Jesse Arseneault is an Assistant Professor of Global Anglophone Literatures in the English Department at Concordia University. Although his most enthusiastic work happens in conversation with students in the classroom, his research is focused on Southern African literary and cultural studies. Arseneault’s work is interdisciplinary, and he has published on animal studies, postcolonialism, and queer theory. He is currently composing a manuscript exploring intersections between African postcolonial and animal studies detailing both the possibilities of multispecies critique in African studies and the limitations of animality as a paradigm for engaging African literature given European colonialism’s history of animalizing African bodies.
Jesse Arseneault will give his keynote lecture on Friday, April 13th at 10h30.
“Apocalypse and Futurity in the Anthropocene: Reading Vermin in Rawi Hage’s Cockroach and K. Sello Duiker’s Thirteen Cents”
Abstract: This inquiry considers how narratives of the Anthropocene imagine survival after eco-apocalypse. Countering narratives that privilege white, heteroreproductive, and anthropocentric futurities, this paper engages with two novels that present possibilities for other, radical collectivities in such futures. The first, Rawi Hage’s Cockroach, follows an unnamed Middle Eastern migrant who navigates the exclusionary landscape of Montreal. The second, K. Sello Duiker’s Thirteen Cents, follows a young sex worker discarded by the state in the cityscape of post-apartheid Cape Town’s racial politics. The paper is especially concerned with figures of vermin and pestiferousness that permeate both texts. Such figures are read by this talk as bodies defined in relation to anthropocentric and colonial narratives of the human, as well as figures of possibility for moving unexpectedly and outside the futures envisioned by them.
16th Comparative Canadian Literature Graduate Student Conference 