People
Faculty Fellows - 2009-10
Jane Desmond
Anthropology/Gender and Women’s Studies
Project Title: When the Artist is an Ape: Visual Arts, the Challenge of Representation, and Political Subjectivity
“When the Artist is an Ape” explores the striking phenomenon of representational paintings produced by captive apes, specifically those who can communicate with humans through sign language or lexigrams, and thus name their own paintings and comment on them. These paintings, like Koko’s “Bluebird,” stand at the edge of the category of representational art, referencing flowers, emotions (“Love”), and even other animals. They draw into question the human/animal divide while challenging current “theories of mind” developed by primatologists and cognitive psychologists. I argue that, ultimately, such representational abilities may require an expanded notion of political subjectivity, thus supporting the concept of a radically post-humanist world.
For more information about Professor Desmond: www.gws.illinois.edu/people/desmondj
Clarence Lang
African American Studies/History
Project Title: The Black Working-Class Public and the Urban Midwest: African American Nationality and Cultural Representation in the Late Industrial Period
Beyond the social movements African American workers waged for social change, their daily activities, associational lives, and institution-building figure centrally in the larger history of the black working class during the 20th century. Using an interdisciplinary approach, this project examines the development of black working-class culture in the urban-industrial Midwest, and the evolution of a black working-class public sphere. It argues that this sphere provided the taproot of a distinct African American national identity that cohered in the late industrial period following the Second World War.
Esther Kim Lee
Theatre/Asian American Studies
Project Title: Performative Representation and Diplomacy During and After Commodore Perry’s Expedition to China and Japan
The project examines the ways in which Commodore Perry of the U.S. Navy used performative representation and diplomacy during his expedition to China and Japan in the mid-19th century. Perry’s employment of blackface minstrel shows and other displays of race will be studied in comparison to Asian representations such as sumo wrestling. The project will also focus on Chinese and Japanese characters in American popular culture in the context of Perry’s expedition and the establishment of diplomacy with East Asia. Relying on both primary and secondary documents, I plan to juxtapose and compare the performative representations of culture with the actual diplomatic representations of nations.
Lori Humphrey Newcomb
English
Project Title:
Representing Shakespeare’s Popular Audience: The Vernacular of Performance, 1576-1642
The plays created for early modern London’s public stages were at once complex pieces of representation and successful products of popular culture. Yet critical estimates routinely assume that most members of the paying audience could barely comprehend the plays. This project argues that popular audience members, simply by living through the Reformation crisis in the relationship between bodies and words, acquired the multimodal literacies demanded by the new hybrid representations onstage. England’s unusually protracted Reformation made its congregants into audience members, fluent in a vernacular of performance that could ground artistic and even political participation.
For more information about Professor Newcomb: http://www.english.illinois.edu/people/lnewcomb
Richard T. Rodríguez
English/Latina and Latino Studies
Project Title: Subject to Fantasy: Sexuality, Space, and the Politics of Latino Male Representation
This project investigates an array of interlocking representations of Latino masculinity in contemporary American society. Drawing from various critical trajectories – literary and cultural studies, queer theory, and visual analysis in particular – the project examines a cluster of texts that enable discussion beyond well-rehearsed debates about Latino masculinity to track its articulation at the intersection of race, class, and gender. By linking masculinity with sexuality, the project aims to trouble the heteronormative presumption underpinning common perceptions of Latino manhood. Furthermore, it renders masculinity as a category of analysis for investigating ongoing concerns pertaining to racism, immigration, gentrification, and the cultural politics of gender.
For more information about Professor Rodríguez: http://www.english.illinois.edu/people/rtrodrig
Spencer Schaffner
English (Center for Writing Studies)
Project Title:
[Unintelligible]: the Art of Writing Beyond Meaning
This project explores how unintelligibility can be part of representational systems. By studying written texts that are unintelligible because they are illegible, hypergraphically diffuse, or based on hidden codes, I explain how disrupted systems of representation make meaning. My inquiry engages with scholarship in the disciplines of neuroscience, psychology, art and art history, and writing studies. The ultimate purpose of the project is to counter a regime of correctness in the field of writing studies that privileges hyper-legible textuality over all other forms of written expression. This project will suggest ways that unintelligible writing can be strategically expressive.
For more information about Professor Schaffner: www.metaspencer.com
Oscar E. Vázquez – IPRH/FAA Fellow
Art History
Project Title: Graffiti’s Palimpsests: A brief moment in the history of representation (1970-2008)
My project is a book-length manuscript examining graffiti’s definitions and functions and the relation of these to representation in the last decades of the 20th century. It explores graffiti as a palimpsest; as a practice read through pre-existing models of social, historical, or visual theory. This will be a history of graffiti not as a chronological development of pictorial styles, or of writing, but rather (borrowing from Rosalyn Deutsche) of “uneven developments,” of advantaged moments and responses by various groups in the face of competing discourses – discourses that argued over how to “read” graffiti as representation, and over what graffiti represents.