Solidarity, Failure, and the Role of the Critic

March 7-10, 2019 seminar at the American Comparative Literature Association Convention, Georgetown University, Washington DC

Conveners: Anthony Alessandrini, City University of New York, and Anna Bernard, King’s College London

Presentations:

• “‘Thinking Back to That’: Solidarity and Spectatorship in the Post-Revolutionary Documentary,” Anna Bernard, King’s College London
• “Caveat Lector: Illiteracy Reads Solidarity in Ousmane Sembène’s Early Works,” Julie-Françoise Tolliver, University of Houston
• “The Import of Brief, Nameless Lives: Intellectual Auto/biography and Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” Shirin Nadira, New York University
• “The Palestinian ‘Nation’ and its Women Across Borders and Generations,” Maurice Ebileeni, University of Haifa
• “Scandal Folder,” Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb, Williams College
• “Across the Secular/Islamist Ravine in Egypt Today,” Noha Radwan, University of California Davis
• “From Serowe to Durban: Bessie Head, Antiracism, and the Work of Solidarity,” Sonali Thakkar, University of Chicago
• “Una Marson’s Contradictions: Feminism, Jamaican Anticolonialism, and Black Internationalism,” Angela Veronica Wong, State University of New York at Buffalo
• “Literary Activism in Contemporary Africa: Co-Production, Solidarity and Failure,” Madhu Krishnan, University of Bristol
• “Good Dialectics, Bad Dialectics: Reading Marx in Beirut,” Sophie Chamas, University of Oxford
• “New Negro Paradoxes and Alain Locke as Philosopher-Critic,” Jay Garcia, New York University
• “Tsitsi Dangarembga and the Failures of Feminist Solidarity,” Alys Moody, University of Pittsburgh
• “Said, Solidarity, Success,” Bruce Robbins, Columbia University20057