Return(s)
With the provocation of return we invite panelists’ meditations in any of a number of possible directions. Return suggests resumption and rootedness, with attendant notions of convention, propriety, and origin. If it is commonplace to invoke detour and routes to counter these conscripting tendencies (or to question the desire for “returning to normal” in a year that has starkly illuminated the inequities we have learned to live with) are there also registers of precarity that may make return inviting or comforting? How is the returnee potentially persecuted (forced out to “secure borders”) in one space, and/or welcomed back as privileged national subject in the other? Return transforms the space of presence into perpetual deferral, into a scene of waiting, an interregnum. Repatriated cultural artifacts press us to imagine imperial histories of violent accumulation as well as orders of value, as in the assessment of returns on an investment. Finally, if return also suggests that which perpetually haunts, the refusal of what has been violently disappeared to stay away, then what are the spiritual practices that either counter or invite such visitations? We invite panelists to think through these and other inflections with us.
Roundtable Participants:
Brandon Callender, Brandeis University
Brandon Callender specializes in black and queer literatures with a budding interest in board games and horror studies. He is interested in how black and queer writers, viewers, and players are able to find affirmation in subcultures, genres and spaces that often fail to acknowledge them. His current book project, "The Charge of the Other in Black Gay Men’s Literatures" examines eccentric expressions of desire and belonging that test the limits of respectability and solidarity.
Harleen Singh, Brandeis University
Harleen Singh is Associate Professor of South Asian Literature and Women's Studies. She and Sarah Lamb founded the South Asian Studies Program at Brandeis and Singh served as its Chair from 2007-2016. She is the faculty representative to the Board of Trustees at Brandeis. Her writing on novels from India and Pakistan, on Indian film, and book reviews on Hip-Hop music, sexuality, and feminism have been published in various leading journals. Her chapters on women warriors and South Asian women writers are included in seminal book collections. Her monograph, The Rani of Jhansi: Gender, History, and Fable in India (Cambridge, 2014), interprets the conflicting, mutable images of an historical icon as they change over time in literature, film, history, and popular culture. The book is in its second reprint and has been reviewed in The Telegraph, Economic and Political Weekly, The Book Review, BIBLIO, and South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies. Her interdisciplinary work in English, Hindi, Urdu, and Punjabi is focused on women, history, politics, and identity in literature and film. Her next book, Contemporary Debates in Postcolonial Feminism, is being published by Routledge in 2021. Her current book projects include a critical translation of Amrita Pritam's seminal partition novel Pinjar and a monograph titled Half an Independence: Women, Violence, and Modern Lives in India. Professor Singh is a recipient of the ACLS Burkhardt fellowship and was a resident fellow at the National Humanities Center.
Rinaldo Walcott, University of Toronto
Rinaldo Walcott is Professor of Black Diaspora Cultural Studies in the Women and Gender Studies Institute; and a member of the Graduate Program at the Institute of Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto. From 2002-2007 Rinaldo held the Canada Research Chair of Social Justice and Cultural Studies at OISE.
Rinaldo is the author of Black Like Who: Writing Black Canada (Insomniac Press, 1997 with a second revised edition in 2003); he is also the editor of Rude: Contemporary Black Canadian Cultural Criticism (Insomniac, 2000); Queer Returns: Essays on Multiculturalism, Diaspora and Black Studies (Insomniac, 2016). With Idil Abdillahi, he co-authored BlackLife: Post-BLM and the Struggle for Freedom (ARP Books, 2019). As well Rinaldo is the Co-editor with Roy Moodley of Counselling Across and Beyond Cultures: Exploring the Work of Clemment Vontress in Clinical Practice (University of Toronto Press, 2010).
Rinaldo’s teaching and research is in the area of Black diaspora cultural studies and postcolonial studies with an emphasis on questions of sexuality, gender, nation, citizenship and multiculturalism. As an interdisciplinary Black Studies scholar Rinaldo has published in a wide range of venues. His articles have appeared in journals and books, as well as popular venues like newspapers, magazines and online venues, as well as other forms of media. His most recent books the Long Emancipation: Moving Toward Black Freedom from Duke University Press, 2021; and On Property (Biblioasis, 2021 which was shortlisted for the Toronto Book Award). He was born in Barbados.
Shahla Talebi, Arizona State University
Shahla Talebi is a sociocultural anthropologist and is currently an Associate Professor of religious studies and the anthropology of religion of the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies at Arizona State University. Her book, Ghosts of Revolution: Rekindled Memories of Imprisonment in Iran (2011), won the 2011 Outstanding Academic Title Award given by Choice Magazine, and was the co-winner (Gold Medal) of the 2012 Independent Publisher Book Awards. Dr. Talebi’s work has also appeared in various academic journals, including and in edited book volumes. Her article on revolutions in recent Iranian history was published in the Oxford Handbook series in July 2018. She was the 2017-2018 Anthony E. Kaye fellow at National Humanities Center where she worked on her book about contested memories of martyrdom in post-revolutionary Iran.
Moderator: Faith Smith is an Associate Professor of African and Afro-American Studies and English at Brandeis University. Her research engages aesthetic strategies of writers and artists contending with the legacies of slavery and indentureship, feminist engagements with the state in the wake of globalization, and the resonance of archival histories of intimacy and loss in the present. She is completing "Strolling in the Ruins: The Caribbean’s Non-Sovereign Modern in the Early Twentieth Century," a reading of the imperial present just before the First World War. Another project, “Dread Intimacies,” examines sovereignty, intimacy and violence in twenty-first-century fiction and visual culture.
ABOUT FEMINISMS UNBOUND
This Consortium for Graduate Studies in Gender, Culture, Women, and Sexuality (GCWS) initiative, Feminisms Unbound, is an annual event series featuring debates that focus on feminist concerns, theories, and practices in this contemporary moment. This series is intended to foster conversations and community among Boston-area feminist intellectuals and activists. The series, in its open configuration, endeavors to allow the greatest measure of engagement across multiple disciplinary trajectories, and a full array of feminist investments.
The event organizers, who are also visiting scholars with the GCWS this year, are Elora Chowdhury (Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Chair of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at University of Massachusetts Boston), Faith Smith (Associate Professor of African and Afro-American Studies and English at Brandeis University), and Kareem Khubchandani (Mellon Bridge Assistant Professor in theDepartment of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies and the Program in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Tufts University). have programmed the events in this series.