This panel topic has its conceptual roots in the rise of what is sometimes called critical Buddhism studies, which explores the racial and sociocultural implications of the widespread adoption of Buddhist beliefs, practices, and aesthetics in the Western world. Important work by scholars in Asian studies, such as Sharon Suh and Joseph Cheah, has historicized the imbrication of Buddhism, white supremacy, and racial capitalism in the twentieth century. At the same time, Buddhist thought remains essential to philosophical debates on epistemology and subject formation. As Marcus Boon, Eric Cazdyn, and Timothy Morton argue, “it is the question of desire itself that runs like a red thread through Buddhism and critical theory.” Our panel brings together these two different scholarly conversations using Sedgwick as a mediating figure. By bringing transhistorical and interdisciplinary frameworks to bear upon a single essay, we contend that deep and close reading remain central to the important task of reflecting on our own practices as readers, interpreters, and teachers.

We will begin with Yixuan Jiang’s “Realizing Encounter: Eve Sedgwick’s Buddhist Turn.” Jiang offers an overview of Sedgwick’s interest in Buddhism, drawing not only on “Pedagogy of Buddhism,” but on archival materials from the Sedgwick Archive at Duke’s Rubenstein Library. Jiang contends that the “practice of realization” central to Sedgwick’s encounter with Buddhism informs her model of “reparative” reading, which can be retheorized in the terms of a cross-cultural encounter between East and West. Reading Sedgwick’s processes of realization and encounter leads Jiang to a discussion of how Sedgwick’s practice, in her criticism and in the artworks, correspondence, and other works in her archives, can inform our own cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary relationalities.

Picking up on the thread of Sedwick’s reparative reading in light of Buddhist thought, Rachel Haines’s “Ineffable Criticism: Eve Sedgwick’s Pedagogy of Reading” analyzes an early version of her “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading” alongside “Pedagogy of Buddhism.” From the conjunction of these two works, Haines draws a new term, “ineffable criticism,” a Sedgwickean mode of reading that realizes the inarticulable and the ungraspable “thusness” of the aesthetic object. “Thusness,” an idea central to critical theory’s encounter with Buddhism, forms the basis for a practice of reading in which criticism and pedagogy are not distinct. What might it mean, then, Haines asks, for us to see criticism as aspiring to the condition of pedagogy?

In closing, Christine Varnado provides a robust consideration of the ways that Sedgwick imagined reading in a pedagogical context in her essay, “We Are Here to Learn What We Already Know." By bringing Melanie Klein’s model of the self in object relations theory to bear on Sedgwick’s “Pedagogy of Buddhism,” Varnado imagines a literary classroom revitalized by the realization that literary texts, too, exist in living relationality with their readers. Fashioned as a response to Kyla Wazana Tompkins’s 2016 essay, “We Aren’t Here to Learn What We Already Know,” Varnado turns the assumption embedded in its title on its head, using Sedgwick and Klein to propose learning what we already know as a useful heuristic for pedagogy. Her invitation to imagine the pedagogical possibilities inherent in Klein and Sedgwick’s alternative models of self and relationality will, we hope, provide a generative entry into a group discussion of at least 20 minutes.

Together, these papers provide a refreshingly specific look into Sedgwick’s work. They help elucidate a complex text that has been under-considered, and which we feel is especially relevant at our current professional—and ideological—crossroads. We hope that this panel will be the beginning of greater scholarly engagement with “Pedagogy of Buddhism" by bringing together a diverse set of voices and writings on the subject.