Abstracts and Bios

Prof. Amideo, Emilio [Keynote Speaker]: Communities in/as différance: Fluid Belonging and Identity in the Black Queer Diaspora

Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s concept of différance which encapsulates both the ideas of difference and deferring in time while highlighting how meaning is not inherent in a sign but emerges from its relationship with other signs, this talk seeks to open a discussion around the idea of community in and as différance in the context of the black queer diaspora. In highlighting the necessity of a community to keep the fight against contemporary racialised and classed heteropatriarchy alive, in Sister Outsider (1984) Audre Lorde declared: ‘Without community there is no liberation […]. But community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist’ (112). In fact, while criticising monolithic notions of identity (in line with a more general queer approach), the black queer critical tradition has always emphasised the importance of recognising and contextualising forms of identification and communal belonging (around axes of race, class, gender, sexuality, and cultural origins) for ‘those for whom these differences do matter’ (Johnson and Henderson, 2005: 5) in an act of radical politicisation that reflects an embodied politics of resistance. In this context, forms of identification become fluid and belonging turns into a project of “ethical political positionality” (Walcott 2001: 133) within different relational and material sites in which inclusion and exclusion are not set in stone but are continually shifted and resituated and as such contribute to offer a new stance on reality. Between the traces left behind by the past and the haunting of future meanings, différance will be used alongside Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s concept of tidalectics and especially its reclaiming from a queer perspective (Amideo 2021) to reflect on the fluidity of a black queer diasporic sense of community as echoed in a number of cultural and literary works whose returning tides and resonances can be found in the crossings between the Atlantic Ocean, the Kala Pani, and the Mediterranean. 

AKAR, BILAL: Dancing Without a Homeland: Leila Bederkhan and the Fluid Communities of Stateless Performance

How do stateless performers navigate shifting communities of belonging and exclusion in post-imperial spaces? This paper seeks to answer this question by delving into Leila Bederkhan (1903–1986) – a Kurdish-Jewish modern dancer. Bederkhan’s extensive career, involved across various places such as Istanbul, Cairo, Vienna and Paris, reflects the fractured realities of exile, artistic networks, and post-imperial identity. Born to Abdurrezzak Bedirxan, a Kurdish aristocrat exiled from the Ottoman Empire, and Henriette Hornik, an Austro-Hungarian Jewish dentist, Bederkhan moved through elite and displaced circles, first in Cairo’s royal court, then within Jewish artistic networks in interwar Vienna, Berlin, and Paris. While her career was shaped by Jewish musicians, choreographers, and theatre-makers, she never publicly acknowledged her Jewish heritage. Bederkhan kept this aspect of her identity concealed in order to be able to navigate an Orientalist performance market and the rise of antisemitism in Europe. This paper examines how Bederkhan’s performances functioned as embodied archives, thereby preserving erased histories while forging fluid artistic affiliations beyond the nation-state model. By 1932, she reconnected with Kurdish nationalist circles, subscribing to Hawar, a journal edited by her cousin Celadet Bedirxan. But did this mark her reintegration, or did she remain an outsider? How did her Jewish artistic affiliations provide an alternative form of community – unspoken yet essential to her career? Through Diana Taylor’s concept of repertoire, this paper explores the tensions between artistic agency, statelessness, and exclusion, asking: How do performers create belonging when their histories remain erased? And how does performance negotiate memory in post-imperial spaces?

 

AMAIRI, ZEINEB: Myths We Speak: The Interrelation of Speech and Cultural Identity in Tunisia

Language is defined as a system of sounds used by a community to communicate and identify themselves. In other words, it is a net that not only connects people but also makes them distinct from other countries and groups. Interestingly, no linguistic system is like another. Each language is distinct, with unique qualities like idioms and figures of speech. These are special phrases that belong to a specific culture and serve to relay a certain message. They go beyond simple linguistic notions to expose real traditions and beliefs. In Tunisia, idioms are a big part of daily life, and people of all ages seem to use them almost instinctively. With how integrated idioms of speech are in Tunisian society, one could grasp the overall cultural understandings and traditions of the Tunisians simply by tracing the repetitive themes their idioms are built upon. This paper will study different Tunisian idioms from different themes, highlighting the correlation between these figures of speech and the Tunisian culture.

 

BASU, ADITI: Narratives of Spivak’s ‘Planetarity’ in Community-Formation: Viewing Ecofeminism in Indian Subaltern Movements from a Postcolonial Perspective [Online]

Human society’s deep connection to nature and its ecosystems has recently witnessed significant changes and challenges. In India’s case (like other countries), its environmental challenges are intrinsically linked to local capitalistic ‘developmentalism’. This may be analysed through the study of subalternism. Subalternism, in post-colonial India, refers to a key movement in the 1980s which expresses the domination and oppression of a class, caste, age or gender in a South Asian society which is binary in nature – ‘elite’ capitalists against indigenous communities, for instance. The binary is hence that of ‘powerful vs. powerless’, linking to the latter; nature, women, peasants and indigenous groups. These groups thus become ‘marginalised communities’, and have limited agency within the spheres of capitalism and colonialism. Nonetheless, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak attempts to re-write the subaltern theories in the context of the Global South. She notes, through a framework of ‘planetarity’, that humans have a global responsibility towards ecological protection. A sustainable future needs to be ensured. In India’s case, this responsibility inevitably falls to the subaltern class. Keeping women as a main focus, the research aims to explore ecofeminism in the Indian perspective by combining Spivak’s views on planetarity and subalternism. In doing so, I hope to increase our understanding on the relationship between women and nature in the Global South, which in turn leads us to illustrate just how subaltern communities are formed, with their ties to general oppression, as well as class and nature exploitation.

 

BLACHER, ROSIE: The Senses and Community in E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India

This paper seeks to provide an innovative reading of E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1925), with specific consideration of the presentation of human sensory experience in relation to community. The representation of the colonial collective, such as the British club, as well as the spaces of intersection between visitors and locals such as the Marabar Hills, will be analysed in Forster’s text. The affect theories of Silvan Tomkins will be applied to the novel, along with a contemporary understanding of human sensations. The question as to why the senses took on such importance in this moment of time and in this location will also be explored. This paper forms part of a larger piece of work which considers how writers in the early twentieth century illustrate travel as an affective encounter that anticipates contemporary affective ecocriticism and contributes to emerging ecocritical discourses which emphasise the importance of anthropocentric power structures. While these texts often uphold dominant imperial attitudes, they simultaneously expose sensory engagement as a route to empathetic relations between the environment and humans, complicating colonial, economic and gendered ideologies. Understanding such encounters offers new material to consider the relationship between the human and the environment as an essential feature of environmental justice.

 

BLACKBURN, SAMUEL: Come Join My Camp: A Unifying Queer Style?

This paper examines camp aesthetics as a method of queer community-building, arguing that it is ultimately an insufficient, or at least flawed, foundation for it. Rooted in queer subcultures since the mid-twentieth century, camp aesthetics create community by providing a subversive sensibility – to celebrate failure, excess, and faded glamour. Camp celebrates and reinterprets the things that mainstream society has rejected. However, camp simultaneously relies on that sense of the mainstream to spot and laugh at both deliberate and accidental subversiveness. This paradoxically concedes that a ‘normal’ standard exists by comparison – one that often excludes both camp aesthetes and their subjects. I argue that this reliance on norms undermines the queer community it attempts to create. Should the style therefore be abandoned due to a fear of harm? Or, should queer people simply target worthwhile victims with it? This is difficult to answer, especially when considering the joke of camp aesthetics has spread, no longer limited to queer communities. Bruce LaBruce claimed in 2013 that camp’s reach has been ‘hopelessly diffused’, with numerous varying subcategories of camp such as ‘Bad Gay Camp’ and ‘Conservative Camp’.¹ However, these subcategories also reveal a way to reclaim camp by targeting the wealth of over-serious, absurd politicians and polemicists. Nonetheless, the style’s potential for cruelty remains unchanged. Although camp liberates those cast off by society, its reliance on norms threatens to undermine that very liberation. Queer people should therefore be cautious when building a community around camp.

 

DINEEN, DYLAN: Who Gets to be a Person? Rethinking the Self through Mind, Gender, and the Other

This paper examines how philosophical and anthropological perspectives on personhood inform ideas of community and inclusion. Rather than arguing a fixed position, it explores tensions between the Cartesian conception of the self and Judith Butler’s theory of gender as performative and socially constituted. By questioning whether identity (and thus, personhood) can exist independently of social recognition, the essay probes at the relational nature of selfhood. Drawing on ethnographic examples such as pet parenting and the Yukaghir’s engagement with non-human agency, it considers how personhood is granted, negotiated, or withheld across different cultural contexts. These cases challenge traditional boundaries between human and non-human, self and other, suggesting that the criteria for community membership are more fluid than often assumed. Through critical engagement with both philosophical and anthropological sources, the paper invites reflection on how the self is conceived, and what implications this has for who is included, or excluded, from moral and social consideration.

 

DINEEN, MICHAEL: Place and Displacement: The Divided Self in the Writings of Seamus Heaney and Brian Friel

Dramatist Brian Friel and poet Seamus Heaney hail from the Northeast corner of the island of Ireland, specifically Omagh and Derry respectively. Both writers are part of communities that inhabit a landscape divided by an international boundary. As a result of this, they face displacement, and their writing is impacted by the politics and violence of this alienation. Place and the sense of place is what unifies these very different writers (different in the sense of the distinct genres they operate in as dramatist and poet respectively). They deal with their sense of dislocation in different ways. This paper seeks to demonstrate how these writers articulate and explore this displacement through symbol, landscape, ritual and language, while offering insight on the regional distinctiveness of their writing. The analysis of their work aims to show how the reader is offered the opportunity of experiencing their differing perspectives through two very different modes of writing.

 

ERSEZEN, ULAŞ: ‘Alone we stand together we fall apart’: A Post-Internet Investigation on İmamoğlu’s Arrest and Türkiye’s Identity Crisis and Inability to Unionise

Since the early 2000s, Turkey has been going through a politically and socially precarious arc usually associated with the Erdoğan governance. However, the patterns of this arc should not be treated as a recent issue, as it would be a truism to argue that this has been the case since the establishment of modern Turkey. The detention of Ekrem İmamoğlu, which sparked protests around the country also presents questions regarding the issue of recurring social patterns.² When the social media side of the İmamoğlu discourse is analysed, it is possible to observe a specific type of polarisation, distaste, identity crisis, and an inability to unionise under abstract ideals. Through employing a critical approach, this work will try to demonstrate how the post-internet aspects of İmamoğlu’s arrest does not reflect a status quo, but rather issues fossilised in Turkey’s social, political and cultural texture.

 

GALEA, NOAH: Poisoning the Well – Community’s Deterioration through Imposed Comforts

Equating ‘connection’ to ‘cooperation’ is a mistake. This is not the aim of globalisation. The true aim is realising Contemporary Capitalism’s ideal – a greatly unequal world, with regions of total wealth and total poverty. This is the product of a morally unchecked ‘Promethean attitude’, as Pierre Hadot references in The Veil of Isis. Humans possess great ambition, leading them to dominate and exploit nature for power. Neglecting morality, this has devolved into people dominating others for power over them. Waubgeshig Rice’s Moon of the Crusted Snow affirms this reality. However, the indigenous Anishinaabe are not victims, or supposedly inferior, as the usual ‘Coloniser vs. Colonised’ discourse would suggest. The post-apocalyptic winter does not threaten them with the end of their lives, as they have met with the same threat many times before, having endured ‘violent assimilation’ by their colonisers. Worryingly though, their strength could be put to doubt. By close reading Rice’s prose alongside postcolonial and ecocritical literary theory, the argument may be made that the Anishinaabe’s survival in the post-Apocalypse has been jeopardised. Their dependence on newfound comforts provided by colonial development weakens their connection to their natural heritage. The young are incidentally made weak, – ‘[m]ost of them don’t even know how to trap!’ – being used to a modernised, arguably more comfortable lifestyle which distances them from their indigenous roots. The Anishinaabe hence risk losing both their lives and identity – a potentially calculated malicious design by the hegemony, asserting control even after its presumed demise in a post-Apocalyptic world.

 

GRECH, MC: Ghosts, Violence, and the Post-Literary

In the history of literary criticism, the idea of discussing literature as a ghostly or spectral presence is not at all new. The two share many aspects, yet it all seemingly comes down to a vital, paradoxical inability to be defined, and the power and multiplicity that such an obscurity can carry. This comparison is especially poignant within a post-literary context. Questions about the death of literature, and the way the ‘literary’ is appearing outside the actual physicality of written work, have in fact extended literature’s ‘ghostliness’ to its full potential. Within the countless parallels between these two concepts, the way they play with truth and meaning is particularly interesting. The idea that what literature and ghosts attempt to represent is in fact dead, or at least absent, is itself a spectral notion, as it resides not in anything immediately apparent within text or apparition, but in something external, in a community that acts as witness. Despite the intangibility of this notion, the environment it creates is nonetheless incredibly powerful, and potentially even violent. In this paper I will investigate this potential for violence, and how it is vital in understanding literature as it currently stands.

 

GUÉNEAU, EMILIE: Fast-Food Brands as Cultural and Emotional Symbols in Contemporary Literature

This study explores firstly the role of American fast-food brands such as Starbucks and McDonalds in contemporary literature. Analysing these brands’ presence in novels like John Green’s Looking for Alaska and Emily Trinkely’s A Starbucks Romance, this paper aims to evaluate how these brands contribute to the narrative and uncover any underlying implications. These brands’ recurrence in fiction reflects their cultural ubiquity and symbolic power within a capitalist framework. Drawing on Maria Christou’s Eating Otherwise, Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, and The Cultural Politics of Food and Eating (James L. Watson, Melissa L. Caldwell), this study ultimately argues that these famous brands function as symbols of emotional consumption, identity construction, and late capitalist desire. Their presence in literature reflects the cultural significance and symbolic resonance of fast-food brands within capitalist societies. Far from being neutral settings or background details, brands like McDonald’s and Starbucks operate as narrative shorthand for emotional states, social identities, and economic realities. These brands signify more than their products – they encapsulate desires, routines, and marketing-driven values that shape character experience and reader interpretation.

 

KATSORCHI, LINA: Mapping the Posthuman: Transversal Subjectivity and Community in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas [Online]

This presentation situates itself within a world of accelerating technology. The twentieth century saw great advancements in bioengineering and cybernetics, yet those can hardly compare to what is known and has been achieved today. Technoscientific developments, like human enhancement and AI, as well as the looming climate crisis, challenge humankind’s comprehension of itself as a static and clearly outlined entity. Instead, a vision is uncovered of the human as something volatile and unfixed – a miniscule part of a larger interconnected network of vitalities and agents. The prime theory that stems from and examines these changes in perspective is that of critical posthumanism. Within this context, this presentation proposes a posthumanist reading of David Mitchell’s novel Cloud Atlas (2004). Often identified as a celebration of the human, Cloud Atlas nevertheless offers a vision of subjectivity that is fluid, relational, and always becoming. The novel’s unique Matryoshka doll-like structure is fundamental for this task as it constitutes a narrative enactment of relationality, fluidity, and multiplicity. The comet-shaped birthmark borne by the protagonists is an additional manifestation of the cosmic network, of which the human is merely a part. The multidimensional interconnectedness between the novel’s plotlines, themes, and characters, which defy boundaries and blend into each other, ultimately gives rise to a transversal vision of subjectivity and community. The aim of this presentation is to show that this vision, which stresses relationality, multiplicity, and interconnectedness between all vitalities and matter, is laden with the potential of ethical social relations as the basis of a better future.

 

MAWDSLEY, MELISSA: Collaborative Communities: An Exploration of Literary Collaboration in the Digital Age

Literature has long been shaped by different forms of collaborative practice. These include the oral tradition (where storytelling was a communal experience), the nineteenth century poetry salons that fostered poetic experimentation, and twentieth century groups like the avant-garde Oulipo or the Dadaist Cabaret Voltaire, which thrived on collective experimentation. This communal spirit is pronounced within the electronic literature (E-Lit) community, where interdisciplinary projects, intertextual engagement, and co-authorship with the machine are encouraged. E-Lit fosters a tight-knit – often exclusive – interactive literary community. This is deeply influenced by traditional literary practices while embracing new modes of multi-disciplinary and machinal collaboration. Writers, coders, artists, and theorists work together to test the boundaries of textuality and narrative form while creating works which engage readers in new ways.² The centrality of the machine to E-Lit practices creates another layer of collaboration since the machine may be considered a collaborator and therefore viewed as part of the literary community. Though the machine is often given a passive role as a platform for the literary, on other occasions, it functions as a more active agent that contributes to the creation, distribution, and engagement of digital literature.³ Deriving from a wider research project on literary collaboration, this paper examines the different layers of collaboration in literary communities of the digital age. It explores how collaborative writing techniques of the past are revisited and adapted with the affordances of the machine, thereby bringing together communities of the past and the present. This also gives way for discussions on the machine’s place within digital literary communities – especially with the use of artificial intelligence in contemporary creative writing practices – inviting questions on various issues, including the human’s status in the future of literature.

 

MHAMDI, OUMAIMA: Laughter as Subversion: Humour and Satire in Ali Dou’aji’s The Shepherd of the Stars

The Tunisian literary pioneer Ali Dou’aji (1909–1949) gained acclaim as a writer and dramatist who delivered incisive social critiques through his satirical work. The Shepherd of the Stars (1944) provides a surreal discussion filled with critical humour which questions social structures alongside gender expectations and philosophical ideas. Through a battle of wits between characters, laughter operates as an act of defiance that reveals the conflicting elements in Tunisian society. The paper examines Dou’aji’s use of satire to analyse power structures and community with specific focus on gender, social class, and knowledge. The play features a female character who uses irony to challenge patriarchal power while discussions about poverty and land ownership reveal economic exclusion as an inherited social trait. The philosophical contradictions presented in the play examine how knowledge and civilisation operate as exclusive groups controlled by power hierarchies. This analysis positions The Shepherd of the Stars as a critical and satirical examination of community boundaries while placing Dou’aji within the Arabic and North African literary traditions of resistance. The analysis evaluates whether laughter serves as a disruption to systems of exclusion or just reveals a persistent cycle of social confinement. Ultimately, this presentation encourages audiences to think about how humour functions to either build, dismantle, or perpetuate the structures that determine inclusion or exclusion.

 

MOFFETT, JAMES: Wanderer and Warrior: Arthur as Exile in Tolkien’s The Fall of Arthur

J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Fall of Arthur (2013) reimagines the legendary king’s return to Britain through the lens of Old English poetic tradition. Though unfinished, the poem reflects Tolkien’s deep engagement with medieval literature, particularly the Anglo-Saxon elegiac tradition. This paper explores Arthur’s portrayal as an ‘eardstapa’ and ‘anhaga’, both of which being terms that denote a solitary wanderer in exile. This suggests that Tolkien presents Arthur not as a triumphant returning king, but as a displaced and alienated figure. The poem resonates with themes found in Anglo-Saxon poetry, such as The Wanderer and The Seafarer, where loss, fate (‘wyrd’), and the transience of earthly glory define the exilic experience. This paper therefore also examines how Tolkien employs the stylistic and thematic elements of Anglo-Saxon verse, namely, its alliterative structure, bleak landscapes, and meditations on fate. This is done in order to craft a uniquely tragic vision of Arthur. As such, The Fall of Arthur not only reinterprets the legendary king’s final days but also serves as a bridge between the chivalric and heroic traditions of medieval European literature.

 

MONTESIN, FRANCESCA: The Evolution of the Novel and the Changing Dynamics of Reader Interaction with Physical and Digital Texts

This paper examines how the novel’s literary and materialistic development reshaped reading practices as well as reader engagement. Tracing its origins from early prose fiction to the rise of the printed novel following the Gutenberg revolution, this research explores how technological innovations expanded access to narrative fiction. Moreover, it seeks to investigate how reading habits have been influenced. With time, the novel slowly transformed into a central medium wherein readers explored identity, culture, and society – an experience deeply tied to the physicality of the printed page. In the twenty-first century, the emergence of digital novels and e-readers has introduced new, often fragmented modes of engagement, altering the psychological and sensory dynamics of reading. This research employs historical, technological, and psychological perspectives to analyse how changes in the novel’s form (print to digital) affect comprehension, immersion, and memory retention. By drawing from various studies, the study seeks to understand how the novel’s materiality informs reader response and narrative experience. Ultimately, it aims to contribute to current debates surrounding the future of the novel and reading in an increasingly digitised and dematerialised literary landscape.

 

PASTOR SANZ, CRISTINA: Blurring Artistic Boundaries

The boundaries between literature and other art forms, once carefully policed by genre and medium, are now being questioned by contemporary experimental writers whose intention is to deliberately erase these separating lines. As such, new cross-disciplinary communities of art are created through conceptually hybrid books that feel more like performances, exhibitions, or installations rather than traditional texts. This shift reflects the constantly changing society of the twenty-first century, where the experience of art and story is increasingly fluid and multimodal. More than just a stylistic trend, it signals a deeper reimagining of storytelling itself. Recent experimental literary works, such as R.O. Kwon’s Exhibit (2024), Victoria Chang’s With My Back to the World (2024), and Torrey Peters’ Stag Dance (2025), represent distinct but overlapping approaches to this cross-disciplinary mode. In the light of increasing questions about form and what constitutes ‘the literary’, these authors intend to create works that reflect new social needs and experiences, blurring artistic boundaries and enriching other discussions on the role of the author, the work, and the reader. These works disrupt traditional expectations of narrative and layout by integrating photography, curatorial logic, and even installation aesthetics into the structure of their work, thus allowing the reader to become an active participant/interpreter who must navigate nonlinear forms, multimedia layers, or unconventional structures.

 

RADTKE, FLORIAN: (Dis)connecting Communities in the Digital Age: Reading for Human and More-Than-Human communities in Rana Dasgupta’s Tokyo Cancelled and Chen Quifan’s Waste Tide

This paper explores community and digital technology as two interconnected facets of 21^st culture through a comparative reading of Rana Dasgupta’s Tokyo Cancelled and Chen Quifan’s Waste Tide. In Dasgupta’s novel, community and imagination are intricately linked – on the one hand by framing the narrative through the act of story-telling, and on the other through the characters in ‘The House of the Frankfurt Mapmaker’. In this story, imagination is cast as a communal act that is contrasted by digital technology and the thought-world it creates, embodied by the character of Klaus the mapmaker. This thought-world is questioned and subverted by the main character Deniz who confronts and resists the narrow definition of community fostered by digital technology. In Chen Quifan’s sci-fi novel, these ideas are developed further, as it interrogates how community can resist extractivist and environmentally destructive forces by rallying around the cyborg character Mimi. Mimi galvanises the resistance of the waste workers to not just the violent extractive regime of e-waste recycling, but also the larger techno-capitalist entities that seek to unmake this newly formed community. Both stories approach community against the backdrop of digital technology and enable the reader to reflect on what community may mean if it encompasses the human and the more-than-human. This is done while also revealing the narrow gaze of techno-capitalism that threatens both ‘communities’. Read in this way, both novels offer different perspectives on exploring community in the digital age, focused on overcoming boundaries of any kind – material or digital.

 

SYNGELAKI, NIKI: Violence as Othering in The Island of Missing Trees and in After the Formalities

Violence is not just a form of othering but also its consequence. Cypriots are not often represented in literature, but the way they are portrayed is of extreme importance. In this paper, the portrayal of Cypriots in two texts, The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak, and After the Formalities by Anthony Anaxagorou, are viewed and analysed in relation to violence as othering. Through post-colonial feminist theory and decolonial feminist theory, I view how the former constructs and perpetuates the colonial, orientalist and patriarchal othering of Cypriots, whereas the latter presents these forms of othering, not perpetuating them but instead shedding light to nuanced and complex representations. Additionally, I argue that The Island of Missing Trees constitutes a dominant, master narrative through its display of both colonial violence and the patriarchy as a source of violence. However, I also argue that After the Formalities constitutes a counter-narrative, deconstructing the former through lived experiences and subjectivity, portrayals of racist and patriarchal violence, and lastly through its circular temporalities and the way violence is presented as timeless.

 

TIMONEY, AISLING: The Body Has Memory: Racial Fatigue and Trauma in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric

This paper seeks to examine the representation of racial trauma in Citizen: An American Lyric (2014) and will argue that it manifests in the Black body as a form of racial fatigue, particularly through breath work. The embodied response of Black American citizens towards their continuous exposure to and experiences of duress due to systemic racism is one of exhaustion. Racial fatigue, understood as a form of chronic pain, becomes for this community a by-product of living in a society that produces what Christina Sharpe calls a distinctively ‘anti-Black climate’. This fatigue is further exacerbated by the burden placed upon Black bodies to act as, what Rankine calls, a ‘flesh cupboard’, tasked with the act of remembering inherited racial trauma in the face of societal silencing. Drawing on Sharpe’s ideas of ‘aspiration’ from her book In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016), I will argue that racial fatigue manifests through the inhalation, exhalation and asphyxiation of Black bodies, where breath becomes a measure of endurance and resilience for Black citizens. Aspiration, as an act of putting breath back into the body becomes a form of resistance to the systemic asphyxiation and silencing of this community towards their own discrimination. Considering both the lyrical and visual elements of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen as forms of embodied ‘wake work’, I will explore how Rankine maps micro and macro aggressions in the Black body and positions aspiration as an act of resistance.

 

WILLARD, EMMA: Boundaries of the Cloak: Queer Liminality and Ecological Haunting in Global Folklore

This paper seeks to explore how cloaks, coats, and animal skins function as queer eco-gothic metaphors across global folklore. Focusing primarily on Celtic Selkie myths and Slavic swan maiden tales, I intend to argue that garments of transformation do not merely signify the traditionally assumed female submission to patriarchal control, but encode deeper anxieties about identity, ecological belonging, and queer survival. In each narrative, a cloaked figure crosses the boundary between human and nonhuman worlds, only to have their autonomy threatened when their transformative garment is stolen, hidden, or controlled. This paper explores how these acts of theft create ‘cloaked communities’ – spaces where women’s agency is masked but not erased. These ‘cloaked communities’ exist in a liminal, often spectral space – simultaneously part of the natural world and estranged from it. Though seemingly subdued, the women haunt their captors’ worlds, embodying suppressed wildness and non-normative being. Through an eco-gothic and queer theoretical lens, I interpret these myths not as static stories of victimhood, but as dynamic expressions of hidden agency, bodily hybridity, and ecological haunting. This transhistorical and transcultural persistence of cloak/coat motifs suggests a submerged collective memory: one that resists the violent enforcement of boundaries between self and other, nature and culture, visible and unseen. Folklore’s cloaked figures invite us to imagine new modes of communal belonging, survival, and resistance beyond the human and the normative.

___________________________