Afterlives, at its most general, describe how events of the past impact, asymmetrically, the time of the present. While one origin of the concept is in art studies and archaeology via Aby Warburg (Nachleben), the term is now a fixture in scholarship that addresses the space-times of empire and colonialism, including the afterlives of slavery (Saidiya Hartman), of imperial violence in the Pacific (Jinah Kim), and of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Glen Coulthard; Audra Simpson; Robert Nichols).
The papers on our panel make visible how these various afterlives of coloniality are simultaneously differential and relational. When put in conversation with another, the papers tie the American state intimately to the Black Transatlantic, Asia, and Indigenous Turtle Island, extending what Lisa Lowe calls “the intimacy of four continents.”
This panel specifically privileges early academics’ visions for Comparative Race and Critical Race studies. These visions argue for pairing critical race tools with interdisciplinary methods, which resonates with recent turns in Black studies that illuminate the ethical power of interdisciplinary modes of inquiry (Katherine McKittrick). We ask: what can we learn in the afterlives of now-calcified academic disciplines? How does disciplinarity come into view in its afterlife and in the interdisciplinary and relational stance of this afterlife?
We begin with Elaine Cannell’s paper, which argues that intersectionality, as embodied in 1980s queer Chicana feminism, remains unrecognized in land-based movements of resistance in America. Cannell reads Cherríe Moraga’s The Hungry Woman (1995) in which multiple revolutions, led by Black, Native American, and Chicano communities, reclaim land from the U.S settler state. The afterlives of this moment, however, are marked by failure. Upholding the centrality of land in anti-colonial politics, Cannell suggests the “revolutionary failure” arises from the continued marginalization of women and queer leadership. Cannell stresses the play’s form and the speculative temporalities it holds, affirming the political potential in the everyday practice of liberatory queer life.
Second, Lauren Dembowitz analyzes the figuration of Black women as aesthetic objects and commodities in the Black Atlantic. Reading Robin Coste Lewis’ Voyage of the Sable Venus (2015), Dembowitz interrogates the aesthetic politics of modernity and its archives that continue to reproduce the “obscene mythologization of the Middle Passage” as represented in Thomas Stothard’s 1794 wood engraving that gives Lewis’ text its name. While the pairing of the poetry and engraving undermine archival logics that historicize anti-Blackness as a relic of the past, Dembowitz stresses how Lewis’ poetry illuminates the constraints within which Black diasporic women live and outside of which their ontologies abound.
Third, Courtney Mullis examines Black and Indigenous responses to police brutality in America through the work of Jesmyn Ward and Louise Erdrich. Widespread recognition of police violence, like in the case of George Floyd whose death is represented in Erdrich’s novel, impacts Black and Indigenous peoples differently. While “signal events,” which Mullis theorizes as eruptions of ongoing structural violence that shift liberalism’s attention towards anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity, reveal institutional and historical racism, Black and Indigenous publics are both re-traumatized and emboldened toward collective resistance. This paper makes an important intervention for Comparative Race studies into Critical Race studies by considering contemporary afterlives of police brutality as a grammar of Black and Indigenous solidarity.
Finally, Jay Gao studies language, hybridity, and sexual violence in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée (1982). An avant-garde text resisting generic classification, Dictée animates, for Gao, the “ghostly return” of experimental and polyvocal language to destabilize not only colonial American parameters for immigrant expression but also the construction of a “stable Asian diasporic subject.” Gao invokes the possibility of a politics that creates both a proliferating literary space in which books like Dictée can contour knowledge and a social reality beyond racial and sexual violence. Gao reads the afterlives of Cha’s work in contemporary Asian American poetry to theorize a “radical ‘afterliving’” in which interrupted Asian lives persist as textual ontologies.
The session reserves twelve minutes per presentation. We therefore ensure ample time for discussion and foregrounding the relations between papers.