Isabelle Zhu

My dissertation focuses on how play shapes subjectivity in multi-ethnic British and American Literatures. While twentieth-century Western play theorists consider play as crucial for self-formation and nation-building, I consider how different novels contain moments of play that maintain the tension between "freedom" and dehumanization. My latest chapter is on Zadie Smith's Swing Time, where I write on how the aesthetics of play becomes a vacillation between the particular and the universal in relation to Black life and history.