Talks by Graduate Student Summer Residents:

“Black Cosmo-cologies: Rebirth and Renaissance in the Long Nineteenth Century” by Eunice Toh, Departments of English and African American Studies

In looking beyond ecology as simply metaphorical in literature, this talk shows how Black ecology limns or haunts questions of liberation, world-making, and humanism in the writings of American authors. By replacing the “e” in ecology with “cosmo,” a Black cosmo-cology invites us to think of the metaphysical and the material together. My investment in cosmology as a framework to approach nineteenth-century American literary studies is in line with recent scholarship interested in exploring cosmologies that encompass both science and faith in tandem. My work scrutinizes one Eurocentric cosmology in particular: the “renaissance.”

“To Invent a New Language: Theorizing Complex Communication as Decolonial Resistance” by Sarah Carey, Department of Philosophy

Bringing together the methodologies of Lugones’s decolonial feminism and Derrida’s deconstruction, I aim to give an account of the possibilities for linguistic resistance under conditions of overwhelming colonial oppression. My project analyzes mechanisms and motivations behind violent colonial uses of language and evaluates alternative ways of communicating that seek to defy and resist coloniality. I argue that Lugones’s practice of complex communication is a promising practice of decolonial linguistic resistance, insofar as it opens an opportunity for more liberatory understandings of each other even while upholding moments of incommensurability and untranslatability. 

“Transculturations and nonencounter in the Realm of Beautiful Boys” by Camila Gutiérrez, Department of Comparative Literature

The genre of Boys Love (BL) took the form of comics in Japanese print media for girls since the 1970s. These comics feature beautiful young men who fall in love, and their commercialization targets mainly heterosexual girls and young women readers. In the past decade, Latin American artists have adapted BL while retaining core elements of the genre. I categorize this phenomenon as third-wave Boys Love. Acknowledging the cultural stakes of this adaptation, I read these comics from the framework of transculturation and nonencounter, and weigh their potential as a new model of genre-world-literature. In this presentation, I will map the waves of BL formation to demonstrate that the genre is an inherently transcultural phenomenon, having undergone an Occidentalization-modernization of Japanese premodern same-sex love tropes, a re-Japanization in the 1980s, and currently a glocal reformation with new shapes.