Emerging Imaginaries
Speaking and Listening - Using Speech and Debate to Communicate the Power of the Humanities View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Timothy Wenzell
As a coach of a Speech and Debate Team at Virginia Union University, an HBCU located in Richmond, Virginia, I am training students to compete for both state and national competitions, including The Ethics Bowl (state of Virginia), with this year's topic Ethics and Digital Media, and the HBCU National Championship, which includes, outside of classic debates, categories that include poetry interpretation, poetry slam, dramatic interpretation, prose interpretation, informative, and persuasive speaking. These categories highlight the power of the humanities delivered through the spoken word--- and the power of listening to those words. This has increased interest in the humanities at Virginia Union since I began the program here, as students gain confidence and experience in speaking and debating on issues across the humanities, Literature and especially poetry is meant to be heard, so students not only gain experience emphasizing how to read poetry that will have an impact on listeners, whether they are reading and interpreting published poetry or writing and reading their own poems, or in prose and dramatic interpretation as a way to highlight significant passages or scenes from literary works. This paper highlights the competitions by Virginia Union University students in both the VFIC (Virginia Foundation for Independent Colleges in The Ethics Bowl on Ethics and Digital Media against PWI's in January 2023 and their participation in the various categories in the HBCU National Championship, including literary interpretation, to emphasize speaking and listening are crucial skills and a form of knowledge in the humanities.
Red and Yellow, Black and White: Racializing Colors in Nineteenth Century French Literature
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Holly Collins
This refrain from renowned nineteenth-century gospel song composer C. Herbert Woolston’s popular children’s hymn, “Jesus Loves the Little Children,” reflects prevalent Western notions of the time regarding race. While the song is meant to be inclusive, the reductionist conception of races based on pigmentation betray a homogenizing and otherizing view of people originating from Africa, Asia, and pre-colonial America. This deference to simplified color is observable in the works of nineteenth-century popular author Emile Zola, where we see an interesting juxtaposition of highly diverse white races and a grouping of non-Europeans in amorphous color groups. For example, in Rome (1896), while many races are presented in Italy: Latin, Italian, French, royal, priestly, aristocratic, and familial (Boccanero), Zola refers to the Far East as “the other face of the earth, the immobile Extreme Orient, the mysterious China and Japan, all the threatening proliferation of the yellow race” (ch. XVI)—an entire continent reduced to a racialized color. Likewise, in the African pages of Fruitfulness, Zola portrays three discernable and distinct races: the fruitful, the (willfully) infertile, and the Africans. While the white Europeans may be divided into multiple races, in this case “types” of people, the Africans are homogenized all into one race, irrespective of the enormous diversity that exists on the continent. In this paper, I analyze the contradiction inherent in Zola’s retention of a Tainian definition of race when it comes to Europeans while simultaneously participating in more modern, biological notions of race when referring to Africans and Asians.
Resistance and Exhaustion: Kinshasa and Lisbon between Literary Geography and Collage
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Fabiana D'ascenzo
Combining the approaches of literary and creative geography, the paper investigates certain forms of urban marginality in Kinshasa and Lisbon through the analysis of fictional literature and the practice of collage. The investigation is conducted through a textual analysis of two novels, by In Koli Jean Bofane and António Lobo Antunes, and the practice of collage as a form of non-representational visualisation. On the one hand, this involves analysis of those aspects which have to do with the intangible dimensions of space, such as emotions and affects, either in their ephemeral or lasting form. On the other, the research considers the impact that a creative approach can have in decolonising perspectives concerning certain social and cultural issues. Inspired by Deleuze and Guattari, the methodology applied goes beyond the boundary of both fictional literature and literary geography, connecting the narrative materials to the related scientific literature and opening the discourse to urban marginality in the postcolonial city. The practice of collage explores the open-ended nature of place by re-layering past and present, engaging with both the novels and everyday life, and altering textual and visual fragments. The aim is to create a vision of Kinshasa and Lisbon which emphasises fractures and contradictions, underlining the role of colonialism, and considers the place as an unfinished, ongoing process of composition where marginality, survival, dispossession, resistance and exhaustion coexist.
