Keynotes

Elahe Haschemi Yekani (Humboldt University Berlin)

Queer Aesthetics of Unbelonging: Masculinity, Race and Negative Affects in Brandon Taylor’s Real Life and Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

The ever-recurring discourse on the “crisis of masculinity” is often understood as a crisis of the unmarked normativity and assumed universality of white masculinity. In my earlier work, I have described this as “the privilege of crisis”. In the 1990s and early 2000s, writers like Hanif Kureishi and Zadie Smith have challenged this notion, often employing humorous tonalities to depict a broader spectrum of racialised masculinities in contemporary Britain. More recently, there have been much more sombre depictions of “men on the margins.” In the US, it is the upheavals around the Black Lives Matter movement but also increasing anti-migrant sentiments that have shaped the climate during the first and now second Trump presidency and continue in the worrying global rise of the New Right. While there is a greater awareness of racial discrimination, racism is frequently only addressed in its most spectacular violent expressions. Yet, this is not necessarily the most common affective experience of Othering that Black and diasporic subjects make. Adapting Raymond Williams’ famous dictum that “culture is ordinary” as “racism is ordinary” in my contribution, I will focus on two works by queer writers of colour from the US whose novels depict the affective toll that racism takes on the lives of their gay protagonists. To highlight that racism is ordinary, is not to belittle its effects. Part of social marginalisation is the continuous unacknowledgeability of racism that does not simply affect everyone in the same way and yet is something banal, something mundane for so many. Both Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019) and Brandon Taylor’s Real Life (2020) can be read as literary responses to this unacknowledgeability. Both authors address negative affects that include shame and abjection that stem from the intersectional experiences of racism and anti-queerness – which in turn shape any understanding of masculinity. While Taylor’s book can be read as an almost clinical dissection of white microaggressions, Vuong seeks beauty in the fleetingness of existence. Despite embracing these entirely different tonalities, both novels contribute to what I would describe as an aesthetics of unbelonging that shapes queer of colour literary explorations of masculinity.

Biographical note: Elahe Haschemi Yekani is Professor of English and American Literature and Culture with a Focus on Postcolonial Studies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany. Haschemi Yekani is the recipient of an ERC Consolidator Grant for the project “Tales of the Diasporic Ordinary. Aesthetics, Affects, Archives”, in which she investigates queer narratives of migration with a comparative focus on Germany, Britain, and the US in a new book project tentatively called Mini City. Her research interests include diasporic writing, postcolonial studies, visual culture, masculinity studies, queer theory and intersectionality. In addition to numerous articles and two monographs, Familial Feeling: Entangled Tonalities in Early Black Atlantic Writing and the Rise of the British Novel (Palgrave Macmillan 2021, shortlisted for the Esse Book Award 2022: Literatures in the English language) and The Privilege of Crisis. Narratives of Masculinities in Colonial and Postcolonial Literature, Photography and Film (Campus 2011, won the Britcult Award 2009), Haschemi Yekani has published a third book on Revisualising Intersectionality (Palgrave Macmillan 2022) co-written with Magdalena Nowicka and Tiara Roxanne.

Rehana Ahmed (Queen Mary University of London)

“A kinship across relentless divides”: Encountering British Muslim masculinities in recent work by Guy Gunaratne, Kamila Shamsie, and Preti Taneja

From “Pakistani grooming gangs” to “homegrown terrorists” to sexually repressive patriarchs, British Muslim men have frequently been associated with deviant and dangerous masculinities in media and political discourses, especially since the beginning of the ‘war on terror’ in the early 2000s. Against this backdrop, a number of British Asian authored novels and memoirs have emerged, responding to, exploring, and at times contesting these tropes, within a literary marketplace that has tended to operate according to a racialised logic, favouring certain stereotyped narratives from Brown writers.

In this context, I examine three contemporary fictional texts – two novels and a memoir – that centre on British Muslim men who are drawn to radicalisation or terror: Guy Gunaratne’s In Our Mad and Furious City (2018), which is situated in the fallout of a terror attack that closely resembles the murder of Lee Rigby in 2013; Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire (2017), which revolves around the family of a young man who is recruited to the so-called ‘media wing’ of Islamic State in Syria; and Preti Taneja’s Aftermath (2021), which contemplates the real-life attack by Usman Khan in November 2019 in London’s Fishmongers’ Hall. Working with Edouard Glissant’s claim to the “right to opacity” (1990), I explore the varying ways in which these texts withhold or decentre individual male subjectivities, limiting their knowability (including that of the would-be terrorist), for example by shifting the focus to the uneven networks in which they are situated, through textual silences, or by foregrounding listening and the aural against the violence of surveillance and the gaze. I then consider how far this withholding or decentring might allow the texts to break down the dichotomies of alien and citizen, other and self, Muslim and not, character and reader, and even to open up the possibility of “a kinship across relentless divides” (Taneja) or a kind of “solidarity across differences” – what John McLeod has described as “that most potent political weapon of all” (2019).

Biographical note: Rehana Ahmed is a Reader in Postcolonial and Contemporary Literature at Queen Mary University of London. Before joining Queen Mary in 2014, she worked as Research Associate on the three-year AHRC-funded project “Making Britain: South Asian Visions of Home and Abroad, 1870-1950”, based at The Open University (2007–10), and lectured at Teesside University. Rehana Ahmed is Co-Investigator on the AHRC-funded research project “Remaking Britain: South Asian Connections and Networks, 1830s to the Present”, a collaboration between QMUL and Bristol University in partnership with the British Library. She is an associate editor of the magazine of international contemporary writing Wasafiri, co-editor of The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, and co-editor or the Manchester University Press book seriesMulticultural Textualities.

Panel 1: Negotiating Race and Masculinities

 

Bisola Joy Ajibade (Humboldt University Berlin)

Shifting Faces, Shifting Masculinities in Igoni Barrett’s Blackass and Mohsin Hamid’s The Last White Man

This paper examines the intersection of race and masculinity in two postcolonial novels, Igoni Barrett’s Blackass (2015) and Mohsin Hamid’s The Last White Man (2022). These novels reimagine Franz Kafka’s novella, The Metamorphosis (1915) through the lens of race. Both stories feature male protagonists – Furo in Blackass and Anders in The Last White Man – who undergo racial transformations. Furo transforms from Black to white in a postcolonial Nigerian setting, while Anders changes from white to brown in an unnamed Anglophone country. Both novels examine how changes in racial identity reshape the protagonists’ experiences of masculinity. In The Last White Man, Anders’s racial transformation strips him of societal privilege, forces him to confront vulnerability, and reshapes his understanding of masculinity in a racialized world. In contrast, in Blackass, Furo’s sudden access to white privilege in postcolonial Nigeria underscores how colonial legacies continue to shape societal hierarchies and notions of masculinity. Using Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality, this paper examines how these narratives challenge hegemonic masculinity and reveal the impact of racial hierarchies in postcolonial and racialized contexts.

Biographical note: Bisola Ajibade is a PhD candidate in Modern German Literature at Humboldt University of Berlin, where she is working on Black representation in German media. She is also an associate lecturer of German at Arden University in Berlin. From 2022 to 2023, she served as an adjunct lecturer at the University of Florida, teaching German language courses and seminars on African cultures and literature. Bisola holds a Master’s degree in German Studies from the University of Florida, completed in 2022 and a Bachelor’s degree in German and French from Obafemi Awolowo University in Nigeria which she obtained in 2018. Her academic interests include Media Studies, Black Studies, African Studies, Black German Studies, and Film Studies, amongst others.

Karolina Kmita (University of Silesia in Katowice)

Unfolding the Margins: Reimagining Masculinity in Akwaeke Emezi’s The Death of Vivek Oji (2020)

This presentation aims to analyse the representation of non-heteronormative masculinity in Akwaeke Emezi’s The Death of Vivek Oji (2020). Exploring the novel’s narrative, this paper argues that Emezi employs Igbo spiritual beliefs to dismantle gender taxonomy rooted in the Western episteme. Portraying the main protagonist’s liminal body as “multifaceted [...] and undeniably real” (Green-Simms 2016, 157), the novel contributes to a critical discourse on “different shades of masculinity” in postcolonial and decolonial context (Roy 2022, 41). In doing so, The Death of Vivek Oji delves into what Walter D. Mignolo conceptualises as the “border gnosis” (Mignolo 2012: 11), that is, the ways of sensing and knowing obtained through residing in colonial borderlands. Border thinking, as Mignolo suggests, challenges the inclination of colonial endeavours to regulate the production of knowledge, and emerges as an interplay of “the body-politics of knowing, thinking and doing” (Mingolo 2012: XX), which stem from “the bodies who dwell and think in the borders” (Mingolo 2012: XX). In this way, the narrative unfolds the epistemic margins, imagining alternative notions of masculinity which provide a transformative perspective on African queerness and emerge as the “warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality” (Muñoz 2009: 1).

Biographical note: Karolina Kmita is a PhD student in literary studies at the University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland. Her academic interests include postcolonial literatures, gender discourses and queer studies. Currently, she is working on her dissertation entitled “Beyond the Flesh: Representations of Corporeality in Anglophone Nigerian Novels of the 21^st Century.”

Eva Ries (University of Augsburg)

Progressive Black Masculinities in Caleb Azumah Nelson’s Open Water (2021) and Small Worlds (2023)

In my talk, I will argue that the fictional work of contemporary British-Ghanaian writer Caleb Azumah Nelson projects a progressive Black masculinity (Athena D. Mutua “Theorizing Progressive Black Masculinities”, in Progressive Black Masculinities, ed. Mutua, Routledge 2006) that deliberately engages with vulnerabilities and relational ties of interdependency with others as proposed by Judith Butler in Precarious Life (2004). In doing so, Azumah Nelson’s work bears “a co-constructive potential” (Stefan Horlacher “Configuring Masculinity”, in Configuring Masculinity in Theory and Literary Practice, ed. Horlacher, Brill 2015, p. 4), which opens pathways to alternative constructions of masculinity and denounces structures of gendered racism through poignantly voicing its effects. Both Open Water (2021) and Small Worlds (2023) feature protagonists who openly announce their emotional vulnerability as opposed to a hypermasculine silence and sovereignty embodied by the protagonists’ fathers. What is more, both texts turn vulnerability into a visceral affective experience through intermedial connections to Black music and film as well as a particular focus on the bodily experiences of eating, dancing, crying and physical intimacy. Open Water performs this vulnerability as a response to the “precarious” living (Caleb Azumah Nelson, Open Water, Viking 2021, p. 136) afforded to Black men, whereas Azumah Nelson’s second novel centres around the production of the eponymous “small worlds” – to be found in music, food and affective connection with others – as a reprise from a hostile environment. The construction of those worlds is based on the very same conception of a flexible, vulnerable masculinity that engages in nurturing behaviour towards others and allows for intimacy between men.

Biographical note: Eva Ries is a lecturer in English Literature at the University of Augsburg. Her research interests include modernist literature, Pan-Africanism, Caribbean and African Literatures in English, contemporary city texts, narratology and contemporary British drama. Her PhD thesis Precarious Flânerie and the Ethics of the Self in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction (2022) investigated how flânerie as a technique of the self contributes to the formation of ethical subjects in contemporary Anglophone city texts. Her current research project focuses on Pan-African writings in the first half of the twentieth century.Since 2013 she has been editorial assistant of ANGLIA/Journal of English Philology.

Panel 2: Arab and/or Muslim Masculinities

 

Esra Mirze Santesso (Department of English, University of Georgia)

“Muslim Masculinities in Guantanamo Comics”

Militarized spaces are typically gendered; they both valorize and weaponize masculinity. A legacy of the War on Terror, the Guantanamo Detention Center in Cuba, described as a “black site” due to extralegal imprisonments, operates as a militarized zone of exception for the Muslim detainee. Subjected to “enhanced interrogation methods”, the Muslim detainee becomes a disposable body, which can be tortured but cannot be killed. My presentation will focus on two Guantanamo comics, namely Jérôme Tubiana and Alexandre Franc’s Guantánamo Kid: The True Story of Mohammed El-Gharani, andSara Mirk’s Guantanamo Voices: True Accounts from the World’s Most Infamous Prison, to examine the transformation of the Muslim prisoner to Muselmann, the “living-dead” figure reincarnated from Holocaust narratives to describe the cadaveric and zombified existence of the broken prisoner in Gitmo. By giving voice to the Muslim-turned-Muselmann, these comics not only interrogate the collapse of the human in a regime of abuse, but also scrutinize Muslim masculinities, pushing back against the trope of the active, sinister, violent Muslim jihadi (featured in post-9/11 comics). In this regard, they act as witness accounts, attempting to show the desubjectification of the Muslim prisoner through emasculation, illustrating how the Muslim man becomes abject, having lost his dignity as well as his capacity to speak for himself.

Biographical note: Esra Mirze Santesso is Professor of English at the University of Georgia. She is the author of Disorientation: Muslim Identity in Contemporary Anglophone Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), and Muslim Comics and Warscape Witnessing (Ohio State UP, 2023). She is the co-editor of Islam and Postcolonial Literature (Routledge, 2017). Her essays have appeared in numerous journals, including Critical Muslim, Postcolonial Interventions, Recherche Littéraire / Literary Research, The Comparatist, and Postcolonial Text.

Martina Balassone (Sorbonne University and Ca’ Foscari University)

Passing Through the Margins: Queer Arab Masculinities in Rabih Alameddine’s Fiction

In this paper, I explore the construction of queer Arab masculinities in Rabih Alameddine’s The Angel of History (2016) and The Wrong End of the Telescope (2021). Through a close reading of these texts, I examine Alameddine’s nuanced portrayal of the intersecting marginalizations faced by gay Arab men in the United States, from the 1980s to the present. Positioned at the crossroads of competing identities, these men are perceived as a threat by heteronormative, white Anglo-Saxon society – both because of their queerness, linked to the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s, and because of their Arabness, demonized during the Gulf War and the War on Terror. Simultaneously, their marginalization within both queer and Arab communities compounds their exclusion: racialized in queer spaces and discriminated against in Arab ones, gay Arab men often find themselves isolated in the face of oppression. As a result, “passing” becomes for them a survival strategy: adapting to the social context and showcasing the least “offensive” facet of their identity allows them to secure a safer existence, though at the cost of never fully embracing their whole selves. Read through a postcolonial and intersectional lens, Alameddine’s work illuminates the vulnerability of queer Arab masculinities, revealing how the interplay between race, sexuality, and diaspora complicates identity-building.

Biographical note: Martina Balassone is a doctoral student in Anglophone Studies at Sorbonne University and Ca’ Foscari University. She is currently working on her thesis The Literature of the Lebanese Diaspora. From the Anglophone World to Multilingualism under the joint supervision of professor Alexis Tadié and professor Marco Fazzini. She has participated in a number of national and international conferences, and holds a teaching position at Sorbonne Université. Her research focuses on postcolonial Anglophone literature, with a particular interest in the Middle East and a penchant for comparativism.

Shafinur Nahar (Universiti Brunei Darussalam)

The Intersection of Identity: Muslim Masculinities in Southeast Asian Anglophone Narratives

Western literature has often depicted Muslim men as patriarchal figures emphasizing family honor and religious practices (Britton, 2019) or as oppressed victims of colonialism and modernization (Aslam, 2012). Nevertheless, these depictions fail to capture the complex experiences of Muslim males within the Muslim cultural context. This paper investigates the intersectional construction and representation of Muslim masculinities in contemporary Southeast Asian Anglophone literature by Muslim authors, focusing on works from Malaysia, Indonesia, and Brunei. The research explores how these works challenge or reinforce stereotypes and societal norms surrounding masculinity within Muslim communities by analyzing texts such as Karim Raslan’s Heroes and Other Stories (1996) and other regional narratives. Within Southeast Asia’s diverse cultural and predominantly Islamic context, the study examines how cultural, religious, and gender dynamics intersect to shape the identities of Muslim men. Key themes include the interplay between Islamic teachings and local traditions, the negotiation of individual agency amid societal and community pressures, and the reclamation of marginalized narratives. This paper utilizes a close reading methodology for examining critically the multifaceted nature of Muslim masculinities as these characters struggle with issues of faith, ethnicity, class, and sexuality. The theoretical framework is grounded in Raewyn Connell's concept of hegemonic masculinity and the notions of Islamic masculinity articulated by Ouzgane and DeSondy. The study aims to enhance understanding of how Muslim masculinities are constructed and represented in a rapidly evolving Southeast Asian context. This exploration contributes significantly to global discourses on gender and identity, revealing the dynamic interplay between cultural specificity and universal themes in articulating masculinity.

Biographical note: Shafinur Nahar, currently a Ph.D. candidate at Universiti Brunei Darussalam, is dedicated to advancing the discourse on Muslim masculinities in South Asian and Southeast Asian Anglophone literature through her thesis. Her scholarly contributions include research articles published as chapters in esteemed books by renowned academic publishers such as Rutgers University Press and Routledge. Her primary research interests encompass South Asian Diaspora writing, gender and religion, media and language, and the study of gender-based violence. Alongside her academic pursuits, Shafinur serves as the editor of the literary magazine Prachya Review.

 

Panel 3: Irish Masculinities

 

Dane Holt (Trinity College Dublin)

Son(Son)nets: The Familial Elegy in the Work of Tony Harrison and Seamus Heaney

In the twentieth century the boundaries and possibilities of the sonnet in English were challenged, first by Tony Harrison in his “School of Eloquence” sonnets which brought to light issues of English working-class histories and suppression, and Seamus Heaney’s “Clearances”, which interrogated the efficacies of memory in the face of grief through a rural Irish Catholic context. These texts have rarely been read comparatively, however. My paper proposes to investigate how each poet’s adherence and advancement of traditional poetic forms and techniques can be read as post-colonial acts of resistance against the pervasive structures of nationalism and masculinity. The paper will also focus on the inherent differences between the poets’ paternal and maternal elegies and how their complex conceptions of masculinity, labour, class, national identity and domesticity both inform and refract their grief through the prism of the colonial history of the sonnet in its elegiac mode. The paper will go some way to understanding the beginnings of the contemporary shift away from harmful masculine constructs and rigid poetic national borders and thus clear a path for a wider understanding not only of Harrison and Heaney’s entire oeuvre but of post-colonial masculinity in England and Ireland as a whole.

Biographical note: Dane Holt is a Leverhulme fellow at Trinity College Dublin. He completed a PhD on the work of Tony Harrison at Queen’s University Belfast and was the 2023 Ciaran Carson Fellow at the Seamus Heaney Centre, Queen’s.

Scott McKendry (Queen’s University Belfast)

“I can / Never become your he-man”: Troubled Masculinity in the Poetry of Padraic Fiacc

Before the appearance (or rather, admittance) of Medbh McGuckian’s work in the 1980s, the Northern Irish poetic canon had been an all-male affair for well over half a century. Frank Ormsby’s indispensable anthology Poets of the North of Ireland (1979) is infamous for its first edition, which didn’t include a single female contributor. This dearth of women’s voices is all the more curious considering that Northern Revivalist poets such as Moira O’Neill, Ethna Carbery and Alice Milligan were arguably more prominent than their male counterparts in the first decades of the twentieth century. Critics offer a variety of explanations for this phenomenon, but the most compelling is the most obvious. In 1996, Belfast poet Ruth Carr described Northern society as one “which has not been [receptive] to the work of women in any sphere.” (“Introduction”, Word of Mouth, Blackstaff Press, 1996, p.2) Poetry, then, was not a special case. If the Troubles (1966–1998) didn’t begin with testosterone, they were certainly maintained by it. The Northern state itself was brokered at gunpoint, proverbially and literally, by men in smoke-filled rooms.

Belfast poet Padraig Fiacc (1924–2019) stands alone as a male poet whose work recognises the roots of, and challenges the logic of, Northern hypermasculinity. Although Fiacc was admired for his extra-poetic irreverence and frankness, his work has long been disregarded by a critical consensus. Scrappy, fragmentary and not ostensibly ‘well-made’, Fiacc refused to hold to the same lyrical pieties as his poetic peers and immediate successors. Fiacc’s father was a barman and IRA volunteer who went ‘on the run’ to New York after his involvement in paramilitarism following the 1920s Belfast Pogroms. “Sun of a Gun”, from his second collection Odour of Blood (1973), unearths the cyclical causality of a trauma fed by patriarchal conviction and political violence:

Bar-man father, sleeping with a gun under
Your pillow, does the gun help you that much I wonder
For the gun has made you all only the one
In of sex with me the two sexed son (or three
Or none?) you bequeathed the gun to
Still cannot make it so, I can
Never become your he-man; shot
Down born as I was, sure, I thought
And thought and thought but blood ran.

(The Selected Padraic Fiacc, Blackstaff Press, 1979, p. 51.)

The proposed paper will argue that Fiacc’s critique of a sexually repressive and politically oppressive society still lends us new ways of understanding Ulster machismo at its most bloodthirsty, whilst offering a foil to its genteeler manifestation: poetry during and after the “Ulster Renaissance”.

Biographical note: Scott McKendry is a poet-critic from Belfast. He is currently a Lecturer of Practice at Queen’s University Belfast, where he is writing a monograph on Anglophone Irish poetry, exploring aesthetic discourse, dialect, literary networks and the politics canon-building. McKendry has a chapter on the Ballad forthcoming in the Handbook of Poetic Forms (de Gruyter, 2025) edited by Irmtraud Huber and Jessica Bundschuh. McKendry’s poems have appeared in The Poetry Review, The Stinging Fly, Virginia Quarterly Review and elsewhere. His pamphlet, Curfuffle (Lifeboat, 2019), was a Poetry Book Society Autumn Choice. In 2019, McKendry won a Patrick Kavanagh Award. In 2024 he was chosen by Paul Muldoon as Ireland Chair of Poetry’s Poet of Promise. His debut collection, GUB, was published in February this year by Corsair (Little, Brown).

Matthew Rice (Queen’s University Belfast)

“The night is proletarian”: Writing Masculinity and the Factory Poem

The factory worker poem has a tradition in the United States associated with the likes of Philip Levine, Larry Levis, Charles Bukowski, and to a lesser degree, Raymond Carver, among others. However, there is not yet a comparable tradition in poetry generations from the North of Ireland. My forthcoming book, Plastic (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2026) is a book length poem in time-stamped sections set during a twelve-hour nightshift in a plastic moulding factory. The book is based on my own experience working there for ten years and draws on aspects of the hierarchy of masculinity that tends to be prevalent in such modes of industrial work, particularly during the night shift, when, deep into the early hours, the thought processes become almost hallucinatory. Monthly financial deadlines, low wage pay, zero working benefits, post-Troubles anxieties, all combine to contribute to a hyper masculine environment where Afghanistan war vets, single fathers and lonely men use puerile humour and emotional deflection to endure a working existence that offers almost no avenue to personal betterment. This autocritical paper will reflect on my forthcoming book and will explore my own personal journey in discovering how to write a factory poem drawing from a masculine environment that was, for the most part, ‘anti-poetry’.

Biographical note: Matthew Rice was born in Belfast. His poems have appeared in The Poetry Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Asheville Poetry Review, The Dark Horse, The Tangerine, and in the anthologies The Best New British and Irish Poets 2017 (Eyewear), Hold Open the Door: A Commemorative Anthology from The Ireland Chair of Poetry (UCD Press / University of Chicago Press), and The Forward Book of Poetry 2022 (Faber). He holds an MA in Poetry from Queen’s University, Belfast, and is currently undertaking a Northern Bridge AHRC funded PhD at The Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s, where he has taught Introduction to Creative Writing to first year undergraduates. His debut collection, The Last Weather Observer (Summer Palace Press), was published in 2021 to critical acclaim, was Highly Commended for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and was included on the Arts Council of Northern Ireland’s top ten books of the year. His new book, Plastic, is forthcoming with Fitzcarraldo Editions (UK) and Soft Skull Press (US) in 2026.