Anonymity, as the quality of making oneself apparent but not identifiable, is an aesthetic and sociopolitical tool that cuts across political lines and axes of power. Anonymity may emerge in the violence of masked or otherwise nonidentifiable government agents; in censored or lost artistic or political speech; in floating expressions not tied to a known individual, as in much protest art, street art, and whistleblowing; and in accounts of the self that offer incomplete visibility to their publics. This panel will consider anonymity’s possible aesthetic and political applications, foregrounding especially the uses of anonymity as an emancipatory, narrative technique of self-authorship. What is lost, and what can be gained, by the redaction of a name or other markers of identity? This panel brings together scholarship from literary studies, film and visual studies, and sociology to understand how anonymity in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has been adopted as a strategy for narrating the self on one’s own terms, against dominant, authoritarian, or otherwise too-easily legible systems of knowledge.

This panel takes seriously the idea that anonymity does not equate to invisibility, but rather, involves making visible a partially obscured narrative about a self, group, or act. The panel’s papers spotlight tropes of facelessness, namelessness, blacklisting, and redaction, and examine how these tropes are deployed to craft strategic narratives about the self or community. Each paper is centrally concerned with narrative approaches to anonymity, primarily in novels but also in film, street art, and other objects that embrace anonymity as a means of rearticulating terms of narrative and social legibility.

The panel proposes anonymity as an element of the stylistic illegibility associated with modernist and postmodernist works, while also linking anonymity to current cross-period revisitations of formalist and narratological questions about anonymity, naming, character, and fictionality. (Indeed, we were pleased to see such interest demonstrated in eight submitted abstracts.) Scholarship treating anonymity as a narrative device has largely focused on British texts from earlier periods, as in works by Halkett and Laing (1926–34), Mullan (2008), and Vareschi (2018). By shifting this conversation’s scope to a set of multinational twentieth and twenty-first century objects, our panel attends to how anonymity operates in this period as an emancipatory narrative technique for resisting modern state apparatuses of colonialism, surveillance, and authoritarianism.

Thomas DeGloma, chair and professor of sociology at Hunter College–CUNY and author of Anonymous: The Performance of Hidden Identities (2023), provides an entry to anonymity as an intersection of the aesthetic and the social by mapping anonymity’s various manifestations as acts of authorship. DeGloma describes anonymity as a performance in which contingent moral and political meanings emerge between anonymous actors and their audiences. Focusing on what he terms cover representations, DeGloma delineates the protective and subversive dimensions of anonymity in novels, autobiography, political manifestos, graffiti, and performance art. He proposes that the obscuring of personal identities by creative actors is frequently more generative than it is ablative of meaning.

From this survey of anonymity’s many forms, Pamela Weidman, PhD candidate in English and Film & Media at UC Berkeley, brings literary theories of character to bear on the case of The Adventures of * (1957), a film marking John Hubley’s return to public view after he was blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Weidman excavates the film’s historical context to understand its character * as a reflection on strategies for laying claim to artistic expression under McCarthyist conditions of namelessness and exclusion. She proposes that the film’s ever-changing, sometimes-invisible, and always-nameless * contributes to an understanding of conditions of anonymity as inherent in narrative accounts of character.

Continuing this focus on anonymity and visuality, Themba Mbatha, assistant professor of English and African and African American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, links questions of anonymity to motifs of facelessness and visibility in Ben Okri’s Astonishing the Gods (1995) and The Famished Road (1991). Mbatha reads Okri’s tropes of anonymity, facelessness, and facial instability as reconfiguring the relationship between visibility and personhood, turning faces into speculative sites for imagining identity untethered from colonial epistemes and their demands for subjective legibility. These anonymous faces offer, Mbatha argues, a postcolonial subjectivity resistant to capture by colonial modernity’s regimes of visibility and recognition.

Each panelist will present for fifteen minutes, leaving time for a three-minute introduction by the presider and fifteen minutes of discussion. Our panel brings together speakers from a range of academic positions, institutions, and fields to discuss connected questions about the emancipatory potential of narrativizing oneself or one’s characters as anonymous.