We begin with Hitchcock’s “Insurrectionary Exception” where he reads Gina Apostol’s hyper metafiction in terms of American exceptionality and the state of exception in colonial violence. In Apostol’s novel, Insurrecto (2018), the narrative, like the nation, cannot settle on an order of time without immediately questioning the orders given to it. The work challenges the conventional history of U.S. regional hegemony—the U.S. saves the Philippines from Spanish predation (1898), as if the Filipinos were not already waging revolution—only to assert their own claims of annexation and sovereignty in the bloody suppression of the Philippine independence movement. Apostol makes time for this historical injustice but also makes space for complex feminist and postcolonial questions about how to represent it through the main characters of her fiction.
Our second paper, Singh’s “Postcolonial Exceptions and the Politics of Literary Dissent,” situated at the intersection of Cold War and postcolonial aesthetics, reads Hindi writer Nirmal Verma's novel Raat Ka Reporter (The Dark Dispatches, 1989) and the Indian National Emergency (1975-77). Literary criticism on the Emergency, focusing primarily on the Indian novel in English (Rushdie, Mistry), has often posited the literary sphere in oppositional terms, however Singh’s turn to archives of the Emergency reveals linkages between the Indian literary-cultural sphere and the global Cold War and Emergency state. Through a close reading of the representational politics of the Emergency in Verma’s novel, she argues for a persistent Cold War aesthetic in Indian Emergency literature. In doing so, she asks: How do postcolonial literatures produced during and about states of exception engage with the state beyond the dialectic of resistance and complicity? How have these engagements shaped the postcolonial contemporary?
Our third paper, Moore’s “Unraveling Exception: Enforced Disappearance and the Legacy of the War on Terror,” examines enforced disappearance as a trademark tool of exception and emergency politics that also undermines its ostensible logic. Focusing on Guantánamo as a synecdoche for larger networks of, at once, black sites in the War on Terror and immigration detention centers today, she examines its role in the shift from covert to hypervisible disappearance since 2001 and reads former detainee Mohamedou Slahi’s creative work (memoir, drama) as witness, guide, and response to the emergency aesthetics (e.g., Thomas. Paik) of our current moment. She analyzes detainees-turned-public-intellectuals’ invocation of normative frameworks of justice that failed them as well as their efforts to forge alternatives through their representational aesthetics.
We conclude with Hogue’s “Exception-al Infrastructures: Cryptocurrency and the Suspension of Sovereignty” which examines cryptocurrency as a form of governance analogous to the “state of exception,” in which legal, political, and economic norms are suspended and reconfigured. Placing blockchain discourse in dialogue with contemporary science fiction, including Annalee Newitz’s The Terraformers (2023), she argues that both imagine systems of authority that emerge not through law, but through crisis and infrastructure. Cryptocurrency positions decentralized networks as alternatives to state-backed systems of financial management and regulation. By reading cryptocurrency alongside speculative fiction, this paper demonstrates how literary and technological imaginaries expose the reconfiguration of law and politics, human rights, and sovereignty in an era of climate crisis and computational capitalism.
The panelists range from a Distinguished Professor to an advanced doctoral student, represent a diversity of racial/ethnic/gender identities, and represent different regions and both public and private R1 institutions. The papers address a wide range of literary and cultural texts: metafiction, the novel in translation, reportage, memoir, drama, and science fiction.