Kandice Chuh: “What will we have been? On literary studies in the future perfect”

The Zabel Lectures series presents Kandice Chuh, Professor of English and American Studies at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. In this talk, the CUNY professor reflects on the aims and horizons of literary study in an era characterized by the ongoingness and spectacularization of racist and colonial violence, as well as proliferating efforts to whitewash US history by curricular censorship. Thinking with and through Asian American literary studies as primary problem space, Chuh asks us to work in the future perfect tense in our conceptualization and organization of literary studies in the present. What aesthetics, what sensibilities, might be amplified and prioritized by a literary studies thought and organized in this way? What arrangements of knowledge and modes of knowing might we accordingly privilege or enunciate or elaborate?

This event is free and open to the public. For questions about accessibility services, please email sutt0063@umn.edu or call 612-626-1528.

Chuh is the author most recently of The Difference Aesthetics Makes: on the humanities ‘after Man’ (Duke UP, 2019), the winner of the 2021 Association for Asian American Studies Book Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Humanities and Cultural Studies: Multidisciplinary Approaches. The book argues that instead of defending the humanities, as has been widely called for in recent years, we should radically remake them, organizing around "illiberal humanism."

Sponsored by the Department of English and co-sponsored by American Studies, Asian American Studies, Cultural Studies & Comparative Literature, Curriculum & Instruction/CEHD, Race, Indigeneity, Disability, Gender & Sexuality Studies, and the Institute for Advanced Study.