Getting DEEP

Jefferson Journal of Psychiatry, 1988

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2008

program in American Studies and the Graduate Faculty of the University of Kansas in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

A NOTE FROM THE EDITOR: Previous issues of The St. John’s University Humanities Review mainly focused on book reviews, essays, and interviews. With this issue, I wanted to do something different, so I also asked for personal stories and essays that answered the question: How do you define and/or use the humanities as activism? In the middle of May of 2016, when I was asked to edit this issue of the journal, I said yes. But what I didn’t say was that I truly didn’t want to do it, and that I didn’t think that I was capable of doing it. This was because I felt that I had nothing new to say about the humanities that had not already been said ad nauseam. Then, in June, 49 people were killed at the LGBTQ nightclub, Pulse, on “Latin Night,” in Orlando, Florida. And I knew that homophobia shot those bullets. Then, in July, two more Black men—Philando Castile and Alton Sterling—were killed by the police. And I knew that racism shot those bullets. For me, it was a summer of attending vigils and protests. And I observed that the various disciplines of the arts and humanities were explicitly being utilized as activism in the streets at these vigils and protests. Specific language on protest signs. Writers reading poems at rallies. Performance artists theatrically marching. Etc. The summer of 2016 proved the value of the humanities. Nothing more to debate! This idea of the humanities as activism is not a new one for me because for many years, in my own work, I have been connecting the two. But I noticed that it was obvious that others realized that the two were inextricable. And that was when I knew that I had something new to say about the humanities, and that I would use this issue to say it. And then Trump won the election. One of the many wonderful things that feminism taught me was that the personal is political. I chose the theme of “The Humanities As Activism” for this issue of the journal because it is personal. It truly is that simple. I believe that in order to improve our current social-political problems, we must make use of the humanities as activism. The arts and humanities must be utilized as agents of change. As I edit this issue, I keep re-reading two of Dorothy Allison’s essays (for inspiration): “Believing in Literature,” in which she tells us that “literature should push people to change the world”; and “Survival Is the Least of My Desires,” in which she writes: “I became convinced that to survive I would have to re-make the world so that it came closer to matching its own ideals.” I think that it is time that all of us start to re-make this cruel world. And I think that the contributors in this issue of the journal agree with me; they, too, are trying to re-make this world. What you are about to read are forceful pieces that demand and deserve the same attention that we would give to any energizing speech at a protest rally. So, with your fists up, voices screaming, and feet marching, I hope that you enjoy the journey and movement that is this issue of The St. John’s University Humanities Review. The revolution is coming and it is documented in this journal. In solidarity, Michael Carosone, Editor New York City, May 2017 Dedicated to the activists, artists, humanists, scholars, and writers, to the oppressed and marginalized, to the victims. Dedicated to revealing the truth. “The arts [humanities], it has been said, cannot change the world, but they may change human beings who might change the world.” –Maxine Greene

Talk at Scholars' Week Luncheon, accepting MSU Alumni Association Distinguished Researcher Award, 2012

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means-electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other-except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. a c k n o w l e d g m e n t s Many people have helped bring this book into existence. I am grateful to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak for her great generosity and for mentoring me over the years, and I thank Bruce Robbins and Carol Jacobs as well for their continued support of my work. Conversations with Benjamin Conisbee Baer, Nicholas Boggs, Rosalind Galt, Jeff Gatrall, Jeannie Im, Heather Lukes, Mina Rajagopolan, Lily Saint, and Penny Vlagopoulos enabled me to reframe earlier ideas and move forward in new directions. These true and lasting friends have also offered invaluable comments on argument, structure, and style throughout the research and writing processes. Colleagues and students at the various institutions at which I have taught while developing the book have been a source of intellectual inspiration and growth. The students in the graduate seminars I led at New York University's John W. Draper Master's Program in the Humanities and Social Thought and at Oklahoma State University helped me reformulate my uses of the concepts of testimony and trauma so as to engage more effectively the ethics and politics of the literatures I examine. In the English department at OSU, Linda Austen and Martin Wallen read early drafts and offered not only incisive comments but much encouragement along the way. They, Brian Price, and Meghan Sutherland provided an intellectual and social haven for testing out my ideas and challenging them. Colleagues in the English Department at Georgetown have offered advice at other stages in the book's development. The members of our junior faculty writing group helped me hone my articulations of interventions I hope to make. Lori Merish and Ricardo Ortiz guided me through institutional thickets while reading drafts. My Georgetown colleagues Nathan Hensley, Caetlin Benson-Allot, and x Acknowledgments Samantha Pinto, as well as colleagues working outside of Georgetown, Sangeeta Ray, Peter Kalliney, and Seth Perlow, were kind and careful readers of different chapters. Their comments helped me improve each one of these. I am grateful to the editors and editorial staff at Fordham University Press for their help in transforming the manuscript into a book. I thank Helen Tartar for supporting the project. Helen died a week after she had fi nalized the approval that put the book under contract; her untimely death was a blow to her family and friends, of course, but also to the many authors who have worked with her over the years and to the readers who have learned so much from that work. I thank Tom Lay and Richard Morrison for taking on the project at different points to guide it toward publication. I am indebted to the anonymous readers for their comments and suggestions. I am grateful to Fordham's managing editor, Eric Newman, and I also thank my student Samantha Reid for her care with the source-checking process. All errors that remain are of course my own. Earlier versions of pieces of two chapters appeared in journals. I thank Twentieth-Century Literature and College Literature for permissions to reprint these. I also thank Georgetown University for awarding me a grant-in-aid to help fund the publication of the book. My family has been an enduring source of support and joy even (or especially) when the writing process has been its most challenging. Mark, Dee Dee, and Declan enrich my life by helping me see the world differently and do so often in hilarious ways. Topher Lundell has been a singular companion whose patience, wit, and humor are unparalleled. I am grateful that he has always been game when the possibility of pursuing my career involved moving across many states during a relatively short span of time. Finally, I dedicate this book to my parents, Helen Morrissey Rizzuto and Thomas Rizzuto, whose creativity and curiosity continually inspire me and whose love, support, and friendship made it possible. Insurgent Testimonies 1 i n t r o d u c t i o n Challenging Ruptures Testimonial Insurgencies, Spectral Witnesses To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it "the way it really was.". .. It means to seize hold of a memory as it fl ashes up at a moment of danger.-w a l t e r b e n j a m i n , "Theses on the Philosophy of History" In this book, I examine how British, Caribbean, and African Anglophone writing elaborates an ethics and politics of witnessing events in imperial modernity that generated crises in historical memory. 1 During the second half of the nineteenth century and the fi rst half of the twentieth, insurgencies erupted in imperial states and colonies around the world, including Britain's. At the time of such confl icts, England was confronting social and political unrest within its borders, undergoing cultural and economic shifts accompanying the growth and decline of empire, participating in geopolitical realignments of Europe and the global "East" and "West," and fi ghting in world wars. Britain relied on legislation, trials, changes in policing, and extraordinary techniques such as indefi nite detention and torture to restore or maintain order while also attempting to protect cherished narratives of national cohesion and imperial benevolence that would secure it from charges of totalitarianism and barbarism leveled at other imperial powers. The writings collected here depict these historical events and their after effects as 2 Introduction traumas that compromise such narratives. Such events are traumatic not only because they caused great pain, both physical and psychological, to individuals but because they brought to crisis representations of collective pasts, called into question the conceptual and affective underpinnings of nations, and challenged the legitimacy of empires. The fi ction and nonfi ction I consider orchestrate testimonies to insurgencies, wars, and varied forms of social and political agitation while engaging cultural, state, legal, and literary discourses that sought to control them. But these works also orchestrate testimony as insurgent, in the narrow and general senses of the word. As such, testimony disrupts established orders, is not institutionally recognized, rises up and overfl ows borders, and is diffi cult to contain. Insurgent Testimonies draws into constellation works from different nations and literary-historical periods to analyze how testimony crosses and displaces boundaries between literary, legal, documentary, and autobiographical domains and thereby interrupts the dominant representations of colonial history these works also often ratify, indeed reinforce. My aim is not to offer a comprehensive survey of testimony to trauma in twentieth-century Anglophone literature but to construct a particular genealogy of witnessing as it intersects with moments in which the stability of nations and empires as economic, cultural, and social formations were perceived to be under heightened threat. The cause of the threat is different in each of the works I consider, but in every case it is fundamentally connected to anticolonial struggle. These diverse struggles were both "successful" and "unsuccessful," some organized and sustained under the mantle of national liberation, others sporadic and unlinked to claims for national sovereignty. Each struggle was also coterminous with other intranational and international confl icts whose structural relationship to them, these texts indicate, was often obscured. Viewed together, the writing of the Ukrainian-born Joseph Conrad, the Anglo-Irish Rebecca West, the Jamaicans H. G. de Lisser and V. S. Reid, and the Kenyan Ngũ gi wa Thiong'o testify to contested events in colonial modernity in ways that question premises underlying approaches to trauma in modernist studies and trauma and memory studies. Their modes of witnessing also invite us to reassess divisions and classifi cations in literary studies that generate such categories as modernist, colonial, postcolonial, national, and world literatures. Critics working on trauma in modernist studies and those working in trauma and memory studies have tended to focus on the effects of what than dynamic or violent. Such arguments express a temporal imaginary that takes modernism at its word when it claims to "make it new" and a spatial imaginary that posits a gap between metropole and colonies. Others, however, have dispelled these mythic visions. Jay Winter argues that "the view that there was a 'modernist' moment in literary history, beginning in the 1860s, maturing before 1914, but coming of age after the Great War" is a dream of order; "to array the past in such a way is to invite distortion by losing a sense of its messiness, its non-linearity, its vigorous and stubbornly visible incompatibilities." 8 Modernist and Great War culture and literature did not exclusively perform a radical break with the past or abide by Ezra Pound's commandment to make it new. In mourning and rememoration, writers often availed themselves of earlier aesthetic techniques and practices, Winter asserts. The performance of testimony in Conrad's and West's works composed during the war illustrate that both authors do so. This performance also questions the ideology that situates modernism, and modernity, as rupture, an ideology that Fredric Jameson critiques and attributes to modernism's commentators and periodizers. Jameson contends that a dialectic of rupture and periodization restore the social and...

Interviews, 1974

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Studies in Engineering Education, 2021

Martin and Garza's (2020) article presented a commendable case for empowering marginalized students in engineering education research at a poignant moment in global history. Presenting the experiences of a Black woman navigating the consequences of structural educational barriers as Black Americans endured the consequences of structural injustices in health and law enforcement was quite compelling. This response extends the discussion of their work by engaging with two important questions: 1) What is autoethnography? and 2) How can White scholars support Black students without also reinforcing the benefits of White supremacy? Although these questions seem distinct-one focuses on the methodology, the other on the culture of scholarly practices-they represent a growing trend in engineering education research to use autoethnography as a way to present the voices of the marginalized. Because this trend has so much revolutionary potential, I provide some critical reflections on the culture of power in engineering education research and offer suggestions on how research practices can be healing-centered and power-shifting.

This is an autoethnographic account of a family's struggle to respond to a series of tragic losses and to fend off the encroaching shadow that descended on them in their grief. The story unfolds as a study of the redemptive power of story to penetrate the shadows of collective grief and speaks to the possibility of healing from tragedy through the fusion of dream and story into a new nexus of possibility.

Engaged Scholar Journal: Community-Engaged Research, Teaching, and Learning, 2017

In the Exchanges, we present conversations with scholars and practitioners of community engagement, responses to previously published material, and other reflections on various aspects of community-engaged scholarship meant to provoke further dialogue and discussion. In this issue, Natalia Khanenko-Friesen talks with Darrell McLaughlin of St. Thomas More College at the University of Saskatchewan. Darrell McLaughlin (PhD) is an Associate Dean at St. Thomas More College, University of Saskatchewan.