EDLIE L. WONG
Assistant Professor of English
Rutgers University

From Emancipation to Exclusion: Contract, Citizens, and Coolies

BACKGROUND HISTORICAL CONTEXT
In the era of emancipation, the ideals of contract freedom and voluntary exchange began to coalesce into a political worldview. Emancipation ushered a new paradox into American life and thought: it nullified one kind of property relation—the buying and selling of chattel slaves—to consecrate the market made up free persons who voluntarily sold their labor as property.

PROJECT DESCRIPTION
By placing Asian immigration within the analytical and historical framework of African American slavery, From Emancipation to Exclusion illuminates how the radical reconstruction of postbellum citizenship, American geopolitics, and national belonging led to the ratification of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the nation’s first racially specific immigration law.

TEXTS AND AUTHORS CONSIDERED
Writers Frederick Douglass, Mark Twain, and James Williams; Senator James G. Blaine; illustrator Thomas Nast; and reformer Wong Chin Foo

ALEXANDER G. WEHELIYE
Associate Professor of English and African American Studies
Northwestern University

Modernity Hesitant: The Civilizational Diagnostics of W.E.B Du Bois and Walter Benjamin

BACKGROUND HISTORICAL CONTEXT
Critics often consider the ideas of W.E.B. Du Bois and Walter Benjamin as incompatible. However, both thinkers were expressly concerned with bearing witness to modern civilization from the vantage point of the seemingly non-civilized. They espoused forms of messianism, engaged extensively with Marxism, and attempted to salvage supposedly premodern concepts, while taking into account newly urban environments.

PROJECT DESCRIPTION
Modernity Hesitant seeks to trace the convergences between their thoughts, especially their critiques of progress and modern civilization, to reevaluate the histories of and the porous boundaries between aesthetics and politics, the modern and the pre-modern, the human and the social sciences, the visual and the textual, and the religious and the secular.

TEXTS AND AUTHORS CONSIDERED
Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, Darkwater, The Philadelphia Negro, One-Way Street, Dark Princess, and major essays and autobiographical writings; Benjamin’s The Arcades Project and major essays and autobiographical writings

COLLEEN R. ROSENFELD
Doctorial Candidate, Graduate Program of Literatures in English
Rutgers University

"Indecorous Thinking: Style, Form, and Spenserian Poetics"

BACKGROUND HISTORICAL CONTEXT
In sixteenth century England, pedagogues began to produce rhetorical manuals in the English vernacular with the intention of supplementing the traditional training of the humanist schoolroom. These manuals were composed by scholars who were dissatisfied with the insularity of the university, and who imagined audiences traditionally excluded from this training. The specter of rhetoric’s unregulated deployment assumes the form of poetic figures—tropes of thought and schemes of sound—that operated in defiance of the standards of classical decorum.

PROJECT DESCRIPTION
“Indecorous Thinking” explores this specter in the poetic corpus of Edmund Spenser. By understanding these poetic figures as detached or detachable from the schoolroom exercises that were intended to promote their decorous use, these figures indicate faultlines in the architectonic plates of early modern intellectual history. Spenser’s poetic practice confounds any set ideological division between thinking (invention) and speaking (elocution).

TEXTS AND AUTHORS CONSIDERED
Spenser’s poetic corpus, including The Faerie Queen; The Shepheardes Calendar; Prosopopoia, or Mother Hubberd’s Tale; Daphnaïda; Colin Clouts Comes Home Again; Spenser’s prose tract, A Veue of the Present State of Ireland