Rasheed Tazudeen

PhD University of California-Berkeley, 2015

My work is focused broadly on the intersections between ecology, race, and sound in 20th- and 21st-century literature and music. My first book, Modernism’s Inhuman Worlds (Cornell UP, 2024), explores the centrality of ecological precarity, species indeterminacy, planetary change, and the specter of extinction to modernist and contemporary metamodernist literatures. Modernist ecologies, I argue, emerge in response to the enigma of how to imagine inhuman being—including soils, forests, oceans, and the earth itself—through languages and epistemologies that have only ever been humanist. Inhuman modernism, as I theorize through a range of literary and poetic works from Lewis Carroll, Gustave Flaubert, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Cody-Rose Clevidence, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs, names the ways in which modernist aesthetics is routed through the enigmatic relations between species and metaphor developed in 19th-21st century literatures. Inhuman modernism, too, is underwritten by what I call the contemporary post-extinctionist poetics of Gumbs, Clevidence, and others, in which Anthropocene and post-Anthropocene worlds are inseparable from the historical and material traces of imperialism, slavery, genocide, antiblackness, and global resource extraction. (Meta)modernist engagements with the figures of enigma, riddle, and metaphor offer a means towards what Kafka calls an “otherwise” speaking, based on language’s obliqueness to inhuman and planetary being. Drawing on ecocriticism, decolonial and feminist science studies, postcolonial theory, inhuman geography, and sound studies, I analyze inhuman modernist literatures as both part of a collaborative rethinking of modernism’s planetary aesthetics as well as occasions for imagining new modes of livingness for the extinctions to come.

I am currently at work on my second book project, The Musicked Earth: Towards a Decolonial Sound Ecology, which examines modern and contemporary ecology in relation to the diasporic and decolonial (counter-)imaginaries of Black Atlantic, Caribbean, and Indian Ocean novelists, poets, and musicians. I approach these dynamics through two intertwining strands. The first is the relation between musical expression and the fertility of the earth—especially as it arises in Caribbean festival, folk, literary, and musical cultures—and focuses on what I call the decolonial polyphony of works by Sylvia Wynter, Maryse Condé, Wilson Harris, and Shani Mootoo. The second is the trans-diasporic musical and poetic resonance between the Black Atlantic and the Indian Ocean, as expressed through the migratory (or “coolie”) poetics and sonic aesthetics of Alice Coltrane, Khal Torabully, Lord Shorty, and Cyril Dabydeen. Read (and heard) together, these works limn another, decolonial sonic geography—made of fugitive, submarine communions across the Black Atlantic, Caribbean Sea, and Indian Ocean—that resonates somewhere beneath and beyond empire’s audition.

With Sunny Xiang, I co-founded and co-led the Yale English department’s Antiracist Pedagogy Reading Group from 2020 to 2022, and I continue to be interested in antiracist teaching, thinking, and scholarship. I recently developed a research guide for the English department’s writing programs, Oral History as Decolonial Research Methodology, designed for both instructors and student researchers. The project centers oral histories and other forms of knowledge from Indigenous and community Elders and knowledge-keepers as essential to the academic research process. The main goals are to challenge existing norms that tend to further the silencing of Indigenous and Black diasporic voices within the academy and to create spaces for further dialogue between oral and written forms of history, knowledge, and thought.

Book:

Modernism’s Inhuman Worlds. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2024.

Selected Publications:

“Hearing Beyond Extinction: The Inhuman Comedy of Woolf’s Between the Acts,” in Virginia Woolf and the Anthropocene, ed. Peter Adkins. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2024.

“Black Sound, Earth Rhythm,” in Black Environmentalisms, ed. Cajetan Iheka and Jonathan Howard. Duke University Press, forthcoming 2025.

“Gardening as Decolonial Memory: From Barbados to the Bronx,” in The Oxford Handbook to Queer Modernisms, ed. Octavio González, Hannah Freed-Thall, and Juno Richards. Oxford University Press. In progress, forthcoming 2025.

“Ecological Soundings,” Parallax 26:2 (April-June 2020), co-edited with John Mowitt. 

“The Eco-Sonic Grotesque in Béla Bartók’s The Wooden Prince,” Parallax 26:2 (April-June 2020),179-194. 

“Béla Bartók’s Dissonant Ecologies: Nonhuman Sound in Bluebeard’s Castle,” Modernism/modernity Print Plus 4:2 (Sept 2019). 

“Sounding the Nonhuman in Joyce’s ‘Sirens’ ” Humanities 2017, 6, 64 (special issue on “James Joyce, Animals, and the Nonhuman”). 

“ ‘Discordant Syllabling’: The Language of the Living World in Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts,” Studies in the Novel, 47.4 (Winter 2015): 491-513.

“Immanent Metaphor, Branching Form(s), and the Unmaking of the Human in Alice and The Origin of Species,” Victorian Literature and Culture 45.3 (Fall 2015): 533-558. 

updated August 2024