Program in Comparative Literature
From the soulful tones and timbres in Liniker’s music (Brazil), to the electronic, hip hop, rap, funk, and pop references of Linn da Quebrada and Jup do Bairro (Brazil), Judas (Portugal) and Titica (Angola), dissident formations of Lusophone popular music map a terrain of acoustic and embodied resonances that escape the cisheteronormative and patriarchal discourses undergirding demarcations of Luso-Afro-Brazilian cultures. Gendered conventions, disciplinary rigors, and geopolitical divides muddle their reception. How do we hear their voices and performances? How can we better attune ourselves to their expressive repertoires? How might we listen to them in concert with one another? What do we hear when we perceive their repertoires as constitutive of a queer Lusophone acoustic terrain? As an introduction to my forthcoming book, Trans Tessituras: Listening for Black Queer Lusophone Diasporas, I propose trans tessituras as a mode and an analytic of expression and a wily musicology to discern the material and affective terrain of resonance and embodiment formative for nonnormative lives and desires lived and expressed in Lusophone contexts. Trans tessituras – transgressive vocal, acoustic, and compositional registers – reveal how these performances are deeply rooted in local terrains even as they move in and out of diasporic Lusophone and non-Lusophone constellations of subjectivity and expression. They map dissident formations and queer arrangements at play in contesting long-enduring silences, and they require a recalibration of measures – a wilier musicology – to discern the worlds and desires that coalesce around them.
Jerusalem within Athens: The Theological Substratum of Derrida's 'Plato's Pharmacy'
Through the juxtaposition of the Indian-English, Hindi, and Tamil literary spheres, this talk argues for a focus on how writers and texts perform acts of “worlding,” rather than defining which texts belong in the global literary canon, as contemporary scholarship has done. Such acts mobilize “world literature” to define certain texts as “literary,” while simultaneously concealing other existing literary processes and social relations.
From Caitlyn Jenner to Laverne Cox, transgender people have rapidly gained public visibility, contesting many basic assumptions about what gender and embodiment mean. The vibrant discipline of Trans Studies explores such challenges in depth, building on the insights of queer and feminist theory to raise provocative questions about the relationships among gender, sexuality, and accepted social norms.
Two recent stage productions—Clifford Odets’s Awake and Sing, performed by the National Asian American Theater Company and New Yiddish Rep’s presentation of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman in Yiddish translation—employ provocative performance interventions to problematize notions of the Jewishness of these plays’ characters and narratives.
Caroline Godart will be discussing new book: The Dimensions of Difference Space, Time and Bodies in Women’s Cinema and Continental Philosophy. Caroline Godart is a Scientific Collaborator at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB).
