Open Collections

Villareal, Alexei Luis

In conversation with Stefano Harney and Fred Moten's theory of the undercommons, this paper examines how R.F. Kuang's 2022 novel Babel and Ralph Ellison's 1952 novel Invisible Man responds to the enclosures of debt and theft established by the university. Hidden in the shadows of both novels' interests are the relations between the fugitive scholar of colour and the tactics of evasion they employ to navigate the academy's institutions and structures which ultimately adhere to the accumulative and disruptive logics of racial capitalism. I suggest that Robin and Ellison's narrator turn to these methods and strategies as a way of mobilizing and resisting against the university. My essay also takes up critical interventions from both Asian American and Black scholars to reconsider the concessions coerced from the marginalized scholar of colour as they seek to elude the university’s relentless demands of indebtedness.

Text

University of British Columbia. ENGL_V 499

Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library

10.14288/1.0448941

Arts, Faculty of; English Language and Literatures, Department of

Undergraduate

DSpace