Joshua Lam

Joshua Lam’s primary research and teaching interests include modernism, African American literature, and twentieth-century and contemporary U.S. literature and culture. Additional interests include critical race theory, science and technology studies, theories of habit and attention, and popular culture (comedy, horror, SFF). His first book project, Creatures of Habit: Race, Automation, and U.S. Modernism (forthcoming from Johns Hopkins University Press), explores how fears and fantasies about technological development in the early twentieth century were often articulated through the language of racial difference. Examining works by Pauline Hopkins, Gertrude Stein, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Jean Toomer, among others, the project regards the figure of the human automaton as an index of how the rhetoric of race and technology became intertwined. From fears of becoming enslaved to technology, to condemnations of jazz as machine music, to medical beliefs that “primitive” peoples were not susceptible to “hysterical automatisms” caused by urban overstimulation, Creatures of Habit shows how the rhetoric of race was omnipresent in literary and popular discussions of technological modernity. Tracing a series of aesthetic innovations in African American literature that focus upon the figure of the racialized automaton, the project ultimately demonstrates how black writers in the U.S. used stereotypes of compulsive behavior to combat reigning ideologies of white supremacy in ways quite distinct from “uplift” movements and the politics of respectability. He is also at work on a second project that seeks to explain the prevalence of minstrelsy and stereotype in contemporary innovative poetry by black writers in the U.S. Examining poetry by Douglas Kearney, Dawn Lundy Martin, and the Black Took Collective, among others, the project analyzes how these poets reduplicate stereotypes in order to scrutinize both formal and racial expectations, especially within the tradition of African American poetry. Rather than adopting the humanizing rhetoric of much conventional African American poetry, the project argues, these poets create innovative poetic forms that use the trope of the objectified black body to deconstruct linguistic processes of racial reification from within. Two essays from this project have appeared in boundary 2. Other essays have appeared in the Journal of Modern Literature, Callaloo, College Literature, and The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism and Technology, among other venues. He earned his PhD from the University at Buffalo (SUNY).