PANEL: “Race & Arts & Politics”
Location: UC Theater
Krystal Languell "On the Structure of Belladonna Collaborative: Collaboration and negotiation of the editorial process via non-hierarchical, author-centered, anti-capitalist, anti-racist practices"
Kirsten Ortega: “What Audre Lorde’s Body Teaches Us: Imagining New Pedagogies of Race and Poetry”
John Hyland: “Sonic Performances of Radical Blackness”
Michel Valentin: “Hybridity/Territoriality/De-Territorialization: Zones and Fluxes in Orson Welles's Touch of Evil”
Alicia Mountain: "Queer Mooring and Un-Mooring: Racialized Erotic Tourism in Woolf’s Orlando"
Rachel Mindell: "Cutting Ties: The Deeply Wounded in Michelle Cliff's No Telephone to Heaven."
Understanding Native Tribal Identity through Native Drama: A panel discussion of the plays of Assiniboine playwright, William S. YellowRobe
Chair: David L. Moore, University of MontanaKatie Kane, University of Montana: “Better-n-Indians: A Reading” [title to be revised]
Margo Lukens, University of Maine: “Art That Works: William YellowRobe’s Star Quilter as Open Letter”
George Price, University of Montana: “Afrophobia in Native American History: Reflections on William S. YellowRobe's Grandchildren of the Buffalo Soldiers”
Respondent: William S. YellowRobe
Abstracts:
1) David L. Moore, as chair, will briefly offer a context for the panel and introduce the panelists.
2) Katie Kane, University of Montana
“Better-n-Indians: A Reading” [title to be revised]
Katie Kane, professor of English at the University of Montana, will read William S. YellowRobe’s formally innovative and thematically anti-colonial play, “Better-n-Indians,” drawing on interviews she did with Mr. YellowRobe during the late stages of production of the play. In addition, Mr. YellowRobe’s relationship of affiliation and distance from the plays of Luis Valdez and dramaturgy of Oskar Eustas will be explored.
3) Margo Lukens, University of Maine
“Art That Works: William YellowRobe’s Star Quilter as Open Letter”
In the context of Claudia Rankine’s calling out of unexamined racism in contemporary American art, and of art’s failure to make us confront and think creatively in response to racism, the importance of reading plays by William Yellow Robe is undeniable.
In “The Star Quilter” William YellowRobe examines racism with the absolute clarity that his audience might include anyone—from Assiniboine people to Native Americans and African Americans to white Anglo protestant people like myself—and everyone in between. No surprise there—like Rankine, YellowRobe lives the experience of an American of color, where one is responsible for being aware of many perspectives outside one’s own.
YellowRobe’s play depicts four private encounters between Mona Gray, a traditional Assiniboine star quilter modeled on YellowRobe’s mother, Mina Rose Forest YellowRobe, and Luanne Jorgensen, a wealthy and politically “well-connected” Montana rancher’s wife. YellowRobe’s work of art, aimed at public performance, makes public a private exchange mirroring so many private exchanges that have taken place between white and Native American people—in a way that shows the intricacy of racist behavior and self justification, and illuminates for his audience the complexity of possible responses to unexamined racist behavior. YellowRobe’s depiction gives all the participants (readers, actors, audience members) a chance to walk a while in someone else’s shoes, and to try on attitudes in a safe way. This immersion in a moment of art (a poem, a song, a scene from a play or story) is different from taking the stance of academic argument that too often aligns with one’s most rigid preconceived notions. Even reading aloud—giving breath to words from the page and hearing how they sound coming from one’s own mouth—is a way of trying on the pain or fear or courage or questioning of another person’s experience.
I will argue (from experience) that the Assiniboine aesthetic informing YellowRobe’s work provides a model for the work art could be doing, and an exemplum of the change we all need to learn to make.
4) George Price, University of Montana
“Afrophobia in Native American History: Reflections on William S. YellowRobe Grandchildren of the Buffalo Soldiers”
The popular concept of “race theory,” as a way of explaining human diversity, was unknown among indigenous peoples of the Americas before European colonialism in the Western Hemisphere. Shortly after the U.S. confiscation of Native American lands west of the Mississippi River, the creation of the reservation system, and the arrival of millions of racist Euro-Americans to live in close proximity to, and some cases actually on, the Indian Reservations, Afrophobia and other racial concepts began to filter into Native American social discourse and experience. William YellowRobe’s play, Grandchildren of the Buffalo Soldiers, sheds much light upon this historic occurrence as it played out in one Northern Plains tribe in the 20th century, along with its aftereffects and ongoing challenges. I plan to comment on this history and how it is illuminated in this play, along with the consequences and current issues related to it. One question that I hope to explore is how and why did the Buffalo Soldiers come to represent all African Americans in the minds of many Native people of Northern Plains tribes, and how much of that perception was based on their actual interactions with African Americans, as opposed to hearsay and general allegations?
5) William S. YellowRobe as respondent, will comment on the papers, the plays, and the themes of the panel.
Jimmy Kendall: Decentering White Authority: Teaching Ferguson as a Rhetorics of Inclusion
Joyce Maxwell: Raced Fear: Real and Imagined
Quan Ha: Imperialist Nostalgia in Andrew Lam's Vietnamese American short story 'Slingshot'
Casey Charles: Queer Intersections in Baldwin's Jimmy's Blues and Other Poems
Ari Laurel: Teaching Solidarity
David Witzling: “Postmodern Prose and the Discourse of the “Cultural Jew”: The Cases of Mailer and Foer”
Janelle Adsit: "Finding the Other’s Voice: Race, Institution, and Will Alexander’s Poetics”
Jane Wong: “Continuing the 'MFA vs. POC' Conversation”
This panel considers the way whiteness participates in the racial dynamics of contemporary American poetry. As Toni Morrison assures an interviewer, we are all "raced." But what does that mean for white writers who have written with whiteness as their background, white on white? Markers of whiteness are deeply embedded into the expectations that govern how a thing or a person should be composed, into notions of legibility. Where do white writers’ choices implicitly or explicitly reveal how the writers are raced? How do decisions about subject or process impact poets of color? Presenters will engage with specific aspects of what happens as the white subject position becomes racialized. Presenters will discuss the topic through close readings, interrogations of personal work, creative erasure, and socio-historical reviews. This includes notions of anger as held against people of color, anxiety around the term “racist” as an adjective versus a noun, and an exploration of white male poets dragging the dominant lyric into a mode of interiority at a time when minority voices were gaining authority from an expanding speaker position.
STATEMENT OF MERIT
The full context of the Toni Morrison interview shows her responding to accusations of being preoccupied by race, and to “concerns” that she only writes about black subject matters. This highlights the problem of whiteness being somehow excluded from racial configurations, or, more to the point, the problem of race being recognized topically as an explicit social or political category and not by the micro-tendencies and residual effects of structuring (literary) perception on a white and euro-centric legacies. Beyond self-announcing efforts at incorporating race into a poetic project, how can race be made visible—through affective stances, tonal contours, procedural decisions? White poets have historically seemed unconcerned with race, though their indifference does not mean that their poetry does make statements about race. Where racial aspects of white have been discounted or under-investigated, this panel seeks to make interventions.
Reflecting on experiences of feminists of color in academia, this panel explores the politics and poetics of intersectionality in identity (re)formations fractured through innovative texts. Its participants will speak in tongues of split consciousness, polyphonic voices, and “fracturations,” i.e. fractured social liminalities and / or fracturing of institutional power and privilege via resistance. The panel may include readings of microessays, experimental poetry, or hybrid media projects.
As I contemplated the intersections of creativity and identity politics in academia, the concept for “Fracturations” germinated in response to invitations by dominant culture members to speak about my experiences as “an Asian female professor.” Of course, my issues with the question itself -- in the contexts presented, i.e. positions of institutional and racial or gender privilege vs. my token "otherness" -- were multifarious. I leave it up to the audience and panelists to fill in the blanks with your own avocations, your own agency to name yourselves and present your identities and avocations to the world through innovative texts that cross boundaries – not only within academia but outside it, as well.
Ailish Hopper: "Impossible Beings: Poetry, Time-Travel, and the Death of White Supremacy."
Benedicte Boisseron: “'Bad Dog!' Race and Dogs from the Plantation to Michael Vick”
Ruth Vanita: “Precolonial Modernity in India: The Example of Cosmopolitan Lucknow"
Vanessa Place: "Playing Divya Victor’s Race Card"
Title: Why KA? FP
Description:
The panelists will read representative samples of poetry by contemporary Korean American female poets and open the forum by saying something startling and potentially offensive. The panelists will then discuss issues including the function of old tales then and now, where they saw themselves in the literature as child writers, how to write good poems, I, and ignoring the ignorable.
Statement of Merit:
This panel concerns the growing body of literature by Korean American female poets. All of a sudden, we’re everywhere. Today, for example, Poetry magazine sent one of us a check for $500 for the Frederick Bock Prize, though it was intended for Frances Choi, who may be another Korean American female poet. In spite of our growing visibility, there have been very few literary conference panels devoted to this topic, perhaps none. We believe we can start a thoughtful conversation, which we will generously open up to the audience.
This past year, a Junot Diaz article in The New Yorker ("MFA vs POC") and a subsequent NPR article ("In Elite MFA Programs, the Struggle of Writing While 'Other'") helped give new life to an ongoing conversation about race, representation, and access to the resources and opportunities the MFA often provides. The latter piece tracked the experiences of several Iowa Writers Workshop alumna from skeptical-acceptees-and-frustrated-students to successful-authors-and-now-faculty-at-their-alma-mater, expressing determination to change the program's racial landscape, from the bodies in the room to the undertones of career advice and workshop discussion. The piece did not, however, acknowledge the rise of the Creative Writing PhD as a prerequisite for such faculty positions, especially for job candidates of color, who are systematically required to be "twice as good to get half as much" in every professional field. In light of this--and foregrounding our agreement that it is imperative that student and faculty demographics in doctoral programs reflect the growing diversity of many higher education institutions--this panel specifically interrogates the curricular experience that attends the PhD's "professionalization" of writers for academic careers.
In other words: How, and to what degree, do doctoral course offerings support the writers of color that these programs claim to value? Furthermore: If doctoral programs that do recruit underrepresented students also require/offer courses that reinforce the notion of Eurocentric Whiteness as the voice and locus of literary authority, what implicit message does this send to writers of color about the market, field, and institutions that await them? This panel presents for discussion the results of a crowdsourced survey of more than 20 Creative Writing PhD programs' course syllabi, privileging the following qualitative and quantitative concerns:
We propose to look at the Fall 2014 semester in particular, a small but relevant sample size that is meant as a starting point for a broader, deeper, and more direct conversation with Creative Writing PhD programs than we’ve seen before.
Event Description: On the Poetics of Anguish, Gender, and Variant Constructions
Can violence, the bifurcation/trifurcation of gender, and the line speak to impossibilities of saying and arrival? Is monstrosity’s fluidity and multiplicity contained in a poetry’s body? Do the pathways of grammar, our variant/queer/violent/diasporic sentences/lines/sounds–reflect the risks and failures of our experiments? In this conversation, Ching-In Chen, Bhanu Kapil, Soham Patel and Mg Roberts investigate gender and its constant relation to a non-resolution and to anguish by exploring the self’s push against structures of possibility, grammar, and the body itself. Moderator: Mg Roberts.
TITLE: Shifting Authenticities: Play in the Face Of…
“Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in the face of
certain defeat.” Ralph Ellison’s 1952 articulation of the structure (and psychology) of some
aspects of the American racial imaginary is both comic and, though painful, fun. The novel’s
absurdist humor is, in part, dependent on the irrational logic of the racial. We imagine the
space for “fun” is won (or earned) largely through labor, through work. Work hard, play
hard, the saying goes. What is the work of the racial imaginary? What are the forms of play
that animate (and subvert) the (il)logic of the racial?
This panel will combine critical inquiry, performances, and readings in considering the
operative force of humor and serious play in the poetics of Amiri Baraka, Wanda Coleman,
and American others. What is fun in the literary and performative? How do artists play
around with shifting modalities of representation, authenticity, and authority? How are
attempts to administer identity and meaning subverted and reconfigured in literature and
performance? How do these writers (the writers being celebrated and the writers
celebrating) engage in unadministered fun?
This panel will explore the indispensible nature of humor and fun in both navigating and
subverting structures that operate to legislate identity and meaning. We will consider how
literature and performance may resist ready categorizations, and how pleasure is activated
even as one faces the serious and the deadly (without simple resort to the masochistic).
