Vice Presidential Seminar: "After Political Knowledge"
Description
In the introduction to his Orientalism (1978), Edward Said claims that, “the general liberal consensus that ‘true’ knowledge is fundamentally non-political (and conversely, that overtly political knowledge is not ‘true’ knowledge) obscures the highly …political circumstances obtaining when knowledge is produced”(10). In its last pages, he concludes, “interesting work is most likely to be produced by scholars whose allegiance is to a discipline defined intellectually and not to a ‘field’ like Orientalism defined either canonically, imperially, or geographically” (326). While the first claim, which challenges the classical liberal distinction between “pure” and “political knowledge, has changed over the decades from more controversial to widely accepted, the second claim that producing knowledge through commitment to method points to the unfinished business of disciplinary practice in the shadow of a politicized humanities.
Where Said’s late 20th century discussion of the political nature of knowledge production carefully delineates the qualifications and pitfalls that travel with thinking of humanities scholarship as a political enterprise, we live in a 21st century where writers outside the university represent humanities scholarship as purely political, and they do so often crudely and cynically. In the face of these exigencies, how do scholars of literary studies currently understand their “allegiance to a discipline defined intellectually”?
Scholars of comparative literature working in multiple subdisciplines will offer their own case studies of how the politicization of the humanities has interfaced with their own disciplinary practice, through their engagements with poetics, translation, literary theory, cultural studies et al. In the course of these presentations, we investigate in a particular way, the current “state of the discipline” through key examples of scholarly practice in the face of a general atmosphere of political repression and degradation of the study of literature.
Panelists:
Sanchez Prado, Ignacio. “Latin for the Left: Against the false binaries of austerity and cultural capital”
Selim, Samah. “Discipline in the Global South”
Tolliver, Cedric. "When Uncle Tom Went to Work for Uncle Sam: Tracing the Cold War Global Politics of African American Literary History."
Poole, Janet. “Translating Alternative Futures: Thoughts on History, Allegory and the Importance of Poetry”
Al-Kassim, Dina. “‘Literarity’ in the Anti/Post/Decolonial Scene ‘After the Death of a Discipline’”
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado is the Jarvis Thurston and Mona van Duyn Professor in Humanities at
Washington University in St. Louis. His research focuses on Mexican cultural institutions with a
focus on literature, cinema, art and gastronomy. He is the author of eight books including Taco
(Bloomsbury, 2025), Strategic Occidentalism. On Mexican Fiction, the Neoliberal Book Market
and the Question of World Literature (Northwestern UP, 2018) and Screening Neoliberalism.
Transforming Mexican Cinema 1988-2012 (Vanderbilt UP, 2014). The most recent of his
seventeen edited collections are Teaching the Mexican Revolution (MLA, 2026) and World
Exhaustion in Latin American Literatures and Cultures, co-edited with Gesine Müller
(DeGruyter 2025). He has published over one-hundred academic articles and chapters in journals
and scholarly books across the Americas, Europe and Asia. His public writing has appeared in
The Washington Post, Los Angeles Review of Books, Words Without Borders and other
publications. He serves as editor of two book series: Latin American Cinema at SUNY Press and
Critical Mexican Studies at Vanderbilt University Press. He served as the Kluge Chair for the
Cultures of the South at the Library of Congress in 2021.
Speaker Bio
Samah Selim is a scholar and translator of modern Arabic literature. Her research focuses on the Arabic novel from a comparative and translation perspective, and on the cultural politics of modern and contemporary Arabic fiction. She is the author of The Novel and the Rural Imaginary in Egypt, 1880-1985 (Routledge, 2004) and Popular Fiction, Translation and the Nahda in Egypt (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). She has been awarded the Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation, the Arkansas Arabic Translation Award and the National Endowment for the Arts Translation Award. Her most recent translation is Arwa Salih's The Stillborn: Notebooks of a Woman from the Student Movement Generation in Egypt (Seagull Books, 2018). Selim is co-founder of the Turjoman Translators Collective in Cairo. She teaches in the Department of African, Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Literatures at Rutgers University
Speaker Bio
Cedric R. Tolliver is associate professor and chair of the English Department at the University of Oklahoma (OU). He was the M. H. Abrams fellow at the National Humanities Center in 2022-23. His book, Of Vagabonds and Fellow Travelers: African Diaspora Literary Culture and the Cultural Cold War (University of Michigan Press 2019), was a 2020 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title. Working at the intersection of Africana literary and culture studies and literary history, he is currently at work on a second book manuscript, tentatively titled Spook(ed), that considers writing from or about African Americans that worked in the national security state apparatus over the course of the Cold War.
Speaker Bio
forthcoming
Papers
Speaker Bio
S. Shankar is a novelist, literary and cultural critic, and translator. He is Professor, Department of
English, University of Hawai`i at Mānoa; Editor of Mānoa; and a former member of the Board
of External Experts appointed to advise the Swedish Academy in the awarding of the Nobel
Prize for Literature (2022-2025). Shankar’s latest book is his third novel Ghost in the Tamarind
(2017). He has two books forthcoming: a volume of cultural criticism The Cost of Living: The
Stories We Tell About the Poor (Duke University Press, 2027); and Touchable/Untouchable:
Dalit Literature from India in Translation, a co-edited issue of the journal he edits presenting
works of five writers, also available as a book from University of Hawai`i Press. His full-length
play The Library of No Books has been performed in Bengaluru (2025) and Chennai (2018). He
is working on a climate dystopia novel-in-stories entitled The Block and the Wheel.
Speaker Bio
Jini Kim Watson is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at New York University, where she teaches postcolonial and transpacific literatures. She is the author of Cold War Reckonings: Authoritarianism and the Genres of Decolonization (Fordham UP, 2021), which received Honorable Mentions for the ACLA’s René Wellek Prize and the MLA’s James Russell Lowell Prize, and The New Asian City: Three-dimensional Fictions of Space and Urban Form (Minnesota UP, 2011). She has also co-edited several volumes: The Postcolonial Contemporary: Political Imaginaries for the Global Present (2018) with Gary Wilder; The Cambridge Companion to the City and World Literature (2023) with Ato Quayson: and Ends of the Global City (2025) with Rashmi Varma. She is co-founder of NYU's Postcolonial, Race and Diaspora Studies Colloquium.
Speaker Bio
Huda J. Fakhreddine is a writer, translator, and Associate Professor of Arabic Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Metapoesis in the Arabic Tradition (Brill, 2015) and The Arabic Prose Poem: Poetic Theory and Practice (Edinburgh University Press, 2021), and the co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Arabic Poetry (Routledge, 2023). Among her translations are The Sky That Denied Me: Selections from Jawdat Fakhreddine (University of Texas Press, 2020), The Universe, All at Once: Selections from Salim Barakat (Seagull Books, 2024), and Palestinian: Four Poems by Ibrahim Nasrallah (World Poetry Books, 2024). Her creative work includes a book of creative non-fiction titled Zaman saghīr taḥt shams thāniya (A Brief Time under a Different Sun), Dar al-Nahda, 2019 and the forthcoming Wa min thamma al-ālam (And then the World), Manshūrāt Marfa’, 2025. She is co-editor of Middle Eastern Literatures and section editor of the Encyclopedia of Islam.
Speaker Bio
forthcoming