Spring and Summer 2015 Recap
The spring was full: dynamic and energized students in both
of my classes; senior theses to advise, some of them extraordinary; a trip to
SUNY Oneonta to give a talk on liberal education; a trip to Las Vegas for the
Western Political Science Association annual conference and a roundtable on What Would Socrates Do?; workshopping my latest paper on Herodotus with the
terrific graduate students at Penn; serving as an external examiner for the
Political Science Department at Swarthmore College; and meeting the outstanding
students for the “360” I’ll teach in the fall entitled “Arts of Resistance,” with
my course as one in a cluster of three courses organized around questions of
silence, voice, and participation in institutions, with a special focus on
schools and prisons. I’m out of breath!
Among the many good events, a few successes stand out: the
acceptance of my essay on Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis
and the politics of literature by Theory & Event; the “official” launching of the Tri-Co Political Theory
Workshop, which Paulina Ochoa-Espejo and I did by winning a $3000 Mellon Seed
Grant to fund guest speaker visits and dinners; the publication of
book reviews of Adam Sandel's The Place of Prejudice (in Contemporary Political Theory), of Matt Brim's James Baldwin and the Queer Imagination (in Theory & Event), and of David Branscome's Textual Rivals (in Polis); and, perhaps most importantly,
the tangible sign of my students’ appreciation in our Hannah Arendt cake at the
end of last semester. (Notice that it reads: “Happy Political Thinking Arendtians”!)
Now that the summer has begun, I’m concentrating on two
facets of what I think will be a single project continuing where my DeLillo
essay ends. I received a grant from the Center for Social Sciences at Bryn Mawr
to read much more deeply into what I call “the politics of language,” studying
some of the philosophies of language in modern political thought (e.g. Hobbes,
Locke, and Rousseau) but then devoting a good deal of time to Wittgenstein,
Austin, and Cavell as well as their epigone and critics such as Bourdieu,
Derrida, and Butler. (My syllabus was inspired by Jason Frank's "Politics and Language" course taught at Cornell in 2010.) I’m writing a contribution to a roundtable on “American
Literature and Political Theory” for this fall’s APSA meeting that makes an
argument for American poetry as oriented by what Adrienne Rich calls “the dream
of a common language”; the politics of language allows me to elaborate what I
mean by “a common language” and how it names a literary yet also political
project that has received little attention (as far as I know) in political
theory circles. At the APSA, I will elaborate this broader argument through a
reading of Claudia Rankine’s brilliant book-length poem Citizen.
Alongside this reading and writing, I’ve devoted an enormous
slice of my time to rereading all of Joan Didion’s books – five novels, seven
works of non-fiction, and two memoirs in all – as I prepare an essay
provisionally titled “Joan Didion and the Dream of a Common Language.” As I’m
still finishing a complete draft of the essay, I’ll say only that I’ve learned
an immense amount from Didion’s writing but I also think she comes up short, in
a way, on the broader project of “the dream of a common language” that I’m trying
to develop. How and why she does so is what makes reading her work so
worthwhile.
As these two projects have progressed, I’ve filled the
gaps with ongoing concerns as well as anticipatory excitements: writing on
Herodotus as I craft fellowship proposals for the fall (since I still do intend
to write this book on Herodotus next – and have a very good idea of what it
will look like!); reading about prisons as well as a series of prison
narratives and studies in preparation for my 360 cluster; and perusing literature
that Didion names as formative for her own work as I try to learn how to read
her more intelligently. This last project led me to the most sublime experience
of the summer: reading Conrad’s Victory
while gazing eastward across the Indian Ocean, supine on a lounge chair
overlooking Diani Beach, Kenya.