In this episode of High Theory, Rasheed Tazudeen tells us about the inhuman. The inhuman offers a way of moving beyond the legacies of humanism and across categories and scales of being. Thinking with the inhuman world, from spools of thread to microplastics, helps us try and think otherwise about the complex assemblages that shape our lives. If you want to learn more, check out Rasheed’s new book, Modernism’s Inhuman Worlds (Cornell UP, 2024). The book explores the centrality of ecological precarity, species indeterminacy, planetary change, and the specter of extinction to modernist and contemporary metamodernist literatures. Modernist ecologies emerge in response to the enigma of how to imagine inhuman being—including soils, forests, oceans, and the earth itself—through languages and epistemologies that have only ever been humanist. Rasheed asks how (meta)modernist aesthetics might help us to imagine (with) inhuman worlds, including the worlds still to be made on the other side of mass extinction. Rasheed Tazudeen is a lecturer in English at Yale University. His work is focused broadly on the intersections between ecology, race, and sound in 19th- and 20th-century literature and music. He is currently at work on a second project tentatively titled The Musicked Earth: Towards a Decolonial Sound Ecology, focused on the resonances between Black/Afro-Caribbean and Indigenous theories of sound, music, festival, and ecology through the work of Sylvia Wynter, Édouard Glissant, Leanne Simpson, and Alice Coltrane. This week’s image was made by Saronik Bosu in 2024. It represents a humanoid creature in fetal position, merging with the inhuman world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of High Theory, Mackenzie Cooley talks about animals. The animal lies at the center of science and the human, from imperial conquest and Enlightenment thought to the creatures on our dinner plates and beside us at the table. The practices of animal breeding and the politics of making life are, in Mackenzie’s account, key to understanding the history of race as a concept and term that emerged in the Early Modern World. For more animal encounters, check out her book The Perfection of Nature: Animals, Breeding, and Race in the Renaissance (Chicago UP, 2022). In it, Italian horses and Mexican dogs provide examples of controlled breeding before eugenics, helping us see how human difference was understood in the colonial encounter, and illuminate undertheorized notions of generation and its discontents in the more-than-human world. Tag dog and Bartolomé the cat sometimes participate in the making of High Theory, but the podcast is not necessarily pitched to non-human ears. If you want radio for animals, listen to Bad Animals on WFMU. Mackenzie Cooley is Assistant Professor of History, Director of Latin American Studies at Hamilton College. She is an intellectual historian who studies the uses, abuses, and understandings of the natural world in early modern science and medicine. And she has two Newfoundland dogs. The image accompanying this episode is a painting of a Newfoundland Dog by Charles Henry Schwanfelder (1812), from the collection of Temple Newsam House, Leeds Museums and Galleries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of High Theory, Geoffrey Sanborn tells us about Plagiarism. A concept emerged with the idea of originality, plagiarism challenges some of our most deeply held notions of individualism and status. Hatred of plagiarism is so baked into our culture that it evokes a gut response of disgust, which prevents us from actually analyzing it as a form of social behavior. In the episode, Geoff talks about websites that promise to “humanize” chatGPT content, like the AI Text Converter and the Plagiarism Remover. He talks about postcolonial theory, as a tool that might help us analyze plagiarism, and invokes Homi Bhabha’s idea of “colonial mimicry,” which appears in his 1984 article “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse.” He also talks about the actress and playwright Anna Deavere Smith, and references David Graeber’s book Debt, which we ran an episode on way back in 2020. It was in the early days of High Theory, so apologies for the audio quality, but we think you’ll like it. Geoff is a Samuel Williston Professor of English and department chair at Amherst College. He has published many books about nineteenth century American literature, most recently Plagiarama! William Wells Brown and the Aesthetics of Attractions (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), which was the inspiration for this conversation. It’s a really great book! You should read it. The image for this episode was made by Saronik Bosu in 2023. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In our second crossover episode, Saronik talks to Maryyum Mehmood and Aditya Desai, the hosts of Diasporastan, a podcast for discussions on the South Asian diaspora, both as topic and lens through which to view the world. They talk about the podcast, and what the word ‘diaspora’ has meant to them in identitarian and generative capacities. Maryyum is a socio-political analyst, cultural commentator and community cohesion expert. Along with her interfaith work, she teaches in the Department of Theology and Religion at the University of Birmingham. Aditya is a writer, teacher, and activist in Baltimore. His stories and essays have appeared in in B O D Y, Barrelhouse Magazine, The Rumpus, The Millions, The Margins, District Lit, The Kartika Review, The Aerogram, and others. Image: The logo of Diasporastan, created by Nirja Desai (@kalakar on Instagram) Music used in promotional material: ‘The Beginning or the End’ by Nicholas Mackin Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode Kim talks to Adrienne Raphel about crossword puzzles. For lots more about crosswords, check out Adrienne’s book Thinking Inside the Box: Adventures with Crosswords and the Puzzling People Who Can’t Live Without Them (Penguin Random House, 2021) For some of the historical puzzles she mentions in the episode, Adrienne recommends The Curious History of the Crossword: 100 Puzzles from Then and Now by Ben Tausig. If you’re inspired to start doing crosswords and looking for some guidance, she suggests the New York Times guide: “How to Solve The New York Times Crossword.” For more on cryptic crosswords, check out Stephen Sondheim’s article “How to Do a Real Crossword Puzzle.” New York Magazine (April 1968). Also on cryptics, Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon’s book The Random House Guide to Cryptic Crosswords (Random House, 2003) is out of print but very good. And the crossword blog in The Guardian has lots of cryptic crosswords too. Adrienne is a poet, scholar, and lecturer in the Princeton writing program. She has a super cool web site with links to all the other amazing things she’s written! Our cover photo shows the stage set from Puzzles of 1925, a crossword musical! The digital image is from the White Studio Theatrical Photography Collection at the New York Public Library. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Shalini Sengupta thinks together ‘the mycological turn’ in the humanities and the narrative and aesthetic work that mushrooms do in some modernist literature. She draws from Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World and the research of Sam Solomon and Natalia Cecire. Modernist mushrooms, if they are a thing, exist in the writings of Alfred Kreymborg, Djuna Barnes, and Sylvia Plath, and the photography of Alfred Stieglitz. Shalini is a final year PhD student at the University of Sussex, UK. Her thesis explores the concept of modernist difficulty in British and diasporic poetry through the lens of intersectionality. Her academic writing have appeared/are forthcoming in Modernism/modernity Print Plus, Contemporary Women’s Writing, and the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry. In 2021, she was selected as a Ledbury Emerging Critic. Image Art by Saronik Bosu Music used in promotional material: ‘How Many’ by Windmill Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kim talks to Amy Wong, Ronjaunee Chatterjee, and Alicia Christoff about ‘Undisciplining’, a term they borrowed from Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake and have used in an article and a journal issue to signify a heuristic that would help bring modes of knowledge and methodologies to Victorian Studies that are unfamiliar or would be considered unnatural, given the regulations of that discipline. References are made to Elaine Freedgood’s Worlds Enough, Zadie Smith’s concept of the ‘neutral universal’, and the work of Brigitte Fielder. Amy R. Wong lives in Oakland and is assistant professor of English at Dominican University of California, where she teaches courses on literature, film, media theory, and critical race studies. Her essays and reviews have appeared in Narrative, Literature Compass, ASAP Journal, Modern Philology, Studies in the Novel, SEL: Studies in English Literature, Public Books, and Avidly. Ronjaunee Chatterjee lives in Montreal and teaches feminist, queer, and critical race theory, as well as courses on the 19th century, at Concordia University. Her essays and reviews have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, ASAP Journal, The New Inquiry, French Studies,Victorian Literature and Culture, and other venues. Alicia Mireles Christoff is associate professor of English at Amherst College. She is the author of Novel Relations: Victorian Fiction and British Psychoanalysis (Princeton University Press, 2019). Her essays have appeared in PMLA, Novel, Victorian Literature and Culture, Public Books, and other venues, and her poems in The Yale Review and Peach Mag. Image: Fire at the Crystal Palace Music used in promotional material: ‘Fall Apart’ by Livio Amato Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Leading up to Mayday, the nationwide Day of Refusal, and Abolition May, Saronik talks with Sean Gordon about abolition as an historical movement to end the transatlantic slave trade and a transformative justice movement to abolish prisons and defund the police. The episode focuses on the relationship between absence and presence, destruction and reconstruction, in abolitionist narratives and thought, and makes reference to Angela Davis’s Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture (2005), Mariame Kaba’s We Do This ‘Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice (2021), Tiffany Lethabo King’s The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies (2019), and works by W. E. B. Du Bois, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Frank Wilderson, and Jared Sexton. There is no doubt that abolition will save the world. Sean recently finished his PhD in English and American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His research and teaching focus on nineteenth-century American literature, abolition, and the environmental humanities. You can visit the We Do This ‘Til We Free Us publisher’s website to donate copies of the book to people who are incarcerated. Image: “A is for Abolition”, one in the series titled Collidescopes by Julia Bernier Music used in promotional material: “Heartbeat” by ykymr Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode Kim talks with Ama Bemma Adwetewa-Badu about distant reading. Ama Bemma provides her Global Poetics Project as an awesome example of distant reading. She also references Franco Moretti’s book Distant Reading (Verso, 2013) and Ted Underwood’s essay “A Genealogy of Distant Reading” Digital Humanities Quarterly 11 no. 2 (2017). Take a look at her short blog post on big data at the Network for Digital Humanities in Africa, for more of her insights on distant reading. In the longer version of our conversation Ama Bemma gave the African literary blog Brittle Paper as another example of contemporary digital humanities work. She also mentions James Yeku’s symposium on African digital storytelling. Towards the end we discuss Alan Liu’s commentary on cultural criticism in the digital humanities, and the philosophical amusements of “What is Digital Humanities?” Make sure when you visit that last page that you reload the page! Ama Bemma Adwetewa-Badu is a Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellow (2021-2022) and a Ph.D. Candidate (ABD) in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell University, who researches post-1960s global literary networks, focusing on poetry and poets from around the world. You can read her essay on “Poetry from Afar: Distant Reading, Global Poetics, and the Digital Humanities” in Modernism and Modernity. Image by Saronik Bosu Music used in promotional material: “These many stairs” by Tendon Levey Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bassam Sidiki talks about the right to maim, the titular concept in Jasbir K. Puar’s book, and the related concept of debility. He explains how these concepts have changed how the field of disability studies orients itself. References are made to Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb’s new book Epidemic Empire, the work of Anita Ghai, Tommy Orange’s novel There There, Lauren Berlant’s concept of ‘slow death’, and Alexander Weheliye’s Habeas Viscus. Bassam is a PhD Candidate in English at the University of Michigan, where he studies postcolonial studies, disability studies and health humanities. His scholarship appears or is forthcoming in Journal of Medical Humanities, Literature and Medicine, and Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies. Of particular relevance to this episode is his recent article on the novel Anatomy of a Soldier. Image: Saronik Bosu Music used in promotional material: “Rough” by Natus Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode Kim speaks with Lauren Fournier about autotheory. Lauren has recently published a book on the subject, titled Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism (MIT Press, 2021). In the episode she points to Maggie Nelson’s book The Argonauts as the book that made the term famous, but refers us to a longer history of autotheoretical feminist writing, including work by Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Audre Lorde, and bell hooks. She also mentions critical research by Zoe Todd, “An Indigenous Feminist’s Take On The Ontological Turn: ‘Ontology’ Is Just Another Word For Colonialism” and the book I Love Dick, by Chris Kraus. Lauren is a writer, curator, and artist, who currently holds a SSHRC postdoctoral fellowship in visual studies at the University of Toronto. She is currently co-editing a special issue of ASAP Journal on Autotheory with her colleague Alex Brostoff. Her novella, All My Dicks, is forthcoming with Fiction Advocate. Image: Art by Sona Safaei-Sooreh Music used in promotional material: ‘Braided Flower’ by Lee Maddeford Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kim talks to Patrick Deer about the Military Industrial Complex, a term used by US President Dwight D. Eisenhower in a 1961 speech to describe a permanent war economy, and the political, economic, and cultural matrix that sustains it. References are made to James Ledbetter’s book Unwarranted Influence and Seymour Melman’s book The Permanent War Economy. Patrick Deer is Associate Professor at the Department of English, New York University. He focuses on war culture and war literature, modernism, and contemporary British and American literature and culture, and Anglophone literature and human rights. His book Culture in Camouflage explores the emergence of modern war culture in the first half of the 20th century. Image: Scene from the film Doctor Strangelove Music used in promotional material: “Grim Desert Aftermath” by Kevin Bryce. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is our first crossover episode! Saronik and Kim talk to John Plotz from the wonderful Recall This Book podcast. Our conversation is rather wide ranging, but we focus on podcasting and the pastoral. Take a look at their page for show notes and transcripts. Some of the books we discuss include Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule, by M.K. Gandhi; Herland, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman; Angel Island by Inez Haynes Gillmore. Our recallable books are Mark Matthew’s Droppers, John Ruskin’s Unto This Last; and Thomas Hardy’s Return of the Native. Recall this Book is hosted by John Plotz and Elizabeth Ferry. Elizabeth Ferry (who wasn’t able to join us for this crossover episode) is a professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. John Plotz is a professor of English at Brandeis and a proficient podcaster. He’s just launched a new podcast called Novel Dialogue with Aarthi Vadde at Duke University. Check it out! This week’s image is the Recall This Book podcast logo. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Anat Rosenberg, Kristof Smeyers, and Astrid Van den Bossche discuss the fresh historiographies of capitalism offered by studies of enchantment and magical thinking. They talk about their research network for scholars interested in the historical role of enchantment as a tool, structure, or foundation for the organization and the development of modern markets, economic institutions, and economic relationships. Anat Rosenberg is a senior lecturer at the Harry Radzyner Law School, Reichman University, Israel. Her work concerns the cultural legal history of capitalism, liberalism and consumption in Britain, and methodologies of law and the humanities. She is author of Liberalizing Contracts: Nineteenth Century Promises Through Literature, Law and History (Routledge, 2017), and The Rise of Mass Advertising: Law, Enchantment and the Cultural Boundaries of British Modernity (Oxford UP, 2022). Kristof Smeyers is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Ruusbroec Institute, University of Antwerp. His research interests are magic, the supernatural and the occult, and their connections to the histories of religion, science and folklore, as well as their historiography and their archive history. Astrid Van den Bossche is Lecturer in Digital Marketing and Communications at the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London. She is particularly interested in scepticism and humour as forms of engagement with promotional culture, and the application of computational methods in historical studies. Image: Public Domain Image of Great Market Hall, Budapest Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode Kim talks with Mustafa Yavas about Alienation. Mustafa quotes Karl Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. He also references Albert Camus’ books The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus, and Charlie Chaplin’s film Modern Times. Towards the end of the episode, he mentions Bertrand Russell’s 1930 article “In Praise of Idleness.” For listeners interested in reading more on alienation, he recommends Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization; David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs, and Rahel Jaeggi’s Alienation. He also suggests three great movies that dwell on the subject: Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann; Charlie Kaufman’s Anomalisa, and Tolga Karacelik’s Toll Booth. Mustafa is a postdoctoral scholar in sociology at NYU Abu Dhabi, where he works on work! He is writing a book called White Collar Blues about the transnational Turkish middle class, for which he has recently completed a brilliant book proposal (editors take note!). His previous research focused on boundary processes in social, economic, and political settings, including status homophily in social networks, residential segregation by income, and collective identity formation in social movements. This week’s image is a 1920 painting of Sisyphus at his futile labor by Franz Stuck. Available on Wikimedia Commons. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode Saronik talks to Manasvin Rajagopalan about critical possibilities in varied literary ideations of love. Manasvin mentions Hannah Arendt’s concept of love as destruction, the concepts of Puram and Akam in classical Tamil poetics, Moliere’s comedies, Plato’s Symposium, the Hebrew Bible, Sappho’s poetry, the story of Shakuntala, and The Aeneid. Manasvin is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at UC Davis , where he writes about questions of identity and world building in Early Modern French and Tamil literature. Image: An eighteenth century representation of the Dhanasri Ragini held by The Art Institute of Chicago. Public domain artwork. Music used in promotional material: “The Flute in a Barrel” by Sandro Marinoni and Stefano Roncarolo. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ulrich Baer talks to Kim about the process and phenomenon of witnessing, which creates collective acknowledgement, understanding, and responsibility for trauma. Among other works, he talks about Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub’s book Testimony. In his discussion of witnessing with respect to our present political moment, he talks about the murder of George Floyd and the following global reckoning. Ulrich Baer is University Professor at New York University where he teaches literature and photography, and writes frequently about photography, art, literature, and other subjects. A graduate of Harvard and Yale, he has been awarded Guggenheim, Getty, and Humboldt fellowship. Image: Detail from ‘Girl with a Yellow Bird’ by Hale Woodruff. Music used in promotional material: “Leaving for Chicago” by Rest You Sleeping Giant. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kim speaks with Amanda Caleb about Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia. Amanda says that the classic definition of “heterotopia” is found in Foucault’s article “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias” (Architecture /Mouvement/Continuité, October, 1984). She also mentions The Birth of the Clinic. In comparison to Foucault’s heterotopia, we talk a bit about Mikhail Bakhtin’s concepts of the carnivalesque and the chronotope. If you’re interested in reading more about heterotopias, check out Amanda’s article: “Contested Spaces: The Heterotopias of the Victorian Sickroom” in Humanities vol. 8 no. 2 (April 2019). Amanda is a professor of English and Medical and Health Humanities at Misericordia University. She also runs a super cool podcast called the Health Humanist. She was kind enough to interview me about a crazy 1978 medical satire called House of God back in November 2020. This week’s image is Gustave Caillebotte’s Les jardiners (1875). Below is a map of the “Gardens and Pleasure Grounds Baltimore Argyleshire” from The Art & Craft of Garden Making by Thomas Hayton Mawson (London : B.T. Batsford, 1900). We’re feeling gardens this week. Music used in promotional material: ‘Floating Panther’ by Outrun Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Saronik chats with Jay Shelat about the 9/11 family novel. They discuss how the attacks (re)dynamized constructions and perceptions of family. Jay refers to a few 9/11 family novels, including Burnt Shadows by Kamila Shamsie, The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid, Netherland by Joseph O’Neill, and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer. If you want a list of more 9/11 family novels, feel free to ask. A special shoutout to Sarah Wasserman’s The Death of Things: Ephemera and the American Novel for ideas about the state of print culture. Jay is a PhD candidate at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, where he is writing his dissertation about 9/11 and the family. His work can be found or is forthcoming in Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Critic, ASAP/J, and elsewhere. You can follow him on Twitter @jshelat1. Image: photo taken by Ben Hider at the 9/11 Memorial Museum. Music used in promotional material: Adagio (mother nature’s sleep) by Dee Yan-Kay Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kim talks with Gina about Jacques Rancière’s concept of dissensus. Gina refers to several major works of philosophy including: Jacques Rancière’s Dissensus Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgement Jacques Derrida’s The Truth In Painting Plato’s Republic She also takes a small dig at Althusser, in the spirit of Rancière Gina is a PhD candidate at NYU and an amazing teacher. She studies medieval literature and critical theory. She loves Theodor Adorno and really really hates the dialectic. This week’s image is an illuminated miniature from a 15th C manuscript held by the British Museum, depicting the “Debate for the Soul.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Saronik talks to Shweta Krishnan, doctoral candidate in Anthropology at George Washington University. She speaks about how she uses Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of deterritorialization in her work on the emergent religious discourse of Donyipolo in the Indian states of Arunachal Pradesh and Assam. Shweta thinks with the geological metaphors and mythological stories of the Mising and Adi tribes, and brings them into conversation with Deleuze and others. Donyipolo (sometimes referred to as Donyipoloism) is an emergent discursive formation shaped by the efforts of the Adi, the Mising and other Tani tribes to revive, reform and improvise their ancestral ethical practices since the 1980s. Donyipolo is the name given to an omniscient and omnipotent force that catalyzes the formation of the material world in Tani cosmologies. Shweta examines how the revivalists reimagine religiosity in and through their efforts to rebuild their relationship with Donyipolo. Image: photo taken by Shweta on the way to Majuli from Jorhat by boat. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kim talks with Mercedes Trigos about eugenics. Mercedes references Francis Galton, who coined the term, preimplantation genetic profiling, and the failures of our ordinary progress narratives. If you are interested in reading more about the subject check out: -Alexandra Minna Stern, Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America, University of California Press, 2015 -Daniel Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity, Harvard UP, 1998 -Nancy Leys Stepan, “The Hour of Eugenics” Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America, Cornell UP, 1991 Kim and Mercedes organized an panel on “Eugenics and the Body” at the Modern Language Association Convention in January 2021. If you attended the conference and held onto your registration ID, you can watch a video of the panel on the MLA website, and learn more about the history and legacy of eugenic thought. Mercedes is a sixth-year PhD candidate at New York University’s English Department. Her work focuses on racialization, sex, and sexuality in Chicanx and Latinx studies. This week’s image is the root system of the Dicotyledoneae Asteraceae herb. For the Deleuze scholars and botanists in the room, it is an example of root phenotypic plasticity: a primary root which becomes tap root and lateral roots. This image is in the public domain. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Saronik talks to Tuhin Chakrabarty about the creative processes of Artificial Intelligence, what we can expect from it, and how to keep the results fair. (Saronik messes up the word GPT-3 twice!) Reading List: GPT3 Creativity When AI Falls in Love, GPT-3 Creative Fiction, Are You Ready for NaNoWriMo? Papers/Posts on Computational Creativity Generating Similes Like a Pro, Content Planning for Neural Story Generation, Reverse, Retrieve, and Rank for Sarcasm Generation , The Comedian is in the Machine Music and Art Google Magenta Creating Image from Text Dall-E, Creative Text Generation Bias in Language Models Stereoset measures Racism, Sexism, and other Forms of Bias in AI Language Models, Towards Controllable Biases in Language Generation, The Woman worked as a Babysitter, Timnit Gebru’s thread about Google firing her, RealToxicityPrompts, Measuring and Reducing Gendered Correlations in Pre-trained Models Bias in Poetry Investigating Societal Biases in a Poetry Composition System AI Poetry Google’s New AI Helps You Write Poetry like Poe, Generating Topical Poetry Academic Venues Computational Creativity, Machine Learning for Creativity and Design Image: created using Dall-E Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kim talks with Chad Hegelmeyer about the institutional turn in literary studies. Chad references Jeremy Rosen’s article “The Institutional Turn” from the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature. We also talk about: Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (Harper Collins, 1963), D.A. Miller’s The Novel and the Police (U California Press, 1989), Nancy Armstrong’s How Novels Think (Columbia UP, 2006), Mark McGurl’s The Program Era (Harvard UP, 2011), and Janice Radway’s books, Reading the Romance (UNC Press, 1984) and A Feeling for Books (UNC Press, 1997). Chad quotes several texts referenced by Rosen: Franco Moretti’s Signs Taken for Wonders: On the Sociology of Literary Forms (Verso, 2005) Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Cornell UP, 1982) Mark McGurl. “Ordinary Doom: Literary Studies in the Waste Land of the Present.” New Literary History 41, no. 2 (Spring 2010): 329–349. In the longer version of our conversation, Chad gave several other examples of the “institutional turn” including: James F. English, The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value (Harvard UP, 2005); Claire Squires, Marketing Literature: The Making of Contemporary Writing in Britain (Palgrave, 2007); John B. Thompson, Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century (Polity, 2010); Laura J. Miller, Reluctant Capitalists: Bookselling and the Culture of Consumption (U Chicago Press, 2008); Jim Collins Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture (Duke UP, 2010). Chad is a friend of the pod! He writes about fact checking and literature, and he’s a postdoc in the English Department at NYU. Today’s image is a photograph of the “Staircase of the National Museum of Slovenia” taken by Petar Milošević, posted under a creative commons attribution share-alike license on Wikimedia Commons. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of High Theory, Neil Safier talks with us about the Plantationocene, a geological epoch that traces the effects of climate change to the historical systems of human and nonhuman environmental exploitation known as plantation agriculture. It is another name for the world we currently inhabit. In the episode, Neil describes how Donna Harraway and Anna Tsing invented the term Plantationocene in response to another recent term Anthropocene. Sources to check out include Donna Haraway’s essay, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationcene, Chthulucene: Making Kin” Environmental Humanities 6 no. 1 (2015): 159-165. doi: 10.1215/22011919-3615934, and Paul Crutzen, “The ‘Anthropocene’” Earth Systems Science in the Anthropocene ed. Eckhart Ehlers and Thomas Krafft (Springer, 2006) pp. 13-18. He references B.F. Skinner’s novel Walden Two (MacMillan, 1962) at the end of our conversation. Neil Safier is Associate Professor in the Department of History at Brown University where he currently serves as Director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies of the Watson Institute for International Affairs. He studies the history of science, agriculture, and other forms of knowledge-making in the late-eighteenth-century Atlantic world, focusing on the plantation cultures of the Caribbean and Brazil. He was recently the director of the John Carter Brown Library, at Brown University, and many years ago, when he was more optimistic about the current global epoch, he managed grants for the Sierra Club Foundation in San Francisco, California. He is the author of Measuring the New World: Enlightenment Science and South America (U Chicago, 2008) and is cooking up two new projects, on the historical connections between natural science and plantation agriculture in the Amazon River basin and the global history of collecting. The image for this week comes from Neil’s research on the history of plantation agriculture. This drawing of a plantation from Hispaniola (Saint-Domingue) was reproduced in José Mariano da Conceição Velozo's Fazendeiro do Brazil Tome III Part II (Lisbon, 1799), in the volume dedicated to coffee production. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Saronik talks with Manish Melwani about outdated visions of the future and stale science fiction ideas that just won’t die. Manish is a Singaporean writer of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. He attended the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop in 2014, and then completed a master’s thesis at NYU entitled Starports, Portals and Port Cities: Science Fiction and Fantasy in Empire’s Wake. (That’s where he met Saronik.) Manish has published several short stories, with several more—and a novel—on the way. They talk about science fiction’s imperialist heritage and how going to Mars is just a distraction from the imaginative (and literal) dead end our civilization faces. They also throw shade on Cecil Rhodes and certain tech moguls who have completely missed the point of Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels. Manish’s perspective has been shaped by many other writers and theorists including: John Rieder’s work on Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction, Samuel R. Delany’s seminal essays, Alec Nevala-Lee’s Astounding, a group biography of John W. Campbell and other figures from the Golden Age of science fiction, and Kim Stanley Robinson’s recent climate sci-fi oeuvre. Further reading includes Joanna Russ’s We Who Are About To, Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future, Chen Qiufan’s The Waste Tide, Malka Older’s Centenal Cycle, Glass and Gardens: Solarpunk Summers edited by Sarena Ulibarri, and Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Eco-Speculation edited by Phoebe Wagner and Brontë Christopher Wieland. Image created by Saronik Bosu using open source vectors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Saronik interviews Kim about intersectionality, a concept developed by Kimberlé Crenshaw. Kim references two essays by Crenshaw in the episode: one that she read, and one that our previous podcast guest, Chad Hegelmeyer taught. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (July 1991) https://www.jstor.org/stable/1229039 (Kim read this one) “Demarginalizing the Intersections of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum Iss. 1 (1989) https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/uclf/vol1989/iss1/8/ (Chad taught this one) Kim recommends that you read the latter. This week’s image is a painting by Alma Thomas, titled “Light Blue Nursery” (1968). The image is made available under a Creative Commons license by the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kim talks with Sonya Posmentier about hurricanes. Sonya writes about hurricanes and diaspora in her book, Cultivation and Catastrophe: The Lyric Ecology of Modern Black Literature, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017. In the episode she references Kamau Brathwaite’s essay “The History of the Voice” and Rob Nixon’s book Slow Violence, Harvard University Press, 2011. She also talks about a genre of Jamaican dancehall music that grew in the wake of Hurricane Gilbert in 1988. To hear some of that music and learn more about the musical resonances of hurricanes, you can read her “Hurricane Season Playlist” on the Johns Hopkins University Press blog. Sonya teaches African American literature in the English Department at New York University (where she is an excellent dissertation advisor for literary scholars and future podcasters). This week’s image of a spiral evoking hurricane wind patterns was borrowed from Wikimedia Commons. Creative commons license, CC By Share Alike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Saronik talks to Kim about Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson’s seminal 2013 book Border as Method, Or, the Multiplication of Labor, where they use the concept and ubiquity of border and border-thinking for political innovation. Other works touched upon are Biju Matthew’s Taxi!: Cabs and Capitalism in New York City, The Communist Manifesto, and Kenichi Omae’s The Borderless World. The image is from the cover of Taxis as Public Transport: A Bibliography, published in 1979 by the US Department of Transportation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kim talks with Margaret Nash about settler colonialism. Margaret Nash is an Emeritus Professor in the Graduate School of Education at the University of California Riverside. You can watch her explain her research on settler colonialism and land grant universities in her talk: “An Unacknowledged Legacy.“ Her recent article “Entangled Pasts: Land-Grant Colleges and American Indian Dispossession” Higher Education Quarterly 59 No. 4 (November 2019) examines the long reach of settler colonialism in US Higher Education. In the episode, Margaret references a book of political theory by Adam Dahl, titled Empire of the People: Settler Colonialism and the Foundations of Modern Democratic Thought. The image is taken from the cover of a 1992 booklet on HIV Prevention in Native American Communities Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kim talks with Michelle Rada about the death drive in psychoanalysis. Michelle references Todd McGowan’s Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis, University of Nebraska Press, 2013. She also recommends Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets, by Todd McGowan. In our longer conversation, she also quoted, What IS Sex? by Alenka Zupančič, MIT Press, 2017. She also recommends a special issue of differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies on “Constructing the Death Drive.” This issue includes an article by Luce Cantin, “The Drive, the Untreatable Quest of Desire” which she discusses in the epidsode. Michelle thinks the whole issue is worth checking out, and especially recommends the article in there by Tracy McNulty as well, “Unbound: The Speculative Mythology of the Death Drive” and the piece by Willy Apollon, “Psychoanalysis and the Freudian Rupture.” She also highly recommends Life and Death in Psychoanalysis by Jean Laplanche (Johns Hopkins UP, 1976), which really informs her understanding of the economics/psychic structure of the drive, and of course….Beyond the Pleasure Principle by Sigmund Freud. And “On Narcissism: An Introduction,” Freud’s 1914 essay on primary/secondary narcissism. Michelle Rada is a PhD candidate in English at Brown University and Affiliated Faculty at Emerson College. Her research is on modernist aesthetics, form, the novel, and psychoanalysis. Michelle’s work has appeared in Room One-Thousand, The Comparatist, The James Joyce Quarterly, The Journal of Beckett Studies, and The Journal of Modern Literature. She is Senior Assistant Editor at differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kim talks to Rebecca Falkoff about hoarding. Her book on hoarding, Possessed, will be coming out with Cornell University press in April of 2021. In the episode, she references Giorgio Agamben’s Stanze: La parola e il fantasma nella cutltura occidentale, translated into English as Stanzas: Words and Phantasm in Western Culture. by Ronald L. Martinez (University of Minnesota Press, 1993). And Arjun Appadurai’s essay, “Mediants, Materiality, Normativity.” Public Culture 27 no. 2 (2015) doi: 10.1215/08992363-2841832 Rebecca is an assistant professor of Italian studies at NYU. She also has a blog on hoarding that you might want to check out: https://ifiwereahoarder.com/ The image is the future cover of Possessed. Painting by Carey Lin, Untitled (Screen shot 2009-10-19 at 1.20.48), 2011, Oil on canvas, 15 x 22 in. from the series Hardly nothing to do without Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Angelina Eimannsberger talks to Saronik about cultural phenomenon Jonathan Van Ness, and movements in queer femininity that they represent. They touch briefly on Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, Jean Genet’s Notre Dame des Fleurs, Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider, Janet Mock’s Redefining Realness, and the hashtag #transisbeautiful inaugurated by Laverne Cox. They also talk about Michel Foucault’s interview “Friendship as a Way of Life“. Angelina and Saronik had a post-recording conversation about the activistic work that JVN does. On that note, here is a list of organizations they support, and that you can support too: Planned Parenthood, RAINN, Phoenix House, The Trevor Project, National Coalition of Anti Violence Programs, Advocates for Youth, GLSEN, Peer Health Exchange, ASPCA. The image for this episode is a frame titled “Flowering Tree” by the fin de siècle English artist Aubrey Beardsley. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

An excerpt from Kim’s conversation with Elaine Freedgood on commodity fetishism that didn’t make it into the original episode. Elaine references Louis Althusser and Slavoj Žižek on ideology; Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Cornell UP: 1981; and Claude Levi Strauss’s work on Caduveo body painting (which seems to have been published in the surrealist magazine VVV in 1942 and is very hard to find on the internet — see Luciana Martins ‘Resemblances to archaeological finds’: Guido Boggiani, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Caduveo body painting” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 2014. DOI:10.1080/13569325.2017.1309317.) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of High Theory, Erin Pineda talks about decolonizing praxis. Black American activists in the 1950s and 1960s used strategies of civil disobedience and nonviolent direct action as part of a broader anticolonial movement, and reading their story in an international context can help us rethink the narrative of the US civil rights movement enshrined in American political theory. In the episode Erin references Jack Halberstam’s concept of “low theory” which derives from the work of Stuart Hall, and appears in the book, The Queer Art of Failure (Duke UP 2011). She also references several mainstream liberal political philosophers who set the terms of the debate about “civil disobedience” in the US academy in the 1970s, John Rawls Theory of Justice (Harvard UP, 1971), Hugo Bedau, “On Civil Disobedience” (Journal of Philosophy 58, no. 21 (1961): 653-665) and Carl Cohen, Civil Disobedience: Conscience, Tactics, and the Law (Columbia University Press, 1971). Pineda writes against this tradition. The American activists she studies developed a different set of theoretical commitments to civil disobedience that are a bit less polite, and have a bit more potential for actual revolution. Erin Pineda is the Phyllis Cohen Rappaport ’68 New Century Term Professor of Government at Smith College. She teaches courses in the history of political thought, democratic theory, race and politics, social movements and American political thought. Her research interests include the politics of protest and social movements, Black political thought, race and politics, radical democracy and 20th-century American political development. If you want to learn more about the topics she discusses in this episode, read her book! It’s called Seeing Like an Activist: Civil Disobedience and the Civil Rights Movement (Oxford UP, 2021). The image for this episode is a famous photograph of Black student Elizabeth Eckford being jeered by white student Hazel Bryan as she attempts to enter Little Rock Central High School, taken by Will Counts on 4 September 1957, one of the more famous images of school desegregation from the US Civil Rights Movement. This digital version came from wikimedia commons. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kim talks with Elaine Freedgood about Karl Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism. The concept comes from: Karl Marx, Capital Vol. 1, translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, edited by Frederick Engels, 1887, available on marxists.org Other texts mentioned: -Peter Stallybrass, “Marx’s Coat” in Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces, edited by Patricia Spyer, Routledge, 1998. -Rosalind Morris and Daniel Leonard, The Returns of Fetishism: Charles de Brosses and the Afterlives of an Idea. University of Chicago Press, 2017. In the longer version of our conversation we talked about: -Tamara Ketabgian, The Lives of Machines: The Industrial Imaginary in Victorian Literature and Culture. University of Michigan Press, 2011. -Frederick Engels, The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844. Translated by ---Florence Kelley Wischnewetzky. London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1852. Internet Archive. -And Elaine’s book, The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel. University of Chicago Press, 2006. Elaine is super cool. She studies Victorian Literature and teaches in the English Department at NYU. Image borrowed from archive.org. If this image is under copyright, please inform us and we will remove it promptly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Huzaifa Omair Siddiqi talks about the idea of debt, mainly with respect to the book by David Graeber on its history. This episode is dedicated to his memory. Huzaifa is a doctoral candidate at the Department of English, Jawaharlal Nehru University, working on speculative materialism. He has written on several subjects including Graeber’s work. The image is that of the Cone of Urukagina, which has the first recorded instance of the word ‘freedom’ (‘amargi’). In his book, Graeber talks about this record as one of several issued periodically by Sumerian kings to “declare all outstanding consumer debt null and void…, return all land to its original owners, and allow all debt-peons to return to their families”. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode Kim and Chad talk about Julia Kristeva’s theory of “intertextuality.” Chad references Chapter 3 of Kristeva’s book Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, Translated by Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez, (Columbia UP 1980). The last quote (the permanent revolt one) is from Chapter 15, “Europhilia-Europhobia,” of Kristeva’s Intimate Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis, Translated by Jeanie Herman, (Columbia UP, 2002). Chad Hegelmeyer is a postdoc in English at NYU. He wrote a dissertation about fact checking! The Capybara still stands, proudly, in place of Chad. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Kim and Saronik discuss Roland Barthes’ essay “The Death of the Author” printed in Image Music Text, translated by Stephen Heath, New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. The image for this week is plate three from Jules Morel, Manuel d’Anatomie Artistique. Paris: Grand, 1877. Medical Heritage Library Collections on Internet Archive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

John Linstrom talks about the ecosphere, a way of understanding the world deriving principally from the work of ecologist and philosopher Stan Rowe. We also refer briefly to James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, crown shyness in trees, Aldo Leopold’s idea of a ‘land community’, Wendell Berry’s The Way of Ignorance and knowledge humility. John Linstrom is a 7th year Ph.D. Candidate at the Department of English, New York University., and series editor of The Liberty Hyde Bailey Library for the Comstock Publishing Associates imprint of Cornell University Press. The image for this episode is that of red-blue-and-green sea anemones. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kim talks with Pardis about Theodor Adorno’s concept of the autonomous work of art, as articulated in his Aesthetic Theory, and The Dialectic of Enlightenment (with help from Max Horkheimer). Pardis Dabashi is an assistant professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno, where she specializes in 20th-Century literature and Film studies. Starbucks Christmas Blend is one of her many guilty pleasures. Adorno would be upset. Image source: Witches dancing in forest, in the Compedium Maleficarum of Francesco Mario Guazzo, published in 1608. Available on Wikimedia Commons. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Kim talks with Saronik about the game “Fort / Da” — a game played by Sigmund Freud’s grandson in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, (which you can borrow from the amazing Internet Archive). Our cover image comes from another text on Internet Archive, in the Medical Heritage Library’s collection: Die Suggestion und ihre Heilwirkung, written by Hippolyte Bernheim and Sigmund Freud in 1888. The image appears on page 330. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Saronik talks with Diane Enobabor about Afropessimism and Afrofuturism. Diane is a Ph.D. student at The Graduate Center at CUNY. She studies Black Geographies, social movements, borders, critical theory and migration. Reading List: -Diane’s recent article “A Call for Mourning: How To Adapt to Our American Ruins” -Frank B. Wilderson III, Afropessimism. Norton, 2020. -Afro-pessimism: An Introduction. Racked & Dispatched, 2017. Available online for free. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode Kim and Saronik discuss Bruno Latour’s essay, “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.” Critical Inquiry 30 (Winter 2004): 225-248. Image source: M. Platen, The New Curative Treatment of Disease: Handbook of Hygienic Rules of Life, Health Culture, and the Cure of Ailments Without the Aid of Drugs… London : Bong & Co., 1893, p. 668 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Saronik asks Chad about narrators in fiction, and life, who cannot be trusted – their quirks, productive unreliabilities, their effect on present politics, the works! We talk around Wayne C. Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chad Hegelmeyer is a postdoc in English at NYU. His current project is sunbathing while reading Hannah Arendt. The Capybara stands, proudly, in place of Chad. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of High Theory, Matthew Kirschenbaum talks about txt, or text. Not texting, or textbooks, but text as a form of data that is feeding large language models. Will the world end in fire, flood, or text? In the full interview, Matthew recommended Tim Maughan’s novel Infinite Detail (Macmillan, 2019) as an excellent example of writing about the end of the internet, and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (Knopf, 2014) as a positive example of a post-internet apocalypse. In the episode he references a paper by Beder et al., “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?” FAccT '21: Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (March 2021): 610–623. And several apocalyptic scenarios, including the dead internet theory and the gray goo hypothesis. Matthew Kirschenbaum is Distinguished University Professor of English and Digital Studies at the University of Maryland and Director of the Graduate Certificate in Digital Studies. His books include Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing (Harvard UP 2016) and Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (MIT Press, 2008). With Kari Kraus, he co-founded and co-directs BookLab, a makerspace, studio, library, and press devoted to what is surely our discipline's most iconic artifact, the codex book. See mkirschenbaum.net or follow him on Twitter (or X?) as @mkirschenbaum for more. Because we are hoping to encourage the text apocalypse, we made today’s image using generative AI. Specifically Saronik made it using the prompt “Text” in Canva’s AI interface. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Kim finds out that Saronik gets a little weird when it comes to dogs. We talk about Donna J. Haraway’s book The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Haraway studies methods (and practitioners) of agility training in order to try and figure out what these praxes that bring together nature and culture, by means of which humans relate with species they have evolved with. Saronik is waiting to meet Miles, Kim’s amazing Newfie. Below, you can see him with Toby. He met Toby on two occasions a year apart, at the same cafe in Bushwick, completely by accident. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode Saronik asks Kim about the aura. The idea comes from Walter Benjamin’s 1935 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Besides the central text, the episode references Benjamin’s 1940 essay, “On the Concept of History” in which the Angel of History appears. We also talk about Oscar Wilde’s 1891 essay “The Soul of Man Under Socialism.” And make a passing mention of the British artist Banksy. The image is a photograph that Kim took of a painting of peaches in an art museum in Amsterdam. She forgets artist and title of the painting, and would welcome reminders from listeners. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to High Theory! High Theory is a podcast in which we get high on the substance of theory. And we ask the three standard questions, to each other, and our guests. We invite you to listen and learn, and think critically! This podcast comes at difficult ideas from the academy with irreverence. Wikipedia says that “critical theory” is “the reflective assessment and critique of society and culture in order to reveal and challenge power structures,” which suggests a rather serious subject, but we think theory is hardly dense and somber and sober. In these times, we need to love, and finding the buzz of curiosity and delight in critical thinking, we want to bring that joy to you. We aim to distill some solid points from our ramblings. We are looking at theory differently, and making pretty wild connections. Like maybe having and loving a dog will make you a better activist. Or hating on Humbert Humbert might help you sift through fake news. If you have an idea you would like us to talk about, let us know! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of High Theory, Margaret Galvan talks about the queer politics of Visibility. In her work the activist practices of representation take concrete form in comic books, photographs, and even drawings on lecture slides! In the episode, she discusses the photography of Nan Goldin and queer comic books in the 1980s. She quotes Adrienne Rich’s 1980 essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” She also references This Bridge Called My Back: Writings By Radical Women of Color, and Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera. At the end of the episode she references the Lesbian Avengers, who have amazing images. Margaret Galvan is an assistant professor of English at the University of Florida. Her research examines how visual culture operates within the print media of feminist and queer social movements of the 1970s-1990s. Her brand new book In Visible Archives: Queer and Feminist Visual Culture in the 1980s, is out this fall from University of Minnesota Press‘s Manifold Scholarship Series. You should go check it out! Because the amazing images Margaret talks about were drawn recently, they’re still in copyright. Our image this week is from Gladys Parker’s comic Mopsy which ran from 1937 to 1966. Parker was a successful female artist in a world of mainstream US comic books dominated by men. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices