Critical Literary Consumption

Erica N. Cardwell reflects on writing Wrong Is Not My Name: Notes on (Black) Art, a possible anti-memoir that features essays on the importance of art criticism, visuality, grief, and radical Black imagination. Because the visual aspects of Cardwell's stories and analysis are so striking, she also shares stories of the art featured on the book cover and accompanying essays.

Dr. Matthieu Chapman discusses his experiences with genre shift from academic writing to his beautiful hybrid memoir, Shattered: Fragments of a Black Life. He shares his thoughts on craft, genre, “the canon” in Early Modern Studies, the fallacy that Shakespeare is inclusive, and the importance of Afropessimism.

At the beginning of the new year, I talked to Athena Dixon about the release of her latest book, The Loneliness Files: A Memoir in Essays. She shares how the book came to be and how she interrogated the concept of loneliness in all of its manifestations through research, personal life, fandoms, pop culture, technology, the pandemic, and more.

In Nishanth Injam's stunning debut collection, The Best Possible Experience, examines the social ails of life abroad as an adult immigrant. In the episode, Nishanth discusses how fragments and contours of his personal life weave into his fiction as a way to translate, preserve, and document memories of home and family. He also shares his thoughts on technology and labor, craft decisions, and more.

In her debut book, A Flat Place: A Memoir, Dr. Noreen Masud traces the longstanding impacts of colonialism in flat places and landscapes while sharing intimate stories of her formative years in Pakistan, her family, trauma and therapy, and her sojourns to Orford Ness, Morecambe Bay, Newcastle Moor, and Orkney. In the interview, we also address the two different subtitles in their respective U.K. and U.S. contexts, the possibility of being misread as reparative, and much more.

What would resistance against capitalism and neoliberalism look like in the intimate sphere is one of the major questions Sophie K. Rosa reflects upon in her debut book, Radical Intimacy. Thinking through many social movements (Black Lives Matter, climate justice, FreeBritney, political scandals in the U.K.), she shares her thoughts on using theoretical language (e.g., Sophie Lewis’s work on abolition in family and Dr. Kim Tallbear’s scholarship on anticolonial perspective on kinship, love, and relationships) while being attuned to their local and global contexts.

Mai Nardone talks about his first book, the story collection Welcome Me to the Kingdom, which spans four decades and traces urbanization of the late 1980s, the financial crisis of 1997, and the current landscape in Thailand. He talks about his studies in economics and how this perspective shaped the focus on labor and the many industries (tourism, sex), racialization, travel, religious communities in Thailand, and writing against the global imagination of the country.

Lamya H. speaks about writing an unapologetically queer and Muslim text in her debut work, Hijab Butch Blues: A Memoir, which chronicles her formative years in a Middle Eastern country and her continuing education in the United States. She recalls writing “Hajar” as a standalone essay, and how she formed and shaped a narrative arc that shaped the memoir extrapolating foundational texts like the Quran to share stories about her upbringing, relationships, academia, critical nostalgia, geographies, and intertextualities.

Rebecca May Johnson charts her writing and thinking processes in what became her first book, Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen, a text that embodies and challenges notions of language and form, recipe writing, domestic spaces, performativity, and the body and labor, all of which gestures to the possibilities and pleasures of the text. She shares how writing her dissertation on The Odyssey is an allegorical, shadow text to the epic in Small Fires, memoir vs./or epic, her travels in Arkansas, and more.

Dr. Allan E.S. Lumba (Concordia University), author of Monetary Authorities: Capitalism and Decolonization in the American Colonial Philippines, discusses critically examining the seemingly quotidian object of money to write about the history of the Philippines by engaging questions of racial capitalism and hierarchies, imperialism, unconditional decolonization, and materialism. In the interview, he also shares insights on the evergreen topics of interdisciplinarity, narrativizing the archives, expertise, and more.

In anticipation of his debut novel, Jinwoo Chong shares the genealogy of writing Flux, an ambitious novel told through multiple perspectives. Chong talks about being inspired by Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos, and weaving them into a complex novel that examines multiple discourses, including technocapitalism, overblown promises of technology, nostalgia, pop culture, representation, and much more.

Morgan Talty’s debut story collection, Night of the Living Rez, poignantly contemplates, examines, subverts idealized understandings of community, intergenerational trauma, and life on a reservation in Maine. In weaving the story collection together, he shares his writing practice, a desire to write sparingly and to gesture to the importance of omitted details without fetishizing pain and trauma.

Su Cho’s debut poetry collection, The Symmetry of Fish, examines the stories of language through relationships, food, space, and places. She shares how she resisted the urge to be concerned with accuracy when including Korean characters and words; instead, she chose to portray being stuck in language, to capture the symmetry and asymmetry of language and translation.

Lyzette Wanzer ruminates on the events leading up to the conception of her edited volume Trauma, Tresses, & Truth: Untangling Our Hair Through Personal Narratives. As she breaks down the four sections of the anthology, she discusses the historical and ongoing racism through the policing of natural hair, racial justice, intergenerational trauma, the creation of Create a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair (C.R.O.W.N. Act), collaboration, and writing across genres.

Cija Jefferson reflects on her experiences in an MFA program, craft, community, and revision. Her MFA project, Sonic Memories and Other Essays, is her first book, in which nine essays capture different stages of the writer as she frames sounds and silences to capture adulthood, grief, loss, and time.

Dure Aziz Amna talks about writing her debut novel, American Fever, using tuberculosis as a motif to explore questions of who is responsible for high school exchange student Hira’s health and nourishment in the alleged land of opportunity and abundance. She shares how she was interested in interrogating how culture -- and food -- are formed and deformed when transported from Pakistan to the United States.

Dr. Tiffany N. Florvil (University of New Mexico) shares how her research on the history of social movements, subculture activist archives, Germany, and Black Studies shaped her monograph, Mobilizing Black Germany: Afro-German Women and the Making of a Transnational Movement. As she discusses some of the topics explored in her book - collectivity, quotidian intellectuals, and Germany's erasure of its own colonial history - and how voices in the diaspora in their regional/local contexts belong in robust trans(inter)national collectivity.

Nguyễn An Lý talks about her experiences as a translator, especially in reference to Thuận’s atmospheric Chinatown. Using the novel as a focal point, she also elaborates on readership, audience expectations, the idea of cultural tourism, Chinatown as a physical and metaphorical space, and her work with Zzz Review.

Dr. Reighan Gillam (University of Southern California) discusses how her fieldwork and research on media producers in Brazil shaped her first monograph Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media. She speaks on how her work in anthropology intersects with media and race studies, antiracist visual politics, alternative media in Brazil, Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) and the question of ethics in research.

Belinda Huijuan Tang recollects how emotionally resonant family stories inspired her debut novel A Map for The Missing and connects the gaokao (the standardized college entrance exam) with the years 1977, 1982, and 1993 as major historical and cultural moments in China. In the episode, Belinda also discusses the ideal of education as upward mobility, the politicization in education, and how the idea of citizenship can change in the course of one’s life.