This special session reflects on the analytical bridges that can be built between post-political theory and literary studies. Decades after everything was declared to be political, what are the affordances, triumphs, and pitfalls of a post-political theory of literature? The work of theorists of post-politics such as Jacques Rancière, Chantal Mouffe, Ernesto Laclau, Alain Badiou, and Slavoj Žižek has exposed the processes by which political action is currently being eroded, sites for its practice are increasingly disappearing, and political agency is in urgent need for revitalization. At the same time, much critical discourse on post-politics has connected the saturation and subsequent evacuation of the practice politics to cause meaningful change with the need to formulate new and alternative ways to counteract such phenomena. Thus, while theory of the post-political has featured in analyses traditionally labelled “political,” a more explicit reflection on the contours, scope, and interpretative value of such an approach for the study of literature can offer an important contribution to the field. How can questions concerning representation (textual as well as political) be rethought through this lens? What imaginative processes dovetail political activity and the work of literature? What are the continuities between political creativity and aesthetics? The papers in this panel, which respectively adopt a local, a national, and a global focus of analysis, attempt to answer these questions while seeking to illuminate the ways in which this theoretical apparatus can offer new avenues for the practice of literary studies.

Speaking first, Mitchum Huehls will offer an analysis of Stephen Markley’s 2018 novel Ohio, which recounts a single night in 2013 when its four protagonists converge in their hometown New Canaan, Ohio. While their lives have taken divergent paths, for each there’s something about “The Cane” that pulls them back. Gradually, Markley reveals the sinister cruelties that shaped their lives in small-town Ohio: homophobia, bigoted patriotism, addiction, racism, poverty, and sexual violence. Notably, the characters return to New Canaan not in spite of these privations, but because of them. The novel thus asks: what should we make of small-town Ohio’s constitutive cruelties and their indelible, irrational, aftereffects? Are they the proper object of politics, or do they require a reconsideration of politics, perhaps a politics transposed to an irrational key? Huehls answers these questions in an effort to think more broadly about a contemporary political moment defined by irrationality and cruelty. Resisting an us-them approach that treats white, working-class New Canaan as a problem that needs solving, Huehls suggests that the novel reveals that irrational violence and cruelty are the basis of our common inhumanity. Consequently, politics conventionally conceived misses the mark. Huehls, thus, will suggest that Markley uses this vision of our shared inhumanity as the basis for a distinct form of localized solidarity. Specifically, the novel articulates a solidarity predicated on an atypical form of pity, one that separates those who feel pity from the pitiful, a pity of utter complicity that understands Ohio’s impoverished humanity as our impoverished humanity.

Next, Samantha Allan will explore the relationship between post-politics and literature from a national angle. Allan will begin by considering Siobhan Phillips’s essay “Political Poeticizing,” in which the poet asks the following: “Good politics is a game of clear, unambiguous messages; good poetry, less so. How to make poetry political, then?” In the wake of the US 2016 election, Phillips’s study of a shared history between American poetry and the cultivation of political allegiance has only acquired greater urgency. Allan’s paper, then, locates a renewed interest in the political application of poetry that is specific to the reactionary response following the inauguration of Donald Trump. To do so, Allan connects Phillips to James Baldwin, whose essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel” foreshadows the troubled landscape that protest poetry currently occupies: one where the political and ethical value of art is determined according to its deployment of reductive political allegories. With the help of theorists such as Claire Bishop, who argues that protest art is becoming increasingly vulnerable to commodification in direct correlation with its rejection of aesthetic quality, Allan then identifies poetry’s investment in contradiction in order to investigate the ways in which we might understand effective protest poetry as an art that not only sparks political change, but also evades its co-option into the political practice of the state. Allan concludes by arguing that poetry is uniquely vulnerable but also uniquely resistant to this co-option, particularly in an increasingly neoliberal, post-Trump age.

Finally, William Mahan will seek to elucidate how language, nationalism, and the crossing of boundaries are prisms to understand the current erosion politics and its attendant consequences at a global level. In his paper, Mahan will consider the work of German-Japanese author Yoko Tawada, and in particular her 2014 novel The Emissary. In it, Tawada employs an ironic and comically bitter tone in order to create a dystopian future set in Japan in which, following a Fukushima-like ecological disaster, the country has adopted a new isolationist position, rendering politics and foreign relations as myths of a distant past. With an argument that critically assesses the benefits and pitfalls of globalization, thus, Mahan explores how Tawada’s fictionalized Japan reflects how most other countries are no longer interested in the essential aspects related to the welfare of their citizens. He does so by exploring the extreme depoliticization of life in Tokyo, where foreign languages have been forgotten, Japanese has been purged, and the imposition of newspeak is progressively creating a new political imagination. This is illustrated in the relationship between 108-year-old Yoshiro and his grandson Mumei, whose health is severely impoverished as a result of governmental neglect. Drawing a parallel between these two precarious lives and Japan’s relationship with the rest of the world, Mahan shows how Tawada’s sardonic and wry critique effectively warns readers against the dangers of either unavoidable or self-imposed isolation in the current post-political global climate.

Speakers will be held to a strict 20-minute time limit with a 15-minute final segment for discussion.