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A consideration of how paratextual information present on two, recently-published little magazines -- The Southern Review and The Virginia Quarterly Review -- might work to mediate their readers' literary expectations and interpretations. Published simultaneously at: https://southernfringes.substack.com

In a paper titled “Responsive feedback: Towards a new paradigm to enhance intervention effectiveness”, Viswanath et al. argue that dominant models of intervention design do not account for the complexity and unpredictability of implementation challenges. Particularly in the behavioural sciences, intervention designs need to consider many factors that will be uncertain, or unknown, at the beginning of a new project. This letter describes how we were able to respond to feedback during the design phase of a proof-of-concept project to create a digital service business for Nigerian patent and proprietary medicine vendors (PPMVs). Our approach was to create an initial ‘Theory of Change’ (ToC) based on a similar project with Kenyan shopkeepers. This ToC was revised following user feedback and a landscape analysis with key stakeholders. The new ToC required us to access additional funding to create a ‘digital ordering’ facility for the PPMVs. Digital ordering provides a mechanism whereby we can reduce the prevalence of counterfeit medicines, offer the PPMVs credit and group-buying facilities, and reduce supply chain costs through co-distribution with fast-moving consumer goods. An important learning point was that while our focus was on designing a platform to meet users’ needs, changes in regulation meant that we spent considerably more time than anticipated meeting the needs of multiple stakeholders. However, the importance of ensuring stakeholders’ continued buy-in cannot be underestimated and has likely increased the sustainability of the project in the longer term. As Viswanath et al. suggest, for responsive approaches to be widely adopted needs more flexibility than exists in current funding models and project plans. Both funding bodies and grantees will need to be more responsive to feedback coming from the field.

Black artists have created, modified, or otherwise treated the book as an object of aesthetic expression since at least the nineteenth century. African American artists' production and circulation of friendship albums and scrapbooks, democratic multiples and artist publishing, accordion folds, enclosures, and fine printing editions, all work to bend and stretch the form of the codex-based book in multiple ways. However, black artists' books are under-examined, if not wholly untreated, across several scholarly domains. Johanna Drucker's genre-defining claim that "It would be hard to find an art movement in the 20th century which does not have some component of the artist’s book attached to it" rests on a body of critical literature that ignores the legacy of structural racism in artistic, literary and museum cultures, and in turn forecloses how black artists' books simultaneously align to and disrupt conceptual and practical definitions of the form. Yet Drucker's understanding of artists' books as a "zone of activity" where artists and audiences explore questions about the nature of what constitutes the book-as-form in concert with artists’ creative and intellectual visions, the political economy of independent production and circulation of books, and activist work on the part of artists, exhibition spaces, and audiences continues to have intellectual purchase. My paper highlights examples of how black artists' books align with and push against the over-determined modernist definition of the artist's book which dominates existing scholarship. Black artists' books serve as sites for what Bertram Ashe describes as post-soul aesthetics, thus contributing to understanding blackness' complexities and nuances, and also enriches and expands the temporal and conceptual domain of the artist's book itself. The history and present condition of black artist’s books textuality necessitates the comprehensive recovery, amplification, and criticism of this vital cultural work.

Examining the production, transmission, and consumption of the syllabus opens up ways of seeing the traces of dominant practices, meanings, and values in contemporary academic culture. This hegemony is in place as a function of the deliberate efforts of intellectuals hailing from the dominant cultural group. What has become pedagogical common-sense. the instrumentalism, the policy-driven determinism, and the modes of assessment, is not ahistorical, but the byproduct of a conscious effort to promote and maintain a bourgeois status quo of individualism, achievement, and measurement. Yet these manifestations of power can be switched and redirected by articulating the creation of any syllabus as an act of literary production.

Our work in this course will center around two questions. First, what were the material and social conditions for Black men, women, and children living in the territory that would become the United States, from roughly 1750 until on or about 1860? While slavery is likely the first concept that comes to mind, additional concepts such as racism, white supremacy, and what Cedric Robinson defines as “racial capitalism” offer nuanced ways to ways to address this complicated, first question. From here, our second question, In what ways, and with what effects, did Black men, women, and children work to overcome, resist, or otherwise avail themselves from their material and social conditions during the first part of the long 19th century? points to the various successes, failures, and missed opportunities Black people had in working against white supremacy, racial capitalism and other forms of oppression. Such work came in the form of a wide variety of activism inside and outside conventional politics; from writing, speaking, and organizing to emigration and revolts. What should become clear over the arc of our course is that Black people and organizations, sometimes along with their allies in indigenous, European, and white communities, were anything but passive or unsuccessful in their work towards liberation in facing racialized power structures in the United States. HIS 2050: Writing History | 19th Century African American Activism | Fall 2018 | Florida Atlantic University

ENC 1101: College Writing 2 Spring 2018 Syllabus, Florida Atlantic University

The following exposition is about how the reader encounters imaginary extinction, and the related concept of deforestation, in Ursula Le Guin’s 1972 Hugo Award-winning novella, The Word for World is Forest. My analysis points to how The Word for World is Forest can be read to reveal a representation of extinction, both on Earth as well as on the fictional planet New Tahiti. Separated into three distinct threads, my first analytical section draws on theoretical perspectives from Ashley Dawson in his 2016 work Extinction: A Radical History. The first thread of my analysis points to how the reader can come to see Le Guin's representation of extinction on Earth and deforestation practices on New Tahiti as an imbrication of capitalism, colonization, deforestation, and extinction that works in concert with Dawson’s argument about how extinction is an overt feature of the inherent contradictions of capitalism.

ENC 1101: College Writing 1 Summer 2018 Syllabus, Florida Atlantic University

I employ distant reading techniques and data visualization tools to assess the literary criticism of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart. My findings suggest that the scholarly literary criticism of Things Fall Apart did not occur independently with the publication of Achebe’s work in 1958, but was a part of a larger trend in literary criticism and theory associated with the establishment of postcolonial studies. Moreover, distantly reading the literary criticism of Things Fall Apart points towards the ways in which critics have narrowly focused on framing Achebe’s text as a work of African culture and colonialism, in comparison with other texts in the genre. This has implications not only for locating Achebe's text within a narrow literary genre but also for the ways in which literary scholars can apply quantitative literary analysis to literary criticism in order to make inferences about the production of literary theory and culture.

Tesler presents a powerful argument against this fantasy of a post-racial America. Through the employment of solid data analysis with compelling descriptions, Post-Racial or Most Racial? explicates a muscular argument to reinforce claims made against a post-racial America reality that can be found in contemporary journalistic narratives. Tesler’s writing is enhanced by his use of graphics and simple-to-understand explanations of complex mathematical processes make his work accessible to readers who are unfamiliar with social science research, without betraying the methodological rigor or argumentative style of the discipline.

Talitha LeFlouria’s Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South ambitiously takes on the task of highlighting the roles that black women played in the modernization of the Georgian economy and culture in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; roles that were products of material and ideological circumstances as well as acts of resistance against hegemonic class and racial forces. LeFlouria carves out a space for her study of black women distinct from other scholarship on oppressive convict labor systems in the New South. Relying on a detailed reading of periodical records, primary sources, and historiography, LeFlouria conveys the unique economic and cultural experiences of black women in Georgia, who through choice and circumstance, end up involuntarily providing an invisible, exploitive form of labor for rebuilding the Empire State of the South. Georgia’s particular system of convict labor –a partnership between the state and capitalist interests to develop and sustain an exploitative, profitable, and renewable labor force –comes to serve as a way of modernizing state and private institutions through the continued oppression of black women’s labor, bodies, and identity.

The silhouetted cutouts in Kara Walker's Gone: An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred b'tween the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart are fine with being seen but care little for the actual presence of the viewer. They're kissing and sucking, fucking and birthing, playing and pillorying all without shame or service to the viewer. Walker’s image depicts bodies, not as objects for gazing upon, but are subjects which look back or better yet look away from the viewer. Read this way, the figures in Walker’s work serve to disrupt the viewer’s perspective and meaning of race, and in turn represent the shifting complexity and diversity of contemporary African American identity, all through a gaze directed anywhere but towards the viewer’s own.

Gregory Crewdson’s cinematic, tableaux photographs often depict an anonymous, banal, and tension-filled life in suburban and rural communities. Working as a self-described American realist and strongly influenced by a tradition of American vernacular artists, including work by Arbus, Eggleson, Friedlander, and Hopper, Crewdson actively seeks to construct or highlight points of tension between landscapes, people, and their communities in the photographs he produces. In his Beneath the Roses project, Crewdson’s application of a multitude of artistic influences informs his production of visual culture; one that is at once pleasing in the way he uses color and light to convey the richness of the every day and provocative in the questions he poses viewers about the quotidian nature of contemporary human life outside of the cityscape. Underpinning these depictions of simply-lived human experiences, Crewdson constructs narratives and sustains assumptions about the very foundation of contemporary American life; namely an uninterruptable and perpetual access to energy. While Crewdson eschews deeper political meanings and critiques of late capitalist culture in Beneath the Roses, his world building --from production processes to thematic representations --rests upon a consumption of and availability to energy that is directly at odds with the very people and places which are the subject of his artistry. By unpacking the broader aspects of Crewdson’s work, I seek to highlight the deleterious effects of Crewdson’s photographs in both ignoring real environmental issues that are impacting the very subjects he is photographing, as well as pointing a way towards rethinking about artistic production and representation in more sustainable ways.

This paper explores the extent to which whiteness is represented in the Fall 2016 issue of Brevity. I suggest that the authors’ representation of whiteness manifests in the forms of both white privilege and white supremacy, and thus serves as the predominant theme of this issue of the magazine. I also consider the ways in which distant reading techniques can be used to offer a distinct perspective on contemporary literary magazines, an approach which has implications for the study of print culture and digital humanities.

The interdisciplinary study of indigenous literature and politics is fertile ground for inquiry into understanding how each discipline can inform the work of researchers, practitioners, and students within the humanities and social sciences. Yeremei Aipin’s "And So Dies My Clan" (2010) offers an opportunity to explore the intersection of pluralistic approaches to trauma theory as a way of engaging Siberian indigenous literature. Relying on Jenny Edkins’ (2014) frame of “trauma time” and her four-fold conceptualization of “missing persons” during traumatic experiences, I suggest that Aipin’s essay offers the reader an opportunity to locate specific instances of disruptive events experienced by both individuals and groups in the story with the sociopolitical record of Khanty people's interactions with corporate and state actors in the 20th and 21st century. Characters in Aipin’s essay experience the trauma of property theft, economic disenfranchisement, are subject to asymmetric economic development, and untimely death, which combined with the appropriation and spoiling of sacred, traditional territory and the forced assimilation of Khanty cultural practices, easily connect readers to contemporary political events --including violations of human rights --and social justice concerns for Khanty people in Western Siberia. This approach of linking the study of literature and politics aligns with calls for expanding the intellectual domains of both trauma theory (Rotherberg 2014; Visser 2015) and critical indigenous studies (Moreton-Robinson 2015), and can serve as an epistemological model for future comparative, cross-disciplinary research.

The professor character is no stranger to readers of contemporary African American literature. Indeed, the variety and ubiquity of a professorial character across a range of post soul fictional novels is not simply a curiosity to comment on, but phenomena available for critical interrogation. This analysis explores the location of Deck Lee’s character in Danzy Senna’s novel Caucasia. The term ‘location,’ refers to the physical locations where Deck Lee appears in the plot, what Deck does in those spaces and whom he does things with. The central argument of this analysis is that Senna’s character of Deck Lee is emblematic of the complicated ways that professors appear in post soul literary representation, and thus work against tropes of the narrowly-articulated absent-minded or exclusively-scholarly professor in popular culture. Moreover, this analysis of Deck Lee points to an approach to study professorial characters that are ubiquitous in post soul literature, one that could theoretically inform debates about how the complexities of African American life correspond to contemporary literary characters.

Postcolonial theory has a people problem. By this, I am unabashedly suggesting that postcolonial theoreticians’ overemphasis on people as the site of analysis lies at the heart of the limitations of the field’s key terms, epistemological boundaries, and approach to understanding phenomena as a whole. Indeed, if postcolonial theory and its related concepts and methods are to have any intellectual purchase, then it is time to abandon its anthropocentric approach to explaining how the world works and suggesting how to right humanity’s wrongs in favor of perspectives which acknowledge the solidarity of things and the non-hierarchical nature of life.

ENC 1101: College Writing 1 Fall 2017 Syllabus, Florida Atlantic University

Debates over safe spaces and trigger warnings have become a regular part of campus discourse, especially in context with discussions over free speech, intellectual freedom, and the role that universities play in the social formation. In particular, the University of Chicago entered into the public fray surrounding safe spaces in the fall of 2016 with the publication of Dean Jon Ellison's letter to incoming Freshman students. I argue that the internal colorblindness of Dean Ellison's letter makes invisible the external racial inequalities of admission and participation at the University of Chicago. For those nonwhite students who happen to fit the university’s profile for admission, they may find a discursive and academic environment that at the one hand embraces a diversity of thought and yet adopts a market-oriented approach discourse which invariably positions them in unequal positions of power to pursue the freedom of inquiry and expression.