Publisher's Synopsis
This, the fifth volume of Critical Theory and Social Justice: Journal of Undergraduate Research, is produced in a time of strife at its home campus, Occidental College. In the middle weeks of November 2015, Occidental College saw a multitude of students participate in a week-long occupation of the Arthur G. Coons Administrative Building; this occupation was the result of a long-standing complaint from students of color, queer students, and female-identifying students towards the current Administration for its (argued) lack of commitment to diversity, equity, and 'inclusive excellence.' It is in the midst of this student protest, like those student protests that propelled the careers of those thinkers common to this Journal, that we mark the five-year anniversary of our publication history. In the first piece in this volume, " 'Tête-a-tête avec Antonin Artaud: ' On the Communicability of the Void'," Occidental alumnus Elizabeth Caldart (2012) explores the politics of ability, performativity, and nonknowledge through a review-like lens of one of Antonin Artaud's performances near the end of his life. Demanding a (re)experience of those forces present in Artaud's work that beg analysis from the epistemes of Georges Bataille, Caldart forces readers to shift ever-so-close to the Hegelian line that marks the border of transgression and the void (nonknowledge and its variants). The second piece in this issue bounds directly out of the condition that Caldart leaves readers in; that is to say, Caldart offers the question of the (im)possibilities of subjectivity which Joseph Ferber of the University of Dayton directs towards the poetry of indigenous writer Sherman Alexie. In "The Deconstruction of Simplified Sovereignty in the Sonnets of Sherman Alexie's What I've Stolen, What I've Earned," Ferber argues that one of the hallmarks of colonialism is the articulation of an easy to understand sovereignty-a positioning of the Law in a way that is so relatable, it can be dematerialized in a way that ensures its materiality. This false erasure could be understood as a ontology that cannot be escaped. Critical Theory and Social Justice: Journal of Undergraduate Research in this and all following volumes will be taking on a new, third publication aspect: that of resistive, sub-altern art. The first artist in this series is the deceased/slain performance artist, Ana Mendieta. Student Editor Gabriela Rosenada (2017) expands upon the logic of juxtapositioning subjects and objects in a dichotomy in her piece on two of Mendieta's images in, "A Reflection of Binary Disruption in the Photographs of Ana Mendieta," where she (de)links the re-dressing of the 'human' as animal to the death of the subject-sovereign-to among other instances of binaristic failure. The middle of this volume moves towards music and the works of James Baldwin and Edward Soja; Ethan Blake of Brown University enters into the budding discourse on the racialization of space in, "The Socio-Spatial Dynamics and Roots of America's Modern Black Creative Genius." What is most unique about Blake's work is that it refuses to participate in the discourse of racial essentialism that haunts this era of political activism and social justice; leaning towards a model of black excellence from the positioning of blackness as a politics of resistance, Blake opens new entryways for discussions of the politics of space. Lastly, Emily Long of Appalachian State University enters into the flurry that is the conversation surrounding the legitimacy of the works of Martin Heidegger. What Long finds in her piece, "No Selfhood...No Freedom: Martin Heidegger's Radical Definition of 'Transcendence' in 20th Century Europe," is that the excommunication experienced by thinkers such as Paul de Man is necessarily inconsistent with work done on the concept of transcendence-particularly by Heidegger.
