This episode of Pod45 discusses our recent Gestures of Refusal cluster, co-edited by Sarah Bernstein and Yanbing Er.

Contemporaries co-editor Francisco Robles sat down to chat about the cluster (as well as broader questions and themes it suggests) with Sarah and Yanbing, alongside Akwugo Emejulu, who contributed the essay "Ambivalence as Misfeeling, Ambivalence as Refusal" to the cluster, and Xine Yao, whose writing doesn't feature in the cluster but whose work and thought on (dis)affect, (un)feeling, and refusal articulates closely related concerns.

Pod45 host and Contemporaries co-editor Michael Docherty also provides some information on how you can stay informed about Contemporaries and Post45 more generally in the event that Twitter, currently our primary means of circulating our clusters, disappears in a cloud of billionaire hubris.

You can read Gestures of Refusal, and sign up for our newsletter, at post45.org now.

Guests

Dr. Yanbing Er (@eryanbing), Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of English Language and Literature, National University of Singapore

Dr. Sarah Bernstein, Lecturer in Scottish Literature and Creative Writing, University of Strathclyde

Dr. Akwugo Emejulu (@akwugoemejulu), Professor of Sociology, University of Warwick

Dr. Xine Yao (@xineyaophd), Lecturer in American Literature to 1900, University College London

Akwugo's Fugitive Feminism (Silver Press 2022) and Xine's Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America (Duke UP 2021) are out now.

Production

This episode was produced by Michael Docherty and co-produced by Gunner Taylor, with logistical co-ordination by Francisco Robles and music by Michael Docherty.

R: Why these realities are important