Spotlight: CLS Postdoctoral Fellow, Azadeh Safaeian

Comparative Literary Studies welcomes CLS Postdoctoral Fellow Azadeh Safaeian in Fall 2022! In 2022-23, Azadeh will teach COMP_LIT 200: Introduction to Literary Theory and COMP_LIT 201: Reading World Literature.

From Azadeh:

In August 2022, I defended my dissertation, “Toward a Minor Theory of Trauma: Literature and Cinema of the Iran-Iraq War (1980-Present).” It was a strange experience to have the defense on zoom and hundreds of miles away from Evanston. I researched and wrote this project in two continents and over seven years in conversation with a brilliant community of scholars at Northwestern and beyond. My research received the institutional support from Northwestern and external fellowships, including the Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship and Mellon/SSRC International Dissertation Research Fellowship. I am thrilled to be back at Northwestern as a postdoctoral fellow in CLS and MENA this Fall. The position gives me an invaluable opportunity to revise my dissertation into a book manuscript and teach two courses on literatures and cinemas of care. Currently, I am also planning a symposium about postcolonial trauma theory for the Spring 2023. It is exciting to be back home and among friends. And I look forward to meeting my new students.  

2021-2022 EVENTS SUMMARY

Spring Quarter 2022

Cosmopolitanism and Inhospitality: Voluntarism and Melancholia in the Art and Literature of Migration Crises | June 1, 2022

On Wednesday, June 1, Professor Mariano Siskind (Harvard University) gave a talk that reflected upon the ways in which contemporary literature and art represent their own historical function (their political agency and their sense of impotence) in relation to the closure of the cosmopolitan ethical imagination in public discourse that, in the past, used to function as the condition of possibility for a politics of hospitality. Today, in the context of the most recent migration crises, hospitality has been relegated to the remote corner where literature and the critical and theoretical humanities attempt (and fail) to re-mobilize this and other utopian signifiers.

Earlier that afternoon, Professor Siskind and CLS' Mauricio Opportus hosted a lively graduate student luncheon workshop. The events were sponsored by the Comparative Literary Studies Program and co-sponsored by the Critical Theory Cluster and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese.

MARIANO SISKIND is a Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature at Harvard University.

Black Hopes: A Philosophy of Independences | May 26, 2022

On Thursday, May 26, CLS hosted Nadia Yala Kisukidi of Université Paris 8 Vincennes St Denis for a lecture entitled Espérance noire – une philosophie des indépendances (Black Hopes: A Philosophy of Independences), which included an introduction by Professor Nasrin Qader (CLS), and a lively discussion and reception following the event.

NADIA YALA KISUKIDI is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis University where she specializes in French and Africana Philosophy. She has served as vice president of the Collège International de Philosophie (2014-2016) and as a co-curator of the Yango II Biennale, Kinshasa RDC (2021). She has also contributed to the creation of a "Global South" research network between Haïti, France, and Colombia. She has taught in Switzerland and France and lectured widely in the United States and on the African continent. In 2022-23 she will be a visiting fellow at the Institute for Ideas and Imagination, Columbia University.

As part of her visit, CLS co-sponsored a workshop on Wednesday, May 25th along with the Critical Theory Cluster entitled Dreamt Territories and Diasporic Politics: Art, Futurity, Philosophy, which included an introduction by Professor Evan Mwangi (CLS) and remarks from Professor Kisukidi, followed by brief graduate student presentations on the following topics: Decolonizing Philosophy; Universality and Race; Négritude, Temporality and Racial Hospitality; Geopolitics; and Art and Cities. Click here for a full list of presentations.

The Critique of Violence from the 1920s to the 2020s  | May 23, 2022

On Monday, May 23, 2022 the Department of German, the Program in Comparative Literary Studies, and the Critical Theory Program at Northwestern University invited graduate students and early career researchers to participate in a colloquium in response to the publication of the new translation and critical edition of Walter Benjamin’s 1921 essay, Zur Kritik der Gewalt (Toward the Critique of Violence). The colloquium welcomed explorations on any topic related to Benjamin’s essay or the additional writings gathered in the volume—those by Benjamin and as well as those by Hermann Cohen, Kurt Hiller, Erich Unger, Georges Sorel, and Emil Lederer. In addition to giving brief accounts of how the new edition of Toward the Critique of Violence changes our understanding of Benjamin’s contribution to political theory, the two editors of the volume, Peter Fenves (CLS) and Julia Ng (CLS '12), responded to the presentations.

Click here for the colloquium’s complete schedule. 

Luncheon for Comp Lit and Critical Theory Students with Cecelia Sjöholm | May 18, 2022

As part of a multi-day workshop, co-organized with the Music Department and CLS’ Professor Ryan Dohoney, on Thursday, May 19 Comp. Lit. hosted a luncheon with Cecelia Sjöholm (Södertörn University, Stockholm) for CLS and Critical Theory students. The conference, Everything was Designed to Make Us Sound: Hannah Arendt and Aesthetic Judgement, included multiple events over the course of several days.

The conference centered on an accompaniment to the rise of authoritarian political movements across the globe in the last decade: renewed public interest in the political philosophy of Hannah Arendt (1906–1975). Her critique of totalitarianism, provocative thesis on the “banality of evil,” and full-throated defense of the democratic public sphere have retained their value in the decades since she first proposed them. What has received far less attention is--and the focus of this conference was--her consideration of the relationship between politics and the arts and listening, particularly as they are connected by the human faculty of judgement and the development of common sense.

On Wednesday, April 18th the event kicked off with a concert by a.pe.ri.od.ic, with music by Yoko Ono, Antoine Beuger, Nomi Epstein et al, in the Ryan Center for the Musical Arts. In addition to the luncheon, on Thursday, May 19th, Professor Sjöholm gave a lecture with a response by Professor Anna Parkinson. And on Friday, May 20th, the conference wrapped up with an all-day workshop with PhD student responses, featuring presentations by Andrea Bohlman, Brigid Cohen, Susannah Gottlieb (CLS), Jonas Roenbrück (CLS), and Ben Steege.  

Masculinity, Politics, and Postwar Germanophone Literatures and Visual Culture | May 12 & 13, 2022

Across the political spectrum, contemporary politics is intensely shaped by concerns of gender and sexuality: from masculinist politicians seeking to demonstrate their virility to the biopolitical administration of birth rates to feminist strikes, politics inevitably needs to articulate how sexual difference shapes community. This colloquium offered a variety of perspectives on this question by mobilizing the rich conceptual resources of the German term “Geschlecht,” simultaneously meaning gender, sexuality, race, nation, and generation. Post-1945, Germanophone cultural production attempted to develop a new notion of “Geschlecht” that would overcome the devastating legacy of National-Socialist politics that centered on a eugenicist, ethno-nationalist, and racist understanding of “Geschlecht.” From this nodal point outwards, the colloquium employed interdisciplinary perspectives to open up discussion of transnational and contemporary concerns. 

This colloquium was sponsored by the Department of German and co-sponsored by Comparative Literary Studies. It included a panel discussion with Xan Holt (German), Thomas Love (Art History), and Jonas Rosenbrück (CLS) with a response from Professor Isabel von Holt (German); as well as a keynote address from Sophie Salvo (University of Chicago) on Thursday, May 12th; and a Friday, May 13th lunch workshop.  

The Aesthetics of Counter-Communities | April 28, 2022

The experiences and practices of marginalized and oppressed groups are often described in aesthetic terms: counter-communities are marked not only by their political, moral and ethical practices, but also by their specific collective aesthetics of existence. In the aesthetic evaluation of these forms of life, often an inversion of material relations of domination occurs: Marginalized forms of life are economically, politically, and socially disadvantaged, but aesthetically superior, that is, they are more beautiful than dominant forms of life.

In his Thursday, April 28th lecture, Professor Daniel Loick (University of Amsterdam) explored two questions. First, what is specific about the aesthetic (self-)evaluation of forms of life, as opposed to other normative evaluations? In other words, what does it mean when social practices are implicitly or explicitly characterized as beautiful (or as ugly)? Second, he explored whether there are unifying moments between different forms of oppression in which the shared experience of aesthetic superiority is grounded. Such a connection not only allows for a translation of situated beauties into the aesthetic vocabulary of another, but could provide the fragments of the description of an abolitionist aesthetics – fragments, that is, of a sensual practice from which the aesthetic regime of bourgeois society can be interrupted and exploded from within.

In addition to his lecture, Professor Loick led a workshop sponsored by Critical Theory and co-sponsored by CLS, on Wednesday, April 27, 2022 entitled The Abuse of Property: From Occupy to Abolition. As Professor Penelope Deutscher summarized it, "In this section from Daniel Loick’s The Abuse of Property (forthcoming with MIT Press), two classical critiques of property are reconstructed. First, the social critique of property, as formulated primarily by Karl Marx, then the ethical critique of property of the Franciscans of the 13th and 14th centuries, which Giorgio Agamben has recently revitalized."

Cryptohumanism: Hermeneutics, Value, and the Hash Rate | The Metaphysics of Data Capital | April 7, 2022

On Thursday, April 7, CLS' José Chavez and Connie Kang hosted two lectures and a reading group and workshop with Professors Jeffrey Kirkwood (Binghamton University, State University of New York) and Leif Weatherby (New York University). The lectures by Kirkwood and Weatherby, respectively, were titled Cryptohumanism: Hermeneutics, Value, and the Hash Rate, and The Metaphysics of Data Capital. In the time of always-on computing, issues of data extraction and collection, surveillance, and privacy seem to navigate most of our discussions and concerns regarding certain forms of digital technologies. We have commonly come to refer to this as the era of Big Data. But, most recently, in a special issue of the journal Critical Inquiry, the four editors begin by stating that “It is no longer enough to say that data is big. Data is now in a state of surplus.”

This event then, comprised of two talks, placed us in conversation with Jeffrey West Kirkwood and Leif Weatherby, two prominent scholars of media theory and digital technologies—as well as being two of the four editors of the mentioned journal issue—to address and build on the issue of ‘surplus data’ and the already-ongoing and yet-to-be-lived consequences of this data capital.

This event was sponsored by The Center for Global Culture and Communication, Northwestern University, and co-sponsored by the Comparative Literary Studies Program, the Department of German, the Department of English, and the Program in Critical Theory.

Islanding: Ocean Media and the Aesthetics of Desertedness in the South China Sea | April 6, 2022

Bringing together the methodological approaches of infrastructure and media studies and the island philosophy of Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze, this talk by Erin Y. Huang (Princeton University), co-organized by CLS' José Chavez and Connie Kang, explored a new genealogy of island critique and examines Danial Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, the contemporary American satellite surveillance network on Asian oceans (e.g., AMTI’s “Island Tracker”), and the expansion of Chinese artificial islanding in the South China Sea. Rather than defining “ocean media” at the outset, this talk probed what we mean by “media” in the context of understanding capital’s creation of “environments.” 

ERIN Y. HUANG is Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies and Comparative Literature at Princeton University. She is an interdisciplinary scholar and comparatist specializing in critical theory, Marxist geography, postcolonial studies, feminist theory, cinema and media studies, and Sinophone Asia.  

Post45 7th Annual Graduate Symposium: Race and Empire | April 1-2 & 8-9, 2022

On Friday-Saturday, April 1-2 and Friday-Saturday, April 8-9 CLS' Viola Bao co-organized the 7th annual Post45 graduate symposium, with this year's topic of Race and Empire. Post45 seeks graduate-level works-in-progress related to post-1945 literature and culture that expand the conception of post-1945 literature’s histories, boundaries, and future trajectories, or place it in a comparative, transnational, or hemispheric frame.

This year’s conference also invited contributions that generate traction on the urgency of race and empire to post-45 studies, and emphasize connections between US ethnic studies and postcolonial studies; as well as work that queries the boundaries of post-45 as a field formation. In addition to paper workshops, the symposium featured a keynote address by Michelle Huang (Northwestern University) and a faculty roundtable on race, ethnicity, and empire, which included participation by Professor Harris Feinsod of CLS, among others. 

Winter Quarter 2022

Meeting Up in the Spatial Turn: The Historical Geographies of Antonio Gramsci and a Few Others | February 18, 2022

On Friday, February 18, 2022, Stefan Kipfer (York University, Tornto) gave a lecture entitled Meeting Up in the Spatial Turn: The Historical Geographies of Antonio Gramsci and a Few Others. Antonio Gramsci has been subjected to a wide range of interpretations and appropriations. One way to return to Gramsci while developing his insights is to pay close attention to the historico-geographical aspects of his work, the way in which his multi-temporal conception of the world is mediated in and through space and scale to usher in what one could call a spatial historicism. Proceeding this way is to not only to bring the spatial turn of social theory to bear on Gramscian scholarship and, in turn, to ensure Gramsci has his proper place within what used to be called, in the English-language, radical geography. Accentuating Gramsci’s spatial historicism is also a way of organizing the terrain on which Gramsci may encounter others with whom his work resonates. The lecture was followed by a response from Professor Roberto Dainotto (Duke University). 

STEFAN KIPFER teaches urban politics, urban planning and urbanization in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change at York University in Toronto. His research has focused on comparative urban politics and the place of space and urban questions in social and political theory, particularly in Marxian lineages (Antonio Gramsci, Henri Lefebvre) and counter-colonial traditions (Frantz Fanon). 

ROBERTO DAINOTTO is Professor of Literature, Italian and International Comparative Studies at Duke University. He has been Professeur invitè at the Universitè ParisOuest, and Fellow at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies in South Africa. His main research and teaching interests hinge on the concepts of place and space as narrative, rhetorical, and geopolitical organizational categories.   

Isabelle Alfandary Book Launch | February 2, 2022

On Wednesday, February 2, 2022, Comp. Lit. hosted a book launch in honor of the latest release by Professor Isabelle Alfandary (Université Sorbonne-Nouvelle, Paris-3): Science et fiction chez Freud: Quelle épistémologie pour la psychanalyse? [ITALICS]. Isabelle Alfandary is a professor of American Literature and Critical Theory at the Université Sorbonne-Nouvelle (Paris-3), France. As Directrice de Programme at the Collège International de Philosophie (CipH), her research focuses on the intersection of philosophy and psychoanalysis.

ISABELLE ALFANDARY is a professor of American Literature and Critical Theory at the Université Sorbonne-Nouvelle (Paris-3), France. As Directrice de Programme at the Collège International de Philosophie (CipH), her research focuses on the intersection of philosophy and psychoanalysis. 

Fall Quarter 2021

Comp. Lit. Grad Presentations/Prospectus-in-Progress | November 12, 2021

On Friday, November 12, 2021, Carly Bortman presented on her Prospectus-in-Progress, "In Dreams, We Go Home (or To Paris): The German-Jewish Dreamscape from Heine to Herzl," and Sihan Wang on her Prospectus-in-Progress, "The West in the Present: Chan Aesthetics and Chinese Literary Modernity."

Ecological Revolutions and Revolutionary Ecology | November 5, 2021

Jay Bernstein (The New School) gave a CLS-sponsored response to the Friday, October 29, 2021 talk by Eva von Redecker (University of Verona), Slow Revolution at the Guillotine: Rethinking Paradigm Shifts with Walter Benjamin and Thomas Kuhn, which was organized by the Department of Philosophy and the Critical Theory Program. Professor von Redecker’s lecture was preceded by a reading group which met in Fall Quarter to discuss passages from Von Redecker's Praxis and Revolution.

 Workshop in Transnational Cultural History | October 7, October 28, November 18, 2021

This faculty and graduate research workshop was concerned with the changing historical circumstances under which a globalized culture has been produced, consumed, and circulated, especially in the recent past. Part 1, New Critical Directions in Global South Studies, featured a conversation with Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra (Penn State). Part 2, Generic Life: Mass Consumption and Globalization in Harryette Mullen's S*PeRM**K*T, was a Dissertation Chapter Workshop with Anna Zalokostas (PhD Candidate, English). And Part 3, Victorianism in the Age of Decolonization, was a Workshop with Nasser Mufti (UIC).

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