Submission for "Expanding Forms: A Writing Workshop" Seminar

My scholarship focuses on the intersection between literature and electoral politics in the early United States – in particular how the aesthetic discourse surrounding written “sketches” of character shaped the ways... [ view full abstract ]

My scholarship focuses on the intersection between literature and electoral politics in the early United States – in particular how the aesthetic discourse surrounding written “sketches” of character shaped the ways Americans came to understand electoral representation as representative. In doing so, my academic work reveals the surprisingly literary history of how Americans thought through questions like, What size legislature best represents the people? and What distinguished legitimate from illegitimate electoral district boundaries? My writing for non-academic audiences extends this interest in how literary conventions shape and limit what can be expressed within a politicized American public sphere. Sometimes the links between these essays and my scholarship are specific and literal – as, for example, when I wrote about electoral representation and House of Cards for Los Angeles Review of Books. At other times, my work draws more expansively on my deep scholarly connections to nineteenth-century American literature and its fraught engagements with how identity, especially racialized identity, is expressed in the public sphere. The work I’d like to share in the “Expanding Forms” seminar, an essay in progress called “Banning Fedallah,” falls in this latter category. The essay explores my experience as an Iranian-American woman reading and teaching Moby-Dick during the various iterations of the “Muslim Ban.” It focuses on the ways unstably racialized descriptions of the Parsee harpooner Fedallah speak both to my own embodied experience and to the United States’ long history of racializing Middle Eastern immigrants in ways that confound visual logic.