Department of English

• Friday, June 20, 2025 - 3:00pm to 6:00pm

Hybrid: Fisher-Bennett Hall Faculty Lounge, room 135; and Zoom

On Friday, June 20, Arianna Qianru James will defend her dissertation "A Sense of AfroAsia: Blackness, Asianness, and the Speculative." Arianna writes:

In The Souls of Black Folk (1903), W.E.B. Du Bois describes how “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line – the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.” Much has been written about this “problem,” but far less attention has been paid to the Asia/Africa part of this clause. By focusing on what Martinican philosopher Édouard Glissant calls the “poetics of relation” between Asianness and Blackness in the United States, "A Sense of AfroAsia" moves intentionally across fields and histories to better denaturalize the racial boundaries that have become so entrenched in our vocabulary. This project includes under the category of speculative texts: legal documents, poetry and prose, fragments of archival material, visual art, and film set in the United States. It takes up a wide variety of material from Masahiro Mori’s 1970 graph of the “Uncanny Valley” in the field of robotics, the figure of the cyborg in Franny Choi’s Soft Science (2019), the speculative race-changing technologies depicted in George S. Schuyler’s Black No More (1931) and Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017), to the queering of Black and Asian Avatars in Black Mirror’s “Striking Vipers” (2018). At the intersection of critical race theory and mixed-race studies, "A Sense of AfroAsia" ultimately traces the triadic bond among Blackness, Asianness, and the speculative in pursuit of surprising articulations of race formation and alternative ways of being and belonging. 

The defense will be a hybrid event, held both in the FBH Faculty Lounge (room 135) and on Zoom (please contact Arianna for the link). The private portion of the defense will take place from 3 to 4 pm, and the public portion of the defense will take place from 4 to 5 pm, to be followed by a celebratory reception.

We hope to see you there as we congraulate Arianna on this wonderful achievement!