On (Not) Hating the State
Description
Humanists love to hate the state, perhaps now more than ever. Negativity toward the state is de rigueur in the humanities and Trump's version of the white supremacist fascist state in many ways manifests critical theory’s darkest visions. But as democratic institutions in the US and around the world come under increasing attack, as civil servants are fired and authoritarianism rises, it is time to take stock of the limits of state negativity.
How can we imagine and theorize the state outside the dark horizon that looms ever more heavily upon us? What can we learn about the state from genealogies of welfare or state-led development, the legacies of liberalism, the histories of national and local institutions that support everyday life, postcolonial independence movements, or from alternative versions of the state that were dreamed but never fulfilled? This seminar invites papers that consider a range of theories and histories to reimagine the state, illuminate its positive actions, or dwell with its alternative possibilities.
What of aesthetic objects and literary forms? What genres and narratives have dominated how we imagine the state, and what limits have they placed on the ways we conceptualize it? How can literary scholars see the state newly with different forms? When and how does literature convey the complexities of the state - at local, regional, or national levels? What genres and modes do we have for reading the state in more positive or at least in contradictory ways? How do courts, bureaucracies, agencies, or executive heads and legislators appear in novels and other texts? What do we learn by disaggregating the state? Rather than homogenizing the state into a singular bad form – the settler state, the necropolitical state – or ceding it to the puppeteering of corporate capital and right-wing repression, can we resuscitate those versions and aspects of the state that we want, that support community, democratic participation, material needs, and robust forms of citizenship? To do so we must expand the narratives, tropes, and genres through which we view the state. This seminar thus also seeks papers that explore how particular forms, narratives, and texts reveal the state anew, as a site of complexity, intervention, or desire.
In all, this seminar invites papers that show how particular objects, methods, or histories can help us see beyond the quagmire of state negativity. Submit 250 to 300-word abstracts and brief bios via the ACLA website August 26-October 2, 2025.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Bruce Robbins is the Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. His most recent books are "Who's Allowed to Protest?" (forthcoming from Melville House, 2026), "Atrocity: A Literary History" (Stanford UP, 2025), and "Criticism and Politics: A Polemical Introduction" (Stanford, 2017).
Speaker Bio
Lisi Schoenbach is Associate Professor of English at the University of Tennessee and author of Pragmatic Modernism.
Speaker Bio
Leif Turner is a PhD student in Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota. His research is concerned with re-evaluating the relationship between the philosophy of self-determination developed by Hegel and the visions of individual and political freedom that appear in the work of Black Marxist writers like Richard and Sarah Wright.
Speaker Bio
Laura Ritland is a postdoctoral faculty fellow at New York University. She recently completed her PhD in English literature at UC Berkeley where her dissertation focused on the intersections of public education movements and the evolution of English literary studies, from the Victorian era to the present. Her research has appeared in Cultural Critique and Feminist Modernist Studies. She is also the author of the poetry collection, East and West.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Rebecca Oh is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Illinois. Her first book, Reading Better States: Utopian Method and Environmental Harm in the Global South, is forthcoming with Fordham UP. She is in the early stages of a second project on genre and infrastructure and her work has appeared in Interventions, Modern Fiction Studies, Ariel, ISLE and other venues.
Speaker Bio
Janice Ho is Associate Professor of English at the University of British Columbia. Her monograph, Nation and Citizenship in the Twentieth-Century British Novel, appeared with Cambridge UP in 2015. She has published on both modernist and contemporary literature in a range of journals and edited collections, including NOVEL, PMLA, Modern Fiction Studies, and The History of 1930s British Literature. She is currently co-editing a series on Literature and Politics with Oxford University Press.
Speaker Bio
Arielle Stambler is an assistant professor in the English department and African and African American Studies program at Mercer University. In 2024, she earned her Ph.D. in English from UCLA. She previously taught literature at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in English from Yale University. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in ARIEL, Parallax, The Journal of World Literature, and The Los Angeles Review of Books.
Papers
Speaker Bio
I teach at the University of Pennsylvania and am interested in the conjuncture of questions about reading, writing, and labor. I have previously written about eighteenth-century novels and contemporary reading practices during the pandemic. I am currently writing When Writing Doesn't Work, a study of how the material practice of writing displaces different forms of paid and unpaid labor across history.
Speaker Bio
I am a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania. I am currently writing a dissertation on literary and cultural conceptions of childhood in post-Independent India, especially on the Indian state's relationship with childhood reading and viewing practices, looking mostly at material in Hindi, Malayalam and English. My broader research interests are in modern Indian literatures, the State and its relationship to literature and childhood studies.
Speaker Bio
Amanda Jennifer Su is Berkeley Lecturer in English at UC Berkeley. Her book project argues that during the Cold War, novelistic figurations of Chinese womanhood served as compelling but volatile proxies for debates over two competing feminist traditions: liberal feminism and socialist feminism. Her criticism and fiction have been published in Post45, Guernica, Amerasia, the Journal of Asian American Studies, ASAP/J, and Breaking the Bronze Ceiling: Women, Memory and Public Space (Fordham UP).