Abstract This roundtable discusses the future of research in critical Kashmir studies through a close consideration of questions of power, ethics, and positionality that have come to the fore in recent years.

Abstract This essay offers an overview of the threats posed to our democratic and educational institutions by neoliberalism and neofascism and articulates a pedagogy of “educated hope” based on the work of Ernst Bloch, Paulo Freire, and James Baldwin to restore a sense of civic and democratic agency in the classroom and other public settings.

Abstract This essay draws on the author’s experiences in the Faculty Senate at Pennsylvania State University and cochairing a committee on COVID-19 and shared governance for the American Association of University Professors.

H ow can literary scholars productively engage with the contradictions of revolutionary violence, both as a historical phenomenon and as a legacy that continues to script contemporary politics? In particular, how might we situate major upheavals like the American Revolution, Haitian Revolution, and US Civil Warwhen violent insurrection proved central to dismantling and defending figurative and literal forms of slavery-alongside latter-day instances of antidemocratic, white-supremacist violence that reveal the as-yet-incomplete nature of those very events? This essay takes up these questions by considering three recent publications. Shelby Johnson's 2020 article, "'The Fate of St. Domingo Awaits You': Robert Wedderburn's Unfinished Revolution," and Betsy Erkkila's 2021 article, "Phillis Wheatley on the Streets of Revolutionary Boston and in the Atlantic World," each consider an early Black Atlantic theorization of insurrection forged at the crossroads of antislavery activism, evangelical Protestantism, and revolutionary ideology. Reading these works in dialogue with Chris Hayes's January 7, 2021, interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates about the January 6 US Capitol insurrection clarifies racism's paradoxical role as democracy's limit case and its most inexorable summons to fulfillment. Johnson's eloquent and provocative article offers a reading of The Axe Laid to the Root, an 1817 periodical produced by the mixed-race, Jamaican-born abolitionist and radical activist Robert Wedderburn (1762-1835?). Taking as her point of departure the text's prophetic warning of an "imminent Jamaican insurrection" modeled on the Haitian Revolution, Johnson analyzes The Axe's formal quirks to excavate Wedderburn's "radical historical sensibility."1 Informed by early nineteenth-century millenarianism and ideas circulating in London's radical underground, the text elaborates a complex political temporality that "layer[s] past and future history" to imagine "a revolution that . . . has both already happened and is yet to come."2 In so doing, Wedderburn simultaneously evinces a "commitment to revolutionary inevitability and a recognition of its profound contingencies."3 For Johnson, Wedderburn's literary ventriloquy-his evocation of multiple voices, including those of the enslaved and the deceased-diffuses revolutionary agency in ways that at once defer and guarantee liberation's eventual arrival. Transforming the liability of individual human "finitude" into an asset through acts of imagined collectivity, The Axe "conjures out of revolution's unfinishedness a wholly new future."4 en gl ish lan g u a ge no t es

Abstract This essay analyzes the 2007 board game Pandemic in light of the COVID-19 global pandemic. The essay explores the connections between the reality of Pandemic and the play of COVID-19. To do this, it uses Ian Bogost’s interpretation of systems (both real and imagined) to invite a dialectic of reality and game simulation. The interaction of such systems, in a game whose theme became real, highlights a major tenet of game studies—the borders between reality and games are thin, blurred, and mobile, if they exist at all. Games, in their simulation of the real, are mimetic, and, in turn, reality has become gamified. The essay examines the board game and highlights its mechanics, which include cooperation and mitigation of risk. It also explores how the game and reality blur their borders in this instance of play, inviting further study into the ramifications of simulated games and the fantasy of the real.

Abstract Excess signals uncontrolled natural agency and thus provides a key ingredient in horror and ecohorror. Because excess ultimately threatens our agency over matter and meaning, nature comes to threaten the fall and dissolution of humanity, offer an erasure of what it means to be human, and exert a muffling of the very agency that defines our sense of our exceptionalism. Yet horror and ecohorror also enthrall. They do so precisely because they provide a perversely traumatophilic/traumatophobic sensation, a paradoxical presence of opposites that somehow, like sweet-and-sour soup for the psyche, tastes good. We watch or read ecohorror for the attraction and repulsion its various traumas offer. Horror and the disgusting captivate us, reminding us at the same time of our corporeality and its fragility. Slime is central here. Slime is the horror of boundary transgressions, of indefinability, of unstoppability, of corporeal and natural agency. Reactions to slime reveal not only a fear of nature but a fear of women, and understanding theoretical connections between sexism and ecophobia is a critical step toward ending both. Central here is understanding how the balancing between attraction and repulsion, traumatophilia and traumatophobia, produces compelling spectacle that is entertaining but stimulates no activist engagement.

Abstract This essay analyzes how George A. Romero, in his underrated psychological vampire film Martin, translates individual trauma (slow, process-based, unrecognized) into collective trauma (sudden, event-based, recognized) through a vocabulary of horror. The language of trauma spoken by Martin is not the one we expect from the horror film, with its traditional investments in fantastic spectacle. Instead, it is a language that combines horror’s fantastic vocabulary and documentary’s realist vocabulary in ways that undermine our attempts to distinguish between the two modes. Romero’s vision urges us to see catastrophe where we are accustomed to seeing only the mundane, and collective trauma where we routinely see only individual trauma. In Martin’s version of horror, the economic decline of Braddock, Pennsylvania, is paired with trauma connected to the Vietnam War and immigration. The film moves between these coordinates to revisualize the distinctions that divide the fantastic from the real as well as the individual from the collective.