The Late Style of Late Empire

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Roundtable Format

Abstract

This roundtable will consider the aesthetic modes, dispositions, categories, and forms that have come to define the purported “late-stage” of American empire. Thinking the concept of late empire alongside the concept of late style, the participants will consider the aesthetic and artistic choices that accompany the repeating narrative of American decline. What are the aesthetic analogues to the crumbling infrastructure and cultural stagnation that define the current epoch? What do the repeating aesthetic patterns of remediation, and the exhausting of familiar narratives tell us about Black anger, ambivalence, and despondence in the present? This panel is connected by a concern for what the aesthetics of decline looks and sounds like in the longue duree of antiblackness and the current manifestations of neofascism.

Corrine Collins will explore the popularity of model and food content creator Nara Smith. Smith’s rise to fame exemplifies the cultural value of multiracial aesthetics and (re)productivity as her body and food are both sites of consumption. Smith’s dulcet tones and couture clad body exemplify a glamorized domesticity that emphasizes late style multiracial aesthetics while appropriating content from dark-skinned Black women.

Chad B. Infante will discuss the concept of the speaking object via a triangulation of slavery’s minstrel character in animation, puppetry, and robotics. The aesthetic choices that surround the question of the sentience of the object reflects a persistent and repeating pattern that is heightened in moments of perceived crisis and decline. This involves the use of the speaking object to reinvigorate and augment the fatigued soul of the modern human being and the crumbling infrastructures of late-stage American empire and late-stage capitalism.

Examining US technological progress, particularly in the form of aviation, Delali Kumavie questions the historical temporality of late-stage American empire by turning to a constellation of literary and speculative texts by Black writers. Unsettling the temporal linearity of late-stage empire, Black writers, including Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison, and Ama Ata Aidoo, questioned the universality of aviation’s myths by distorting notions of progress. In this talk, Kumavie draws narrative throughways that connect the panic over the crumbling of aviation infrastructure to Jim Crow lynchings.

Mlondi Zondi engages a choreopolitics of expressive voicelessness at the scene of protest. The mystifying properties of both politicized art practice and the aestheticization of politics. What does dance at the scene of protest reveal about either collision or collusion with state forces? Zondi draws on social media recordings of dancing at prominent protest to contest the assertion that dance solely offers a joyous release from violence rather than functions as a conduit for the expression of riotous resistance in context.

Weaving together the current aesthetic obsessions with the trad-wife, mechanical reproduction, an incessant return to monuments and memorializaiton, repetition and “historical memory,” AI, tiktok (the form of social media…), aeromobilities, crumbling infrastructure, technology as the new “arms race”, white decline, stagnation, and dance and its relationship to protest, this roundtable invites a conversation that deconstructs the artistic choices that are accompany our current political zeitgeist of capital and American decline.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Tyrone S. Palmer, Wesleyan University

Panelists

• Corrine E Collins, University of Southern California

• Chad B Infante, University of Maryland-College Park

• Delali Kumavie, Syracuse University

• Mlondi Zondi, University of Southern California

Biographical Information

Mlondi Zondi is an assistant professor of comparative literature at the University of Southern California. Mlondi’s writing is published in TDR: The Drama Review, ASAP Journal, Liquid Blackness, Mortality, Performance Philosophy, Espace Art Actuel, and Propter Nos.

Delali Kumavie is an assistant professor in the Department of English at Syracuse University. Her work has appeared in PMLA, Feminist Africa, Substance, Qui Parle, Propter Nos, Postcolonial Text, and English Language Notes.

Tyrone S. Palmer is an assistant professor of English at Wesleyan University. His work has appeared in Qui Parle, Critical Ethnic Studies, Post-45: Contemporaries, TOPIA, and Philosophy Today.

Corrine Collins is an assistant professor of English at the University of Southern California. Her work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Callaloo; ASAP/J; Literature, Critique, and Empire Today; Women’s Studies; and Gastronomica.

Chad B. Infante is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park. His work has appeared in Diacratics and he has a forthcoming essay in American Indian Quarterly.