Current Research Projects: Montesano’s current research conducts a critical study of whiteness globally with particular focus on South Africa’s multiracial democracy since 1994. His working hypothesis is that if “decolonial” possibilities are at all possible for white identities and white people, it is in places like democratic South Africa that we may (or may not) see these beginnings emerge.
The broader scope of the project puts Latin American discourse—particularly the Quechua concept of pachacuti, or the turning over of the earth/world—in conversation with millenarian thinking and post-capitalist visions in South Africa.
With support from Princeton’s Africa World Initiative and the African Humanities Colloquium, Montesano traveled to South Africa in April/May 2024 to conduct further investigation. Trip highlights include giving a book talk as invited seminar speaker at the University of Pretoria, and time in the Mayibuye Archives at the University of the Western Cape.
Milestones, publications: Starting postdoctoral research at Princeton in September of 2022, Montesano began adapting and revising his dissertation into his academic book manuscript, Capitalist Modernity, Dissident Metaphors: Subversive Strategy in Transatlantic Literatures.
The project investigates the movement of dissident tropes and critical theories in the greater Atlantic world and offers a close study of select texts in Nigeria, Peru, and the United States.
Capitalist Modernity analyzes the political and symbolic implications of two figurative moves in particular: 1) the depiction of everyday society as a war on the disempowered, and 2) the portrayal of the empowered group—who tend to see order in the violence of nation-state capital—as sleepwalkers or blindmen. Examining both the subversive implications of these figurations and the mediated nature of their impact in society, the book endeavors to re-conceptualize subversive literary practice in the age of the capitalist empire.
Montesano signed a contract for publication with Routledge in December 2023 following 2 supportive reviews by peer readers. He will submit the final revisions in October 2024.
Additionally, in the Spring of 2024, Montesano published his peer-reviewed article, “Subversive Text as Dystopian Negative: Speculative Gesture, Prophetic Rhetoric, and Helon Habila’s Oil on Water,” in the Journal of the African Literature Association. The article connects a crucial use of rhetoric in activist texts of the past 175 years to a similar rhetorical structure in the arts. The article is part of Montesano’s continued interest in querying the role of the audience in the interpretive field of dissident expression.
Significant developments: Montesano collaborated with the Princeton Program for Community-engaged Scholarship (ProCES) in the design and implementation of his Spring 2024 course, “Africa, Colonialism, and Whiteness.” The course contains a unique project for students to survey and evaluate the quality of Africa-related classroom content in 4 New Jersey school districts (Princeton High School, Trenton High School, Washington Township High School, and Lakeland Regional High School).
As a cross-listed course in the Program in African Studies and the Department of African American Studies, Montesano created an intentionally transatlantic itinerary. Class topics include both how whiteness functions as a symbol of power in independent African nations, and how the American educational system minimizes the role of African civilizations in the record of human history. In a seminar format, the class considered longstanding patterns of biased portrayals of African societies as well as ongoing issues in America’s classrooms. With a common understanding that history is a living community practice, students delivered their assessments of current World History and Geography materials to participating New Jersey educators.