Stanford Humanities Center
Timothy Pantoja is a minister and scholar of literature whose research is invested in exploring the ways Black art and literature render the social, relational, and emotional conditions upon which theories and performances of art rely. He previously was the Medical Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow in the English Department at New York University where he taught courses exploring the ways art, literature, and humanistic inquiry offer resources to engage the hidden aspects of health, illness, and recovery. He received his Masters of Divinity at Harvard Divinity School, where he studied the lingering theological undertow within literature, poetry, and theory.
SHC Project
Scenes of Reflection: Compelling Insinuations and Black Empathy
Pantoja's book project uses interdisciplinary and multimodal approaches to explore the ways modernist Black writers and artists engaged early twentieth-century aesthetic discourses on empathy to recast mental reflection as participatory and relational. Rather than portraying empathy as a cathartic experience of fellow feeling, artists such as the painter Henry Tanner, anthropologist and novelist Zora Neale Hurston, writer and illustrator Richard Bruce Nugent, and poet and storyteller Henry Dumas depict empathy as the body’s felt-sense of absorption with objects and phenomena of a shareable world that mediate vital bonds with others, present and absent, living and dead. His project examines how discourses on kinesthesia and proprioception offer a vocabulary for Black artists to illuminate the reflective dimensions of physical labor, sexual intimacy, and religious practices. He argues that these Black portrayals of reflection that recruit ideas of aesthetic empathy also allow for theoretical connections to be made with the current turn to the haptic and synesthetic in recent aesthetic theories within Black studies. By focusing specifically on Black artists’ depictions of deep cognitive engagement, this project speaks to the history of aesthetics as a regulative discourse that has conceived raced figures as capable only of reacting to their feelings and not reflecting upon or representing them. His project refutes a racial politics of aesthetics whose conceptual investment in individual separateness and “self-possessed” autonomy continues to undercut attempts to engage our entanglement to other humans and nonhumans within environments that sustain our shared existence.
