I'm working on an article on early modern racial formation and affect and ruminating on what it means for me to work in a field that demonizes and diminishes my identity in both its primary texts and the scholarship on them. I offer these questions: #ShakeRace 1/

What happens when you read texts for whom you are not the intended audience? How does that challenge the universalism of the canon? Is canon formation steeped in the universal transcendence of the artistic form? 2/

Am I then not a universal subject if I experience harm from the canon fire? Am I simply the detritus that results from its discharge, the waste necessary for its successful colonial trajectory, the ambit of its imperial aspirations? 3/

What does it mean to stand apart—or more accurately—be prohibited from the universal and yet essential to the formation of the universal? How, then, am I equipped to perform my training in literary criticism? 4/

Do I deny myself in service of the universal identity prescribed by the canon? To I assert my raced, sexed, gendered, classed, self into my analysis and risk delegitimization because my interlocutors believe themselves to be none or just one of those? 5/

Do I presume to have a locus of enunciation when my object of study could not even conceive of me? Do I risk the charge of anachronism by bringing myself to my work when the universal white subject can control time? 6/

What does it mean to embody the identity of the antagonist in everything you read, study, analyze? How do you protect yourself from the constant assault on your subjectivity? 7/

How do you love and honor yourself when you’re being “taught to hate yourself and your kind”? (Malcolm X) 8/8 #ShakeRace #LitPOC #AcademicTwitter #IAmWriting