Aesthetics and Politics of Necrofiction
Virtual Session
Description
Aesthetics and Politics of Necrofiction
Death is universal; its conditions are not. Nor are its connections to memory. As Judith Butler explains, for death to count, for it to register as a mournable loss, it must first be framed and recognized as the end of a life that counts. Achille Mbembe’s seminal work on “necropolitics” similarly explores how deeply unequal power structures determine the precariousness of life and the visibility of death. In this context, our seminar considers a fundamental question: How does contemporary literature intervene to commemorate the dead and inscribe the memory of invisibilized lives into communal, national, and global histories and narratives? At the core of our discussion will be an exploration of the resonances and potential applications of Oana Panaïté’s notion of “necrofiction.”
Necrofiction serves here as an overarching theoretical framework to place into dialogue fictional narratives that act as “literary tombs.” Our aim is to investigate how exactly literature can do justice to the irreducible specificity of concrete deaths while simultaneously gesturing towards the universal experience of mortality and the inherent relationships between death and the literary itself. Through this lens, we seek to understand the mechanisms through which literature can act as an ambivalent space of remembrance and a site of critical interrogation.
We invite contributions on practices of writing, reading, and interpreting necrofiction, including:
The ways necrofictional narratives can sustain memory as an open process or cause its foreclosure.
The role of literature in bearing witness to forgotten or marginalized individual or collective deaths.
Examinations of the relation between aesthetics and mourning.
Perspectives investigating postcolonial necrofiction.
Analysis of literary portrayals of death as both a shared human condition and a deeply subjective experience.
Challenges and demands of authenticity in narratives of loss and mourning.
How fictional narratives might counter or subvert necropolitical control.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
A former student of the ENS Ulm, Aline Lebel prepared a doctoral contract at the University Paris Nanterre, and has been working as a Temporary Assistant, Teaching and Research, since September 2024 at the University of Poitiers. Her thesis, which will be defended on December 18, 2024, is untitled "Facing the Intolerable: The Experience of Evil After Dostoevsky (E. Morante, T. Morrison, A. Roy)." Among her recent works, a communication on the experience of death in Beloved at Sciences Po Paris.
Speaker Bio
Tavleen Purewal is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of New Brunswick where she teaches and researches on Canadian literature, Black studies, and affect theory.
Speaker Bio
Sahid Mondal is a third-year English PhD student at Brandeis. He has a B.A. from Calcutta University and an M.A. from Jadavpur University, both in English. He studies the politics of religious pluralism and secularity among minorities in South Asia. He specifically looks into the issues of religion, caste, and gender violence through 20th- and 21st-century literature, film, and photography.
Speaker Bio
Billie Mitsikakos is reading for a DPhil in Medieval and Modern Languages at the University of Oxford. Their research project, ‘C. P. Cavafy and the Art of Queer Survival’, straddles the disciplines of Queer Theory, Cultural Studies, and Modern Greek to approach and propose a toolkit for queer survival as a spectral, counterarchival, and aesthetic enterprise. Their interests include the interactions of queerness and necropower, queerness and the European South, Decadence and its queer legacies.
Speaker Bio
Carissa Ma, Assistant Professor of Anglophone Literature at Florida Atlantic University, researches the politics of representation in speculative fiction, focusing on Asian Futurisms to explore transformative potentials through past and future visions. Her scholarship has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Science Fiction Studies, Printing Culture, Cultural Studies, Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction, and Oxford Research in English.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Oana Panaïté is Ruth N. Halls Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Indiana University – Bloomington (USA). Her publications include Necrofiction and the Politics of Literary Memory (Liverpool UP, 2022) and Fictions of Race in Contemporary French Literature. French Writers, White Writing (co-author É. Achille, Oxford UP, 2024).
Speaker Bio
Renée Ragin Randall is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Her research and teaching focus on trauma and memory studies; literatures of the Global South in circulation; and, the literary prize economy. She is currently finishing a monograph on the afterlives of wartime atrocity in modern Lebanon.
Speaker Bio
Pujarinee Mitra (she/her/hers) is a PhD student at Texas A&M University, College Station. Her research focuses on the mobilization of anti-fascist affects in South Asian English literature and Hindi commercial cinema from 1990-present. She has published her work in Humanities, Feminist Encounters, and Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics. Her public-facing writing has appeared in Film Companion and Live Wire. Her areas of interest include Postcolonial Studies, South Asian Literature and Cinema, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Cultures of Fascism and Anti-Fascism, and Affect Theory.
She can be reached at: [email protected]
Speaker Bio
Ioana Pribiag is Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, where she teaches Francophone literature, postcolonial theory and cinema. Her recent work includes articles on First Nations' women's filmmaking and poetry of the Quiet Revolution, as well as the thought of Jacques Rancière. She has co-edited a symposium for Theory & Event entitled "Locations of Politics" and is completing a book manuscript entitled Shards: Fragmentation in Francophone Postcolonial Literature.
Speaker Bio
Letitia Guran is a Comparatist interested in global and transatlantic studies with a focus on Romanian/Eastern European literatures, African American identity, Cold War and post-Cold War studies.
A Fulbright grant recipient (2007), she has published articles and a monograph about the aesthetic dimension of Romanian American critical thought, (Crossing the Iron Curtain, 2010), and has made contributions to scholarship on transatlantic theory, post-communism versus post-colonialism, aesthetics as a modus vivendi in East Central Europe, and the New Wave of Romanian filmmakers. Since 2019 Dr. Guran teaches Romanian in the Romance Studies Department at UNC Chapel Hill.
Dr. Guran’s interest in the African American struggle for racial equality, desegregation, social justice, and fair representation led to her study about Reconsidering Contemporary African American Identity. Experiments by Post-Soul Artists (2010) which focuses on Suzan-Lori Parks, Paul Beatty, Coleson Whitehead, and Touré.
A recipient of a NEH grant (2022-2023), Dr. Guran is putting the final touches on her digitally annotated edition of Hughes’s book "A Negro Looks at Soviet Central Asia" (1934) which is scheduled to be released on the Afro-PWW Scalar website by the end of 2024.