Maryam Ivette Parhizkar is a joint Ph.D. candidate in American Studies and African American Studies. Her dissertation tells the performance histories of several diasporic figures whose lives and public personas engage with U.S. narratives of modernity and racial primitivism. Spanning a number of knowledge-producing institutions as their backdrop (including world’s fairs, the museum, and the university), these performances together offer a counternarrative to racialized accounts of modernity and the modern subject––challenging prevailing U.S.-American conceptions of possession, innovation, and futurity while pursuing alternative imaginings of social collectivity and history.
CRITICAL ENCOUNTERS highlights new scholarship in the field of American Studies, bringing together Yale faculty and graduate students as well as other scholars and artists to present work in progress and promote interdisciplinary conversations around the diverse aspects of the American experience locally, nationally, and globally.