“Identifying the Self and Decolonisation Via Memory-writing and Imagination in Indigenous American and Chinese American Fiction.” Jessica Mure, University of Gloucestershire.
This paper will discuss representations and explorations of memory within selected Indigenous American and Chinese American literature. These texts examine and utilise memory-writing as a means to reclaiming identity in post-colonial discourses, and to confront the colonial past and contemporary debates concerning decolonisation within the sphere of literary and cultural studies.
My research has been focussed on an analysis and comparison of specific themes within The Way to Rainy Mountain by Kiowa author N Scott Momaday, Ceremony by Laguna author Leslie Marmon Silko, and Homebase and The Joy Luck Club by Chinese American authors Shawn Wong and Amy Tan respectively. The perception and formation of identity and selfhood through shared themes in these titles, throughout which a combination of memory and imagination recur, will be presented.
These novels, and their contemporaries within these bodies of literature, have come to contribute to the definition and establishment of theory about the dual heritage and multicultural experience, while also engaging with present discourses regarding the impact of memory upon individual/collective identities, and the production, interpretation, and teaching of history. Alongside pioneering the hybridity of creative and artistic forms, the literature also confronts American political, social, and cultural events, to challenge the nation’s dominant discourses and implicit limitations placed upon the definition of ‘American.’
The creative, literary elements of the texts will be presented, foregrounded against a backdrop of the sociological and historical aspects, and recent events such as the Capitol Hill riots, the ‘taking the knee’ campaign, and the Black Lives Matter movement.
I am a postgraduate researcher in the field of Literary and Critical Studies at the University of Gloucestershire in the United Kingdom. My research is an analysis and comparison of specific themes within selected Indigenous American and Chinese American literature, with a focus on identity and post-colonial theory, and reflections of these topics in contemporary political and social events in America, and beyond.
“The Decolonial Imagination in African American Literature: Hauntings that Delink from Modernity/Coloniality to Reconstitute Ways of Knowing.” Lisa LeBlond, Stony Brook University.
While colonial domination has been largely defeated, it produced and has left lingering intrusions on the present. My paper bears witness to the trauma induced by the structures of coloniality particular to the historic African American experience. The stories I focalize are Paul Beatty’s White Boy Shuffle, Charles Chesnutt’s “Po Sandy,” and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s “The Finkelstein 5.” Just as race and postcolonial theorists often think diachronically, i.e., across time, when confronting subjugation with metaphors like Christina Sharpe’s ‘the wake,’ Homi Bhabha’s ‘fixity,’ and Fanon’s ‘temporality of emergence’ my authors also imply the diachronic imposition of the colonial matrix of power—that the horrors of the past are still reverberating in the present. The authors I highlight offer decolonial visions that re-narrativize the past (and the present), delinking from western epistemologies, and improvising terrain for thinking about oppression and temporalities. What they also share are hauntings, glimpses of the undead. Their spirits relay that fully realistic narratives play by modernist rules and talk the logic of history when there is little logic to the black historic experience. They also keep the memory of modernity/coloniality alive to upend utopian notions of the nation and of US exceptionalism. These otherworldly creatures decry the idea that what has happened in the past should be kept in the past. Moreover, a close examination of these fantastic beings uncovers a care for the dead which expressly concerns itself with the living and their modes and rights to exist in the present and the future. I incorporate the decolonial theory of Walter Mignolo, Catherine Walsh and Aníbal Quijano, as well as the race theory of Christina Sharpe, Ta-Nehesi Coates, and George Yancy, among others.
Lisa LeBlond is a 4th year PhD candidate in the English department at Stony Brook University. Her current research interests include literatures of oppression, film, decolonial theory, philosophies of history and time and satire. She is dissertating, recently nearing completion on her chapter 1 which looks at decolonial visions in African American literature, specifically how authors utilize spectral beings to delink from western epistemologies to reconstitute ways of knowing.
“Personal Histories of Wrongful Death in the Context of Black Lives Matter: Community-Based Obituary Projects as Instruments of Resisting Racial Violence.” Sunoo Kim, Independent Scholar.
Obituaries written mainly by professional journalists during the period of the Civil Rights Movement highlighted Black Americans’ struggle for legal equality in ways that differed strikingly from contemporary community-based obituary projects associated with Black Lives Matter. Despite the shared goal of political resistance to institutional racism, contemporary obituaries include more explicit elements of community-building, raising the question of how obituaries have come to function as a distinct political tool within the larger framework of Black Lives Matter. Through analysis of an extensive data-set reflective of recent community-based Black obituaries, a framework was developed to identify the following motifs: community-building, direct refutations of stereotypes, calls for solidarity to motivate individuals to join the movement, and examples of ways to contribute. Focusing on obituaries as a means of community-building within Black Lives Matter, this paper proposes a classifying analysis of forms of emotional appeal, categorized into empathy, motivation, and inspiration. These applications of obituary-writing demonstrate how Black communities are reinforcing internal ties of solidarity while also creating a public presence by directly refuting negative stereotypes commonly used to discredit Black Americans. This paper argues that obituaries are thus being constructed as instruments of critique in the community-based struggle against daily forms of
racial violence.
Born in Seoul, Korea (currently residing in New York) is an independent scholar of the Black American experience with America’s systemic racism. She is currently at work on a study of obituaries, written by still-living Black American authors, serve as a form of political resistance. Her work has previously been accepted for presentation at the 2022 Symposium on Space and Movement Through Literature, Theory, and Culture.
