Diverse Literatures and Cultural Studies Minor, Coordinator
Office: Fretwell 255E
Phone: 704-687-8325
Email: juan.meneses@uncc.edu
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Diverse Literatures and Cultural Studies Minor, Coordinator
Office: Fretwell 255E
Phone: 704-687-8325
Email: juan.meneses@uncc.edu
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.”
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.
For more, please visit my Academia.edu page.