Joshua Lam

Joshua Lam’s primary research and teaching interests include modernism, African American literature, and twentieth-century and contemporary U.S. literature and culture. Additional interests include critical race theory, science and technology studies, theories of habit and attention, and popular culture (comedy, horror, SFF).

His first book project, Creatures of Habit: Race, Automation, and U.S. Modernism, explores how fears and fantasies about technological development in the early twentieth century were often articulated through the language of racial difference. Examining works by Pauline Hopkins, Gertrude Stein, Richard Wright, and Jean Toomer, among others, the project regards the figure of the human automaton as an index of how the rhetoric of race and technology became intertwined. From fears of becoming enslaved to technology, to condemnations of jazz as machine music, to medical beliefs that “primitive” peoples were not susceptible to “hysterical automatisms” caused by urban overstimulation, Creatures of Habit shows how the rhetoric of race was omnipresent in literary and popular discussions of technological modernity. Tracing a series of aesthetic innovations in African American literature that focus upon the figure of the racialized automaton, the project ultimately demonstrates how black writers in the U.S. used stereotypes of compulsive behavior to combat reigning ideologies of white supremacy in ways quite distinct from “uplift” movements and the politics of respectability.

He is also at work on a second project that seeks to explain the prevalence of minstrelsy and stereotype in contemporary innovative poetry by black writers in the U.S. Examining poetry by Douglas Kearney, Dawn Lundy Martin, and the Black Took Collective, among others, the project analyzes how these poets reduplicate stereotypes in order to scrutinize both formal and racial expectations, especially within the tradition of African American poetry. Rather than adopting the humanizing rhetoric of much conventional African American poetry, the project argues, these poets create innovative poetic forms that use the trope of the objectified black body to deconstruct linguistic processes of racial reification from within.

His scholarship has appeared in the Journal of Modern Literature, Callaloo, College Literature, and the Journal of Foreign Languages and Cultures, and is forthcoming in The Palgrave Handbook of Magical Realism in the Twenty-First Century and The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism and Technology.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS:

“Race.” The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism and Technology, ed. Alex Goody and Ian Whittington. Under contract with Edinburgh University Press.

“Black Magic: Conjure, Syncretism, and Satire in Ishmael Reed.” The Palgrave Handbook to Magical Realism in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Richard Perez and Victoria A. Chevalier. Under contract with Palgrave MacMillan.

“Richard Wright’s ‘Basket of Deplorables’: The Return of the Lumpenproletariat in U.S. Political Discourse.” Journal of Foreign Languages and Cultures, vol. 2, no. 2, 2018, pp. 31-44.

“Black Objects: Animation and Objectification in Charles Chesnutt’s Conjure Tales.” College Literature: A Journal of Critical Literary Studies, vol. 45, no. 3, 2018, pp. 369- 98.

“Uncanny Compulsions: Automatism, Trauma, and Memory in Of One Blood.” Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters, vol. 39, no. 2, 2016, pp. 473-92.

COURSES TAUGHT:

Undergraduate / English
Readings in Non-Fiction: U.S. Modernism (ENG 323)
Comedy: Dark Humor in U.S. Literature and Culture (ENG 320A)
Foundations of Literary Studies II: Literary Theory and Its Others (ENG 280)

Undergraduate / Integrative Arts and Humanities
Monsters in Literature and Film (IAH 207)
Fantasy in the Modern World (IAH 221C)
The Great American Road Trip in U.S. Literature and Culture (IAH 211C)