Select Conferences
On Listening: Murmurs and the Topology of the Ear
Abstract: Listening is a complicated act that is often reduced to the function of receiving encoded messages. In this paper, I will explore and examine other functions of the ear that resist and yet are integral to meaning generation. In particular, I will bring the concept of “vestibularity,” as developed by Rizvana Bradley in Anteaesthetics (2023) and Hortense Spillers in “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: an American Grammar Book” (1987) with reference to black art and black feminine subjectivity respectively, into a conversation with Derrida’s examination of Tympan (eardrum), which is central for understanding how philosophy resists itself, in Margins of Philosophy (1982). The purpose of this study is to find a mode of attunement to different frequencies of sounds of protest that fall on the ear as murmurs and reverberate long after the meaning content of those sounds has been analyzed, discussed, debated, decimated, and digested. These murmurs that carry a specific charge of protest, and which resist the analytical functions noted above, are interlaced within the very materiality of the sounds but often remain undetected or are entirely undetectable. An attunement to these frequencies will make audible how we can resist the neutralization and reduction of protests to their base meaning. To this end, I will examine protest recordings, music by artists such as Nina Simone, James Baldwin’s radio recordings, and Franz Fanon’s “The Voice of Algeria” (1965), among other sources.
Learn More
“Extra-Poetics of the English Language in The Pole”
The Pole(s): Coetzee and Others, Research Seminar, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland
A Rootless Language
Novel Languages, Society for Novel Studies Biennial Conference, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina
The Epidermal Racial Schema and Psychoanalysis
LACK V Conference, Otterbein University, Columbus, Ohio
At the Limit of Form: Re-examining the Problematics of Form and Meaning in Coetzee’s Early Fiction
Dusklands at Fifty Conference, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa (Remote)
On Idleness in South Africa
Southern Concepts, American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) Annual Meeting, Chicago, Illinois
Photography, or the Form of Shame
Northeastern Modern Language Association (NeMLA), Baltimore, Maryland