Dr. Anna-Lena Oldehus

I have concluded my doctoral studies with summa cum laude in April 2024.

In my dissertation I examined and discussed the three contemporary novels The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), by Junot Díaz, Ghana Must Go (2013), by Taiye Selasi, and On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2018), by Ocean Vuong. All three text are considered immigrant literature and portray the lives of families who migrated from the Dominican Republic, Ghana, and Vietnam to the United States. In my thesis I argued that through an affective response, which I call weirdness, these novels challenge constructions of whiteness, irritate white readers, and thereby ultimately disrupt notions of postrace happiness. While weirdness does resonate with concepts such as Robin DiAngelo’s ‘white fragility,’ it goes beyond mere discomfort and irritation, and offers moments of alternative alliances and solidary bonds. Weirdness encourages white people to sit with their discomfort, or as Donna Haraway put it, to stay ‘with the trouble,’ as a means to work through their uncomfortable feelings themselves, instead of shifting emotional labor to people of color and Black people.

In Junot Díaz’s Pulitzer Prize-winning work, with its strong narrator figure, suggests to follow Western traditions of historiography which relies on unambiguity and ‘truthfulness.’ However, the narrator ‘fails to adhere to these expectations and instead constantly calls white readers out on their white ignorance. To allow these calling-out to happen enables readers to engage in a non-white historiography of US imperialism and white supremacy, which does not claim to be complete, but truthful. Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go, as what Linda Williams framed ‘racial melodrama,’ invites readers, regardless of positionality, to follow the characters through their often painful and highly emotional experiences. While the novel stages feelings as ‘universal,’ readers are time and again reminded that some experiences and affective realities are racially specific and that we engage in affective realities never outside an existing racial power structure, in which Black suffering is conditional for the white readers’ redemption. In his debut novel Briefly Gorgeous Ocean Vuong alludes to the tradition of Asian American Bildungsroman, as coined by Pamela Chu, which bases on the assumption that the Asian immigrant, often through a white mentor, willfully wants to assimilate into white society. Vuong, however, portrays a whiteness that is sick, addicted, destructive, and stricken by toxic masculinity and can therefore never function as a coherent, let alone, desirable social body.

By discussing how ‘our’ academic practices, too, follow Western/ white promises to be rational, unique, overarching, and universal the thesis self-reflectively expands the mode of weirdness onto non-literary fields. It thereby contributes to a discourse of critical whiteness studies and affect studies that aims to decenter whiteness in order, as Linda Martín Alcoff put it, to make whiteness ‘more bearable.’

My second research project, tentatively titled “Floating, Drifting, Enduring: Writing with the Great Lakes in the 19th Century,” is a literary and cultural studies project situated within the field of North American Studies and responding to current intellectual premises developed in the Blue Humanities. The project sets out to bring into conversation different kinds of texts, such as travel writing and poetry, with media such as maps, sketches, and newspaper articles produced about, at, or with the Great Lakes during the long nineteenth century. Following the field’s tenet of “thinking with water,” this project privileges an understanding of the Great Lakes region as fluid, transgressive, and emergent. I am interested in exploring how a rereading of canonical writers such as Margaret Fuller and Pauline Johnson through water expands our understanding of their negotiation and representation of cultural identities, gender expectations, and the environment. So far, my research has included Margaret Fuller’s travelogue Summer on the Lakes, 1843, Anna B. Jameson’s Winter Studies and Summer Rambles (1838), and the poetry of E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake), and will be published as articles in special issues with Bloomsbury, the European Journal of American Studies, and The New American Studies Journal in 2026/2027. The second strand of this project follows the Blue Humanities’ interest in the natural sciences. The Great Lakes constituted an important link in the Underground Railroad, as numerous enslaved people found their way to freedom in Canada on so-called “freedom ships.” Some of these ships sank, and their shipwrecks have endured in the lakes for decades, constituting an organic archive of Black freedom struggle. How can we read such cultural, historical, and organic artifacts, and how can we bring them into conversation with discourses in the humanities? How does natural scientific knowledge about barnacles and sediments allow us to enhance our historical understandings of abolitionism, solidarity, and freedom? I hope to find answers to these questions on a research trip to Canada and the United States in 2026.