Poetry, Delyricised: The Formal and Moral Stakes of Claudia Rankine’s Poetic Address (Sara L. Borga, University of Oxford):

If the subtitle (An American Conversation) of Claudia Rankine’s Just Us (2020), the third volume in her American Lyric trilogy, signals a retreat from the lyric while still holding onto its vestiges, how does this shift redefine the stakes of Rankine’s poetic address? While the trilogy’s reception as formally innovative has largely focused on its intertextual effects or the wayward lyricism of Citizen (2014), it often sidesteps an in-depth engagement with how the volumes relate to one another, particularly Rankine’s distancing from the ‘lyric’ as a defining category. This talk will focus on how this transition aligns with Rankine’s deepening concern with the intersection of language, accountability, and ethics evident in her dialogic exploration of racial justice in Just Us as an intimate, everyday practice. The book’s title—echoing Richard Pryor’s pun on ‘justice’ as ‘just us’—captures this tension, exposing how historical failures of justice permeate, and segregate, intimate and systemic interactions. I will discuss my current research on how the aesthetic potential of Rankine’s poetics might be most fully realised by tracing her lyric’s journey away from itself.

George R. Stewart and the Post-Apocalyptic American Eden (Maya Hollander, University of Oxford):

This talk proposes a tradition of biblical reception in post-apocalyptic American fiction centred on the creation story of Genesis 1-3, focusing on George R. Stewart’s Earth Abides (1949) as a representative example of this tradition. For Stewart, the apocalypse becomes a setting for Edenic regeneration and the emergence of a new American Adam, an agent of light, order, and civilisation. The tradition of the post-apocalyptic American Eden, which can be traced as far back as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ‘The New Adam and Eve’ (1843), resurfaces across myriad speculative renderings of American landscapes, including novels by Walter M. Miller, Angela Carter, Octavia Butler, Margaret Atwood, and Cormac McCarthy.

Cruel Dualisms: Restraints, Resistance and the Limits of Bare Bottomhood (Andrie Morris, University of Oxford):

My talk considers satire in Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s speculative fiction. I suggest his treatment of spectacular blackness in ‘Zimmer Land’ and Chain-Gang All-Stars illustrates Christina Sharpe’s observation that ‘spectacle is a relation of power.’ The confluence of antiracist politics and neo-colonialist capitalist agendas produces a literary black body that, I argue, comments critically on that hegemony.