Please join us for the 2022 Annual Fales Lecture: "Disappropriative Editing, Distituent
Philology: Redacting Textual Scholarship Today" by Professor Matt Cohen.
What kind of editing is sufficient for the needs of today? What stance toward textual scholarship is called for in the conflicted now? This talk responds to those questions with appreciation and speculation. It surveys inspirational postcustodial textual scholarship, queer philologies, Black bibliography, postcolonial editions, bibliographic work that embraces the sensory and material domains of books and book-making and -reading, and a range of deformative experiments. It then speculates about the theoretical and professional consequences of that work, which has revealed how textual scholarship has often been about recovering an individual, preserving the fame of other individuals, making an editor famous, and ultimately propping up a professional or disciplinary enterprise. But what if this work were not about the human; or if it were about catalyzing collectivities; or if it were about connection rather than authority-making or authority-resisting; or about cultivating textuality rather than, even in defiance of, academic-institutional integrity? What if it's about not editing at all? In Christina Rivera Garza's concepts of disappropriation and necrowriting, in the stance of destituency, and in work on Afrofuturism and Afropessimism—theoretical domains and stances not entirely compatible with each other—lie potential not just for new forms of edition-making (or breaking) and textual analysis, but different relations to be lived between bibliography in all its forms, desire, and being in the world.
Matt Cohen is Professor of English, affiliate faculty in Native American Studies, and Fellow of the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The author of The Networked Wilderness: Communicating in Early New England (University of Minnesota Press, 2009), he co-directs the Walt Whitman Archive and co-edits the Charles W. Chesnutt Archive. His book The Silence of the Miskito Prince: How Cultural Dialogue was Colonized will appear this fall from the University of Minnesota Press. He currently serves as President of the Society for Textual Scholarship.
Please register using this link.
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