“The Case for a ‘Trans-‘Critical Optic”
9 July
Presented in Panel 4, “Scales of the Global”, moderated by Lindsey Drury. 17:30-20:00 (Berlin time).
This talk will argue for a “trans” critical optic, understood as a critical attitude or orientation rather a certain transdisciplinary project or a specific canon of transnational literature. A trans critical perspective can be mobilized between and across several areas of analysis at once, taking on multiple categories such as discipline, national literature, gender, ethnicity, or racial identity at once. Without erasing the specificity of such terms as “transnational” or “transgender,” it asks us to consider the ways that a trans attitude can challenge defined and delimited categories of analysis in comparative literature and move us beyond gestures that are comparative but leave the original terms or categories of analysis unchanged. In this way, a “trans” orientation might allow us to see how scholarship can be both trans-disciplinary and transnational, examining work outside of national or imperial circuits of travel, exploring non-privileged migrations of people and texts; or tracing trajectories outside of the usual metro-centric routes of travel.
Introduction by Lindsey Drury, Postdoctoral Researcher RA 5 “Building Digital Communities”
Jessica Berman is Professor of English at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, where she also directs the Dresher Center for the Humanities. She is the author of Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism and the Politics of Community and Modernist Commitments: Ethics, Politics and Transnational Modernism, editor of A Companion to Virginia Woolf and a reprint edition of Purdah and Polygamy by Iqbalunnisa Hussain. Berman was a co-editor of Futures, the ACLA’s Report on the State of the Discipline (2017) and co-edits the Modernist Latitudes book series at Columbia University Press. Her current project investigates global radio in relation to transnational modernism.
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