“'Spatial Study': Renee Gladman’s Underground Architectures," a Lecture by Laura Kathryn Nelson

How might we convene social architectures for collective reading in times of “crisis”? Through drawings and novels that experiment with language and architecture, Renee Gladman takes up and elaborates this question. In her Ravicka novels (2010-), the architecture is uncanny: buildings move, sway, self-intersect, and run away. In her drawings, sentences loop, curve, smudge, and form tentative structures. I propose reading Gladman’s spatial experimentation across prose and drawing as an enactment of "spatial study." Read together, her sentence-drawings and drawing-filled novels enact an ongoing unknowing, a collective relinquishing, a generative and generous learning that takes place in the breaks and interstices of racial capitalism’s violent architectures. Put another way, “spatial study” is about finding the hidden architectures of a city, plunging down into the undercommons of broken institutions (of language itself), and scaffolding structures (and methods) for shared reading within and beyond capitalism and its crises.

Laura Nelson is an Assistant Professor of English at Princeton, where she teaches courses on media studies, radical pedagogies, and contemporary literature and film. Her current book project, After School: Collective Experiments in Art, Study, and Education, looks at different formations of study outside traditional schools and universities from the 1920s to the 1980s. Over the last few years, she has taught in many non-traditional settings, including at Deep Springs College and Tidelines Institute. Alongside teaching, she co-organizes experimental sites of learning, including projects like Place Settings, the Oakland Summer School, and the Library of Study.

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