In the late oughts and 2010s, critical and cultural theory across the humanities embraced the power of positive thinking. If we paid lip service to the determinations of (neo)liberal modernity, our thinking nonetheless gathered with feverish intensity around all that was said to escape or exceed its iron cage. Those of us tutored in assembling a historical ontology of ourselves turned to dreams of possible futures – or else to cultural practices and lifeways whose onto-epistemic difference enacted futurity in the midst of a seemingly endless now. This politics of utopian adjacency crystallized in a now-familiar set of keywords: affirmation, futurity, speculation, utopia, worldmaking, and (of course!) the ever-popular injunction to imagine otherwise. Within this semantic field, negativity – as critical practice and social relation, ethical stance and political horizon – signified negatively, from the “gay white man’s last stand” discerned in queer-theoretical accounts of a primordial non-identity both enabling and annulling the social, to the “blank utopianism” ascribed to the Afropessimist insistence on world-ending as the only demand worthy of a thoroughly antiblack world. Antagonism without alternativity, critique without redress, violence without repair – for a while, these scanned as the decadent symptoms of a politics of privilege (at best) or the renunciation of politics as such (at worst).

While this particular mode of understanding our critical practice is hardly behind us, change is clearly afoot. The symptomatic coupling of “Worldmaking/Worldbreaking” at last year’s ASAP marks just one signal flare in negativity’s tendential reinvention as something other than the bad object of our affirmationist romance. In recent years, Asian-Americanists have turned to archives and idioms of uneasy feeling, from disaffection and inscrutability to spoilage and masochism. In Black Studies, pessimism percolates beyond its overdetermined locus in Irvine, CA, finding new vehicles in Black feminist literary theories of loss and historiographical interventions that emplot Black political struggle in the tragic mode. Long sequestered in literary studies as an account of cultural politics – the cost of its admission to a latently anticommunist academy – Marxism too has reemerged in that space as a theory of the obdurately material negations of capital, its vulgarities of crisis and value, wageless life and revolutionary necessity.

This roundtable invites participants to reflect on the shifting fortunes of negativity in the repertoire of contemporary humanistic thought and practice – as observers, fellow travelers, critics, and (longstanding or come-lately) partisans. It treats this year's theme, with its tangled connotations of resistance, survival, and prefigurative rehearsal, as an index to field imaginaries tarrying between speculation and immanence, flight and antagonism, affirmation and negation. What is at stake in this critical (re)turn? Is this a long-awaited development – a welcome evasion of the affirmationist censor – the unlearning of hard-won insights into the necessities of feeling/thinking/being otherwise, or something else entirely? What historical circumstances and libidinal attachments in and beyond the academy condition how we appraise the agency and aspirations of our critical practice?

If you are interested, please send an abstract of 300 words, along with a brief bio, to Eric Cheuk at echeuk@middlebury.edu by April 13th.