Unit for Criticism SCT Fellow, Summer 2026
I had heard that the ebbs and flows of the graduate school journey are inevitable, but I didn’t pay much attention to the thought until I experienced it myself. Having started my PhD program in Sociology in 2023, I was thrilled and on a high for two years. But that changed last year, due to a serious injury, coupled with a general intellectual numbness that emanated from questioning the usefulness of intellectualism under the current political moment; amidst monstrous and ubiquitous violence. I was meeting my requirements in the program, but it didn’t feel the same. I needed to be in an environment where I could immerse in critical theory (my forever companion to understand the world and its intricacies), on the path of thinking, critiquing, and producing knowledge of socio-political as well as personal importance. This brought me to the School of Criticism at Cornell University which a Nicholson Fellowship from the Unit for Criticism allowed me to attend last summer.
At SCT, I chose the seminar “Orientalism/Capitalism” taught by Professor Chi-ming Yang.
The seminar was an interesting mélange of the two towering critical theoretical frameworks— Orientalism and Marxism— rarely brought together this way and often regarded as theoretically incongruent. (For example, see, Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, Verso Books, 1992.) The seminar was particularly intriguing for the way that it centered nature and the environmental crisis. More specifically, the seminar resonated with my ongoing research, which aims to understand the conjoined history of capitalism and environmental degradation, the local-global entanglements of the climate crisis, and how imagined geographies reshape land and infrastructure, shaped by particular logics of militarized capitalist/neoliberal developmentalism. Besides reading the obvious choices Edward Said and Karl Marx, we engaged with other thinkers, working on questions such as Orientalism, Marxism, settler colonialism, environmental orientalism, Eco-Marxism, racial capitalism, the Plantationocene and the Anthropocene, and abolitionism, for which we read the works of Angela Davis, Cedric Robinson, Mike Davis, Katherine McKittrick, Donna Haraway, Patrick Wolfe, Kareem Rabie, Andreas Malm, and Timothy Mitchell, among others.
Altogether, the seminar was an enthralling six weeks of some fascinating conversations with Professor Yang and the other graduate students. Some of the concepts that stayed with me: examining the coalescence between race, ecology, and empire; understanding settler colonialism as a structure and its variegated manifestations across the globe; how analogies and scientific generalizability is used a tool of oppression on certain populations; the importance of place-based thinking to understand the specificities of climate crisis, all while staying internationalist with regard to political aspirations; how romantic anticapitalism in its identarian form obscures concrete material questions; Black surrealism; and finally the co-constitutive character of incarceral infrastructures and oil economy (for example as occurs in Louisiana). Fellow student Lijin Yang, in the SCT student-organized conference presentation that occurred in the last week of the program, challenged the unending eulogisms of some of the contemporary environmental humanities, and said something that lingers in my mind: “What happens when a linguistic change moves faster than social change?” The engagement with the professors Jason Frank and William Mazzarella, with students from other seminars, and through colloquia, lectures, and works in progress was equally exciting.
Beyond the intellectual vibrancy, at SCT I made some wonderful friends from across North America, China, Hong Kong, and the U.K. The beautiful landscape of Ithaca with gorgeous gorges and waterfalls was a perfect place for this much-needed intellectual sojourn, which has motivated, inspired, and revitalized me at this critical juncture of my PhD program, where I’m proposing my dissertation project this year. Ithaca also has some wonderful ice cream places, wineries, and bars where we would gather after a long day of activities.
I’m grateful to the Unit for this opportunity. Thanks very much!