Remembering Otherwise: The Politics and Poetics of Touch in Claudia Rankine and others

Event details

Modern School Research Seminar with speaker Dr Maya Caspari (York).

What does it mean to write ethically about historical violence? What are the limitations of empathy as a response to the suffering of others? What might it mean instead, as the anti-colonial psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon once asked, to try to ‘touch’ the other? This paper engages these questions through discussing recent work by contemporary writers, focusing particularly on poet Claudia Rankine and her engagement with the afterlife of slavery (Hartman) in the United States and beyond. 

While Rankine has received significant acclaim, she has also attracted critique for what some see as a marketable reproduction of violence as spectacle (Sharpe). Focusing on two of Rankine’s 21^st century texts, this paper considers how Rankine performs the present - and presence - as frictional: the speaking self is an embodied, moving archive of touch, registering the violence of the past while open to the potential of tactile encounters in the present. Meanwhile, bringing normatively distinct genres and modes of representation into contact, Rankine also generates ‘frictions’ on the page.

Drawing on varied scholarship on the ethics and politics of representation, I consider whether the texts’ engagement with touch can enact, and imagine, an ethical form of remembering—one which, perhaps, refuses to abstract violence into ‘benumbing spectacle’, while also avoiding a ‘narcissistic identification’ which erases the other’s singularity (Hartman).