Prathna Lor | Teaching Portfolio — Research Profile
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Sample Syllabuses
Sample Syllabuses
Dissertation
Unthinkable Subjects: Postmortem Poetics in Modernity investigates the status of the dead in theory and the avant-garde at the limits of race and sex. Bringing together queer theory, critical race studies, psychoanalysis, and contemporary experimental writing, the dissertation argues that the dead animate these fields as a site for ethical and political inquiry. If oppressive rhetoric murders by castigating nonnormative others beyond the sphere of the common—as sick, infected, contagion, dying, or already dead— “Unthinkable subjects” examines the risks of reclaiming such murdered and murderous bodies. Since fatality invigorates queer theory and critical race studies, the first part of the dissertation considers the murderous subjectivities that compose these fields. In this section, the dissertation critiques the “murderous jouissance” of the antisocial thesis in queer theory, which offers the most extreme version of self-annihilating fantasy as an ethos of being in the world. Given that the antisocial thesis is most often articulated through psychoanalysis, the dissertation goes on to historicize questions of psychoanalysis and race in Frantz Fanon, arguing that for racialized subjects a condition of murderousness registers the violent logic of racism as a psychotic aberration. The rest of the dissertation offers readings of contemporary experimental texts working along axes of race and sex, troubling both queer theory’s self-assured fantasy and the apparent inescapability of racialization as a psychically damaging prison. The writers in this study—Wilson Harris, Gail Scott, and Renee Gladman—paradoxically respond to the murderous language of oppressive rhetoric with texts that demonstrate how language not only murders but is itself murdered. Murdered language is registered by the experimental poetics that claim unbecoming, decay, attrition, severance, and violence as their form, resulting in narratives of “in-existence”—texts that formally dwell in and meditate on ambivalence, refuse narrative wholeness, solicit poetic enigma, and traverse the antagonisms of language. Each author’s investment in murder, self-murder, self-annihilation, or self-removal paradoxically offers nonaggressive forms of undoing, ravishment, and coming undone as that which occasions novel ways to claim ontological murder at the scintillating and ecstatic limit of fatal language. My next book project, “Unwriting Race: The Poetics of Bare Forrm,” develops from my dissertation and mobilizes nudity and nakedness as a framework to think through racialized writing today
Unwriting Race: The Poetics of Bare Flesh
Can the racialized body ever be naked? If we are to follow the damning insight of Antillean anticolonial writer and psychiatrist, Frantz Fanon, that “The black man is fixated at the genital level, or rather he has been fixated there” (2008: 143), racism not only sexualizes racial flesh—it makes it naked, bare, and everywhere. Racism is thus a form of naked exposure that makes racialized flesh and bodies irrevocably exposed. Given the ways that racial violence, particularly antiblack violence, police brutality, and mob mentality direct harm and death often as a result of such deep-seated sexual anxieties and cathexes, it is vital to consider the conceptual underpinnings that make and unmake race naked as such. How is racialized violence part and parcel of discourses that sexualize and fetishize flesh? What is the logic of white supremacy that anatomizes racial flesh in order to castigate it? And how does racialized life survive under such naked pressure? If racial flesh and bodies are already “inscribed” with a stereotype of nudity and nakedness, how are racialized authors responding to notions of identity, authorship, and writing? My next book project explores how writers of colour engage with racism as a naked form through peculiar and paradoxical experiments with literary form with the express aim of unwriting race. Gravitating to the extreme ends of formal bareness, that is, reducing writing to its most bare and essential parts, the writers in the proposed study underscore questions of race and sexuality that present themselves in fundamental acts of reading and writing. My research will track and engage with emerging literary and visual cultural production and discourses around racialized identity, sexuality, and form, offering a new literary framework to participate in race and contemporary writing. Specifically, I examine how a number of racialized authors return to formal bareness—returning to the form of writing itself—in order to show that race is always inscribed in the fundamental act of inscription.
Publications
“Asceticism’s Rose.” In special issue of Psychoanalysis & History on a new translation of Lou Andreas-Salomé’s “‘Anal’ and ‘Sexual,’” edited by S. Pearl Brilmyer and Filippo Trentin, 24:1 (2022): 55-56.
“Daydreaming Transgender in Cemetery of Splendor.” Trans-in-Asia, Asia-in-Trans, special issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, edited by Howard Chiang, Todd A. Henry, and Helen Hok-Sze Leung, 5.3 (2018): 394-403.
“Everybody’s Poetry.” Emergent Precarities and Lateral Aesthetics, special issue of the minnesota review, edited by Elizabeth Adan and Benjamin Bateman, 85 (2015): 153-161.
Unthinkable Subjects: Postmortem Poetics in Modernity investigates the status of the dead in theory and the avant-garde at the limits of race and sex. Bringing together queer theory, critical race studies, psychoanalysis, and contemporary experimental writing, the dissertation argues that the dead animate these fields as a site for ethical and political inquiry. If oppressive rhetoric murders by castigating nonnormative others beyond the sphere of the common—as sick, infected, contagion, dying, or already dead— “Unthinkable subjects” examines the risks of reclaiming such murdered and murderous bodies. Since fatality invigorates queer theory and critical race studies, the first part of the dissertation considers the murderous subjectivities that compose these fields. In this section, the dissertation critiques the “murderous jouissance” of the antisocial thesis in queer theory, which offers the most extreme version of self-annihilating fantasy as an ethos of being in the world. Given that the antisocial thesis is most often articulated through psychoanalysis, the dissertation goes on to historicize questions of psychoanalysis and race in Frantz Fanon, arguing that for racialized subjects a condition of murderousness registers the violent logic of racism as a psychotic aberration. The rest of the dissertation offers readings of contemporary experimental texts working along axes of race and sex, troubling both queer theory’s self-assured fantasy and the apparent inescapability of racialization as a psychically damaging prison. The writers in this study—Wilson Harris, Gail Scott, and Renee Gladman—paradoxically respond to the murderous language of oppressive rhetoric with texts that demonstrate how language not only murders but is itself murdered. Murdered language is registered by the experimental poetics that claim unbecoming, decay, attrition, severance, and violence as their form, resulting in narratives of “in-existence”—texts that formally dwell in and meditate on ambivalence, refuse narrative wholeness, solicit poetic enigma, and traverse the antagonisms of language. Each author’s investment in murder, self-murder, self-annihilation, or self-removal paradoxically offers nonaggressive forms of undoing, ravishment, and coming undone as that which occasions novel ways to claim ontological murder at the scintillating and ecstatic limit of fatal language. My next book project, “Unwriting Race: The Poetics of Bare Forrm,” develops from my dissertation and mobilizes nudity and nakedness as a framework to think through racialized writing today
Unwriting Race: The Poetics of Bare Flesh
Can the racialized body ever be naked? If we are to follow the damning insight of Antillean anticolonial writer and psychiatrist, Frantz Fanon, that “The black man is fixated at the genital level, or rather he has been fixated there” (2008: 143), racism not only sexualizes racial flesh—it makes it naked, bare, and everywhere. Racism is thus a form of naked exposure that makes racialized flesh and bodies irrevocably exposed. Given the ways that racial violence, particularly antiblack violence, police brutality, and mob mentality direct harm and death often as a result of such deep-seated sexual anxieties and cathexes, it is vital to consider the conceptual underpinnings that make and unmake race naked as such. How is racialized violence part and parcel of discourses that sexualize and fetishize flesh? What is the logic of white supremacy that anatomizes racial flesh in order to castigate it? And how does racialized life survive under such naked pressure? If racial flesh and bodies are already “inscribed” with a stereotype of nudity and nakedness, how are racialized authors responding to notions of identity, authorship, and writing? My next book project explores how writers of colour engage with racism as a naked form through peculiar and paradoxical experiments with literary form with the express aim of unwriting race. Gravitating to the extreme ends of formal bareness, that is, reducing writing to its most bare and essential parts, the writers in the proposed study underscore questions of race and sexuality that present themselves in fundamental acts of reading and writing. My research will track and engage with emerging literary and visual cultural production and discourses around racialized identity, sexuality, and form, offering a new literary framework to participate in race and contemporary writing. Specifically, I examine how a number of racialized authors return to formal bareness—returning to the form of writing itself—in order to show that race is always inscribed in the fundamental act of inscription.
Publications
“Asceticism’s Rose.” In special issue of Psychoanalysis & History on a new translation of Lou Andreas-Salomé’s “‘Anal’ and ‘Sexual,’” edited by S. Pearl Brilmyer and Filippo Trentin, 24:1 (2022): 55-56.
“Daydreaming Transgender in Cemetery of Splendor.” Trans-in-Asia, Asia-in-Trans, special issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, edited by Howard Chiang, Todd A. Henry, and Helen Hok-Sze Leung, 5.3 (2018): 394-403.
“Everybody’s Poetry.” Emergent Precarities and Lateral Aesthetics, special issue of the minnesota review, edited by Elizabeth Adan and Benjamin Bateman, 85 (2015): 153-161.