Kimberly Kay Lamm CV

I am currently at work on two book-length manuscripts. “Words and Clothes: Sartorial Self-Fashioning and the Legacies of Enslavement” explores the work of Black women writers who show that fashionable clothing has been an affectively-laden "language" that attests to the psychic impact of sexual and racial violence but also Black women’s capacities to create spaces of subjectivity and privacy. “Inheriting Letters of Exile: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and the Aesthetic Education of Contemporary Art” analyzes the work of three artists—Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Mona Hatoum, and Lorna Simpson—in relationship to Spivak’s theoretical writings on global feminism, deconstruction, and the aesthetic. For Spivak, an aesthetic education is a necessary supplement to political and legal change, as it can, in her words, “uncoercively rearrange desires.” Dense with textual inscriptions and images of writing, the oeuvres of Cha, Hatoum, and Simpson exemplify such a rearrangement.