Fashioning Critical Theory
by John E. Drabinski
Podcasted conversation on critical and literary theory, drawing on a range of theorists from Europe, the United States, Caribbean, and Latin America. Our title is drawn from Audre Lorde's essay "Poetry Is Not a Luxury," where she writes that poetry fashions a language where words do not yet exist. How does theory make words and world new, attuned, and embedded within inventive and inventing lived-experience, tradition, and cultural production?
Episodes
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Wynter and Quijano on Politics, Coloniality, and the Human
A discussion of Sylvia Wynter's essay "Toward the Sociogenic Principle" and Aníbal Quijano's "Coloniality of Power" essay, with particular attention to how each diagnoses the pathologies of the colonial relation, the world is buoys, and the kinds of racial and national identities it produces. How...
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Glissant on Difference, Opacity, Traces, and Creolization
A conversation about Édouard Glissant's work on creolization, with particular emphasis on how that conceptualization of relation emphasizes both the right to opacity and the necessity of cultural contact. What happens to concepts, to art, to expressive life when it is put in contact with...
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Celan, Levinas, and Derrida on Representation and the Unrepresentable
A discussion of Paul Celan's essay "The Meridian," along with companion pieces of Emmanuel Levinas. Claude Lanzmann, and Jacques Derrida, with particular focus on the poetic word's capacity to bring the deconstructive, dismantling, and interruptive function of absence in reckoning with traumatic...
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Spillers on Gender, Race, Naming, and Possibility
A discussion of Hortense Spillers' essay "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book," with particular emphasis on the critical possibilities opened up by her interrogation of naming, gender, and race after The Moynihan Report. What does the Report tell us about the status of the phrase...
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Kristeva on Abjection, Misogyny, and the Symbolic-Political Order
Long discussion of Julia Kristeva's The Powers of Horror, with special attention to how her theory of abjection informs political strategies of oppression and exploitation rooted in the body. Our discussion works through the conception of the abject and its relation to misogyny and patriarchal...
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Spivak on the Subaltern, Epistemic Violence, and Representation
A discussion of Gayatri Spivak's "Can the Subaltern Speak?," an essay that interrogates the discursive conditions of speaking and the coloniality of such conditions. We focus here on silence, withdrawal, and the refusal to enter into discourse as a form of resistance and ethics. In particular, we...
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Derrida on Origin, Supplement, and Deconstructive Practice
A discussion of Jacques Derrida's deconstructive practice, which seeks to identify "the supplement" to any origin story or set of claims in a text. What are the characteristics of this readerly practice? What motivates Derrida to make these kind of readerly, critical interventions? And where does...
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Morrison on Memory, Imagination, and Place
A discussion of a cluster of Toni Morrison's non-fiction pieces concerned with gender, memory, and the imagination. We explore the relation between Morrison's meditations and our previous conversations about place and memory, in particular how transcendence is brought to sites through memory-work...
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Murray and Ellison on Blues, Memory, Embodiment, and the Origins of Tradition
This podcast is bookended by musical pieces by Arthur Cooper, Malaco Records recording artist and great grandfather of participant and University of Maryland doctoral student Timmy R. Bridgeman. A conversation about Albert Murray's The Hero and the Blues and two essays by Ralph Ellison, "Living...
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On Heidegger, Dwelling, Art, and the Fourfold
A process piece reflecting on our discussion of two essays by Martin Heidegger, "The Origin of the Work of Art" (1936) and "Building, Dwelling, Thinking" (1951), with particular emphasis on how he rethinks the object of art and our sense of place. Heidegger's essays attend to the experience of...
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Violence, Love, and Influence in Bloom and Senghor
Discussion of Harold Bloom's 1973 book The Anxiety of Influence, with attention to the limits of the book and also how a perversion or transformation of revisionary ratios might provide insight into anti- and even post-colonial literature and cultural production. In particular, we discuss how...
About this show
Podcasted conversation on critical and literary theory, drawing on a range of theorists from Europe, the United States, Caribbean, and Latin America. Our title is drawn from Audre Lorde's essay "Poetry Is Not a Luxury," where she writes that poetry fashions a language where words do not yet exist. How does theory make words and world new, attuned, and embedded within inventive and inventing lived-experience, tradition, and cultural production?
Hosted by
John E. Drabinski
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