There is solidarity in recognizing our alienation from happiness, even if we do not inhabit the same place (as we do not). There can even be joy in killing joy. And kill joy, we must and we do.

Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (2010)[1]

Xine Yao’s keynote opens with the Queen of Swords card in the Rider-Waite Tarot, seen through Sara Ahmed’s concept of the feminist killjoy. In the spirit of disaffection, Yao posits the sadism attributed to the Queen of Swords as critical negativity to be embraced: the alienated point of departure for thinking the relations between political solidarity, practices of reading, and citation politics amid ongoing global fascisms.

In his recent work Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis, Alberto Toscano argues for understanding fascism as a process rather than a coherent political regime bound to specific times and geographies. Alongside the conventional European bibliography of philosophers, Toscano suggests Black thinkers as theorists of fascism. In this talk, Yao examines the longer histories behind the specifically North American intellectual traditions in which objects become signifying images within the cultural imagination. Watermelons and gauze are the twin focal symbols in this lecture that leverages nineteenth-century North American literature to discuss injury and healing across forms of difference. The watermelon, once a symbol of Black self-sufficiency before becoming a racist stereotype, is reimagined against its vilification through the writings of Charles Chesnutt and August Wilson. Yao also turns to gauze as a symbol of healing and beautification in the poetry of Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, while incorporating it with W.E.B. Du Bois’s theorization of the Black experience. The lecture unpacks how gauze and watermelon meet as images of solidarity, asking what it means when non-Black thinkers cite Black theory. Through popular culture, poetry, and philosophy, Yao reflects on the orthogonal, appositional, coeval, and oblique as methods to consider the slippages between gazes, veils, and gauze.

[1]  Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010), 87.