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stephjayb.bsky.social
Steph Brown
@stephjayb.bsky.social
5K followers 1.6K following 760 posts
Author | Watching Women: Militant Suffragists Write the British Surveillance State | U Toronto Press, 2024

Assoc Prof of English in Tucson | Surveillance | C20/21 Caribbean and British Lit | GWS

rock scrambler | hawk enthusiast | she/her
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stephjayb.bsky.social
A page from William Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying," which reads "Vardaman" and then "My mother is a fish,"
November 9, 2025 at 8:04 PM
stephjayb.bsky.social
@mattseybold.bsky.social's proposal to (among other things) reestablish faculty and students' control over their data & work here is...brilliant, actually?

(Tho it would strip upper admin of their power to decide WHO gets to buy that data...😢)

theamericanvandal.substack.com/p/mamdani-wi...
Text reads: If CUNY is successful in developing internally owned-and-operated substitutes for any or all of its Software As A Service (SaaS) contracts with for-profit EdTech firms (and their private equity owners), the development costs will very rapidly pay for themselves, merely by freeing the associated institutions (and the city) from ongoing Ponzi austerity extraction of public resources at the expense of investment elsewhere in the CUNY system. CUNY-owned EdTech platforms would provide an additional public benefit by reclaiming student, instructional, and employee data, the reserve currency of technofeudalism which is presently being mined by EdTech operators like OpenAI, Oracle, KKR, Vista and Silver Lake Partners. Universities are currently paying these SaaS providers and their investors twice, first with large subscription fees and again with access and aggregation power over large troves of data produced by members of their campus communities.
November 5, 2025 at 9:11 PM
stephjayb.bsky.social
Finishing up Peter J. Kalliney's _The Aesthetic Cold War_ and going to hang on to this paragraph as an example of the kind of reflection and work for which there are no shortcuts, and that a humanities education prepares us to do:
A passage from the conclusion of Kalliney's book, The Aesthetic Cold War. The text reads: It took me a long time to make decent sense of the archival record I encountered. Ingrained habits of thought prevented me from understanding the data I found. I had to unlearn many of the assumptions I brought to the project. When I started working on cultural diplomacy initiatives, I was prepared to read every utterance through the lenses of conspiracy and cynicism. How did the United States and the Soviet Union coopt and defang and reroute the literature of decolonization, I wanted to know? How did the cold war's partisans recruit and corrupt intellectuals from the decolonizing world? The temptation to interpret the archival record from this perspective was even greater when I turned to the punitive measures state agencies visited upon writers. I anticipated writing a book detailing how large states first tried to bribe writers, resorting to coercion and intimidation when lavish conferences and generous book deals did not do the trick. There was, however, a problem. Neither the archives I consulted nor the literary texts themselves seemed to support such a reading.
October 27, 2025 at 10:20 PM
stephjayb.bsky.social
Poetry haul from my first visit to Palabras Bilingual Bookstore in Phoenix last week 💜 Came away feeling that I would live there if I could…
Poetry collections by Sally Wen Mao, Ariel Francisco, and Jacqueline Balderama against a white background
October 21, 2025 at 4:55 PM
stephjayb.bsky.social
Speaking of, this is happening this afternoon:
Flier for the "UA Protest National Day of Action." Text reads "10.17.25, Old Main, 4-6 PM. Don't sign, Don't fold. No loyalty oaths. No compact." There is a graphic in the upper right hand corner of a closed fist radiating golden light and the background image shows the Old Main building with the words "We are keeping DEI" chalked on the sidewalk.
October 17, 2025 at 9:32 PM
stephjayb.bsky.social
Re-organizing my work schedule for the next few days because my pre-order of "Claude McKay: Letters in Exile" arrived a week early 💜💜💜
The cover of "Claude McKay: Letters in Exile," edited by Brooks E. Hefner and Gary Edward Holcomb shows a black-and-white of McKay in a suit and overcoat, sitting on a low concrete wall with a bridge in the background. He is clearly swinging his feet, which are blurred.
August 26, 2025 at 7:44 PM
stephjayb.bsky.social
Read @biancatherosestone.bsky.social's What Is Otherwise Infinite in the same week as Koleka Putuma's Collective Amnesia and it was the perfect accidental pairing--excellent on their own, and better together.
Two books sitting on a wooden table: Keleka Putuma's Collective Amnesia, whose cover shows a person in an elaborate face covering and a dark dress holding an infant in a light-colored dress, and Bianca Stone's What is Otherwise Infinite with a green overlay on an originally sepia-toned painting of a demon leaning across two rocks with the sea in the background.
July 24, 2025 at 6:30 PM
stephjayb.bsky.social
Gene Wilder, as Willie Wonka in the film Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, dressed in a white cleanroom suit and a brown tophat, says "Stop. Don't. Come back." in a halfhearted tone, suggesting that he does not, in fact, mean it.
July 21, 2025 at 11:25 PM
stephjayb.bsky.social
If you'll be at the Modernist Studies Association conference in Oct and want to talk surveillance: just received the acceptance for the Surveillance Modernity, Surveillance Modernisms seminar. Join us!

(MSA registration coming soon!) @moderniststudies.bsky.social @modernistudies.bsky.social
A description of the seminar, which reads: This seminar considers surveillance, broadly conceived, as a practice of modernity. In keeping with the theme of the conference, it encourages considerations of surveillance infrastructures as constitutive of, and responses to, modernity. It asks whether our definitions of modernity and modernism might reveal them to be coeval with surveillance as an increasingly institutional, corporate, transnational, and state-based mode of control. The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw the expansion of surveillance-based state power at the level of nations and empires (including emergent US imperial ambitions in the Caribbean, Latin America, and the Pacific). However, the seminar will not limit its consideration of the entanglement of modernity and surveillance to these decades, and may include work that takes up surveillance modernity outside a strictly delineated historical modernism. Similarly, work that considers non-state infrastructures (of e.g. the factory, the ship, the corporation, the university) are welcome. The seminar will query how different media forms, working at scales that vary from the compactness of the passport, the poem, and the case file up to the expansiveness of the census, the sociological study, the epic, and the ordinance survey, registered emerging surveillance culture. It will ask, broadly, how surveillance practices and the institutions from which they emerged shaped modernist aesthetic practice? Similarly, it encourages participants consider the affordances of modernism to reveal the dynamics, desires, impulses, and demands that underlay various surveillance infrastructures as they evolved.
June 12, 2025 at 6:22 PM
stephjayb.bsky.social
Overwhelmed with the amount of new reading I need to do, I have naturally embarked on a re-read of Glissant’s Poetics of Relation
Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation, translated by Betsy Wing, lays on a marble countertop. Its paperback cover is white with a light blue map of the Caribbean islands, taken from Willem Janszoon Blaeu’s 17th century _Map of the Americas_.
June 10, 2025 at 12:19 AM
stephjayb.bsky.social
I almost took The Dragon Can't Dance off my Caribbean Lit syllabus this semester, so of course this is the semester that our class discussions and their papers keep coming back to it over and over. (The lesson here is "don't sleep on Earl Lovelace," I guess.)
The cover of Earl Lovelace's novel "The Dragon Can't Dance" shows a man dressed as a dragon for Trinidad Carnival. He is painted bright red and wearing enormous wings and pitchfork, with black paint covering his head and horns. He wears trainers and cutoff jean shorts, and is walking down a residential street.
May 16, 2025 at 5:48 PM
stephjayb.bsky.social
Nothing says Summer 2025 like your new bathing suit being detained by tariff enforcement.
A Fed-ex shipping update screen showing a shipment from Oldenzaal, Netherlands suffering a "Clearance Delay" in Memphis, TN.
May 14, 2025 at 4:52 AM
stephjayb.bsky.social
In the UK suffrage movement too: one of the first thing the East London Federation of Suffragettes did when WWI broke out (maybe even before?) was establish milk centers so that working class women had access to unadulterated milk.
An image from the cover of the Sept 26, 1914 issue of Sylvia Pankhurst's paper, the "Woman's Dreadnought," shows several women, most of them holding small children, in a wood-floored room in the East London neighborhood of Bow. An especially chonky little boy sits in the foreground, looking at the camera and holding a milk pail. The caption reads "Our Bow Milk Centre."
May 1, 2025 at 4:17 PM
stephjayb.bsky.social
Finally reading Many-Headed Hydra, and while "superlucration" might not be plain speech in the way "surplus value" is, I do enjoy how it gets at the dragonish lucre-hoarding aspects of the extremely wealthy.

We're living in the era of superlucration, y'all.
Text reads, "Sailors thus produced surplus value above the costs of production, including their own subsistence; the political arithmetician called this process "superlucration." Petty thus originated the labor theory of value by refusing to think of workers in moral terms." The word "superluctraion" is circled in blue ink. Cover image of Peter Linebaught and Marcus Rediker's "The Many Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic" includes several small pencil sketches at the top, with the rest of the cover image taken from "Badia di Manfredonia" (1790).
April 29, 2025 at 7:34 PM
stephjayb.bsky.social
Don't let ICE just wave any old piece of paper at you. Great that Pima County is giving their workers a primer on administrative v. judicial warrants.
Excerpt from the article quoted in the original post reads: "According to the National Immigration Law Center, “Unlike a judicial warrant, an administrative warrant does not authorize a search.” Administrative warrants can be signed by ICE officials, whereas judicial warrants must be signed by judges."
January 30, 2025 at 5:23 PM
stephjayb.bsky.social
I'm not at MLA this week, but my book is! Stop by the @uoftpress.bsky.social table and send me pics! (Piling them up on my coffee table isn't the same...)
A pile of five copies of a large, white, hardback book, titled Watching Women: Militant Suffragists Write the British Surveillance State, 1905-1924, sitting on a light wood coffee table.
January 9, 2025 at 6:03 PM
stephjayb.bsky.social
Rafe Dalleo did an amazing job editing the Journal of West Indian Lit Special Issue on George Lamming. So proud to have contributed, alongside Linden Lewis, Yutaka Yoshida, @jackieretalis.bsky.social, Tohru Nakamura, and Amílcar Peter Sanatan!

Read the issue here: www.jwilonline.org/downloads/vo...
A promotional poster for the Journal of West Indian Literature, Volume 33, Issue 1, Novembe 2024. The left half of the poster shows the cover of the journal which says "Special Issue on George Lamming, edited by Raphael Dalleo." Most of the cover is a pencil sketch of Lamming with fluffy white hair and glasses, and pink, yellow, and light blue accent shadowing. The right half of the poster is a list of the journal contributors.
January 6, 2025 at 7:15 PM
stephjayb.bsky.social
🎉Obligatory Edith Garrud tossing a constable*🎉

*not really a constable, actually her very obliging husband dressed as a constable.
A series of six black and white photographs in which Edith Garrud, a suffragette dressed in an ankle-length coat and enormous hat, demonstrates how to sweep the legs out from under a taller man in a constable's uniform and put him in a shoulder lock. Garrud's hat remains in place throughout.
December 19, 2024 at 12:13 AM
stephjayb.bsky.social
A seasonally appropriate one that didn't make it into the book (but that I squeezed into a different article that's coming out soon): The Suffragette threatening to cover everyone's Christmas cards in acid if women aren't given the vote:
A poem excerpt from the December 20, 1912 issue of The Suffragette. The verses read: Christmas, I believe is coming. Soon its missives will be here… Haply these may never reach me; haply they are destined yet For the blacking or corrosive of the ardent suffragette.
December 19, 2024 at 12:07 AM
stephjayb.bsky.social
Just realized that the poster on the dust cover of Barbara Green's Spectacular Confessions is the print that hangs in my office--appropriate given what an outsize role her work plays in my own...

(And with that, I have gotten myself out of alphabetical order, a sign that I should resume tomorrow!)
The cover of Barbara Green's Spectacular Confessions: Autobiography, Performative Activism, and the Sites of Suffrage, 1905-1938 (1997). The image is adapted from Hilda Dallas's "Votes for Women, Wanted Everywhere" poster, designed for the Women's Social and Political Union in 1909, and shows a suffragette in a white dress with a purple sash and green hat holding aloft a copy of the newspaper "Votes for Women."
December 17, 2024 at 3:45 AM
stephjayb.bsky.social
Even though he wasn't at UofA long, getting to read some of Sony Coráñez Bolton's Crip Colony (www.dukeupress.edu/crip-colony) while he was here and it was in progress was a privilege.
The cover of Sony Coráñez Bolton's "Crip Colony: Metizaje, US Imperialism, and the Queer Politic of Disability in the Philippines" shows the title on a black background, above a partial image of Julie Lluch's "Spoliarium"
December 17, 2024 at 3:01 AM
stephjayb.bsky.social
I still have conversational shorthands from the late Greg Colomb's The Craft of Argument that every UVa English grad of a Certain Era would probably recognize.
A cover image of The Craft of Argument: the title on an abstract purple and magenta background, with the names of the four authors: Joseph M WIlliams, Gregory G Colomb, Jonathan D'Errico, and Karen Tracey
December 17, 2024 at 2:46 AM
stephjayb.bsky.social
Insisting that even in end-of-semester mode I can get some slow reading done, I’m really enjoying Imani D Owens’ TURN THE WORLD UPSIDE DOWN, which so far has convinced me that yes, I do need to think more about Eric Walrond…
The book TURN THE WORLD UPSIDE DOWN: EMPIRE AND UNRULY FORMS OF BLACK FOLK CULTURE IN THE US AND CARIBBEAN by Imani Owens, resting on a coffee table, has brightly colored close up birds (finches?) and foliage on the cover
December 10, 2024 at 3:24 PM
stephjayb.bsky.social
The project thinks about how Caribbean writers moving around the (former) British empire used fiction to convey experiential aspects of migrant surveillance. The newest bit of this is on George Lamming’s The Emigrants, in the forthcoming November issue of the Journal of West Indian Literature. 12/
A black-and-white photo of a pensive George Lamming, resting a pencil on the corner of his mouth and leaning against a pillar.
November 27, 2024 at 12:41 AM
stephjayb.bsky.social
My new(ish) book project is an extension of my obsession with the Jamaican/Harlem Renaissance/Black Atlantic vagabond Claude McKay. (For me as for so many modernists-by-training, McKay has been the gateway into doing a whole book about C20 Caribbean writers.) 11/

muse.jhu.edu/issue/44250
The cover of the April 2021 issue of English Language Notes, a special issue on "Transhistoricizing Claude McKay's Romance in Marseille," edited by Gary Edward Holcomb and William J. Maxwell. The entire cover is a photograph of McKay's head and shoulders in left-facing profile. McKay's expression is neutral, and he is wearing a dark-colored suit and tie. The first page of an academic article, "Marseille Exposed: Under Surveillance in Claude McKay's Banjo and Romance in Marseille" by Stephanie J. Brown. The abstract reads: "This article examines the representation of surveillance in Claude McKay’s Romance in Marseille and the influence of surveillance on the novel’s aesthetics. It uses McKay’s 1929 novel Banjo as a prior representation of Marseille that establishes the historical constraints under which characters in Romance navigate the social world of Quayside, the city’s international working-class quarter. The article argues that McKay depicts an important moment in which state and corporate actors create networks of transnational surveillance that aim at securing an advantageous global distribution of labor for capital. McKay’s novel examines the mechanisms through which surveillance controls the mobility of racialized and gendered bodies, and depicts the strategies of resistance that such characters deploy more and less successfully against these often-violent mechanisms."
November 27, 2024 at 12:41 AM