Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities
Home About "Concepts of Diaspora" Deadline FAQ > Profiles of Current Fellows
Current Profiles:
Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellows at Johns Hopkins
- Leonardo Lisi - Fellow in the Humanities Center
- Sana Aiyar - Fellow in the Department of History
- Michael Quintero Birenbaum - Fellow in the Department of Anthropology and Musicology at the Peabody Conservatory
- Olabode Ibironke - Fellow in the Department of English
Leonardo Lisi
Leonardo Lisi completed his PhD in 2008 in the Department of Comparative Literature at Yale University with a dissertation entitled Poetics of Dependency: Early Modernism and the Struggle Against Idealism in Kierkegaard, Ibsen and Henry James. During his years at Yale he won several prestigious fellowships to do research at a number of other institutions and accepted invitations to conduct research at the Kierkegaard Research Centre at the University of Copenhagen as well as at the Howard and Edna Hong Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf College. He also spent a semester studying Philosophy and German at the University of Heidelberg.
Lisi’s research and teaching interests revolve around questions of how philosophic concerns can be seen to express themselves in literature and how literature provides its own unique answers for philosophy. His dissertation challenges the traditional understanding of literary Modernism as the culmination of the aesthetics of autonomy formulated by German Idealist philosophy. In order to do so, he reexamines the historical and social context of the emergence of the aesthetics of German Idealism, and views them as part of the general response to the failure of Kant’s Transcendental Deduction in the Critique of Pure Reason. Mr. Lisi concludes that the aesthetics of autonomy constitutes merely a specific philosophical and formal solution to a crisis in the structure of modern experience. He then goes on to show how an alternative philosophical and aesthetic response to that same crisis is formulated in Scandinavia, placed at the cultural and economic periphery of the modern world-system. Focusing on Kierkegaard and Ibsen, he shows how these two figures self-consciously reject the Idealist aesthetics of autonomy, and instead develop what he terms an “aesthetic of dependency.” Finally, he demonstrates how the formal transformation of Henry James’ oeuvre from his middle to late phase must be understood in light of Ibsen’s influence on English literary life in the 1890s. Henry James’ often neglected experimentation with the dramatic form in the 1890s thus constitutes a crucial engagement with the aesthetics of dependency, which provides him with the necessary ingredients for his subsequent modernist breakthrough. From this perspective, a proper consideration of the poetics of Modernism requires an epistemological and aesthetic framework radically distinct from the one usually brought to bear on it.
Lisi has published five articles and was awarded both the Ibsen Essay Prize by the National Ibsen Society of Norway and the Ibsen Society of America, as well as the Aurora Borealis Prize by the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Studies. He has also published several articles on topics related to his research in a number of international, peer-reviewed journals and anthologies.
During his stay at the Humanities Center, Mr. Lisi intends to prepare his dissertation for publication and to begin two further research projects: an exploration of the recurring use of literary models from the 17th century by modernist writers as well as a systematic study of the interplay of philosophy and rhetoric in Kierkegaard.
Sana Aiyar:
Sana Aiyar is completing her PhD thesis in the Department of History at Harvard University, where she went for graduate study after receiving a MA in history at Cambridge University, along the way winning the Alan Coulson Prize for the best dissertation in Imperial History (2003). She has also published an article “Fazlul Huq, Region and Religion in Bengal: The Forgotten Alternative of 1940-43,” Modern Asian Studies 42(6), 2008: 1211-1248 and given numerous papers at conferences.
Her field of study is the South Asian Diaspora, considered within the broader context of inter-racial, inter-regional and transnational connections made across the Indian Ocean by South Asian colonial immigrants. The thesis follows the South Asian diaspora first to colonial Kenya and, from there, to post-colonial Britain, thus examining the experiences and forms of national and religious identity that emerged from this dual diasporic movement, as South Asians negotiated the changing meanings of race, nationality and political rights in the public political sphere in Colonial Kenya. This was a space equally settled by Europeans and both they and Indians lived within the majority African population, making colonial East Africa a highly multicultural social environment. Although the colonial government in Africa claimed to be racially unbiased, the social, economic and political structure of Kenya led to the development of three racially distinct communities there. Thus, between 1910 and 1923, the South Asian diaspora community positioned themselves as sub-imperialists who played a vital role in facilitating the colonization of East Africa, for which they demanded equality with Europeans who had been granted economic and political privileges, demands resisted by the Europeans. However, in the end, South Asians in Kenya were granted only limited political representation.
What makes Sana Aiyar’s thesis so novel and important is that she is not content to end her story there, but follows the fate of this South Asian community after the emergence of an independent Kenya, when its racially-defined independence struggle and territorially-defined nation-state led to the exodus of South Asians from Kenya after independence. Interestingly, rather than return to India, the South Asians who had already migrated to Kenya elected to go to Britain, and the second half of her thesis seeks to unravel why Britain became the obvious “home” to return to, rather than the motherland India. As one of her advisors noted, this is a conceptually challenging and cutting edge” piece of research, which contests existing approaches to multiculturalism as a system of policy, and a framework for political identity. The work promises to be an important intellectual bridge between South Asia, Africa and Britain, to all of whose histories it will make a novel contribution. The novelty, and significance, of this study of a “dual diaspora” is clearly central to the theme of the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowships on “Concepts of Diaspora” and promises to revise our understanding of the relationships entertained between home- and hostland so central to it.
While at Hopkins, Sana Aiyar plans to build on her dissertation research by examining the legitimization of religious identity in the public political diasporic sphere with a particular emphasis on the emergence of this phenomenon among the Hindu South Asian community in Britain, thus focusing on religion, rather than race, as an arena in which the struggle for rights was conducted. Indeed, she will argue, religious rights have come to trump other components of diasporic identity, a powerful finding if sustained.
Michael Quintero Birenbaum
Michael Quintero received his PhD. in December 2008 from the Department of Music at New York University. He is an ethnomusicologist who wrote his thesis on The Musical Making of Race and Place in Colombia’s Black Pacific. While at NYU he received a Fulbright International Institutional Exchange Grant to Colombia, as well as several prizes for distinguished work. He has published five articles and several book reviews on topics such as “Afro-Pacific Music and Identitarian Authenticity in the Era of Ethno-diversity” as well as several studies on Afro-Colombian popular music and has delivered some twenty-five papers to national and international meetings. Because he is both an ethnographer and a musicologist, we plan to give him a joint appointment in both the Anthropology Department at the Krieger School and an appointment in the Musicology Department at Peabody, with courses cross-listed between the two departments, both of whom are eager to have him on their faculties.
His thesis examines the role of the traditional music of the black inhabitants of Colombia’s rural southern Pacific coast in terms of the ways in which it contributed to the formation of racial subjects in Colombia, the country with the third largest black population in the Americas. He traces the history of black Pacific musicality as a social and ritual system and shows how a diverse cluster of musical practices were consolidated in Colombia’s 18th-century slave society and developed in the 19th-century post-emancipation world as a complex web of overlapping belief systems, social affiliations and musical forms and logics which were shaped along lines of class, race, ethnolinguistic groups and religious background. One of his more compelling claims is that Colombia’s black Pacific populations received particular juridical rights from the state as an ethnic minority by legitimating their claims to being a distinctive, and hence credible, ethnicity through musical self-representations that fashioned local black musical culture into scripts of regional folklore and indigenous being. Finally, he demonstrates ethnographically how Afro-Pacific musical practice subsequently became central to a range of new social actors, both black and non-black, shaping their regimes of affect and identitarian subjectivities in the neoliberal, multicultural world of the present. While at Hopkins Quintero will complete the revisions to his thesis, parts of which have already been awarded a number of competitive prizes, grants and fellowships and make it ready for publication as a book. In addition, he hopes to embark on a new project, for which he has already completed some fieldwork and research. This second project seeks to demonstrate the ways in which the black cultural and musical forms of Colombia have suddenly, and quite unexpectedly, become important in diplomatic relations between the US and Colombia. This has happened, he argues, because Afro-Colombian activists have sought to lobby the Black Congressional Caucus of the US Congress on questions of human rights through appeals to pan-diasporic cultural and political fraternity. These efforts have not been confined to political initiatives but are conducted in the cultural realm as well, through a Washington-based Afro-Colombian dance troupe that performs for diplomats, the city’s historically black universities, and other black Washingtonians. These forms of political activism have, in turn, been countered by the Colombian government and both sides have mobilized music as one of the central tropes of the black diaspora as a means and a medium through which to gain the attention of black cultural, political and intellectual classes in the United States. In this context, he will seek to show, music functions as a powerful instrument for claiming intra-diasporic connections, in effect extending to the United States the cultural forms earlier developed in Colombia on the basis of a generalized notion of blackness, a strategy that poses some dangers for black Colombians, who do not have at their disposal the kind of spectacular Africanisms associated with places like Brazil, Haiti or Cuba, and thus threatens to have their distinctive character absorbed into the more generalized topos of blackness. The book that he hopes to write on this topic will explore the processes entailed in the creation of this intra-diasporic connection, as well as the possibilities for mistranslations, frictions, erasures and solipsisms that it contains both on the part of Afro-Colombians and that of their black US interlocutors.
Olabode Ibironke
Olabode Ibironke received a BA and MA from the Obafemi Awolowo University in Nigeria before coming to the United States, where he completed his PhD at Michigan State University in English in 2008. He is currently a CIC Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in the Department of English at the University of Minnesota. He has already published six articles, with several more on the way. Although he had been offered a position at a university in Texas, he declined the position in order to accept the Mellon postdoctoral fellowship.
His PhD thesis, entitled “Between African Writers and Heinemann Educational Publishers: The Political Economy of a Culture Industry” examines the role played by the publishing house of Heinemann, which functioned as the publisher for a large percentage of the literatures of post-independent Africa, Asia, the Caribbean Islands, the Middle East and the Pacific. In particular, it served as the principal publisher of African literature via its well known and widely read African Writers Series. By examining the role played by Heinemann in the shaping and diffusion of African literature through an investigation of the literature published by Heinemann and the editorial notes, readers’ criticisms and editorial correspondence in Heinemann’s archive, Ibironke is able to demonstrate the ways in which the development of African literature in the postcolonial era was mediated by the demands of an Anglophone literary regime – represented by Heinemann -- and offers the first history of the material conditions and imperatives underlying the cultural institutions and industries of literary production in relation to the development of a relatively new, and novel, body of African literature. His work entails a combination of sophisticated theorizing about the nature of cultural production, the activities of a European publishing house, which possessed its own vision and interests, and the African editors and authors whose works helped, via the series of African Writers, to create an initial African literary “canon.” In the words of one of his reviewers, “the resulting dissertation is a provocative intervention into one of the key questions in postcolonial studies: the way in which material culture intersects with the agendas of various producers of culture so as to generate an internationally acknowledged literary corpus, while also manufacturing a cosmopolitan “Africanness” that functions to generate an international Anglophone audience.” It is precisely this kind of study, Ibironke argues, that lays the groundwork for the development of a theory of literary production, in both its material and literary dimension, with significant implications for the fields of postcolonial, transatlantic, world Anglophone and African literature as well as Diaspora Studies.
While at Hopkins, Olabode Ibironke hopes to complete revisions to his thesis and submit it for publication. Once this is completed, he intends to extend the scope of his research into African literature beyond the African Writers Series to a series of black international publications, such as the Negro Worker, La Race negre, and Le Cri des Negres, Transition, Presence Africaine and others, in order to map the fundamental matrices of the thought and politics of the African Diaspora. His approach to the question of the African diaspora thus explores not only the historicity of displacement, but also the mode and transmigratory patterns of forms of knowledge, behind which lies his conviction that “consideration and understanding of the disruptions of the organic relations between African narratives and textual production in the twentieth century ought to constitute an integral aspect of the theory of Diaspora.