Showing papers in "American Literature in 2012"

Unsettling Ecocriticism: Rethinking Agrarianism, Place, and Citizenship

Abstract: In light of Ursula Heise's recent critiques of the concept of a "sense of place" in ecocriticism as well as the vibrant social movement for food justice emerging in the United States, Fiskio asks whether the concept of place can be reformulated in ways that are inclusive of communities on the borders of the food system and compelling to contemporary ecocriticism. Ecocriticism has relied until now on traditional agrarian ideals that privilege long-term inhabitation of place as a basis for responsible citizenship. Through close readings of Wendell Berry's stories and essays, Helena Maria Viramontes's novel Under the Feet of Jesus, and the documentary film The Garden, Fiskio argues for an agrarianism of the margins that unsettles these fundamental assumptions, illuminating the ethical agency of migrant and transnational laborers in situations of transience, and opening a space for multiple ways of producing food, community, and place.

Obeah’s Sensations: Rethinking Religion at the Transnational Turn

Abstract: In a recent journal issue, Jordan Alexander Stein and Justine Murison observe that work on non-Protestant religions has the potential to upend conventional accounts of religion's place in British America. Taking up that challenge, Jaudon's essay discusses Revolutionary-era literary representations of obeah, a creole religion practiced by enslaved persons in the British Caribbean, arguing that such narratives use religious experience to craft an alternative transnationalism. Works such as William Earle's 1800 novel Obi; or, The History of Three-Fingered Jack and similar chapbooks, penny-dreadfuls, and pantomimes share a common fascination with the occult forms of sensation obeah enabled, explaining away these experiences as misrecognitions of a stable material reality. Jaudon draws together recent reassessments of the history of the senses by anthropologists and challenges to secularism by political theorists to unsettle these texts' easy dismissal of the strange sense perceptions and bodily capacities that obeah cultivated among enslaved persons. In their anxious attempts to debunk obeah, these narratives record what Jacques Ranciere calls a "dissensus": a clash between competing models of sensory perception. Such moments of sensory disjuncture posed a significant threat to a colonial order that claimed universality for its sense perceptions. Obeah narratives indicate that embodied religious experience constitutes a sensual alternative to what Elizabeth Maddock Dillon terms the "Westphalian imaginary" of a world mapped into nation-states. By recharacterizing religion as an alternative to the nation instead of something that circulates across its boundaries, Jaudon suggests new maps for transnational inquiry-ones that focus on the sensual relations religions forge or forbid between their adherents' bodies and the nation-state's world.

The Provision Ground in New York: Claude McKay and the Form of Memory

Abstract: Reading Claude McKay's "The Tropics in New York" as a twentieth-century aesthetic equivalent of a slave provision ground, Posmentier argues that the poem asserts cultural autonomy even in the face of the dislocation it describes. In doing so, she suggests that formal lyric poetry can share the burdens and possibilities of these agricultural spaces, insofar as it takes shape in relationship to an oppressive colonial tradition while defining a black expressive form that resists its own utility within the postplantation aesthetic economy. Posmentier reads McKay's American sonnet in the context of "Quashie to Buccra," his earlier meditation on agricultural labor and the cultivation of poetic taste, to highlight the narrative of work omitted from the later poem. In fragmenting that narrative, "Tropics" generates an alternative temporality and spatiality of freedom.

John Cleves Symmes and the planetary reach of polar exploration

Abstract: In 2007, a Russian submarine planted a titanium flag on the seabed under the North Pole, laying the groundwork for Russia's claim to Arctic oil and gas resources. Blum's essay explores the prehistory of Russia's polar land grab in terms of the influential (if satirized) early-nineteenth-century theories of John Cleves Symmes, who believed the earth was hollow and accessible through openings at the poles. In discussing an early-nineteenth-century hollow-earth theorist and his influence on hollow-earth fictions-beginning with the narrative Symzonia (1820)-the essay considers the unexplored possibilities that the Arctic and Antarctic regions offer to hemispheric and transnational conversations, as well as to more recent calls to reorganize critical thinking from a planetary perspective. Blum explores the difference in resources, both material and critical, presented by polar spaces. By resources she refers both to the ecological substance of the polar regions, in their remove from predictable routes and terms of exchange; and to the imaginative and literary outcomes of polar exploration, which themselves did not follow recognizable circuits. Not just another geopolitical space, the polar regions suggest the ecological and critical potential of a nonproprietary, speculative attitude toward resources.

The Nature of Fear: Edgar Allan Poe and Posthuman Ecology

Abstract: Taylor's essay complicates Simon Estok's analysis of ecophobia by illustrating, first, that fear of the natural world need not lead to its domination, and second, that ecophilia-ecophobia's presumptive opposite-represents not a solution to this problem but an extension of the same logic under another name. Extended readings of Henry David Thoreau ("Walking"), Edgar Allan Poe ("The Island of the Fay," "The Black Cat," and "The Colloquy of Monos and Una") and recent posthumanist discourse illuminate these points. Unlike his transcendentalist contemporaries and many current posthumanists, Poe represents the fusion of subjects and environments as a cataclysmic collapse, making the nonhuman environment the field against which discrete selves disappear as material bodies and as metaphysical entities. Poe's texts thus foreclose both the idea that human selves are inherently distinct from or superior to their nonhuman environments and the seemingly antithetical (but actually coextensive) notion that we can self-constructively lose ourselves to the world. For Poe, the world can be made neither other nor mirror; if our ontological separation from the universe is a fantasy, then so too is our enabling kinship with it. What remains is an irresolvable fear regarding the uncertain borders between persons and environments. The essay concludes with a consideration of the implications of such a fear for ecocriticism.

Wondrous Strange: Eco-Sickness, Emotion, and The Echo Maker

Abstract: Houser's essay argues for the centrality of sickness and affect to twenty-first-century environmental consciousness and therefore to ecocriticism, through an analysis of Richard Powers's novel, The Echo Maker. The essay focuses on wonder, an essential affect for promoting environmental investment and scientific interest. In line with much environmental writing, the novel aspires to increase readers' awareness of their surroundings as a way to promote ecological protection. However, it also rethinks the trajectories of wonder under the pressures of neurological injury. The novel presents the oscillation between familiarity and strangeness as the mechanism of wonder, both in the brain and in narrative, and performs wonder by taking readers through a series of dialectics that aim to defamiliarize the everyday. The Echo Maker's narrative complexity uncovers the obverse of wonder-projection and paranoia-and demonstrates how affect can derail ethical energies. Houser's essay builds a multidisciplinary account of wonder and its stakes for environmental thought by analyzing the novel's doubled narration, key texts of environmentalism, neuroscientific studies, and affect theory. It argues that Powers's novel of eco-sickness is a rejoinder to platitudes about connection, awareness, and care that poses the question: Can ethical concern and care for human and nonhuman others take hold without connection?

Harriet Jacobs among the Militants: Transformations in Abolition’s Public Sphere, 1859–61

Abstract: This essay examines previously unexplored divisions within the antislavery movement's published responses to Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Revisiting Jacobs's conflict with her editor, Lydia Maria Child, over the suppressed chapter about John Brown, Smith emphasizes reception rather than authorial intention to show how the militant abolitionist James Redpath and his journal, the Anglo-African, aligned Jacobs's book with the legacy of Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry. While Garrisonian pacifists like Child emphasized the moral influence of Jacobs's testimony, Redpath saw it as a contribution to a circum-Atlantic project of black resistance, liberation, and uplift that crossed lines of race and gender.

Comparative Racialization, Immigration Law, and James Williams's Life and Adventures

Abstract: Wong's essay investigates James Williams's largely forgotten postbellum slave narrative, The Life and Adventures of James Williams, A Fugitive Slave (1873) to chart the various constellations of racial formations emerging from the politics and cultures of early black westward migration. Williams's once-popular autobiography chronicling his experiences as a fugitive slave and California gold miner knits together stories from the Underground Railroad with firsthand observations on Chinese labor migration and Indian resettlement in the West. This essay reads Williams's narrative alongside the key legal and political contexts that gave its narrative shape (and to which Williams addressed his text), including California Governor John Bigler's anti-coolieism campaign (1852), the California Supreme Court ruling in People v. Hall (1854), and the widely publicized Modoc War (1872-73). It builds upon the analytics for articulating racial difference honed in US race and ethnic studies to help illuminate Williams's literary efforts to formulate an early politics of comparative racialization.

“We Don’t Wanna Be Radiated”: Documentary Film and the Evolving Rhetoric of Nuclear Energy Activism

Abstract: Lynch's essay explores the divergence between the symbolic imaginary of nuclear power and the imaginative terrain of environmentalism through a look at documentary film about the civilian nuclear industry. Lynch first analyzes several films about US antireactor activism produced in the 1970s and 1980s, showing how they manifest the codependence of antireactor activism and environmentalism. She then turns to recent films that look more broadly at the industrial processes involved in nuclear power creation. Drawing on disparate strands of scholarly inquiry- including ecocriticism, documentary theory, and science studies- Lynch reads these newer documentaries to illuminate how changing political, material, and economic realities have reshaped how opponents of nuclear energy imagine the relationships between body, place, and planet. She suggests that this reimagining is predicated on a complex global sensibility far more sophisticated than that embraced by past US opponents of nuclear power, as these newer films bring to mind what ecocritic Ursula Heise has described as "eco-cosmopolitanism" or "environmental world citizenship." This latter group of films, in fact, serves as a model for cosmopolitan environmental discourse, thus broadening the applicability of Heise's revisionary critique into a reconsideration of environmentalism as represented in documentary film.

The Moccasin Telegraph: Sign-Talk Autobiography and Pretty-shield, Medicine Woman of the Crows

Abstract: In 1931, Crow medicine woman Pretty Shield delivered her oral autobiography to Frank Linderman, simultaneously through an interpreter of spoken Crow, and without translation to Linderman in Indian Sign Language. Pretty Shield's and Linderman's use of the sign language within this autobiography, coupled with Pretty Shield's explanations of historical use of the sign language among precontact Crow people, suggests new views of various critical problems within the hybrid genre of American Indian autobiography, of which this text is one example. Pretty Shield's husband, Goes Ahead, used the sign language to scout for General George Armstrong Custer at the 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn; Pretty Shield's account of the sign language in this battle additionally provides a rare and understudied interpretation of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, and of the larger American frontier histories in which sign talk played a significant role.

Shadows of Mashantucket: William Apess and the Representation of Pequot Place

Abstract: Rifkin's essay argues that previous considerations of Apess's work, particularly A Son of the Forest, have mentioned the existence of the Mashantucket reservation and Apess's relation to it but have not addressed its role as a framing feature of his writing. Through a reading of A Son of the Forest, the essay illustrates how Mashantucket provides a shadow referent for much of the plot of the narrative, and in this way, the essay demonstrates how Apess develops strategies for signifying Native sovereignty in the absence of treaty-like relations that could signal the presence of "political" matters and of Native geopolitical claims.

Jazz, Black Transnationalism, and the Political Aesthetics of Langston Hughes’s Ask Your Mama

Abstract: Lowney's essay examines how Langston Hughes's cultural work in the 1950s and early 1960s illustrates the challenge of developing a progressive black transnationalist literary culture. It concentrates especially on Hughes's longest and most ambitious poem, Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz (1961), which renders his dual commitment to a black transnationalist public and an innovative African diaspora jazz poetics. Ask Your Mama features the interaction of African cultures in the Americas and Africa, with its evocation of Afro-Caribbean as well as African American music and its movement among different sites of black revolutionary struggle. In this context, jazz plays an explicitly political role in expressing the revolutionary desire for black liberation in the United States, Africa, and the Caribbean. This is most evident in the opening mood of Ask Your Mama, "Cultural Exchange," which introduces the black transnationalist network of musical forms, proper names, and social locations that reverberate throughout the poem. Lowney's essay discusses the implications of Hughes's ironic allusion to the "cultural exchange" of African American "jazz ambassadors," who were funded by the US State Department to perform in Africa in the 1950s. In doing so, it draws from recent research in jazz studies by Penny Von Eschen and Ingrid Monson to underscore the historical complexity and political incisiveness of Hughes's enactment of a black transnationalist public in the poem.

John Neal, American Romance, and International Romanticism

Abstract: In this essay, Gilmore argues that examining the largely forgotten early romances of John Neal within a transatlantic framework leads to a reconsideration of our understanding of romanticism in the United States. Focusing on Randolph (1823) and Logan (1822), he draws parallels between Neal's criticism and fiction and the writings of European romantics such as Friedrich Schlegel and Percy Bysshe Shelley. In doing so, Gilmore contends that Neal provides an alternative understanding of the politics, history, and poetics of romanticism and the romance in the United States. Over the past century, the followers of F. O. Matthiessen and Richard Chase and their New Americanist critics have tended to describe romanticism and the romance in terms of an idealistic retreat into nature or aesthetic form. Furthermore, both mid-twentieth-century critics and later revisionists emphasized a national dimension to American romanticism and the American romance, either as epitomizing a distinctly American literature or as reinforcing or contesting dominant conceptions of the United States. In contrast, he argues that placing the romance, particularly as espoused and practiced by John Neal, at the center of our examination of romanticism in the United States foregrounds the importance of an international literary and sociocultural framework. In this light, romanticism appears less an ideological retreat from modernity or a nationalistic vehicle than a transnational, dialectical engagement with modernity's atomization of the individual.

Contested Terrain: The Suburbs as Region

Abstract: Wilhite contends that a general indebtedness to Cold War cultural critique has kept literary scholars from reading the suburbs and suburban fiction for what they truly are: the endgame and final outpost of US regionalism. Drawing on discussions of regional writing and cultural geography, Wilhite argues that we should read suburban narratives for the ways they update and revise long-standing regionalist approaches to local and global concerns: the charged insularity of the domestic sphere, the geographic containment of racial difference, the repressive construction of a common national identity, and the imperial reach of nation. As a mode of geopolitical analysis, regionalism clarifies the fraught relationship between isolationism and imperialism that has shaped US residential geography. When read as form of regional writing, suburban fiction exposes our homes and neighborhoods as national and transnational "sites of contestation." To develop this line of thinking, Wilhite offers Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections (2001) and Chang-rae Lee's Aloft (2004) as case studies for his broader claims about region and the spatial effects of residential sprawl and suburban domesticity. Franzen and Lee both locate the political subject within the competing ideologies of privatism and globalization, but they produce radically different responses to the suburb as a symptomatic fact of twenty-first-century life in the United States. Taken together, these novels offer divergent paths for understanding the suburbs as a uniquely problematic and potentially transformative cultural and geographic region.

The Cakewalk of Capital in Charles Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition

Abstract: Engaging in a long-standing debate about how to understand post-Reconstruction era "spectacle lynching," Kilgore's essay revisits Charles Chesnutt's 1901 novel The Marrow of Tradition in light of current theories of racial violence read through the logics of corporate capitalism. It contends that Marrow highlights the deep affinities between two nineteenth-century national institutions of US popular culture-minstrelsy and lynching. Chesnutt's novel does not support the traditional view that late nineteenth-century popular industries functioned as a mask of progressive modernity in order to conceal the regressive barbarisms of racist violence, a violence understood as the resilient legacy of convulsive, psychoaffective white supremacy; as a conspiratorial compromise between a reunited North and South; or as a response to the rise of an African American middle-class in the wake of a depressed Southern economy. Instead, Chesnutt gives the reader a subtle and underappreciated look into the constitutive, imperial, and "modern" economic forces behind racial violence, represented, like cakewalk performances, as banal popular entertainment, part and parcel of the extension of US capital both intranationally and internationally. Thus, in an analysis of the violent marrow of US racism, Chesnutt offers a surprising diagnosis: the cakewalk of capital.

The "Plain Facts" of Fine Paper in "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids"

Abstract: This essay intervenes in conversations about mid-nineteenth-century authorship and print culture by distinguishing between the economy of paper and the economy of print. He argues that critical treatments of Melville’s work, and particularly “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” (1855), have not adequately attended to the material economy of paper that existed for Melville before the cycle of literary publication, distribution, and circulation began. Living in the important papermaking region of rural west Massachusetts allowed Melville to experience the raw materials of that economic sector not as a distant or vicarious consumer but, following his visit to the Old Berkshire Mill in Dalton in the winter of 1851, as a specialized purchaser. Instead of treating paper as a metonym of literary-market exchange, then, Thompson’s essay examines Melville’s experience and imagining of this raw material—literally avant la lettre—as a way of better understanding the economy of a substance whose manufactured sizes (folio, octavo, and duodecimo) he had already used to classify whales in Moby-Dick and on which his recalcitrant copyist, Bartleby, refuses to write.

“Some Queer Freak of Taste”: Gender, Authorship, and the “Rock Me to Sleep” Controversy

Abstract: Published in 1860 under the pseudonym "Florence Percy," "Rock Me to Sleep" quickly became one of the most popular and widely circulated poems of the nineteenth century. It also became the subject of a heated literary controversy, with multiple claimants coming forward to insist that they had authored the lyric; the most committed imposter was Alexander McWhorter Ball, a New Jersey legislator whose wealthy and powerful friends mounted a national campaign to prove his authorship. The poem's actual author, Elizabeth Akers Allen, found herself in danger of losing her reputation and therefore her ability to place her work within the literary marketplace. Putzi argues that the poem's sentimentality rendered it eminently reprintable but also distanced the text from its author, thus causing pretenders to imagine themselves in her place. The gendered implications of this sort of aggressive read ing were revealed most clearly in Ball's claim to authorship, which was based on this middle-class gentleman's emotional legitimacy as evidenced by the private circulation of (what he claimed as) his poetry. Rather than asserting her own femininity, however, Akers Allen exposed the gender and class privilege underlying Ball's argument, claiming her own professionalism and disparaging Ball as a "poetaster" or a hopeless amateur. With publications across the United States taking sides on either side, the "Rock Me to Sleep" controversy became an important marker of the status of professional women writers in the post-Civil War era; more specifically, and perhaps more importantly, it positions one woman's composition, publication, and circulation practices within a literary marketplace that paradoxically asked women poets to be simultaneously of and beyond the market-amateurs in a professional world.

James Fenimore Cooper and the Invention of the Passing Novel

Abstract: Sanborn's essay seeks to demonstrate that The Headsman, an overlooked 1833 novel by James Fenimore Cooper, is an allegory of racial passing. After showing that the dominant aim of this melodrama about a Swiss executioner's family is to critique white American prejudice against African Americans, and that it does so by dramatizing the consequences of passing for three members of that family, Sanborn considers the implications of the fact that the end of the novel seems to reverse, or at least neutralize, that critique. Although Cooper is quite serious about the antiracist message of the novel, the involutions of its ending suggest that by impersonating characters whom he thinks of as light-skinned black people passing as white, Cooper seeks imaginative pleasures just as much as, if not more than, he advances political aims. It is worth considering, Sanborn concludes, whether the same may be said of other passing novels-whether the painful secret keeping of literary passers is, for writers and readers alike, more pleasurable than we have imagined.

Literatures of Exile and Return: Jack Kerouac and Quebec

Abstract: Melehy's essay explores Jack Kerouac's relationship to the Quebecois diaspora of which his Massachusetts family was a part, his experience of English as a foreign language, and how these inform his aesthetics. Melehy situates the discussion in debates on multilingualism in the study of American literature as well as theories of minor literature and translation. He demonstrates that Kerouac's realism involves an effort to bring into dominant US representation many aspects of the diaspora that were ideologically hidden. Part of this consideration is the reception of Kerouac in Quebec as a major literary figure who made immense contributions to reflections on hybrid North American identity. In the appreciation of Kerouac by Quebec novelist and critic Victor-Levy Beaulieu, the author shows that early critical dismissals of Kerouac in the United States were closely connected to the aesthetic problems he raised in his work that were specific to his awareness of the diaspora. Melehy then turns his attention to some of Kerouac's lesser-known novels, especially two that focus mainly on French-Canadian culture and identity, Dr. Sax (1959) and Satori in Paris (1966). Proceeding to a commentary of a Quebecois rewriting of Kerouac, Jacques Poulin's 1984 Volkswagen Blues, Melehy demonstrates this novel's exploration of North American identities in connection with Quebec and the role of literature in mapping them. The conclusion assesses Kerouac's contribution to American literature as a meditation on transnational, translingual identity.