Abstract: In Violent America, Ariane Chebel d’Appollonia analyzes why and how various ethno-racial groups use different forms of violence, rationally if not dispassionately, to achieve instrumental goals. Rather than focusing on ethno-racial prejudice as the main source of violence in America, she explores the effect of violence on ethno-racial identification. The predominant forms may have evolved over time, from largely physical to increasingly discursive violence. Nonetheless, their pattern of usage remains intact. Specifically, she argues that the instrumental use of ethno-racial violence today remains a means by which all ethno-racial groups gain status and thus acceptance into the mainstream of American civil, political, and social life. Her goal is to provide an alternative way of understanding the complex relationship between migrant phobia, multiethnic grievances, and ethno-racial conflicts in America and beyond, especially France. In supporting her position, the author examines a vast array of evidence about the historic and contemporary use of violence by ethno-racial groups as part of an “identity strategy” – based on contentious politics – intended to secure tangible or symbolic benefits. This identity strategy has proven to be effective in the past; today, however, it fuels an increasing fragmentation of American society which is detrimental to the fight for […]

Terrance Hayes’ most recent publications include American Sonnets for My Past And Future Assassin (Penguin 2018) and To Float In The Space Between: Drawings and Essays in Conversation with Etheridge Knight (Wave, 2018). To Float In The Space Between was winner of the Poetry Foundation’s 2019 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism and a finalist for the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism.  American Sonnets for My Past And Future Assassin won the Hurston/Wright 2019 Award for Poetry and was a finalist the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry, the 2018 National Book Award in Poetry, the 2018 TS Eliot Prize for Poetry, and the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. A collection of poems, So To Speak, and collection of essays, Watch Your Language, were published by Penguin in 2023. Hayes is a Silver Professor of English at New York University. The People’s Poetry Archive is a 2023-24 Mellon Faculty Grant Project by Professor Joshua Bennett. It is a public humanities project setting out to digitally preserve canonical and contemporary poems from across the African diaspora, as well as historically under-theorized works in the realm of spoken word performance. Inspired by the Black feminist poet and educator June Jordan’s vision of “a people’s poetry”—a term she traces to the democratic imaginings of Walt Whitman—the […]

We are hosting a Jeopardy Style Literature Trivia night on April 2 @ 5:00-6:00pm in 14N-417 Come play with us and test your knowledge of pop culture, MIT history, movies, music, and Literature Please bring friends you have met in your Literature classes. Cookies will be served.

Litshop is by invitation only. Presented by: Jessica Ruffin Assistant Professor of Literature, Literature Section at MIT Abstract: The sublime, as figured by Immanuel Kant, is constituted by reason’s capacity to overcome an encounter with the unrepresentable and incalculable through a movement of abstraction. For rational subjects of Enlightenment, this movement of abstraction becomes a universal ground for an imagined community, attended by the pleasure of belonging. For those lacking Enlightenment, according to Kant, what would be sublime is only experienced as terror. This paper explores the legacy of Kant’s figuring of the sublime in white supremacist aesthetics and white epistemologies of race, space, and time. Carrying David Marriot’s concept of the abyssal into the sedimented coastlines of the Black Belt, this paper performs a media archaeology— interrogating the question of overcoming for the inassimilable subject of the infinite, ever-present terrors of white supremacy and anti-Blackness. Bio: Jessica Ruffin is a critical philosopher, media historian, and moving-image enthusiast. Her research focuses on white supremacist aesthetics in post-Enlightenment German-language media and philosophy, as well as their legacies in popular culture, US film, and media theory. She has particular interest in how Arthur Schopenhauer’s and Friedrich Nietzsche’s engagements with counter-Enlightenment methods share poetic and temporal […]