Complicit Figures, Complicit Forms

We invite papers that explore complicity as a critical methodology for literary and cultural studies. In an age of globalization, hyper-commodification, continued expropriation of labor and resources on a planetary scale – what critics have called the “polycrisis” – the question is not whether we are embroiled in systems beyond our direct perception, individual intent, or exhaustive comprehension, but how to parse these inevitable states of entanglement. As Susan Koshy writes in her study of the figure of “racial complicity,” complicity's “diagnostic and signifying power” arises precisely from its capacity to stretch familiar coordinates of time and space—to facilitate “attunement to states and conditions of being enmeshed or intertwined with others across multiple scales and durées.” To Koshy’s evocative catalog of complicitous figures–“the fixer, the ethnic entrepreneur, the Tiger Mom, the New Immigrant assimilationist, the sellout, the sympathizer, the ethnic politician”--we might add the native informant (Spivak), the beneficiary of global capitalism (Robbins), the diligent or passionate worker (Weber), the however reluctant consumer. Plugged in, implicated, attached in spite of oneself, such figures resist easy binaries of agential/nonagential, inside/outside, demonstrating the centrality of complicity to literary and cultural production.
In addition to a proliferating cast of characters, complicity offers a formal principle–that of entanglement or enmeshment. As literary critics, we are interested in a) how texts deploy complicity to map complex power relations and b) how texts themselves can become implicated in such relations. In what ways do aesthetic and narrative forms represent or induce involvement in its most unsettling configurations? Here, we might think of the value of “impure resistance” in political art  that documents the messiness of resistance unfolding in real time (Mihai) or the “touristic complicities” of poetry in a globalized age (Ramanazi). We might also think of complicity as it inheres in the “event” of translation, where translators’ positions as interlingual mediators are inflected by national interests (Liu), or how it manifests in the novel form. For instance, Bakhtin’s account of polyphony draws attention to the complicity of a writer who gives voice to multiple perspectives but also determines which voices are more prominent. How do aesthetic forms negotiate entangled spaces of resistance and assimilation? How do we, as critics, navigate such spaces in our scholarship and teaching?
For questions, please contact Jennifer Pan at [email protected].