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As the first extant collection of Japanese court poetry (waka), Man’yōshū (Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves, 759–785) lies at the source of Japanese culture and intellectual history; earlier anthologies compiled in Japan emphasized Chinese poetry (kanshi), language, and culture. Man’yōshū, a collaborative project that took many versions to complete, is currently defined as the earliest extant anthology of waka, compiled by Ōtomo Yakamochi (ca. 718–785), and divided into twenty volumes with 4,516 poems. This definition, along with all modern annotated editions, is based on the earliest complete Man’yōshū manuscript, the Nishi Honganji-bon, which dates from the early 1300s but was reintroduced to the public only in the 1930s. In this monograph, I challenge the exclusive legitimacy of this manuscript as the standard for research, teaching, and translation. I also argue that “Man’yōshū” is not just a text but an image, stabilized construct, genre, label, or matrix of knowledge of “Japaneseness” in Japan and beyond.

Embracing Instability proves that the collated and seemingly fixed texts create a distance between the readers and manuscripts on which those annotations are based; they are more a result of the process of handbooking the classics than the classics themselves. In destabilizing “Man’yōshū” through broader frameworks of medieval and reception studies, I expose Japan’s cultural and discursive diversity, while being committed to interdisciplinarity, trans-historicism, and digital humanities. Finally, Embracing Instability explains a contemporary pop-culture trend—interest in the medieval era, as evidenced by Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, the TV show Game of Thrones, and many heroes transfigured in video and mobile games. I argue that we currently live in the era of Neo-Medievalism, that is the unifying impact of technology, ill-information, and tendency for never-ending updates without much consideration for the “original” source.

Shaneda Destine’s current project: Cuffy Witsell and Black Rural Resistance Rearticulated tells a intimate story of Black land ownership through a familial context. It utilizes methods of critical auto ethnography, ethnographic research methodologies and archival research to contextualize the Black land cooperatives, mixed raced alliances that help to build up the postbellum south. Black Rural Resistance Rearticulated is a theoretical conceptualization she uses to uncover strategies of Black people building cooperatives, growing food, and building infrastructure for their community, as they contended with dispossession and precarity, during the Reconstruction era. This project will help to give us a more complicated understanding of how to delve into the makings of Black social movement organizing (BSMO), while contending with the dispossession of Black land, indigenous people and the gendered and racialize ways that it converges.

Gardiner’s research focuses on when evidence justifies conclusions, especially in high stakes social contexts such as legal convictions, scientific conclusions, and morally loaded beliefs. Gardiner’s current monograph project, She Said, He Said, investigates the epistemology of rape accusations, focusing on formal institutional procedures. ‘She said, he said’ cases are accusations of rape, followed by denials, with no further significant evidence, such as credible alibis or third-party witnesses. In such cases, the accusation is probably true. The project explains why uncorroborated rape accusations are excellent evidence of guilt. The research thus helps reduce undue doubt about rape accusations. But the epistemic force of rape accusations generates a paradox. This paradox—which arises from the contrast between the relatively weak ‘preponderance’ standard and the characteristic epistemic strength of rape accusations—reveals tensions among plausible feminist and liberal commitments. Building on recent insights from philosophy and law, She Said, He Said challenges our understanding of testimony, proof, epistemic justice, and the epistemology of rape.

Frances Burney (1752-1840) was one of the most celebrated authors of the long eighteenth century, and her works influenced later authors such as Jane Austen and Charles Dickens.  This project is a critical edition of Burney’s second novel Cecilia (1782) that is part of the Cambridge Edition of the Novels of Frances Burney.  Published at the height of Burney’s powers, Cecilia is a bildungsroman focused on the orphan Cecilia Beverley and the various obstacles she must face before she can marry Mortimer Delvile.  There are significant variants and deletions within the manuscript draft of Cecilia, and the longest and most strikingly obliterated passage is located within the novel’s famous masquerade scene, which I have recovered using techniques in digital paleography.  The newly restored text describes the bizarre satanic rites of Cecilia’s admirer, Mr. Monckton. In my monograph, I have argued that Burney’s suppression and revision of this scene, when read alongside her contemporaneous letters, reveals that she succumbed to familial pressures to remove innovative elements while writing the novel. The fuller range of manuscript evidence that I have begun to recover has already influenced scholarship regarding Burney’s Cecilia, and my further work on the critical edition has the potential to unearth findings that could continue to change our views of Burney and her authorship.

In Separate Yet Intertwined: Black and Native Bonds in the New Negro Renaissance, I examine how authors of the period commonly referred to as the Harlem Renaissance wrote to develop anti-colonial thinking within Black American communities through their representations of indigeneity. I frame these authors within the larger New Negro Movement, extending my archive to include writers who wrote outside Harlem and beyond the 1920s and 1930s as they promoted their own ideas about blackness and challenged stereotyped beliefs popular within mainstream US society. Thus, I offer new ways of considering indigeneity and decolonization with attention to the similar yet distinct experiences of Black and Indigenous peoples in the United States. Through my analysis of novels, essays, and magazine articles, I argue that writers of the New Negro Renaissance invoke the relationships between Black Americans and Indigenous peoples to speculate on coalitions to dismantle colonial thinking within these communities. I also make a case for the New Negro Renaissance’s influence upon contemporary writers who continue to foster anti-colonial thought within Black America through their participation in a discourse of indigeneity. Tropes such as “the Indian grandmother” appear in many texts within the African American literary tradition. However, scholars have not given enough attention to how these authors challenge colonial thinking within their communities with these seemingly flat references to Indigenous peoples. Additionally, Black American writers’ reflections on their indigeneity as descendants of Afro-Indigenous peoples while imagining themselves within US society on dispossessed Indigenous land goes overlooked. Each chapter explores how Black American writers engage in a discourse of indigeneity that highlights the real, imagined, and futures of Black and Native lives working together against white supremacy.

A Cinema of Reparations theorizes a “reparative mode” in cinema, uniting several contemporary and concurrent debates regarding reparations and reparative justice underway in mainstream American politics and law, in racial justice organizing and activism, and in film theory and pedagogy at large. While “reparative modes” increasingly refract through film archives, industries, economies, genres, and curricula, as archivists, practitioners, scholars, and franchise executives attempt to decolonize and deconstruct exclusionary film institutions, no work yet exists on how reparative aesthetics emerge onscreen, within contemporary American media. A Cinema of Reparations locates how cinema refracts and reflects the contemporary reparations debate, spanning from Queen Mother Audley Moore in the mid-1960s to the 2019 and 2021 hearings on bill H.R.40: Commission to Study and Develop Reparations Proposals for African Americans (so numbered to invoke William T. Sherman’s 1865 “40 acres and a mule” promise ). A Cinema of Reparations uncovers a reparative mode, especially within films and media that adapt, amend, or un-make a film predecessor. As critically metacinematic engagements with history, the reparative mode helps to point the way forward in the contemporary sociopolitical struggle for reparative justice in American cultural life.