Mikko Tuhkanen
  • Professor
Scholars@TAMU
Research Areas
  • Transnational Literatures
  • Race and Ethnicity Studies
  • Gender and Sexuality
  • African American and African Diaspora Literature
  • Theory
  • 20th-Century American
  • Comparative Literature

Biography

Mikko Tuhkanen is Professor of English at Texas A&M University, where teaches African American and African-diasporic literatures, LGBTQ+ literatures, and literary theory. He is the author of, among other books, The American Optic: Psychoanalysis, Critical Race Theory, and Richard Wright (2008) and The Essentialist Villain: On Leo Bersani (2018). He is the editor of Leo Bersani: Queer Theory and Beyond (2014) and Fascination and Cinema, a special issue of Postmodern Culture (2020); as well as the coeditor, with E. L. McCallum, of The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature (2014) and Queer Times, Queer Becomings (2011). His other publications include essays in James Baldwin Review, PMLA, diacritics, differences, Modern Fiction Studies, American Literature, and elsewhere. He is currently finishing two book-length studies: “Time’s Witness: On James Baldwin” and “Some Speculation: Thinking with Pet Shop Boys.”

Research Interests


 

Research Areas

  • Theory
  • Transnational Literatures
  • Race and Ethnicity Studies
  • African American and African Diaspora Literature
  • Gender and Sexuality
  • 20th-Century American
  • Comparative Literature

Educational Background

  • PhD, Comparative Literature, University at Buffalo (SUNY), 2005
  • PhD, English, University of Tampere, Finland, 2000
  • MA, English, University of Tampere, Finland, 1994

Selected Publications

  • Leo Bersani Book Cover
    Mikko Tuhkanen. Leo Bersani: A Speculative Introduction. London: Bloomsbury, 2020.

    For the past 60 years, Leo Bersani has inspired, resisted, guided, and challenged scholarly work in the fields of literary criticism, queer theory, cultural studies, psychoanalytic theory, and film and visual studies. Moving across an impressive range of sources, Mikko Tuhkanen seeks out the “fundamental notes”-the questions that we find and refind-in Bersani’s extensive oeuvre across the decades.

    The chapters explore Bersani’s engagement with psychoanalytic theory (Freud, Laplanche, Klein, Lacan), French and American modernist fiction (Proust, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, James, Beckett), poststructuralist theory (Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, Blanchot), queer theory (Butler, Edelman), and the visual arts (Caravaggio, Almodóvar, Pasolini, Malick, Dumont). This first introduction to Bersani’s work provides a chronological overview of his thought and details his contributions to literary studies and critical theory.


    “Fascination and Cinema,” special issue of Postmodern Culture, ed. Mikko Tuhkanen 30.2 (Jan. 2020)

    This issue includes the following works:

    • Introduction: “The Most Fascinating Medium,” Mikko Tuhkanen, Guest Editor
    • “The Violence of a Fascination with* a Visible Form (on Martyrs, Cruetly, Horror, Ethics) [*on and vs. with vs. as],” Eugenie Brinkema
    • “A Moving Which Is Not A Moving: Michael Snow’s Wavelength,” E. L. McCallum
    • “Circuits of Fascination and Inspiration: Blanchot, Bellour, Grandrieux,” Calum Watt
    • “Accompanying Images: Leo Bersani and Cinematic Fascination,” Mikko Tuhkanen
    • “The Power of Absolute Nothing: Psycho-Sexual Fascination and Sadomasichism in Secretary,” Kwasu D. Tembo
    • “What We Don’t See in What We See: A Response to Fascination and Cinema,” Ackbar Abbas

     

    Essentialist Villain - Tuhkanen
    Mikko Tuhkanen. The Essentialist Villain: On Leo Bersani. SUNY Press, 2018.

    Since his first publications in the late 1950s, Leo Bersani’s work has influenced numerous scholarly fields, from studies of French modernism and realist fiction to psychoanalytic criticism and film theory. It has occasionally helped precipitate the emergence of new disciplinary fields, such as queer theory in the late 1980s. The Essentialist Villain is the first book-length study of this impressively rich oeuvre. Mikko Tuhkanen tracks the unfolding of Bersani’s onto-ethics/aesthetics, paying particular attention to his persistent references to “essence,” a concept central to classical speculative philosophy, which has fallen into distinct disfavor since the emergence of deconstructive thought. Because of his early influences—particularly Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy—Bersani remains an ontologist through decades when deconstruction seems to have all but disallowed any thought of being. Tuhkanen also locates Bersani’s thought amidst numerous literary, artistic, and philosophical interlocutors, including Deleuze, Freud, Proust, Laplanche, Beckett, Baudelaire, Genet, Leibniz, and others.

    Gay-and-Lesbian-Literature
    E. L. McCallum and Mikko Tuhkanen, eds.  The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature. Cambridge University Press, 2014

    The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature presents a global history of the field. It is an unprecedented summation of critical knowledge on gay and lesbian literature that also addresses the impact of gay and lesbian literature on cognate fields such as comparative literature and postcolonial studies. Covering subjects from Sappho and the Greeks to queer modernism, diasporic literatures, and responses to the AIDS crisis, this volume is grounded in current scholarship. It presents new critical approaches to gay and lesbian literature that will serve the needs of students and specialists alike. 

    Leo-Bersani - tuhkanen
    Mikko Tuhkanen, ed. Leo Bersani: Queer Theory and Beyond. SUNY Press 2014

    For more than fifty years, Leo Bersani’s writing has inspired and challenged scholars in the fields of literary criticism and theory, cultural studies, queer theory, psychoanalysis, and film and visual studies. This is the first book-length collection on this important author. The book’s extensive introduction outlines in detail Bersani’s oeuvre, particularly its place in queer thought and his complicated relationships with the fields of queer theory and psychoanalysis. The subsequent contributions by notable scholars in various fields demonstrate the richness and open-endedness of his work. The book concludes with a new interview with Bersani. 

    Queer-Times-Queer-Becomings - tuhkanen
    E. L. McCallum and Mikko Tuhkanen, eds. Queer Times, Queer Becomings. SUNY Press, 2011

    If queer theorists have agreed on anything, it is that for queer thought to have any specificity at all, it must be characterized by becoming, the constant breaking of habits. Queer Times, Queer Becomings explores queer articulations of time and becoming in literature, philosophy, film, and performance. Whether in the contexts of psychoanalysis, the nineteenth-century discourses of evolution and racial sciences, or the daily rhythms of contemporary, familially oriented communities, queerness has always been marked by a peculiar untimeliness, by a lack of proper orientation in terms of time as much as social norms. 

    The-American-Optic - tuhkanen
    Mikko Tuhkanen.  The American Optic: Psychoanalysis, Critical Race Theory, and Richard Wright.  SUNY Press, 2009

    The American Optic charts new territory in the relationship of psychoanalysis to critical race studies. Focusing on the work of Richard Wright and Jacques Lacan, it explore the political and ethical implications of psychoanalysis for African American and other diasporic African cultural texts. Mikko Tuhkanen develops a theory of “racialization” that recasts the genealogy of the Western concept of racial difference as outlined by critical race theory, through the theory of the real, which Lacan developed in his later work.

     

    Journal Articles (selected)

     

    Book Chapters (selected)

    • “The Ripened Reverend: Ingmar Bergman and Paul Schrader,” A Companion to Ingmar Bergman, ed. Hamish Ford and Daniel Humphrey (Wiley Blackwell, forthcoming)
    • “Baldwin and Psychoanalysis,” James Baldwin in Context, ed. D. Quentin Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2019), 187-97.
    • “Monadological Psychoanalysis: Bersani, Laplanche, Beckett,” Leo Bersani: Queer Theory and Beyond, ed. Tuhkanen (Albany: SUNY P, 2014), 141-65.
    • “Rigorously Speculating: An Interview with Leo Bersani,” Leo Bersani: Queer Theory and Beyond, ed. Tuhkanen (Albany: SUNY P, 2014), 279-96.
    • “Leo Bersani: Queer Theory and Beyond,” introduction, Leo Bersani: Queer Theory and Beyond, ed. Tuhkanen (Albany: SUNY P, 2014) 1-34.
    • “Native Son and Diasporic Modernity,” The Oxford History of the Novel in English, vol. 6: The American Novel, 1870-1940, ed. Priscilla Wald and Michael A. Elliott (Oxford UP, 2014), 517-29.
    • “Mestiza Metaphysics,” in Queer Times, Queer Becomings, ed. E. L. McCallum and Mikko Tuhkanen (Albany: SUNY P, 2011), 259-94.
    • “The Look of the World: Richard Wright and the Art of Perspective,” A Companion to the American Short Story, ed. Alfred Bendixen and James Nagel (West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 316-27.
    • “Queer Hybridity,” in Deleuze and Queer Theory, ed. Chrysanthi Nigianni and Merl Storr (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2009), 92-114.
Scholars@TAMU