Jordan Taliha McDonald, 'Trust Fall: Betrayal, Complicit Rhetorics, and the Race-Science Fictions of Black Fidelity'

In-person and livestreaming at youtube.com/hutchinscenter

Jordan Taliha McDonald is a Doctoral Candidate in the English Department with a secondary field in History of Science at Harvard University. Her scholarship primarily examines how literary, scientific, and aesthetic ideas of complicity and fidelity were shaped by the legacy of slavery, settler colonialism, and the construction of racial Blackness. Her research interests include 19th and 20th-century Black/Afro-diasporic literature, rhetoric of science, critical theory, visual culture, psychoanalysis, political philosophy, animality studies, the history of aesthetic surgery, and the development of race science. Her work has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Beinecke Scholarship, and the Ford Foundation.

McDonald is an essayist, critic, editor, cultural worker, and (sometimes) poet. Her public writing, journalism, and cultural criticism have appeared in New York Magazine, The Believer, Artsy, Vulture, Africa is a Country, The Offing, The Harvard Review, Lux, Complex, and more. 

Trust Fall: Betrayal, Complicit Rhetorics, and the Race-Science Fictions of Black Fidelity

The fellowship project is an exploration of notions of complicity that have been shaped by the literary and aesthetic legacies of slavery, settler colonialism, and race-making in and through the sciences—adultery, adulteration, apostasy, treason, etc. Looking to 19th and 20th century literature, political rhetoric, and visual culture, it considers how the construction of racial Blackness has been instrumental in enhancing our interdisciplinary measures and metrics for assessing fidelity at the level of relation as well as form. By tracing the “race-science fictions” of Black fidelity as they appear in Black diasporic literary fiction, Trust Fall hopes to demonstrate how the racialization of fidelity has shaped everything from the adultery plot to the classificatory sciences.