Abstract

This essay examines several contemporary works in cultural studies that critique universalizing tendencies in western intellectual discourse. Michael Wiedorn rereads Glissant as a philosophical and political thinker, focusing on the concept of paradox in Glissant’s method of archipelagic thinking, aimed at transforming the imaginaire of collective consciousness. Fred Moten examines a variety of works of interactive, auditory, visual, and textual formats that are representative of black aesthetics to track the affectability of the trauma of antiblackness and the entanglements between blackness and anti-blackness that blur or resist a stabilized definition of black subjectivity and expression. Sharon Suh recovers the Buddhist practice of gazing to critically examine images of Buddhist ideas and practitioners in western and Asian films to challenge a racialized and gendered hierarchy of Buddhism in mainstream culture. Such a project seeks to recover the laywoman’s Buddhist subjectivities and reimagine Buddhism in ways that overcomes the problematic depictions enabled by orientalist studies.