Re-Imagining Space Conference Program

POETRY CENTER (HUM 2001)

 

PLENARY ADDRESS 9:30-10:15
POETRY CENTER (HUM 2001)

“QUEER HOMECOMING AS TACTICS OF INTERVENTIONS”

E.K. Tan, Stony Brook University

Chair: Lindsey Pelucacci, Stony Brook University

In this presentation, I discuss the concept of “queer homecoming” as tactics of interventions that enables the articulation of alternative kinship structures in mainstream cultural expressions such as literature and new media to destabilize the myth of consanguinity among communities in Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan. By rethinking the implications of concepts such as the familiar and the familial, I examine how queer identities and queerness can unsettle the dominant discourse of heternormative kinship and its marginalization of minority groups such as the LGBTQ communities in non-right-based societies. I will focus on two examples, a campaign video for an LGBTQ rally in Singapore and the diary novel, A Wife’s Diary by Taiwanese lesbian writer Chen Xue, to exemplify how queer subjects navigate and negotiate a liveable space within the institution of family and the nation state. My attempt is to map out a regional topography of inter-Asian queer relationalities that reflect a set of spatial politics which seeks to reconfigure the heteronormative home and national space.

SESSION ONE 10:30-11:50

PANEL 1A: RACIAL ERASURE AND VIOLENCE (HUM 2094)

Faculty Respondent: Andrew Newman, Stony Brook University 

Chair: Frank Harder, Stony Brook University 

“Space, Change and Political Violence in Contemporary Arabic Novel.” Jihan Zakarriya, Dhofar University

“Confronting the Color Line in Black and White: Representations of National Belonging in the Old West.” Lea Borenstein, Stony Brook University

“Benito Cereno: The San Dominick & Understanding Spatial Reality as a Medium for Babo’s Uprising.” Rachel Shomer, Stony Brook University

PANEL 1B: TRAUMA, IDENTITY, AND MEMORY (HUM 2030)

Faculty Respondent: Roger Thompson, Stony Brook University 

Chair: Lindsey Pelucacci, Stony Brook University 

“Places, Spaces, and Things—W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz Reconceptualizes Trauma and Loss.” Lisa LeBlond, Stony Brook University

“Writing from the Liminalities.” Ashwathi Menon, New Paltz University

“Traumatic Memory & Temporal Deviation in the Ethnic American Bildungsroman Form.” Gabriella Greco, St. John’s University

PANEL 1C: UTOPIA AND NO-PLACES (HUM 2052)

Faculty Respondent: Ritch Calvin, Stony Brook University  

Chair: Stephen Pallas, Stony Brook University  

“Power, Place, and Hyperreality.” Annmarie Demichiel, University of Rhode Island

“Envisioning American Progress: Eugenics and Feminism in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland and With Her in Ourland.” Kristen Roedel, Stony Brook University

“Citizens of Utopia: Decolonizing the American Sonnet.” Jay Ritchie, University of Massachusetts Amherst

LUNCH 12:00-1:00
POETRY CENTER (HUM 2001)

 

SESSION TWO 1:00-2:20

PANEL 2A: STORYTELLING IN NEW MEDIA (HUM 2030)

Faculty Respondent: Cynthia Davidson, Stony Brook University  

Chair: Sara Santos, Stony Brook University   

“Algorithmic Storytelling: The Narrative of Predictive Analytics.” Alex Sell, University at Buffalo (SUNY)

“Bandersnatch as Method: Database & the Space for New Narratives.” Jon Heggestad, Stony Brook University

“The Future of Narratives: The Western.” Andrew Schlosser, Long Island University

PANEL 2B: THE INDIVIDUAL AND BODIES IN SPACE (HUM 2052)

Faculty Respondent: Patricia Dunn, Stony Brook University  

Chair: Lea Borenstein, Stony Brook University 

“To Be Nowhere: Mapping Urban Dislocation in Belén Gopegui and Paul Auster.” Sara Martinez Navarro, Stony Brook University

“Anonymous Ability: Experiences of the Differently Abled.” Griffin Werner, Kent State University

“Privacy, Space and Shame: Cultural Techniques of Physical Seclusion.” Ethan Hallerman, Stony Brook University

“Confined to the Past: Bleak House Through Esther’s Eyes.” Frank Harder, Stony Brook University

PANEL 2C: ECOLOGY OF SPACE (HUM 2094)

Faculty Respondent: Celia Marshik, Stony Brook University

Chair: Sarah Davis, Stony Brook University 

“Ecological Subjectivity in the Poetry of Dorothy Wordsworth.” Lauren Cooper, Syracuse University

“‘The Power and the Glory’: Depictions of the Natural in J.M. Synge’s The Aran Islands.” Brian Eberle, Stony Brook University

“Capture, Animal, Human: In between archive and jungle.” Zhisheng Ivy Deng, Harvard University

PANEL 2D: THE SPACE OF THE THEATRE (HUM 2113)

Faculty Respondent: Amy Cook, Stony Brook University

Chair: Caitlin Duffy, Stony Brook University 

“Spatial Innovators in Mainstream American Theatre Spaces: Formal Experimentation and Queer Feminism after Fornes.” Nicole Stodard, Thinking Cap Theatre at The Vanguard

“’The Room Where It Happens’: Hamilton at the White House.” Jessica Hautsch, Stony Brook University

SESSION THREE 2:30-3:50

PANEL 3A: HORROR AND HAUNTINGS (HUM 2030)

Faculty Respondent: Justin Johnston, Stony Brook University 

Chair: Lisa LeBlond, Stony Brook University

“I Never Wanted To Be Your Mother”: The Haunted American Home of Hereditary (2018).” Caitlin Duffy, Stony Brook University

“‘The Only [Zombie] Metaphor Left’: Spaces of Security and Historical Excavation in Colson Whitehead’s Zone One.” Sara Santos, Stony Brook University

“‘This Is a Love Story’: Ghost Management and Meta-Televisual Healing in Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag.” Lindsey Pelucacci, Stony Brook University

PANEL 3B: SPACES OF QUEERNESS AND DESIRE (HUM 2052)

Faculty Respondent: Elyse Graham, Stony Brook University

Chair: Jon Heggestad, Stony Brook University 

“Anti E-dipus: Desire and Liberation through Digital Spaces.” Tirza Ben-Ezzer, Kent State University

“A Semi-Virtual Movement: Urban Potentiality and Queer Intimacy Within Online Spaces.” Lucia Cardelli, New York University

“‘Looks like you’ve got a funny one here’: Homophobic Spaces of Belonging in Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy.” Srigowri Kumar, St. John’s University

PANEL 3C: MAPPING TERRITORIES AND BOUNDARIES (HUM 2094)

Faculty Respondent: Timothy K. August, Stony Brook University 

Chair: Kristen Roedel, Stony Brook University

“Fight to Re-Imagine the Border.” Noriko Okada, Purchase College

“Cartographical Constructs: Mapping the Organic Community in Kipling’s Kim.” Brian Reinken, Rutgers University

“The Racial-Spatial Boundaries of Lynching.” Giovanni Battista Corvino, Yale University

PANEL 3D: UNDERGRADUATE (HUM 2001)

Faculty Respondent: Jeffrey Santa Ana, Stony Brook University 

Chair: Bernard Krumm, Stony Brook University

“Matrices of Character: How Born-Digital Categories Forecast An Era of Gamified Literary Readings.”  Zachary Schulman, Stony Brook University

“The Pen in Her Hand: Anne’s Voice and the Ending of Persuasion.” Emma Cesario, Stony Brook University

“Power and Control: The Influence of Psychological and Social Ideologies in Laurie Halse Anderson’s Wintergirls.” Annaliese Brellis, Stony Brook University

“Transgression in Difference: A Comparative Global Account of Mimicry in Postcolonial Literature.” Adiba Khan, Stony Brook University

KEYNOTE ADDRESS 4-5:30
POETRY CENTER (HUM 2001)

“WHERE YOU ARE: MIGRATION, NARRATION, AND THE SHAPE OF APOCALYPSE”

Matthew Hart, Columbia University 

Chair: Brian Eberle, Stony Brook University

“Where You Are” asks and answers a literary-historical question: Why are so many recent post-apocalyptic novels set in archipelagic landscapes? The long version of this argument, which forms a chapter of my forthcoming book, Extraterritorial: A Political Geography of Contemporary Fiction, considers more than ten examples. This paper relies instead on a single case-study: an analysis of setting, narrative voice, and point-of-view in Asian American author Chang-rae Lee’s novel, On Such a Full Sea (2014). Contemporary novelists such as Lee have responded to the increasingly extraterritorial nature of twenty-first-century political geography by accenting and magnifying a quality inherent in many forms of romance narrative: a tendency to divide the story-world into the city and the wilderness, with characters journeying between one kind of redoubt and another. In Lee’s hands, this basic narrative geography shapes a collective narrative voice that’s at once diffuse and certain, comprehensive and unsystematic. Lee’s unusual post-apocalyptic style shows how the extraterritorial spatial logic of the outside within functions as a terrific engine for mediating speculative fiction’s basic oscillation between fantastic and everyday events.