Dear Colleagues and Students,
You are cordially invited to a talk by Dr. Cherrie Kwok (University of Virginia) hosted by the Department of English Language and Literature.
Date: Thursday, January 30; Time: 5:30 pm (Reception starts at 5 pm)
Room: B 206
Title: “Unsettling Tricks: E. Pauline Johnson’s Mohawk Artifice”
Abstract: Sitting at the intersection of British Victorian Studies and Indigenous Studies, this talk examines poet-performer E. Pauline Johnson. Born to a Mohawk father and an English-Canadian mother, this talk argues that Johnson develops a metaleptic decadent poetics in order to subvert the settler colonial gaze in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Metalepsis (a playful rhetorical device in which one trope is slyly substituted for another) is typically associated with British decadent poets such as Algernon Charles Swinburne, who used the device in order to advance the fin de siècle’s commitment to “art for art’s sake.” Yet the device in Johnson’s hands becomes a powerful strategy for undoing the rigid identity categories, stereotypes, and sociocultural expectations that the settler colonial gaze inflicts upon Indigenous peoples. The talk starts by contextualizing Johnson’s heritage as well as her connections to—and departures from—the British Decadent Movement, tracing her consequential 1894 trip to London where she met Swinburne and persuaded The Bodley Head, a publishing house that had made its name by publishing British decadent literature, to publish her début poetry collection, The White Wampum (1895). The talk goes on to examine her metaleptic poetics through a close reading of a dramatic monologue that she wrote in the collection and performed during her recital tours. The talk draws from research that was developed through the 2021 Northeast Victorian Studies Association’s Mentorship Program, and it is part of a larger book project that re-examines decadence in nineteenth and twentieth-century British and Global Anglophone literature from the standpoint of the 1804 Haitian Revolution—the world’s first and only successful slave-led rebellion.
Biographical note: Dr. Cherrie Kwok specializes in Global Anglophone literatures from the nineteenth century to the present (from the Caribbean, East Asia, South Asia, and Indigenous nations) and Race and Empire studies. She received her PhD in English from the University of Virginia in 2024, where she is currently a Research Associate and Lecturer. Her work has appeared in Victorian Studies, Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, and Volupté: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Decadence Studies.