Visualizing Risk in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century

Cannell, Elaine; Cannell, Elaine

This panel interrogates literary and cultural representations of “risk,” “risky behaviors,” and “at-risk” populations through a contemporary transnational framework. While limited scholarship in the humanities has addressed rhetorics of risk and risk reduction, little attention has been paid to the cultural construction of risk as at once an embodied state, an oft-weaponized political keyword, and a felt experience. In the last five years, the long-term effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, global climate change, economic, racial, and sexual disparities, and enduring exploitation via war, displacement, and genocide have rendered the sense of being “at risk” a near-ubiquitous collective affect for marginalized communities. Meanwhile, particularly in the United States, the far right continues to use strategic and fear-mongering claims of national “risk” to justify greater militarization, the abolishment of institutional diversity efforts, and the eradication of queer, trans, and women’s rights.

To respond to these competing and dominant narratives, “Visualizing Risk in the 20th and 21st Century” takes as its impetus the interdisciplinary framework of recent scholarship in cultural studies and queer of color critique to conceptualize and even reclaim risk as a vehicle for political transformation work from the global stage, the archive, and the page.

Each of the four panelists will give a 12-15 minute presentation. Elaine Cannell, the presider, will introduce the speakers and facilitate discussion afterward to ensure a productive and timely conversation.

Ery Shin will begin the panel by theorizing through the risks of self-imposed starvation in Han Kang’s 2007 novel The Vegetarian, which tells the story of Yeong-hye, Han’s heroine who, trapped in a loveless marriage, wastes away like Kafka’s hunger artist. If Kafka’s faster is unable to find the right food for his palate, Yeong-hye takes it one step further: she goes from refusing to eat meat to forgoing all edibles due to her conviction that she only needs water and light for photosynthesis like a plant does. Shin argues that, in the process of depriving herself of the nutrients she needs to subsist, the protagonist’s embodied risk-taking becomes at once a material act and powerful philosophical gesture, producing a theory of panpsychism that endows all material forms with the same phenomenological experience.

Zooming out from the singular, intimate risks of self-starvation, but remaining in the liminal spaces between bodies and/as matter (and considering how particular bodies come to matter), Sally Hansen will direct us to imaginative archives of the transatlantic slave trade through what she calls “asterisked” logics in M. NourbeSe Philip’s 2008 experimental poetry collection, Zong! By theorizing these logics alongside Christina Sharpe’s paradigm of the “Trans*Atlantic” as a burst container for everything Blackness is made to signify, Hansen suggests that Philip’s asterisk breaks open bodily integrity and ushers in the compelled trans*mutability of Black life, constructed as it is around inherent riskability.

Janet Kong-Chow will bring this interrogation of visuality, race, and risk to the twenty-first century United States by exploring the relational duality of risk and security in a post-9/11 context. In this context, Kong-Chow asks: what does it mean to be ‘at risk,’ particularly when the ever-moving target of modern security theatre draws its power from imagined, and increasingly unseeable, global risk and threat? Considering the Latin etymon, sēcūra and its compound meaning, “(se) without (cura) care,” Kong-Chow argues that two connotative assemblages, negligence and trustworthiness, refract and reveal social grammars of race obscured by the colorblind rhetoric of contemporary risk in the United States. By theorizing these assemblages through close readings of post-September 11th carceral and tort language against literatures of conspiracy, this presentation highlights the incompatible tensions between race, an alterity that demands to be seen, and allegiance, an interiority which cannot be proven.

Finally, staging her own counter-narrative to the US-American conception of the risky Arab Other, Sreeparna Das will examine how the hypervisibility of Arab identities in Western cultural mythologies has led to further material and discursive colonization of their lives. Through an analysis of Hala Alyan's 2017 Salt Houses and Zaina Arafat's 2020 You Exist Too Much, she explores how non-normative diasporic Arabs through their hyper-religiosity and queerness constitute a sociopolitical and affective threat for Orientalist discourses and Arab heteronationalisms. Given that Western ideals underpin global narratives around risk and vulnerability, Das ultimately argues that certain risky figures become acceptable than others due to their alignment with Western models of agency.

Together, these panelists hope to offer fresh insights on how we might best traverse and transform discursive, visual, and material sites of risk in twentieth and twenty-first century literature and culture.

786 Visualizing Risk in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century: Calls for Papers