American Cultures and Global Contexts Center

2024-25 Events

Please join us for this co-sponsored ACGCC & Legal Humanities RFG event! 1:30 pm Friday, March 14, South Hall 2635 for Implicated Readers: Global Human Rights Fiction & Political Responsibility Cassandra Falke (UiT-The Arctic University of Norway) How does knowledge about political violence elsewhere implicate us if we benefit from globally unequal distributions of wealth and security? How does fiction compel readers to think about violence and implication differently than other media? In this presentation, Falke builds on Michael Rothberg´s concept of “implicated subjects” to describe “implicated readers.” These are readers who “occupy positions aligned with power and privilege” in harmful systems “without being . . . direct agents of harm” (1). Implication may relate to our inheritance of privilege based on violent histories such as slavery or colonialism or to our ongoing beneficiary status in systems grounded in inequality. Acknowledging and theorizing implication cannot, alone, move any reader toward the enactment of social justice or even toward more just forms of storytelling, but because effecting justice is always a question of actions we take in our embodied relation to other people, a literary theory concerned with justice must clarify the relationship between ethical forms of reading and ethical actions in the world. In clarifying such a theory, Falke builds on a phenomenological tradition, but moves away from that tradition´s focus interpersonal ethics to build a more structurally-attuned phenomenology of reading. Cassandra Falke is a Professor of English Literature at UiT-The Arctic University of Norway and a Fellow of Cornell University´s Society for the Humanities. She has edited four collections, authored fifty articles and chapters, and published two monographs – Literature by the Working Class: English Autobiography, 1820-1848 and The Phenomenology of Love and Reading. Much of her work uses phenomenology and literature to think about the ongoing problems of political violence, inequality and environmental degradation.