Working Group for the Study of Critical Theory

The English department Postcolonial/Decolonial Studies is presenting a talk by Professor David Lloyd: “’For the World to Look At’: On Colonial Shaming (Wilde, Césaire, Fanon)” at 2:30 pm on April 14 in Dauer 219.

Abstract:

Standing exposed on Clapham Junction platform in 1895, in convict’s stripes and handcuffs, Oscar Wilde is overcome with shame in face of the mockery of “a jeering mob”. Given the coincidence of the writing of De Profundis with that of The Ballad of Reading Gaol, dedicated to Michael Davitt and template for Irish political balladry, it is hard not to read Wilde’s shaming in relation to the systematic humiliation contemporaneously imposed by the British penal system on Irish political prisoners: Wilde’s moral or “gay shame” intersects with that of those “representatives” of a colonized people. Some forty years later, francophone poet Aimé Césaire will write of his shame at and for the spectacle of a destitute black man on a street car in Paris, mapping his double identification and anxious disidentification with his fellow in racial abjection. The moment strikingly anticipates Frantz Fanon’s “Look, a Negro!” in Black Skin, White Masks, but its doubleness asks us to think of racial or colonial shaming not only in terms of what Fanon terms being “fixed” or made an object among objects, but also in terms of a certain form of transfer or transit—undergirded by the location of all these moments as scenes of public transport—between being the object and being through dis/identification with the object of the abjectifying gaze: it seems possible that this oscillation furnishes for both Wilde and Césaire the locus of a solidarity in being [a]shamed even as it marks the peculiar way in which shame seems the occasion of compulsive returns, a constant negotiation with the effects of a being thrust into visibility as at once subject and thing.

David Lloyd is distinguished Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. He has worked primarily on Irish culture and on postcolonial and cultural theory and teaches courses on Irish literature, poetry and poetics, and postcolonial and settler colonial cultural studies. He is the author of Nationalism and Minor Literature(1987); Anomalous States (1993); Ireland After History (1999) and his most recent books in that field are Irish Times: Temporalities of Irish Modernity(2008) and Irish Culture and Colonial Modernity: The Transformation of Oral Space(Cambridge University Press, 2011). His new book, Beckett’s Thing: Theatre and Painting, came out with Edinburgh University Press in 2016. Under Representation: The Racial Regime of Aesthetics(Fordham University Press, 2018) collects his essays on race and aesthetics. He is currently working on a book on law, poetry and violence that will include essays on W.B. Yeats, César Vallejo, Aimé Césaire and Paul Celan. He has co-published several other books, including The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse (1991), with Abdul JanMohamed;Culture and the State, co-authored with Paul Thomas (1997); The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital(1997), with Lisa Lowe. He is also a poet and playwright: his Arc & Sill: Poems 1979-2009 was published by Shearsman Books in the UK and New Writers’ Press, Dublin, 2012, and his play, The Press, has had staged readings in Dublin, Los Angeles, Manila, and premiered at Liverpool Hope University in 2010.

He has also been involved in several social justice from divestment against apartheid to Irish political prisoners’ rights. He is a member of the SWANA collective (South and West Asia and Northern Africa Region) that produces KPFK’s weekly SWANA Region Radio.

The talk has been sponsored by the department of English, the Marston-Mibauer fund and the Working Group for the Study of Critical Theory, and the Center for European Studies.