ESSAYS FROM THE ENGLISH INSTITUTE 2015: FIGURE

[...]this definition should not be sought in relation of the figure with something other than itself, but in its existence itself: a figure is what permits itself to be described as such.The aim of the English Institute is not to produce consensus or to track the movements of one school, but conversation.16 One might say that these essays suggest the different kinds of perception that make different figures visible, from the gaze that racializes the figure of the Afro-Swedish subject in Monica Miller's essay to the reading that makes inversion legible in Ian Balfour's.Miller combines memoir and historical readings to think about the legibility of blackness in Sweden, a nation that not only imagines itself as "without race" but has gone so far as to remove race "as a category of identity or legal complaint" through legislation.19 Miller toggles between the present situation of a growing and vibrant Afro-Swedish population, and the fascinating case of a black man, probably a native of French Guyana, who came to Sweden in 1863.[...]Christopher Wood's essay reads the example of Philine in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Wilhelm Meister as exemplary of the problem of the legibility of a figure against a ground.