“What Are You Reading?”: Shelby Johnson

The Communications Fellows are excited to continue the K-SAA Blog’s “What Are You Reading?” series! Started by the 2019 Comms Team, this series aims to spotlight the research of our community members and encourage conversation around recent publications in the field. Please reach out to us if you have someone you would like to see interviewed (including yourself)!

Shelby Johnson is an assistant professor of early American literature at Oklahoma State University, where she researches and teaches courses that take up the intersections of race, gender and sexuality, and ecology in the colonial period. Her book, The Rich Earth between Us: The Intimate Grounds of Race and Sexuality in the Atlantic World, argues that early Black and Indigenous writers improvised worldmaking practices in the ruins of colonial violence. She is working on a new project tentatively titled Intimate Archives of Transformable Life, which explores how Indigenous practices of gender and sexuality offered significant sites of landed relation and dissent to colonial displacement.

What new studies of Romantic-era literature are you reading right now?

Yesterday, I finished Joe Albernaz’s exquisite Common Measures: Romanticism and the Groundlessness of Community. The last few years, we have both been preoccupied by the commons—with questions of land enclosure, colonial dispossession, and property-formation in the Atlantic world, as well as various traditions of dissent to this accumulative energy. The question he opens the book with—“What happens to the experience of community when the grounds of communal life collapse?”—unfolds with an urgency that speaks powerfully to challenges we are confronting inside and outside the academy. For me, as I imagine for others in our shared academic circles, we are witnessing uncertainty regarding funding for research and essential student services (certainly for our most marginalized students), the complicity of institutions in suppressing student protest and investment in genocide, and the explosive and destabilizing reach of Chat GPT and generative AI. 

Joe’s chapter on the Jamaican radical prophet Robert Wedderburn takes up a coalition of refusals that suffuse Wedderburn’s discourse: how the “disinherited and despised [emerge] together to unwork the world” by reclaiming reparative modes of being and belonging: sleep, rest, the general strike. Joe’s generative consideration of Wedderburn has encouraged me to return to Ariella Aïsha Azoulay Potential History Unlearning Imperialism and her meditations on the strike as a framework and method for our present: “Imagine the entire body politic going on strike against imperial sovereignty’s scripts and expectations to protect its fabricated form. When citizens go on strike and disengage from their expected work of reinscribing differential governance, they share with the migrants the presumption that the borders they are trying to cross should not have been closed, let alone erected in the first place […] If the body politic went on strike, we could all refuse the map of differentiated sovereignties that our world has become.” 
Put differently, Joe’s analysis of Wedderburn’s “unwork[ing] of the world” in the strike resonates with Azoulay’s consideration of strikes, bringing to mind Audra Simpson’s work on refusal in Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States (2014). There, she elaborates a form or mode of strike specifically in the context of refusing settler protocol of recognition—but also more broadly in practices of disavowing the very ground of colonial capitalism itself. What could it look like to refuse—to strike against—the world we are in?

Does this writing inform your current research and/or teaching?

Wedderburn, Azoulay, Simpson, and Albernaz have all appeared on my syllabi and in the classroom. To offer an example: in my conversations with colleagues about reconsidering and revising classroom pedagogies in this era of Chat GPT, several have suggested moving towards more personal and reflective writing. One dear colleague at my institution teaches courses on popular culture and television and has created an assignment asking students to analyze their Netflix queue—I could see this working beautifully in her courses. 
But as someone who primarily teaches colonial-era literature, with an emphasis on early African diasporic and Indigenous writers, I am not sure I can see a way toward incorporating personal narrative in these classes, partly because I am mindful of Saidiya Hartman’s point in Scenes of Subjection that foregrounding (white) readers’ “sympathetic responses” to instances of brutal violence and violation may only end with our becoming complicit in Black subjection. That is to say, I have been thinking with Joe’s question—“What happens to the experience of community when the grounds of communal life collapse?”—in a pedagogical sense. Put differently, what happens to our experience of classroom community and shared intellectual inquiry, when the grounds of our communal life collapse? How can we reimagine our pedagogies to reaffirm our commitment to the commons in this era of bleak uncertainty? What might it look like to improvise community within and against the university?

What books are in your 'to read' pile right now? (Any period or genre!)

I really enjoy speculative non-fiction, alternate history, and science fiction—especially work that navigates queer and Two-Spirit and Black and Indigenous histories. This interest is inspired by Robert Wedderburn and Saidiya Hartman. Wedderburn’s The Horrors of Slavery (1824) depends on a powerful fabulation of prenatal manumission—according to Wedderburn, his enslaved mother Rosanna rebelled so persistently against her enslaver, James Wedderburn, that he was pushed to sell her. Rosanna, who was pregnant at the time, demanded that her son’s freedom be a condition of the sale. While Wedderburn was enslaved as a child, he refuses to cite laws or legislation (colonial systems) as the means of his freedom. With my students, we consider how we might focus less on whether Wedderburn’s portrait of Rosanna is historically accurate, but in how his story of an enslaved mother liberating her son expresses history in the subjunctive—“a narrative of what might have been or could have been,” as Saidiya Hartman suggests. 
Because of this, I am always interested in texts that explore alternative possibilities and perspectives on the colonial period. I recently read Kent Monkman and Giséle Gordon’s The Memoirs of Miss Chief Eagle Testikle (2023), which blends narrative and image to tell the story of Miss Chief Eagle, a supernatural, gender-bending, shape-shifting, time-traveling being. She bears witness to the creation of the cosmos and the earth, as well as the ruinous violence of settler colonialism on Turtle Island. Jeremy Chow, a dear friend and colleague, recently recommended Kung Li Sim’s Begin the World Over (2022), a historical counterfactual novel in which a gender-nonconforming prophet, enslaved people, and Muscogee resistance fighters build a coalition against the expansion of slavery and settler colonialism in the young United States. I’m waiting for the ILL copy to arrive, but when it does, I know I’ll be reading it immediately!

Which book(s) do you most frequently recommend to your students? Why?

Given where I am institutionally located in Oklahoma, I try to foreground Indigenous writers in my class and in recommendations to students. Daniel Heath Justice’s Why Indigenous Literatures Matter (2018) is the text I most often suggest to students. It is beautifully written and very accessible. Justice’s organization of the text as a series of questions—“How do we behave as good relatives?” and “How do we become good ancestors?”—foreground ethical questions in literary studies, which resonates with students who may be questioning the value of what we are doing. As Justice puts it, “Relationships are storied, imagined things; they set the scope for our experience of being and belonging.” They matter to the way we experience the earth and our common relations to it.

Have there been any articles or publications recently you’d like to draw our attention to?

Kate Singer has edited a special issue of European Romantic Review on Romanticism and Trans studies. Although I will sheepishly admit that I have an essay in the volume, I’m very excited to read the entire conversation. So many scholars whose work I admire—MA Miller, Jeremy Chow, and Smith Yarberry, among others—are part of the volume.

When you are taking a break from research, what genre or authors do you like to check out?

Science fiction and speculative fiction! Rivers Solomon has been a perennial favorite for me. I taught The Deep (2019) in spring 2024 and An Unkindness of Ghosts (2017) this semester—both texts consider the history of slavery from the view of intersectional Afrofuturism. I also love Joshua Whitehead’s anthology, Love After the End: An Anthology of Indigiqueer and Two-Spirit Speculative Fiction (2020), and frequently teach stories from that collection. Stephen Graham Jones’s recently published Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology (2023) is on my “to read” list. 

Much of this reading is inspired by my love for Phillis Wheatley Peters’s poem, “On Imagination.” I often call this poem a loadbearing text, by which I mean a literary work that has become so significant to my thinking that I cannot bear to imagine a world in which I had never encountered it. In Imagination: A Manifesto, Ruha Benjamin suggests that “imagination” as a term can embrace “dreams and dreaming,” “stories and speculation,” “playing and poetry.” To me, Wheatley Peters’s poem portrays lyric imagination as poesis, as an enactment of Black worldbuilding.

Imagination! who can sing thy force? 

Or who describe the swiftness of thy course? […] 

We on thy pinions can surpass the wind, 

And leave the rolling universe behind: 

From star to star the mental optics rove, 

Measure the skies, and range the realms above. 

There in one view we grasp the mighty whole, 

Or with new worlds amaze th’ unbounded soul.

As I like to tell my students, “On Imagination” may be one of the earliest Afrofuturist texts, an aesthetic tradition that employs genres like science fiction and fantasy to testify to Black experiences of injustice and depict alternative futures. In effect, what Wheatley Peters describes is interstellar travel, by which she leaves “the rolling universe behind.” Her ability to “grasp the almighty whole” ruptures the ideological commitments of colonial society, including laws that legislated the divisions between a “free human being” and an “unfree non/human captive.” Put more simply, as she envisions her transit between stars, she transcends the limited imaginations of her enslavers. Wheatley Peters knew that to build a decolonial future, we must first imagine it—and I believe she helped instantiate a critical and a literary tradition that shapes contemporary speculative fiction.