Minimalist Discontinuity | NFC Doctoral Fellow Connor Bennett

Minimalist Discontinuity

About the talk...

How might literary style respond to the violences of racialization? Scholars have lately theorized racialization in the United States through the psychoanalytic mechanism they term racial melancholia: “the institutional process,” according to Anne Anlin Cheng, “of producing a dominant, standard, white national ideal, which is sustained by the exclusion-yet-retention of racialized others.” As excluded-yet-retained others, these Americans are placed in what she provocatively refers to as a “suspended position” within the national psyche. This is a state that may, for David Eng and Shinhee Han, impose a set of symptoms not dissimilar to those experienced by Freud’s melancholic, including but not limited to “a profoundly painful dejection” and “a lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in self-reproaches and self-revilings,” “culminat[ing]” in an “expectation of punishment.”

By bringing into conversation prominent accounts of racial melancholia, this talk reads the suspended position as a space in which to navigate the immediate violences of a white supremacist state and develop new, collective, and subnational futurities within that state. I show how literary style—specifically, the literary minimalism practiced in Julie Otsuka’s novels of Japanese American internment—not only endorses such futurities but enacts them through a method I call discontinuity: the interruption of linear-progressivist and state-sponsored temporalities by means of a recursive and fragmented minimalist stylistics.

About the speaker...

Connor Bennett is a PhD Candidate at the University of Toronto’s Department of English. His article entitled “Raymond Carver’s Minimalist Mouth-Work” was published in ELH (Summer 2025). A second article, co-authored with Apala Das and Robert McGill, is forthcoming in Modern Fiction Studies. In 2023, he co-edited with Michael Dango an essay collection called “Minimalisms Now: Race, Affect, Aesthetics” for Post45 Contemporaries. His work is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Ontario Graduate Scholarship Program. He is one of this year’s CSUS/NFC Doctoral Fellows at the University of Toronto.

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