Ethnography and/as Literature: Content, Context, and Comparisons
Virtual Session
Description
This seminar will explore ethnography as a method of studying literature—as well as a literary genre.
How do literary scholars constitute our objects? As a field, we do not tend to talk about methods or data with the same degree of explicitness that social scientists use. However, questions about methods, content, and context stand at the heart of many of the most pressing debates in the discipline, both past and present. What is it that we want to know about? How can we go about finding out about that thing? Finally, how do the ways that we pursue our questions shape the field–or, what counts as literature (at a time when interdisciplinarity and various forms of institutional precarity are dissolving the bounds)?
This seminar explores ethnography as one such method of recontextualizing and, thus, reconstituting our objects. We invite papers reflecting on the utility and limitations of ethnography for addressing pressing questions about affect, performance, translation, and circulation, as well as specific questions of method. We also invite papers that reflect on the historical entwinement of the comparative study of literature with comparative anthropology and ethnography.
At the same time, we encourage engagements with self-reflective texts that an anthropologist or sociologist would recognize as auto-ethnography that have become a mainstay of contemporary literature, as observed by Anna Kornbluh, Annabel Kim, and others. What is the difference between (calling something) "autotheory," "autofiction," "autoethnography" or "eco-ethnography"? What do the distinctions we draw between these genres tell us about our understanding of singular selfhood as it intersects with cultural or ethnic otherness, and about the literary-critical methods we build around this understanding?
In recent years, anthropologists and ethnographers have turned to literature in volumes such as Crumpled Paper Boat to revive and reflect on their own genres of writing. It is time for us, as literary scholars, to return the favor–and rediscover the many commonalities between our disciplines that often remain obscured by Northwestern, postimperial definitions of what counts as a literary object.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Roanne L. Kantor, PhD is Assistant Professor of English at Stanford University. Her book, South Asian Writers, Latin American Literature, and the Rise of Global English (Cambridge UP, 2022) was awarded the ACLA Helen Tartar First Book Subvention Prize. She is also a translator and the winner of the Susan Sontag prize for Translation.
Speaker Bio
Sezen Ünlüönen is a Fung Global Fellow at Princeton University, and an assistant professor of English literature at Tel Aviv University. She is working on a monograph on Ottoman representations of British colonialism in the nineteenth century.
Speaker Bio
Marta Figlerowicz is an associate professor of comparative literature at Yale University.
Speaker Bio
Lonnie Monka is a fifth-year PhD student in the Theater Studies Department at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His dissertation examines the innovative conception of orality developed by the American avant-garde poet/artist David Antin (1932-2016). Within the university, Lonnie has facilitated a number of multidisciplinary groups to study performance theory and engage in practice-based research methodologies. He also teaches and curates literary and art events for various institutions.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Yiyun Zhang is a Ph.D. candidate at the College of Chinese Language and Literature at Hunan University, specializing in literary anthropology and comparative literature. Her scholarly work includes the publication of the article "Academic Review: Ten Major Events in Literary Anthropology in 2021"[学术盘点：2021年文学人类学研究十件大事] in "Literary Anthropology Studies"[文学人类学研究],no.1(2022):292-301.
Speaker Bio
Rovel Sequeira (he/they) is an Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and LSA Collegiate Fellow at the University of Michigan. They are also a faculty affiliate at the Center for South Asian Studies, and at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, where they co-direct the Global South Gender and Sexuality (GS2) Collective. They are currently working on a book manuscript on sexual scientific histories and fictions in South Asia, tentatively titled The Empire and its Deviants: Global Sexology and the Racial Grammar of Sex in Colonial India. Their work has been published in Modernism/modernity, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, and History of the Human Sciences, among other venues.
Speaker Bio
Muneer Aram Kuzhiyan is Assistant Professor of English at Aligarh Muslim University, India. He is primarily interested in comparative literary and cultural studies with a focus on literary formations in the Indian Ocean World (IOW); his current research concerns the cultural poetics of Kerala’s wide-ranging Arabi Malayalam literary genres. His recent publications include: “Amphibious Poetics on the Malabar Coast: Kappappāṭṭu and the Chronotope of the Ship in Mappila Literary Culture” in The Routledge Companion to Literature and the Global South, edited By A. J. López and R. Quintana-Vallejo (2024); ‘Toward a Vernacular Globalectics: “Minor” Illustrations from South India’ South Asian Review (Taylor and Francis, 2022); “Devotional Contextures: The Māla Songs and Muslim Ethical Formation in Contemporary Kerala” Contemporary South Asia (Taylor and Francis, 2022); “Poetics of Piety: Genre, Self-Fashioning, and the Mappila Lifescape” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (Cambridge University Press, 2016); and “Poisoned chalice? English at an Islamic university in Kerala” English Today (Cambridge University Press, 2013). He was a 2013-14 Fulbright Fellow at the Department of Anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Brian Fairley studies music and media in historical and ethnographic contexts, with special focus on the Republic of Georgia in the South Caucasus. He received his PhD in Music from NYU in 2023, and is currently a postdoctoral fellow in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. His manuscript in progress, Channeling Voices: A Media History of Georgian Polyphony, is a study of sound, technology, language, and race spanning the Soviet century.
Speaker Bio
Shira Levy holds a Ph.D. from the Department of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics at Ben-Gurion University. She is currently studying sound, storytelling, and queer temporality in Grace Paley's and Zora Neale Hurston's short fiction. She also works as a translator and editor for various literary projects and has acted as deputy editor of the Hebrew edition of Granta Magazine.
Speaker Bio
Susan Morrow is Assistant Professor of German at Princeton University.