort. I think of our students, those who are not yet comfortable speaking in class — we encourage them to try, we find ways to let them know that we will not let them falter, that we will help them through that first comment and also give them feedback on how to improve. Oh, and you better believe their classmates will give feedback (nods, building on the comment, eye rolls, silence). I would say to you and all professors, speak sincerely, humbly (even announce it — I’m not sure how to have this conversation, this is the first time I am trying, and I need you help), and above all, ask questions. Students overwhelmingly appreciate being heard, being included, as well as our willingness to be human in front of them.

Once again, we thank our presenters Dr. Ureña, Dr. Rosa, and Dr. Jones for thoughtful and pertinent talks, and the Comparative Literature Program for supporting this workshop.

Comparative Literature Events, Graduate Students

Rafael Vizcaino’s Dissertation Defense: Decolonial Responses to Secularism from the Underside of Modernity

By Yuanqiu Jiang, with editorial input from Rafael Vizcaino

March 10, 2020 witnessed Rafael Vizcaíno’s doctoral defense, the final step of his academic journey as a graduate student at Rutgers Comparative Literature.

 

Rafael started off by giving us a quick summary of his dissertation, which offers an interpretation of the notions of “secularity” and “post-secularity” from the perspective of epistemic decolonization. Rafael aims at a re-articulation of the meaning of secularization in modernity, where secularization learns from its own mistakes. Situating his project in Latin America and borrowing tools from decolonial thought, Rafael argues that secularity can be resignified beyond modern anti-religious secularism through epistemic decolonization. The ongoing project of postsecularity, defended by an array of scholars across the humanities and social sciences, can thus also take part in a broader process of decolonization.

 

In the examination portion of the defense, Professor Linda Martín Alcoff (CUNY Graduate Center) pushed Rafael to articulate how figures like Gloria Anzaldúa prefigure much of contemporary philosophy of science and standpoint theory. Professor Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel (University of Miami), asked Rafael about how he conceives of the relation between aesthetics, the erotic, and the spiritual. Professor Carlos Ulises Decena (Chair of Rutgers’s Department of Latino and Caribbean Studies) inquired about Rafael’s methods and urged Rafael to better articulate the embodied character of writing in the process of knowledge production. Lastly, our very own Professor Nelson Maldonado-Torres, who chaired Rafael’s dissertation, asked about the role of dialectics and opacity in Rafael’s work.

 

In his thoughtful response to all these comments, the word “trans-disciplinary” emerged as a notion central to Rafael’s own writing and thinking. Rafael invoked the cyberneticist Stafford Beer, whose critique of scholarship Rafael constantly kept in mind while writing his dissertation. The trans-disciplinary moves beyond the disciplinary and the interdisciplinary to think the big picture in an ever-changing world. The project of epistemic decolonization, Rafael argues, presupposes this type of transdisciplinarity, and with this frame, Rafael seeks to make a contribution to theories of modernity, religion, and secularity.

 

Rafael’s dissertation was acclaimed by Professor Maldonado-Torres as a triad of excellent writing, excellent research, and excellent analysis, which were also powerfully demonstrated in the defense. Felicidades, Rafael! And good luck with the next chapter of your career!

Photo credits: Annabel We
Comparative Literature Events, Faculty and Staff

We Are Not Drowning, We are Fighting: Pacific Poets against Environmental Racism

By: Xingming Wang

On February 20, the Department of French hosted Dr. Anaïs Maurer for her lecture and job talk: “We Are Not Drowning, We are Fighting: Pacific Poets against Environmental Racism”. As the title of the lecture indicates, Oceanian literary voices have been contributing to protests against environmental racism­­—an ideology, in Maurer’s words, constituting “structural discrimination that racializes people affected by environmental issues”. Racial discrimination underlies the environmental injustice against pacific islanders. As the U.S. nuclear testing sites, many pacific islands are threatened by climate change, water contamination, and species extinction. To put it in Maurer’s own words, pacific islanders are subject to “dispossession, displacement, displacement, and death”. In the face of the environmental destruction and the loss of homeland, academic discourse like “resilience” and “sustainability” sound too conservative to address the issue. In fact, Oceanian people’s reactions should be described as a heroic struggle of survival. Rather than surrendering to helplessness, they display a rebellious spirit through their voice and literature, which can be captured in the title of this lecture: “We are not drowning, we are fighting”.

Maurer points out three major consequences coming out of the environmental racism against pacific islanders—the threat of mass migration, the destruction of multi-species society, and the annihilation of racism. Yet in response to each threat, pacific islanders are not helpless victims but proactively act against the discriminating ideology. In the face of the rising sea level threatening the Marshall island, the poet and climate change activist Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner claims, “who do you think will be next? I’m taking you with me”. The poetic articulation reserves the role of pacific islanders as passive victims with a powerful declaration of fighting to the end. The rebellious and emotional response also challenges the western apathy towards the environmental destruction in the pacific islands. Pacific poets refuse the destiny of “invisible disappearance”. Instead, they call into question the very ideological foundation of environmental racism.

Elaborating on pacific poets’ voices against environmental racism, Maurer also brings into light the philosophical significance of their reaction, namely resistance to “Islandism”. As Maurer discerns, islandism is an extension of Orientalism, in which the island represents the opposition of modernity—a place frozen in time and outside of civilization. Therefore, people of the island are seen as barbarians that could be sacrificed or even wiped out for the progress of modernity. The ideology of islandism thus justifies the displacement of violence imposed upon the pacific islanders, and it should be abandoned. Therefore, Maurer puts forward “Oceanitude” as a competing ideology as to challenge islandism in Western thoughts. The shift from islandism to oceanitude intends to bring back emotion, unsettling the dominance of reason in scientific discourse that facilitates environmental racism. Maurer also points out the necessity of realizing this historical instance of environmental destruction so as to avoid such tragedies.

The Q&A section features intriguing dialogues between Maurer and professors and graduate students in the Department of French and Comparative Literature Program. Here is a list of questions worthy of further thinking: how do the environmental studies inform the reading of canonical texts? What is the function of emotion in environmental literature? How does the study of pacific literature expand the definition of French literary studies? How to go beyond print literature and exert a wider influence? Is the philosophy of oceanitude applicable to other disciplines like indigenous studies? I especially enjoy Maurer’s response to the last question. Addressing the philosophical significance of oceanitude, she responses, “the sense of being an islander has always emerged in co-constitution with the sense of living in an endangered environment”. Environment, in her view, becomes a new identity. Let us remember the resonantvoice of the pacific poets while exploring the connection between environment and our own identity.

 

Dr. Maurer has accepted a tenure-track appointment as  Assistant Professor of French and Comparative Literature. Starting Fall 2020, she will be teaching courses on Francophone/Pacific literatures and in the environmental humanities more generally.

Comparative Literature Events, Graduate 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.

Comparative Literature Events, Conferences

Reading with Jhumpa Lahiri

by Milan Reynolds

I had the privilege of attending a talk with Jhumpa Lahiri on October 3rd, with Professor Andrea Baldi gracefully moderating the event. A Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Lahiri spoke with those gathered about the recently published Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories. As the editor of the collection and translator of several of the stories, Lahiri described her experience and the methodology behind curating and gathering the texts. For those who might be unfamiliar with Lahiri’s projects, she is known for her creative output as a novelist (The Namesake, The Lowland), short story writer (The Interpreter of Maladies, Unaccustomed Earth), and essayist, as well as her autobiographical work In altre parole (In Other Words), which details her experience learning Italian. Currently, she is working on translating her most recent book, Dove mi trovo, into English while teaching creative writing at Princeton University. For me, Lahiri’s choice to adopt Italian as a literary language is incredibly brave and troubles the implicit assumption of monolingual authorship. It also pushes the question of translation to the foreground of writing, and at the same time affirms it as an indispensable part of life.

Much of the discussion was in fact devoted to the multilingual identities of many of the Italian authors included in the collection. Italy as a country is relatively recent (the Risorgimento, or unification, began in the 19th century) and as such, retains a strong sense of localities, dialects, and cultural specificity. Lahiri talked about her choice of authors in relation to their many registers of language, their attention to place and environment, and their engagement with translation as a reciprocal practice necessary to writing. She imposed two interlocking constraints to focus her task: the authors chosen were primarily from the past century, and none of them were living. She described sifting through libraries, combing tables of contents, and consulting the advice of many friends. Without having a specific theme in mind, Lahiri allowed the collection to develop as an organic substance; her own interests certainly surfaced but she also admitted to being surprised by the encounter as well.

The attention to female authors in the collection is particularly important as a challenge to the canonization of Italian male voices. Lahiri also spoke at length about the role of writing and translating functioning as a political act, particularly during fascist rule. If authoritarianism is based on the idea of a singular truth, translation works to decentralize meaning at the level of the word (and in some cases, alphabet) itself. The stories are arranged by author, but in reverse alphabetical order.

There was also some time devoted to encompassing the audience in the discussion through the form of written questions collected beforehand. One particularly interesting theme was the role of names within Lahiri’s creative work. The discussion was based on the idea that The Namesake, Lahiri’s earlier novel turns on the concept of naming, while her most recent work’s narrator in Dove mi trovo, lacks a proper name altogether. This suggestion was eloquently encircled by Lahiri’s thoughts on identity, metamorphosis, and the potentiality of redefinition.

I also had the opportunity to attend an informal talk in Italian with Lahiri and several graduate students in the Italian and Comparative Literature departments. We got to hear a little about the companion volume to the Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories that was also recently published: Racconti Italiani.

 

Readers may find excerpts of Lahiri’s work here:

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/602664/the-penguin-book-of-italian-short-stories-by-edited-by-jhumpa-lahiri/

https://www.guanda.it/libri/jhumpa-lahiri-racconti-italiani-scelti-e-introdotti-da-jhumpa-lahiri-9788823523173/

Comparative Literature Events

Writing in Difficult Times: Ebola 2014

by Thato Magano

On Tuesday, October 1st, 2019, the Department of French, Program in Comparative Literature and Center for African Studies hosted celebrated novelist, poet, painter, illustrator and visiting professor in the French department, the Paris born, and Côte d’Ivoire raised Véronique Tadjo. The event Writing in Difficult Times: Ebola 2014 was styled as a premiere of the anticipated English translation of her 2017 novel, En compagnie des hommes – The Whispering Tree. Sharing that Rutgers felt much like home as this is her third visit, Professor Tadjo described the visceral sensations that went into her writing about the 2014 iteration of the Ebola epidemic in West Africa broadly and Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, specifically.

Reflecting on the dynamic circumstances that shaped her life and worldview – a child that was born out of and to travel, an adult who has lived in at least Rwanda and several countries on the African continent – her constant curiosity was the ways the local, to mean Abidjan and Côte d’Ivoire, was always altered by the experience of returning after months and years of being away.

This is why it hadn’t seemed strange that it was in late 2013 while living in South Africa when she first heard the news that a mysterious disease had been discovered in Guinea, later identified as Ebola, and in her travels throughout the continent and to Europe and the United States that she started questioning some of the perceptions the global reporting on the epidemic was creating. This is where the idea of the novel was birthed as she wondered about the quality of spectatorship. “What was the implication of this strange way of reporting the disease that is always mediated by commercial activity (advertising),” she asked herself. It was the incommensurate quality of experiences that created the story.

The novel became a meditation on the ways the epidemic changed social life in Abidjan due to the shared borders with Guinea and Liberia, where the disease was most prevalent. The intent was to highlight the human experiences and to demonstrate the ways in which we are all interconnected through various factors precipitated by capitalism and globalization:

“I wanted to show that much more happened with the epidemic than the media had reported on … One of the difficulties with Ebola is that there are five strains hence the difficulty to eradicate it. The current vaccine does not work for all the strains and different strains affect people differently … I wanted to start with people and end with people and show that the social and cultural dimensions of the disease are important.”

Readings from The Whispering Tree revealed that the novel embodied forms of the oral traditions to speak about the epidemic, employing various first-person voices that spanned human and non-human beings. These multiple voices, using a well understood medium in African literature, sought to make the scientific link between deforestation and Ebola to highlight the ways that the disappearance of animal habitation has resulted in a proximity to humans that makes the spread of the disease possible. It is the voice of the baobab tree that affirms the role of the forest to the past and future of mankind:

““We are the link, we bring humans to their past, to their present and their unpredictable future … Our consciousness dwells beyond space and time … You cannot cut down the forest without spilling blood … I am baobab, the everlasting tree, the mythical tree … Our roots search for water, our roots call the rain.”

This delightful experience was followed by a Q&A that delved more into questions of orality and voice; the ways ecological genocide has not been fully explored to give greater context to the epidemic, and how social life has evolved since the epidemic was first contained in 2014.