This panel responds to and extends these conversations by likewise considering the shaping, active role that intermediality can have in literature’s many social and formal operations. Quite differently, however, this panel aims explicitly to trace these operations in a later historical period and to contend that intermediality constitutes a vital shaping force for later twentieth- and twenty-first-literature. To do so, the panel presents new work by younger scholars who all consider the complex ways in which art—a term we use broadly here in order to indicate the full spectrum of intermedial practices as they intersect with literature—helps creators to mediate minoritized identity categories in the contemporary United States. Panelists employ an array of critical languages—including queer, trans, and critical race theory—to argue that intermedial literatures can illuminate crises and help construct authority and identity for BIPOC and LGBTQ+ people. Simultaneously, this panel engages ongoing conversations about affect, agency, and readerly relations to texts and art objects.
To encourage discussion, the session organizers have selected only three panelists, who will each deliver papers limited to 14-15 minutes in length. Professor Lewis, the respondent, will follow all three papers with questions for both the panelists and the audience that are meant to promote a lively discussion.
First, Jared O’Connor argues that queer writer and artist Joe Brainard—a friend and contemporary of Dick Higgins—employs an intermedial logic to interrogate issues of representation and “pure translation” from both image to text and, more dynamically, text to text. Specifically, Brainard’s list poems demonstrate that intermediality can describe relations between texts that ought not be read as homogenous objects. Building on Roman Jakobson’s idea of “intersemiotic translation,” O’Connor shows how texts in relation to each other can be read as objects with increasingly different forms that expand the possibilities of our engagement with them. In this expanded intermedial field, Brainard’s poetry creates a feeling of queer pleasure.
Next, Sumita Chakraborty explores how contemporary visual poets Diana Khoi Nguyen, Eloisa Amezcua, and Keith Wilson use intermediality to re-envision anti-racist ethics by vacating the self-“other” binary that, in various guises, has long dominated ethical theorizing. Each of these poets draw on highly personal archives with anchors in their racial or ethnic subject positions. Yet, in seeming contrast to the intensely particular nature of their archives, each poet’s investment in intermediality leads to texts that consciously resist interpretive closure. The reader’s responsibility and agency is crucial, and Chakraborty shows how these multimedia poems are texts that co-create with their readers an anti-racist ethics predicated upon an adaptive and collaborative ethopoetics.
Finally, continuing Chakraborty’s investigation of collaborative, participatory reading as ethical praxis, Emmy Waldman turns our attention to graphic memoirs by contemporary transgender cartoonists, who use the intermediality of text and image to enter into conversation with the alienated, “othered” parts of themselves. In their narratives of development, K.C. Councilor, Bishakh Som, L. Nichols, and Ebin Lee set their public images into literal dialogue with other images of the self, often those that represent more ideal versions of who they want to be or who they are becoming. The act of making comics takes on a transformative, reciprocative quality, allowing these artists to step into, embrace, and reintegrate the very alternative selves that multiply on the page. By extending the lyric tradition’s conjuration of the reader into an intermedial arena, these artists draw new forms of connection into being as they enact their relation to themselves and others.