Professor Ainehi Edoro’s article “Unruly Archives: Literary Form and the Social Media Imaginary” came out this summer in English Literary History. In this article, Professor Edoro, working specifically with Facebook and “Dear Ijeawele,” Chimamanda Adichie’s feminist manifesto posted on Facebook in 2016, challenges the notion that the impact of social media has not been significant enough to warrant a formal and aesthetic study. She argues that the social media platform—its design features, affective architecture, epistemological concerns, and ideological investments—constitutes a new discursive context for literary form. To get a copy, visit https://muse.jhu.edu/article/856433/pdf
Professor Ramzi Fawaz’s new book, Queer Forms, is officially available! In this book, Professor Fawaz explores how the central values of 1970s movements for women’s and gay liberation—including consciousness-raising, separatism, and coming out of the closet—were translated into a range of American popular culture forms. Throughout this period, feminist and gay activists fought social and political battles to expand, transform, or wholly explode definitions of so-called “normal” gender and sexuality. In doing so, they inspired artists, writers, and filmmakers to invent new ways of formally representing, or giving shape to, non-normative genders and sexualities.
