Riding Renga

“Riding Renga: Low Theory and Collective Critical Dissatisfaction,” is a creative-collaborative project written by six authors, including graduate students and non-tenured faculty. Taking our cues from J. Halberstam’s definition of “low theory,” our article explores the limits and possibilities of collaborative work in the humanities through an array of texts, approaches, and voices. We engage with a deliberate mix of “low” and “high” texts, including the works of Kanye West, Shakespeare, Derrida, the Sugababes, Donna Haraway, John Cameron Mitchell, and José Muñoz. We compare such texts not only to interrogate the divisions between low and high, but also to see what kind of affinities and subjugated knowledges may be unearthed or created in the process. The writing of the article itself—its very form—expresses our desire to think of alternative ways to conduct humanities research and build intellectual communities in the digital era.

In The Queer Art of Fa ilure (2011), J Halberstam explains that low theory “revels
in the detours, twists, and turns through knowing and confusion, and … seeks not to explain but to involve” (15). Halberstam further states that “we can think about low theory as a mode of accessibility, but we might also think about it as a kind of theoretical model that flies below the radar, that is assembled from eccentric texts and examples and that refuses to confirm the hierarchies of knowing that maintain the high in high theory” (16).

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License.

ISSN: 2202-2546

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