104: candid

THIS WEEK: talking about myself (so nothing new!)

Apr 21, 2024

COMMUNITY BOARD

Goodreads / Letterboxd / Instagram / Writers Against the War on Gaza (WAWOG)

It’s usually somewhere between the third ten minute TikTok of someone talking about being 30+ and being boy sober, and the video about reality shifting that I think that we as a society really know too much about one another. Those are the moments when I scream into the void, CAN WE HAVE A BIT OF MYSTERY?? At the same time, I proudly belong to the generation of “Me talking to Graham Norton on the Graham Norton Show about my new project and then realising it’s just me, alone in my room, talking to myself for two hours.” I’ll admit it, I love to talk about myself! Anyway, since there’s more people subscribed to this newsletter than I know IRL, I thought it would be nice to give a small peek behind the curtain, to let you know a little more about the ball of energy that has rewatched the second season of Bridgerton more times than is appropriate and brings up random lines from Frances Ha in the middle of conversation. Some of you asked and I answered…

Who are you?

An (obnoxious) bio I recently wrote for a presentation: “Akosua Adasi is a second-year PhD student, writer, and unofficial Gossip Girl historian. Her current research interests include: gossip, taste, girlhood, Blackness and flânerie, performance and performativity, finance and capital (in a theoretical way, not a real way), the Great American Novel, the body, and the erotics of citation (citation as an erotics).”

People always ask me how I “know so much stuff” about pop culture and celebrities (and to be honest compared to people who are like professionals, I know so little) and it’s truly because my parents never enrolled me in summer camp and so I spent a lot of time at the library on the computer, playing MyScene games and reading People.com. I also think having older sisters who were teenagers in the mid-2000s meant that I got to find out about and watch a lot of things that I might not have otherwise.

Fun facts!!!

1My biggest and best fun fact, which I used to use for every icebreaker, is that for all intents and purposes I’m “Canadian,” but I was born in Ghana, moved to the UK when I was 4, lived in Blacksburg, Virginia from ages eight to twelve, before a brief stint in Trinidad and then eventually settling in Canada. Without a very good reason, Blacksburg is the place I miss the most but I think I’ve just romanticized it.
I’ve never had a pet of my own, but my family had dogs and cats before I was born. Funnily enough, up until the age of twelve I had a massive phobia of both dogs and cats (like I would genuinely run away). When I was 11, I got paid to be a research subject for a study on animal phobias and I guess it cured me because now I am OBSESSED with dogs.
Up until the twelfth grade, I really wanted to be a film and theater director and follow in the footsteps of my two (at the time) heroes—[REDACTED] and Lena Dunham.
I have never broken a bone, but in the fifth grade, I sprained my ankle during recess. The next day, I almost missed the school bus because I had to walk slow, and I cried at the idea that I would miss school.

Petty pet peeves you have about writing and culture criticism

I debated if I would give my real answer to this because I didn’t want to be rude. But I think the fact that it’s a petty pet peeve makes it a little tamer. The two things that have been bugging me recently are:

The use of “Perhaps.” Example: “Perhaps [REDACTED] is the [REDACTED] of the Internet…” Ostensibly, the “Perhaps” is synonymous with “Maybe” or “It might be that…” but unlike those two, it feels overly stylistic, disingenuous, and alienating.
The use of “industrial complex,” serious or ironic. I know I am guilty of using it but it has truly been exhausted, and people seem to use it in place of any kind of real analysis.

As someone who clearly loves both literature and film, how do you think the visualization of stories in film has impacted your experience as reader, if at all? Do you tend to immediately see what you’re reading in a cinematic form, or does it strictly stay on the page and with the words?

I love this question so much! I’m not a very visual reader actually—I rarely can picture what characters are supposed to look like. For example, it took me reading Luster for the second time to realize that Eric, the “love interest,” is supposed to look more like Tony Goldwyn than the tall best friend from Master of None. The one way I think watching movies has translated to my reading, though, is that I have a more impressionistic/evocative experience of reading. Like I can get lost in the mood or tone of a novel in a way that doesn’t have to do specifically with the words on the page. I had a professor once say that you couldn’t zone out to a book in the same way that you could to a movie (or music), which I didn’t think was true, and maybe that’s the way that I experience books like movies? Sometimes I can’t remember a single word I’ve just read but I’ll notice a shift in my mood or the atmosphere…

I will say that the more I think about what makes something literary (which I think is what I’m doing as a student of literature), the more I realize that the movies I think are really smart are ones that are actually quite literary. I can’t necessarily describe to you what I mean by that, but a movie like Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera or Noah Baumbach’s White Noise (which is obviously a book adaptation but visually and structurally is trying to be more like a book than it is a movie) feel literary to me.

Is there an academic project that you are currently working on, planning, or especially excited about?

Without sounding too annoying…the dissertation? This is a recent development and most of the time when people are like what is your dissertation is about, I’m like, IDK I don’t want to think about it until I have to. But over the last month or so, while working on my fields lists and doing research for my final papers/projects, my dissertation topic have become something that feels…real, and not just something that I thought sounded good in a statement purpose. And I think that is the normal result of reading more, of having supportive professors and friends who ask questions. For context, I want to write a dissertation about the Black flâneuse (female flâneur) in 20th century American literature, which I’ve shared a little bit about before. Something I wrote in my notebook recently is that I’m not really interested in producing a taxonomy of the Black flâneuse as much as using the figure of the flâneur as a matrix for thinking about race, modernity, mobility, taste and self-fashioning, and (non)being, etc. (I’m sorry, it does sound fake!) More immediately, what that research looks like is my final assignment for my *deep breath* Gender, Race, and Finance in the Early Modern Atlantic class—I’m focusing on the development of cultures of taste in the 18th and 19th century, both in England and the United States, the ways in which that was built on the black body and the countercultures of taste that emerged as a result. To that purpose, I’m trying to finish Simon Gikandi’s Slavery and the Culture of Taste and then I’m going to go into a theory hole (scary) and read the requisite David Hume and Immanuel Kant as well.

Do you see your personal, creative work as connected to your professional/academic work? How do you see these two spheres of your life intersecting or influencing one another?

YES! I have to! Up until maybe three months ago, I had a lot of anxiety about keeping separate what I did in the realm of “academia” and what I did outside of that. But trying to write fellowship applications while working on edits for a review, writing this newsletter and trying to finish my homework made me realize that it just wasn’t possible to keep things separate. Everything was informing everything anyway, so there was no use in ignoring it or editing it out. Instead, I try to find the openings between something that I mentioned in passing in this newsletter and then something I’m reading or working on that is grounded in more sustained research. It usually makes doing both a lot more fun.