Friday, December 4, 2-4 PM
At The Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities
Sunny Xiang (English, Yale University) Conspiratorial Thinking; Or, Breathing Together
Abstract: My talk uses two seemingly disparate material cultural objects that have long preoccupied me—gas masks and bras—to build toward a theory of conspiracy based on the micropolitics and geopolitics of breath. In pursuing this etymological and elemental interpretation of conspiracy as “breathing together,” I also test out a method of conspiratorial reading that adduces hypothetical chemical intimacies in the absence of verifiable causalities. My archive is eclectic, though it is informed by my commitment to studying U.S. militarism and imperialism in a transpacific context. Components of this archive include: a Maidenform bra designed for WWII carrier pigeons; anti-Vietnam War performance art by Nam June Paik and Salvatore Martirano, respectively; NASA’s use of corset technologies in creating pressurized spacesuits; and an Emergency Bra (EBbra) that converts into a gas mask, which was inspired by the Chernobyl disaster and revitalized during the Covid pandemic. (I may not discuss all of these, but I will bring the EBbra to show you!) Through such examples, I hope to develop a critical vocabulary for redescribing the motifs of exposure and enclosure that underpin colonial conceptions of atmospheric harm and protection. Whereas these boundary-asserting motifs presuppose an antipathy between a vulnerable white body and a hostile environment, I wonder if that a more elemental and relational theory of conspiratorial thinking/breathing can help us devise other blueprints for living in and with chemical and colonial violence.Bio: Sunny Xiang is a professor of English and American Studies at Yale who uses wide-ranging aesthetic, cultural, literary, and documentary materials to study U.S. military empire in Asia and the Pacific. She is especially interested in how historical norms for perceiving race and gender have interacted with the sensory economy of colonial violence and militarized security. Her book Tonal Intelligence: The Aesthetics of Asian Inscrutability During the Long Cold War was published in 2020