Judith Haas in “Ressentiment Nietzsche’s Medievalism and the (Im)possibilities of Solidarity” carefully teases out both the nineteenth-century medievalism implicit but ignored in Nietzsche, and then relatedly Jameson’s account of classed and ethnic ressentiment, all of which can be implicitly tied to “the dethroned privilege at the core of 21st Century Trumpism.” Francesca Sawaya in “Rethinking Melancholic Historicism” returns to Stephen Best’s account of “melancholy historicism,” in order to reopen the critical power of “melancholy” in relation to the endings of Charles Chesnutt’s novels that bespeak both failure and possibility. In “Gendered Solidarity and the Shifting Ground of the Black Feminine,” Catherine John re-narrates the failure associated with Moynihan’s notion of Black femininity in relation to an implied ideal and contrasts it with the possibilities suggested in the work of Hortense Spillers, where the Black feminine is a space of possibility as well as the excess associated with the performance of “attitude” in Black grassroots contexts.
As we reexamine the theoretical representations of the failure of solidarity, our aim is to demonstrate the ways in which there is also a “ground” of possibility that is ambivalently exposed. Haas reframes the ways in which we understand the history of emotions itself as a “progressive” discipline. Sawaya focuses on the ways in which the African American novelist Charles Chesnutt uses melancholic historicism as a critical tool, one that both demonstrates “failed solidarity” and creates new knowledge as the ground for a future of potential possibility. John examines the excess of Black female “attitude” and “plenty plenty-ness” and speculates about the possibility for a gendered solidarity that sits outside of what Ferreira da Silva refers to as “the patriarch form.”
We will each speak for 20 minutes to allow for 15 minutes of discussion.