Issue 2: How To Be Now
"What's happening with the special issue? The 'now' of its title keeps changing its referent!" So one of our contributors complained in June, after we had predicted an April publication date. This special issue has been much longer in the making, of course: it began with The Contemporary, a conference we organized in spring 2016, which already feels like a separate epoch. The speed with which "now" becomes "then" has increased dramatically over the last two centuries, and today it has reached the near-vertical pitch of infinite approach: the "now" and "then" have almost merged — call it the temporality of the Internet, or the Greater Acceleration.
When the three of us were still graduate students — less than a decade ago, not even a blip on in the conventional historical record — "contemporary literature" courses began at 1945, or perhaps 1965, and "The Contemporary" was not yet a widely accepted academic field. Now we are all engaged in the field of contemporary studies; we have all even taught courses based entirely on texts published within the calendar year of the course. The discipline's new openness to the extreme present is thrilling for intellectual reasons, and a relief for expressive purposes, allowing us to bring the dominant feeling of contemporary experience — anxiety — into our scholarship.
This anxiety about the "now" is far from the space-age midcentury infatuation with being "of the moment" or the coming moment, or the fin-de-siècle embrace of the "power of the now." As scholars, this anxiety exhibits itself as an overwhelming sense that we are missing the present as it happens — or, to use a phrase that has already been consigned to the digital dustbin of the extremely recent past, FOMO. ("Fear of missing out," in case it passed you by.) We are anxious that our objects of study are no longer contemporary or perhaps never were, and that in our attempt to address everyone we'll address no one at all. So we obsess about ourselves — about the constant disintegration and regeneration (or not) of academic fields, about our desire to read and watch and listen to everything, about our intellectual and ethical responsibility to address audiences from disparate subject positions and levels of access. We constantly ask, "How to be now now?"
The study of the contemporary literature and culture has always presented a daunting set of challenges. The contemporary refuses periodization — today's contemporary will not be tomorrow's. The contemporary refuses a canon — an agreed-upon set of objects to ground discussion and debate. The contemporary defies expertise—we can't accumulate knowledge about ever-changing objects. The contemporary resists perspective—we can't reliably distinguish fads from innovations. And most daunting: the contemporary is us — and we rarely know ourselves despite our obsessive self-regard.
The study of our contemporary exacerbates these challenges. Buzzwords make the point: information overload, distraction culture, niche culture, fake news, the precariat, interdisciplinarity, disciplinarity, social media, hype, the news cycle, the war on the humanities, the hot-take, Twitter, and, yes, FOMO. We are constantly being reminded about the ephemerality and multiplicity of the present. How can we even begin to understand the now now — let alone write about it accurately?
For all these reasons, writing about contemporary literature and culture is especially urgent. Attendance at the annual Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP) conference has risen 400% in the last decade, from 119 in 2008 to 459 in 2018. A spate of recent books — Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being (2013), Theodore Martin's Contemporary Drift (2017), and Michael North's What Is the Present? (2018), to name just three — are at once symptoms of this urgency and accounts of it. Our own conference, which brought together early and mid-career scholars to discuss the topic at Princeton University, received 135 submissions for six panels.
The six essays collected in this special issue of Post45 respond to these challenges, while investigating our contemporary anxiety. The essays model not only how to write about the now now, but how to be now now. What makes the essays — by Aida Levy-Hussen, C. Namwali Serpell, Rachel Greenwald Smith, Keston Sutherland, Sunny Xiang, and Damon R. Young — exemplary? They present compelling arguments about their respective objects, and intervene in their respective fields. Yet they also look beyond their objects and fields, justifying their arguments to multiple audiences. The essays are rigorous without being insular, public without being belletristic, and provocative without being cynical. They analyze the connection between art and life — and critique it. Together, they drive a wedge between the now and then.
We make these claims as scholars of contemporary literature and culture working in different fields and intellectual traditions. These six essays changed how we approach the present. What did we learn? Historicize, don't periodize. The contemporary may be a moving target, but it does not refuse historical analysis. All the essays in this special issue explicate the genealogies of contemporary phenomena. Historicism and formalism are not mutually exclusive. They are mutually illuminating: history registers the impact of specific forms, and vice versa. Niches need not be hermetic. There are multiple contemporaries, and those contemporaries can, and must, be shared. Advocate for your object. Do not assume its value, but do not mistake its value for goodness. Accounts of what matters need not be redemptive. Uncertainty can be rigorous. All the essays in this issue identify and interrogate forms of ambivalence to elucidate the significance of literature and culture today.
The essays also all dissent from the dominant model of intervention in literary studies: the brand. After a century of isms, we now confront a proliferation of turns (archival, speculative), theories (thing, affect), readings (distant, surface), and posts (posthuman, postcritique). These brands often present themselves as antagonistic, while the essays that promote them often seem more concerned with winning and career advancement than analysis, interpretation, and knowledge production. The essays collected here present a renewed model of intervention, harnessing our self-regard to understand the external world. Accordingly, the essays are unapologetically critical, developing their claims through sustained engagement with literary and cultural objects — novels, poems, video clips, emoji. They are also theoretical, drawing from and contributing to debates in Marxism, psychoanalysis, critical race studies, and postcolonial theory, among other fields. And they are receptive, open to learning from everyone, everything. This pluralism is not a form of compromise — it is a commitment to intellectual inquiry, to the truth. The intervention might seem modest — a collection of truisms. But to us, it is ambitious. Indeed, we believe it represents a method — the method to illuminate the present, and to sustain literary and cultural studies today and for years to come.
The essays in this special issue had their origins in our Contemporary conference; only Levy-Hussen did not attend. We present them in alphabetical order, although they could be constellated in various ways to highlight their complementarity. Field interest in minority literature links Levy-Hussen's "Boredom in Contemporary African American Literature," which interrogates the relation between knowledge and social change, to Xiang's theorization of genre in "Global China as Genre." Attention to genre links Xiang to Sutherland's "Sean Bonney's Hate Poems," which investigates the aesthetics and politics of hate. Close reading as a critical practice links Sutherland to Serpell's "😂; or, The Word of the Year," which explores the expressiveness of emoji, reading a toddler's texting habits in light of linguistic theory. Digital culture links Serpell to Young's "Ironies of Web 2.0," which details the affects associated with YouTube. Questions about speech and power link Young to Smith's "Fuck the Avant-Garde," which presents a powerful argument about the potential of avant-garde provocations today. Critical experimentation links Smith to Serpell — we could go on, detailing shared commitments to the aesthetic, to political activism, to particular objects. The essays invite playful reconfiguration; their open-armed, outward-looking orientation creates and recreates conversations that connect the multitudes that define the now now.
Sarah Chihaya is an assistant professor of English at Princeton University, where she works on contemporary fiction and film. Her essays and reviews have appeared in PMLA, ASAP/Journal, C21 Literature, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, among other places. She is the co-author, with Merve Emre, Katherine Hill, and Jill Richards, of The Ferrante Letters: An Experiment in Collective Criticism (Columbia University Press, 2020).
Joshua Kotin is an associate professor of English at Princeton University. His research and teaching focus on global modernism, and poetry and poetics. His first book, Utopias of One (Princeton University Press, 2018), examines the limits of autonomy in the writing (and lives) of Henry David Thoreau, W.E.B. Du Bois, Osip and Nadezhda Mandel'shtam, Anna Akhmatova, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, J.H. Prynne, and Emily Dickinson.
Kinohi Nishikawa is an assistant professor of English and African American Studies at Princeton University. His writing has appeared in PMLA, Book History, and African American Review; "The Archive on Its Own" won the Katharine Newman Best Essay Award from MELUS. His first book, Street Players: Black Pulp Fiction and the Making of a Literary Underground, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2018.
