Joel Terence Rhone

Candidate statement

Assistant Professor of English at the University of Louisiana
I defended my dissertation Disciplinary Aesthetics: Race and Representation After the Cold War at the University of Chicago in June 2023. This project attends to generative overlaps between late-twentieth-century African American literary production and the manufacture of racial knowledge in the academic disciplines. I show that beginning with the Cold War, African American writers have routinely renegotiated the empirical, archival, and aesthetic priorities underlying the multiculturalist logics that publishers, philanthropies, universities, and state bureaus have taken up since the mid-century period. My revisions toward a book manuscript are underway, and pubic-facing pieces of my work have appeared in The Drift, The Point, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

I have remained an active MSA member since 2022. As a graduate student, I presented an excerpt of my dissertation chapter “ Representation Matters: James Baldwin and the Origins of High Cultural Pluralism” on the “Modernism, Politics, and the New York Intellectuals” panel in Portland 2021. I also participated in the seminar on Black Modernism and its afterlives this past year in New York, and for 2024 I’m organizing a panel on claims to aesthetic autonomy among Blacks Arts movement thinkers. My organizational experience also includes several coordinated lectures at the University of Louisiana as well my founding of the interdisciplinary Race and Racial Ideologies workshop and working group at the University of Chicago.
Website: https://english.louisiana.edu/node/337