On 20 September, the Trowbridge Initiative will host Sunny Xiang in conversation with Joe Ponce, and Lucy Alford in conversation with Rachel Galvin to discuss their recent studies in American literary history in Room 210 in the Illini Union. Admission is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served.
Joe Ponce (Ohio State University), at 10AM: “The Asian American Movement in Queer Literary Retrospect”
This presentation considers the relationship between the Asian American movement of the late 1960s and 70s and subsequent Asian American literary history. While historians and critical ethnic studies scholars have often valorized the movement for its interracial and internationalist radicalism, literary historians—especially feminists and queer theorists—have interrogated the era’s heteromasculinist cultural nationalism. My research bridges these disciplinary divides between retrieval (reconfiguring activist lessons for the present) and disavowal (getting beyond narrow conceptions of “Asian American” identity) by theorizing a queer diachronic method. This approach reads contemporary historiographical literature for its critical reflections on three ideological formations that generated politicized Asian American panethnicity: Black Power, global Maoism, and Vietnamese anti-imperialism. In conversation with Sunny Xiang’s ruminations in Tonal Intelligence on periodization, critical juxtaposition, and a “movement-moment” coalition versus an ungrounded “commons,” my remarks focus on (queer) Afro-Asian dynamics in the 1970s and in the post-Ferguson present.
Sunny Xiang (Yale University), at 11AM: “Open Relationships”
The title of my talk is inspired by Joe Ponce’s insight that textual encounters are metaphors for and extensions of erotic and affective encounters. Combining his reflections on reading with this event’s interest in talking, I contemplate how our relationships to our objects and interlocutors inflect the tone of our writing. I’m particularly eager to think about Joe’s scholarly prose alongside the writings of Laurent Berlant and Max Liboiron. Through these scholar-talkers, I ponder what it means tonally to shift from asking what our work is on to asking who our work is for and with. I propose that this methodological and tonal shift—a shift from the studious to the chatty—is especially meaningful in fields tasked with the study of identity.
Lunch Break
Rachel Galvin (University of Chicago), at 2PM: “Latinx Poetry of the Americas”
How do poets define and redefine what it means to be “Latinx” and/or “of the Americas,” and how their poetry looks, sounds, and stakes claims? What does it mean to write poems in English, Spanish, or a mix of both, and to publish them in the mainland US or in Puerto Rico? How do colonial relationships condition the poetry of Latinx poets? When Latinx poetry is discussed, it is usually framed in ethno-national terms, with a focus on exclusively Chicanx poetry or Nuyorican poetry, for example. In this talk, I discuss my current research, which takes a comparative, hemispheric and diachronic approach to Latinx poetry. As I chart connections among poets and works throughout the Americas, I show that dialogues across linguistic and regional boundaries have been crucial for the development of Latinx poetry.
Lucy Alford (Wake Forest University), at 3PM: “A Precarious Poetics: Positionality and Provisionality in/as Critical Practice”
Marking the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries were diverse modes of experimentation, cross-pollination, and formal disruptions in American poetry, as poets responded to increasingly precarious environmental, sociopolitical, economic, and institutional conditions surrounding the act of making. In the range of divergent and combinatory forms, methodologies, and critical lenses at play in contemporary critical poetics, we see a renewal of this impulse in the form of generic hybridity, formal experimentation, and embodied positionality. Placing my work on poetic attention, precarity, and embodied poetics in conversation with Rachel Galvin’s understanding of translation as radical practice in the formation of Latinx poetry, I explore the increasing proximities and convergences of poetry, translation, and critique—and the ways in which all three have turned instability into generative praxis.
Speaker Bios
Lucy Alford specializes in twentieth- and twenty-first-century American poetry and poetics, as well as transnational and transhistorical poetries in English, French, German, and Arabic. Her first book, Forms of Poetic Attention (2020), examines the forms of attention both required and produced in poetic language, bringing both philosophical and cognitive inquiry into conversation with the inner workings of specific poems. Her current project, Vital Signs, considers transhistorical elements of poetic form (line, meter, stanza) in terms of the human vital signs and vital needs (breath, pulse, shelter)—as signs of life and forms of sustenance amid contemporary conditions of political and environmental precarity. Alford’s scholarly writings have appeared in a range of journals and edited volumes, including Philosophy & Literature, and The Cambridge History of the American Essay. Her poems have appeared in Harpur Palate, Streetlight, Literary Matters, The Warwick Review, Action, Spectacle, Atelier (in Italian translation), and Fence.
Rachel Galvin is Director of Translation Studies at the University of Chicago and the author of News of War: Civilian Poetry, 1936–1945 and three poetry collections, most recently Uterotopia. Her translation of Queneau’s Hitting the Streets (Carcanet) won the 2014 Scott Moncrieff Prize for Translation and was named one of the year’s best poetry books by the Boston Globe. Her co-translation of Decals: Complete Early Poetry of Oliverio Girondo was a finalist for the 2019 National Translation Award. Her poems and translations appear in Best American Experimental Writing 2020, Best American Poetry 2020, Boston Review, Fence, McSweeney’s, The Nation, The New Yorker, and Ploughshares. Galvin’s critical essays appear in Critical Inquiry, ELH, Jacket 2, Modernism/Modernity, PMLA, and The Cambridge History of American Modernism.
Joe Ponce teaches Asian American, African American, comparative US ethnic, and queer of color literatures He is currently pursuing two book projects: a transnational analysis of historiographical Asian American literature that considers how articulations of competing imperialisms, nationalisms and desires simultaneously bolster and challenge American and Asian American exceptionalisms; and a comparative analysis of queer of color literature that examines how evocations of colonial histories, racial objectifications and reclaimed homelands provide alternative world(view)s to the exclusions of white imperial homonormativity.
Sunny Xiang studies the styles and sensibilities of US military empire in Asia and the Pacific. Her first book, Tonal Intelligence: The Aesthetics of Asian Inscrutability During the Long Cold War was published by Columbia University Press in 2020. Her current project, Chemical Apophenia: Air Conspiracies and Skin Connections in the Toxic Tropics, explores how US WWII military science in the Pacific theater generated new paradigms for detecting and combating toxicity in the air and on the skin. She has published articles in such journals as ASAP/Journal, Radical History Review, Post45, and Verge: Studies in Global Asias.
