Juan Meneses Naranjo

Juan Meneses is a scholar and teacher of World and Anglophone literature (of both the 20th and the 21st centuries), critical theory, and visual studies, and a translator.

He is the author of Resisting Dialogue: Modern Fiction and the Future of Dissent (University of Minnesota Press, 2019) and has published or forthcoming articles and book chapters on a variety of themes and topics (see below).

He is currently at work on two book projects. The first is tentatively titled Denizens! On Foreigners, Invaders, and Other Outsiders. This book takes a wide-ranging view and considers—against the grain of the idea of citizenship—how issues such as colonization, migration, the environment, labor, and the future of the human shed light onto an alternative way of being in the world.

The other book project is a collection of key terms in the style of Raymond Williams’s landmark Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Tentatively titled Z to A: A Vocabulary for the Post-Political Era, it provides a full, critical picture of the most important social, cultural, and historical issues that define the current post-political moment through entries such as “F for Focus,” “J for Job,” “I for Investor,” and “P for Pandemic.”

Book

• Juan Meneses, Resisting Dialogue: Modern Fiction and the Future of Dissent. University of Minnesota Press, 2019.

Resisting Dialogue: Modern Fiction and the Future of Dissent reassesses our assumptions about dialogue and, in so doing, about what a politically healthy society should look like.

The book argues that, far from an unalloyed good, dialogue often serves as a subtle tool of domination, perpetuating the underlying inequalities it is intended to address. With an investigation at its center of “illusory dialogue” (a particular dialogic encounter designed to secure consensus and eliminate dissent), the book offers a series of close readings of novels from the English-speaking world written in the past hundred years to show ways of restoring the radical potential of dialogue.

Expanding the boundaries of post-political theory, Resisting Dialogue reveals how these works offer ways to practice disagreement against this regulatory use of dialogue and expose the pitfalls of certain other dialogic interventions in relation to some of the most prominent questions of modern history: cosmopolitanism at the end of empire, the dangers of rewriting the historical record, the affective dimension of neoliberalism, the racial and nationalist underpinnings of the “war on terror,” and the visibility of environmental violence in the Anthropocene.

Selected Articles and Book Chapters

• Juan Meneses, “Teaching the Visuality of Environmental Disasters,” in Teaching Postcolonial Environmental Literature and Media, an MLA Options for Teaching volume (forthcoming 2021).
• Juan Meneses, “Queering the Nation: Hegemonic Masculinity, Negative Sovereignty, and the Great War in Sebastian Barry’s A Long Long Way.“ European Review 29.3 (2021): 354-369.
• Juan Meneses, “Toward an Environmental Theory of Afropolitan Literature,” in Afropolitan Literature as World Literature, edited volume (Bloomsbury, 2020): 85-102.
• Juan Meneses, “Historical Restoration, Narrative Agency, and Silence in Graham Swift’s Waterland.” Journal of Modern Literature 40.3 (2017): 135-152.
• Juan Meneses, “‘Like in the Gringo Movies’: Translatorese and the Global in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666.” Ed. Russell Cobb. The Paradox of Authenticity in a Globalized World. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014: 175-185.
• Juan Meneses, “Reconsidering International Comics: Foreignness, Locality, and the Third Space.” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 5.1 (2014): 58-69.
• Juan Meneses, Review of Jessica Berman’s Modernist Commitments. Ethics, Politics and Transnationalism. Modern Fiction Studies 59.1 (2013): 211-213.

For more, please visit my Academia.edu page.

Selected Conference Papers

• “Sensing the Post-Political,” in “Post-Politics and the Aesthetic Imagination” (seminar), American Comparative Literature Conference. April 2021 (seminar organizer and presenter).
• “Eco-Nationalism, Inhabitancy, and the Politics of Denizenship in Yoko Tawada and Barbara Kingsolver,” Modern Language Association. January 2021.
• “Literature and Post-Political Theory,” panel organizer and chair. Modern Language Association. Seattle, WA: January 2020.
• “Post-Humanism, Animality, and Dialogue in the Anthropocene.” Modern Language Association. Seattle, WA: January 2020.
• “A Climate Without Borders: The Figure of the Foreigner in Contemporary Literature.” Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment. Davis, CA: June 2019.
• “The Limits of Citizenship: A Foreign Counter.” American Comparative Literature Association. Washington, DC: March 2019.
• “Post-Politics and the Valences of Literary Critique.” American Comparative Literature Association. Los Angeles, CA: March 2018.
• “Shedding Light: Environmental Destruction and the Politics of Visibility.” Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment. Detroit, MI: June 2017.
• “Postcolonial Misrecognition in Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark.” Modern Language Association. Philadelphia, PA: January 2017.
• “Counterstories: Visual Spectacle and the Global Novel.” American Comparative Literature Association. Cambridge, MA: March 2016.
• “Domination Through Dialogue: Plurality, Tolerance, and Understanding as Instruments of Political Dispossession.” Modern Language Association. Austin, TX: January 2016.
• “Reading Images, Seeing Words.” Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment. Moscow, ID: June 2015.
• “The Modernist Character as Postcolonial Model.” Modernist Studies Association. Pittsburgh, PA: November 2014.
• “‘Because Our Fathers Lied’: National Allegiance and the Great War in Sebastian Barry’s A Long Long Way.” Modern Language Association. Chicago, IL: January 2014.
• “Renting as Transnational Poetics in Roman Polanski’s The Tenant.” Film and History. Madison, WI: November 2013.
• “Land Matters: Dissent and Political Agency in South African Fiction.” Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment. Panel chair and presenter. Lawrence, KS: June 2013.
• “‘Like in the Gringo Movies’: Parodic Translation in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666.” American Comparative Literature Association. Providence, RI: April 2012.
• “Representation/Re-presentation: When Historicizing is the Problem.” Midwest Conference on British Studies. Terre Haute, IN: November 2011.
• “Le Courrier International: International Newspaper Comics Language and the Image-Text Third Space.” Graphic Engagement: The Politics of Comics and Animation. West Lafayette, IN: September, 2010.

Research Interests

• World and global literatures
• 20^th and 21^st century Anglophone and postcolonial literature
• Theory and critical studies
• Visual studies
• Nationalism and global studies
• Translation
• Ecocriticism
• Film studies
• Comics studies

Courses Taught

• ENGL 6687 Seminar in Global Literature: Contemporary Global Fiction (Graduate)
• ENGL 6101 Introduction to English Studies (Graduate)
• ENGL 6072 Contemporary Literature and the Environment: Fictions of the Anthropocene (Graduate)
• ENGL 6072 Postcolonial Literature (Graduate)
• ENGL 4852 Orhan Pamuk and the World Novel (Undergraduate)
• ENGL 4750/5072 Migrants, Travelers, and Exiles in Literature and Film (Graduate/Honors)
• ENGL 4112 Modern World Literature: Global Issues (Undergraduate)
• ENGL 4112 Modern World Literature: 1664 to the Present (Undergraduate)
• ENGL 4050/5050 Issues in Global Cinema (Graduate/Undergraduate)
• ENGL 3217 Modern British Literature (Undergraduate)
• ENGL 3050 Graphic Novels and Animation Around the World (Undergraduate)
• ENGL 3100 Approaches to Literature (Undergraduate)

Education

• Ph.D., English, Purdue University
• M.A. English Literature, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
• B.A., English Studies, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
• B.A., Translation and Interpreting, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

Professional Appointments

• Associate Professor, Department of English, UNC Charlotte
• Affiliate Faculty, Latin American Studies, UNC Charlotte
• Editor, H-Empire (2014-2021)