This working group will examine the possibilities and limitations of the keyword essay as a mode of thinking and analysis in research
and academic writing. We are driven by the recent popularity in published collections of ‘keywords’ across multiple disciplines and seek to examine the keyword essay as a new genre of writing among the professoriate. Our working bibliography of keyword anthologies includes Raymond Williams’s Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976), Keywords for American Cultural Studies (2014), Keywords for African American Studies (2018), Keywords for Media Studies (2017), and Information: Keywords (2021). The editors of and contributors to these volumes are academics who see the value in distilling the terms and trajectories of various fields through the keyword essay.
The following questions will be grounding our meetings:
- How else can we think of the keyword outside of the essay genre?
- To what end can keyword essays be useful as a genre for public-facing writing? To what end can keywords make specific methodologies and critical debates legible outside of their respective field?
- What information or critical insights get lost or left behind as authors move to consolidate discourses around keywords
- What is the utility of keywords as a pedagogical tool for undergraduates and graduates?
- How can the keyword essay be a supplement to the elevator pitch for ABD students?
We have two approaches for conducting our meetings. One approach is to provide a topic, and speakers would identify a keyword that distills their research interests within said topic. For example, we might provide a topic such as Sexuality. One speaker then might do a keyword on ‘body.’ Another speaker might do a keyword on ‘erotic.’ Our second approach is to invite speakers to offer a singular keyword that drives their scholarship within a specialized discipline. For example, we might host a meeting in which we think critically about keywords in Black Studies. One speaker might offer ‘abolition.’ Another speaker might offer ‘poetics.’ Within both approaches, scholars across departments can come together to reflect on the capaciousness of the keyword as a thinking practice as well as its limitations.
In thinking of our outcomes, we also hope to provide space for scholars to think of the keyword essay genre as a visual articulation through mixed media collages. For example, some of the latter sessions will consist of making collages relevant to various keywords we’ve explored throughout the year. In this way funding would go towards acquiring materials such as paper, scissors, glue, and magazines. Our desire for visual study is directed by an interest in the material possibilities of this genre, which might be equally as interesting as a pedagogical strategy for students.
Organizers
Dr. Naomi Extra is a poet, writer, cartoonist, and scholar. In her creative and scholarly work, she explores the themes of agency and pleasure in the lives of black women and girls. Her current book project, tentatively titled Bad Black Feminism: A Long History of Black Women Writers and Sex-Positivity, focuses on black women writers of the twentieth century who have been construed as problematic or inconvenient to mainstream black feminism. Her research/creative work has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, Cave Canem Foundation, American Council of Learned Societies, and the African American Intellectual History Society.
Mahashweta Chakravarti is a third-year PhD student in English. Her research interests include postcolonial theory, anticolonial thought, and constructions of the ecological in literary and cultural texts of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Brittany Marshall is a third year PhD student in English. Her research interests include 20th and 21st-century Black women’s writing with special attention to poetry and poetics, print culture, and Black feminist theory. She is also a graduate fellow of the Black Bibliography
Project.