Showing papers in "American Literature in 2018"

“The Complexity of Loss Itself”: The Comics Form and Fun Home’s Queer Reparative Temporality

Abstract: This article assesses the queer world-making potentiality of the comics form as demonstrated in Alison Bechdel’s 2006 graphic memoir Fun Home. By deploying the temporal openings of the graphic form, Fun Home challenges the putative fixity of heteronormative family time and the temporality of kinship lines more broadly. Bechdel represents this queering of generation and kinship as a constituent part of the young Alison’s coming-of-age as a queer comics artist; this temporal reworking simultaneously makes possible a queer reparative web of affiliation. Building on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s model of reparative reading, I demonstrate how Fun Home’s form produces a version of reparation that emerges from a shared artistry and embraces ambivalent affective responses to the past. Ultimately, Bechdel produces a queer feminist reparative reading that understands futurity’s potential as complex and grounded in both the pain and pleasure of the queer body.

“Greater Still in Death”: Race, Martyrology, and the Reanimation of Juan Placido

Abstract: This article details how John Greenleaf Whittier accidentally assumed two different Cuban poets of color (Juan Francisco Manzano and Placido) were one and the same person, resulting in an unwittingly combinatory sketch of “Juan Placido.” The resulting syncretic personage in Whittier’s “The Black Man” (1845) became a cause celebre for abolitionists. I argue that to effectively persuade his white Northern audience, Whittier rewrote his source texts into the sentimental registers of moral suasion and culturally decontextualized Juan Placido, transforming the “Cuban martyr poet” into a transnational race man. In the essay’s second half, I demonstrate how Martin R. Delany’s Blake (1859, 1861–62) readapted Whittier’s account to appeal to black radical abolitionists. By literarily resurrecting Juan Placido as an active revolutionary in the serial novel’s plot, Delany articulated not only a sophisticated theory of diasporic collaboration but also meditated on the stakes of fighting for black liberation by repeatedly employing accounts of black martyrdom.

Arrested in the Moment of Dying: Science, Fiction, and the Reality Effect of Reprinting

Abstract: How was it possible that numerous nineteenth-century readers believed in the authenticity of a made-up sensational story about a mesmerist experiment that supposedly arrested its subject between life and death? By juxtaposing Edgar Allan Poe’s “Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” with Justinus Kerner’s medical case history “The Seeress of Prevorst,” this essay compares the narrative constructions of verisimilitude in science and fiction. But in exploring the viral dissemination of “Valdemar,” I also analyze how nineteenth-century print media produced content and credence by means of reprinting—a circular feedback reminiscent of our current world of social media, where unfounded or disproven stories gain credibility by being circulated, shared, and retweeted.

Houses of Contention: Tar Baby and Essence

Abstract: This essay argues that Essence magazine provides a crucial intertext for understanding Toni Morrison’s engagement in Tar Baby with the political debates that surrounded the “Black Is Beautiful” slogan in the black power era and her use of the Tar Baby story to dramatize and interpret those debates. Tar Baby responds to early scandals at the magazine spurred by white capitalist investment in the “Black Is Beautiful” slogan as well as the magazine’s coverage of a splintering black liberation movement, its Caribbean travel features, and its shifting assessments of affirmative action, white feminism, and domestic violence. Throughout, the novel uses the Tar Baby story to link the “Black Is Beautiful” slogan not with an emancipatory politics but instead with New World histories that have constituted racial blackness in and through division and that position black women to become scapegoats for the failure to achieve racial unity in the face of white domination.

How to Undo the History of Sexuality: Editing Edward Taylor’s Meditations

Abstract: This essay establishes how the scholarly labors that brought Edward Taylor’s works to light in the 1930s foreclosed any understanding of them as queer. The absence of a queer critical reception history is this essay’s subject, and to trace that absence, it focuses on the material and intellectual terms of Taylor’s initial critical reception and on the political forces and critical assumptions that bear on those terms. Taylor’s devotional Meditations offer an exemplary case for understanding how many of the ordinary labors associated with recovery and publication—the scholarly acts that stand, ultimately, behind nearly any interpretation of any literary text, including genre classification, editorial presentation, and genealogical authentication—have often been versions of what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick described in the late 1980s as “the extremely elusive and maddeningly plural ways in which cultures and their various institutions efface and alter sexual meaning.”

“The Lesbian Norman Rockwell”: Alison Bechdel and Queer Grassroots Networks

Abstract: Alison Bechdel’s renown has been building since the success of Fun Home (2006). While scholars have focused on her contemporary production, her comics work within grassroots periodicals, including her long-running strip, Dykes to Watch Out For (1983–2008), has received comparatively little attention. By focusing on the grassroots context of DTWOF, this essay demonstrates how Bechdel’s participation in grassroots periodicals shaped her work. Through the development of new reading practices and the notion of queer comics archives, I show how queer communities influenced Bechdel’s visual rhetoric in the pages of WomaNews, the grassroots periodical where Bechdel first published her work and participated as a member of the collective. Informed by archival research, this analysis embraces grassroots contexts as an overlooked venue for exploring queer histories and tracing the development of queer comics.

Memory’s Ends: Thinking as Grace in Thomas Hooker’s New England

Abstract: This essay examines the role of memory in the theology of first-generation New England divine Thomas Hooker. Drawing particular attention to Hooker’s application of imagistic and dialectical mnemonics in his well-known but controversial doctrine of “preparation,” it discovers a Puritan theory of grace that sought to come closer to God by escaping idolatrous thinking, on the one hand, and mechanistic cognition, on the other. Reconceiving Hooker’s preparation as a memorial style and placing that ars memoria at the center of transatlantic Puritan controversies about grace, the essay provides a new model for reading Puritanism not as the start of an American telos but at the end of a European intellectual inheritance.

“Flesh-to-Flesh Contact”: Marvel Comics’ Rogue and the Queer Feminist Imagination

Abstract: The X-Men’s Rogue’s ability to absorb the powers and personality of others through “flesh-to-flesh contact” presents an affective figure for the queer potential of the X-Men’s metaphor of mutancy as difference. Close readings of Rogue’s first appearance, Avengers Annual #10, and the end of her first major character arc, Uncanny X-Men #185, reveal that this affective figure for queerness is variable and derived from X-Men writer Chris Claremont’s ongoing engagement with feminist politics and theory.

“Polluted Luxuries”: Consumer Resistance, the Senses of Horror, and Abolitionist Boycott Literature

Abstract: This essay examines the unique positionality of abolitionist boycott literature, situated within the sentimental trends of antebellum literature while employing the sensationalist language of consumer interaction with morally compromised goods. Boycott literature ultimately introduced into the literary landscape a complicated view of what readers and writers increasingly saw as a suspect “free” market. Writers such as Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Elizabeth Margaret Chandler, and John Greenleaf Whittier imagined a world of goods haunted by the touch of enslaved laborers—goods that in turn haunted consumers. By parsing out the language of abolitionist boycott literature alongside its historical and material cultural moment, this essay argues that such literature posits a very literal and as yet unaccounted-for version of material relations that collapses the boundaries between consumer and producer, self and other, in ways that have horrific, haunting implications for market society, then and now.

Desiring Blackness: A Queer Orientation to Marvel’s Black Panther, 1998–2016

Abstract: The socially symbolic figure of the superhero comes into close contact with vernacular intellectual critiques of race and modernity through the much-anticipated film adaptation of Marvel’s Black Panther comics. This article analyzes the implications for queer approaches to black popular cultural production of the knowledge practices that inspire Black Panther’s depiction of an African utopia. The intertexts involved include histories, travel writings, and other comics. Focusing on the divergent treatments by authors Christopher Priest (1998–2003) and Ta-Nehisi Coates (2016) of the title character’s black female comrades-in-arms, this reading interrogates how race consciousness and colonial legacies inform the discourses of desire operating within the text. The term desiring blackness describes an orientation to reading that defers to African Americanist and black diasporic considerations to ground the task of interpretation in conditions that elicit compromise among disparate lines of theoretical inquiry: queer phenomenology, decolonial epistemology, Afrofuturism, and queer of color critique.

“Rightly Enough Called Girls”: Melville’s Violated Virgins and Male Marketplace Fears

Abstract: This essay contextualizes Herman Melville’s “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” alongside antebellum portrayals of the female wage earner. Melville’s decision to measure the costs of economic change by sexualizing female wage earners typifies antebellum conversations in which men interpreted women’s labor in relation to an increasingly outdated framework for their activities, here termed the patriarchal shelter. This trope presumes that women’s activities ought to take place under conditions found in the preindustrial household and helps to explain why male authors interpreted factory operatives as women of suspect virtue. I argue that male authors who sexualized female wage earners alleviated their own anxieties about their compromised independence in the industrial marketplace. Male authors fixated on factory women’s sexual identity in an attempt to control their activities rhetorically, but in the process they symptomatized the many ways women’s labor no longer clearly evidenced male dominion.

Hard-Boiled Literary History: Labor and Style in Fictions of the Culture Industry

Abstract: In this article I argue for a new understanding of the term hard-boiled by tracing the relationship between literary style and historical shifts in intellectual labor in the mid-twentieth-century United States. Novels representing the culture industry, such as Raymond Chandler’s The Little Sister (1949), Budd Schulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run? (1941), and Frederic Wakeman’s The Hucksters (1946), describe the intellectual labor of producing the commodities on which the industry subsisted, while at the same time struggling to identify and preserve regions of culture as yet unsullied by the market. This tension is crystallized in their distinctive hard-boiled style, understood here as a certain disposition toward the historical process of cultural commodification. Loosened from its genre frame and its associations with the mystery novel, hard-boiled emerges as a richer and more capacious critical term, one that can help us to understand our own work as literary historians.

“An Extreme Sense of Protest against Everything”: Chester Himes’s Prison Novel

Abstract: First drafted during the author’s imprisonment in the 1930s, Chester Himes’s autobiographical prison novel, Yesterday Will Make You Cry, was originally published in expurgated form as Cast the First Stone in 1953. This essay situates both versions in relation to contemporary sociological and popular discourses of state violence and racial liberalism. A pervasive midcentury ideology posited that rationalizing state violence could resolve both social disorder and racial injustice. I argue that Yesterday’s representation of the excessiveness of prison violence undermines the state’s claims to rationality and moderation and that the book’s exploration of queer, criminalized, and racialized subjectivity resists the pathologizing discourses that legitimized state violence. The novel’s transformation did not merely excise its sexual content, then, but greatly diminished its political disruptiveness. Cast the First Stone labors to contain the “extreme sense of protest” that Yesterday dramatizes so powerfully.

The Normative Broken: Melinda Gebbie, Feminist Comix, and Child Sexuality Temporalities

Abstract: Lost Girls (2006) is a return to the themes explored by Melinda Gebbie and other underground feminist cartoonists in the 1970s and 1980s. The text, a collaboration between Gebbie and Alan Moore, should be read as reminiscent of feminist cartoonists who intentionally depicted the taboo or obscene in order to address sexual and gender inequalities. These comics suggest that the obscene can push against purity narratives attached to womanhood, narratives that potentially stigmatize all girls and women. Lost Girls keeps the taboos of children’s sexuality and incest central to the representation in order to reframe possibilities of women’s healthy sexual subjectivity. Injurious pasts and irreconcilable desires do not preclude joyous futures. Painful pasts enable the eponymous lost girls’ agency, creating the conditions that help them find homosocial and queer belonging with one another. The comic thus models the temporalities of surviving trauma. The feminist temporalities of survivorship here also model utopian futures that are homosocial, queer, often ecstatic, and resistant to normative scripts of what should give women comfort. Undergirded by a radical feminist perspective that sees injury as being embedded in many women’s experiences, the creation of community from the wound makes it normal to have been broken.

Disgusting Affects from the Antinomian Controversy to the Antiabortion Movement

Abstract: Focusing on disgust opens up critical paths that involve more expansive scopes of space and time than are possible with strictly historicist approaches to Puritan studies. This essay investigates the remarkably similar tactics for inducing disgust in narratives from the 1640s of the antinomians’ monstrous births and in the US Senate floor debate of the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act just before the Iraq War in 2003. In both instances, rhetoric comparing familiar bodies to unfamiliar corporeal forms conjures powerful feelings of disgust that legitimize intervention. These powerful affective tactics help identify “rogues” to be eradicated—either colonial rogues, a “rogue procedure,” or a “rogue state”—hardening the border-focused feelings of disgust into hegemonic control. The essay concludes by taking a cue from the Puritans about embracing the inevitability of encountering disgusting feelings alongside wondrous ones, as well as inspiration from testimonies of abortion providers in the years immediately following Roe v. Wade, and arguing that critical attention to disgust enables the possibility of imagining a multiplicity of responses to different forms of embodiment.

Into the Morass: Chesnutt, Antinormativity, and the Queer Politics of Early Jim Crow Literature

Abstract: In this essay I discuss how Charles W. Chesnutt’s The House behind the Cedars—through the tropology of spatialization, illustrations of expansive human intimacy, and indictments of the triangulation of antinormatively gendered and sexed bodies as political capital—intervened in sexual respectability politics in the African American uplift culture of the post-Reconstruction era. In doing so I argue that Chesnutt consecrated the “noble strivings” of sexually antinormative African Americans while simultaneously illustrating the way overdetermined sexual identity politics, especially those in the naturalist literary tradition, diminished black life. With Chesnutt as my starting point, I recommend a return to early Jim Crow novels—particularly those written between the years 1900 and 1905—to suggest their progenitorial role regarding recent turns in queer theory and queer of color critique. In doing so I take steps toward a literary genealogy of queer US sex politics that runs from Plessy v. Ferguson and early Jim Crow, into modernism, and down through women of color feminism of the late 1980s before its formal or academic consecration in contemporary US queer theory. I do this to emphasize an important but still-developing ethic in contemporary queer literary studies: the need to center the study of queer representation and politics on more than homosexuality and especially on blackness.

Heroism and Comics Form: Feminist and Queer Speculations

Abstract: Instead of the disembodied abstraction that is typically the norm, I begin and end by remarking on my own embodiment as a white female scholar of popular culture reflecting on comics studies by reviewing four books written by white male scholars, all of whom make significant contributions in theorizing comics form. Queer theory teaches us to question the naturalization of norms, so while I observe that all four are male-authored texts that focus mostly on male characters, creators, and audiences, I do not assume bodies neatly match up with genders and sexualities. Instead, guided by queer of color critique, I emphasize each book’s contributions in theorizing heroism and comics form while asking whether and how they engage, illuminate, limit, or even refuse analysis of intersections of gender, race, sexuality, and nation as intertwining social constructions. Three are studies of male superheroes. The fourth, Bart Beaty’s Twelve-Cent

Langston Hughes’s Constructivist Poetics

Abstract: This essay explores the relationship between Langston Hughes’s 1930s poetry and the Soviet avant-garde theater. It argues that the constructivist theater provides an aesthetic framework through which to read Hughes’s radical poetry. Often read as an artistic failure, Hughes’s 1930s verse—especially his 1938 pamphlet A New Song—represents, I suggest, a formal response to shifting ideologies of poetic labor, namely, an effort to disentangle poetry from capitalist individualism and align it with proletarian collective labor. I argue that Hughes’s socialist poems represent an attempt to refigure poetic labor as a collective act, and I explore the implications that this has for the survival of the lyric poem and lyric modes of address. This article devotes sustained attention to a long-neglected period of Hughes’s career and provides a new reading of the Soviet avant-garde’s influence on US culture in the early twentieth century. Ultimately, it shows that these concerns and tensions are relevant to a broader arc of African American poetic history, from the twentieth century to the poetry of the present day.

The Race of Machines: Blackness and Prosthetics in Early American Science Fiction

Abstract: The steam man is a trope of early US science fiction, one inaugurated by the first dime novel Edisonade, Edward Ellis’s 1868 story The Steam Man of the Prairies. Focusing on early steam man stories as well as the historical origin of the trope—Zadoc Dederick’s 1868 invention, dubbed the Newark Steam Man—this essay argues that the course of US science fiction and US technology more generally was shaped by the racial discourses of the Reconstruction. Coming on the heels of the Civil War, the steam man stories, like Dederick’s patent, drew on extant black caricatures to explicitly racialize their central invention, vividly illustrating the afterlife of slavery at the birth of America’s machine culture.

Bildungsroman Hermeneutics in the Post–Civil Rights Era

Abstract: This essay defines the problem of bildungsroman hermeneutics for literary criticism and social policy in the post–civil rights era. Examining critical responses to Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street, it argues that the traditional bildungsroman exerts a powerful hold on interpretations of minority mobility. Bildungsroman hermeneutics understands social relations as organized around individual development. This model undermines the collective politics many critics sense in Cisneros’s text and obscures her revisions of the genre. Furthermore, bildungsroman hermeneutics intersects with neoconservative arguments that helped to roll back civil rights reforms and stymie government interventions. To address the inequalities enduring after civil rights we must circumvent an individual-centered template that has shaped plots of narrative and social change. Part of a broader effort to decenter the bildungsroman (including the work of Maxine Hong Kingston and Gloria Naylor), Cisneros’s text can help us do so, if we can learn to read it otherwise.

Islam, Puritanism, and Secular Time

Abstract: This article reconsiders the legacy of American Puritanism in the context of the current controversy around “radical Islam.” The rise of Salafi jihadism has emboldened those who maintain that Islam is incompatible with Western secularity. Liberal responses to this claim frequently appeal to the United States’ allegedly Puritan past, suggesting that the United States is particularly well placed to deal with both radical Islamism and anti-Islamic prejudice because of the ecumenical pluralism that emerged from the colonial crucible of competing denominations. I interrogate this claim by reading liberal and conservative statements about Muslims in the contemporary United States alongside the writings of Roger Williams, whom many consider to be the father of American pluralism. I argue that the modern rhetoric of religious diversity mirrors the eschatological structure of Williams’s tenet of toleration, wherein Muslims are offered only temporary acceptance. In each case, the pluralism of the present is set off against an anticipated cultural homogeneity.

Infidel America: Puritan Legacy and Antebellum Religious Persecution in Frederick Douglass’s Transatlantic Speeches, 1841–49

Abstract: This essay examines Frederick Douglass’s oratory of the 1840s, when religious appeals drove his abolitionist rhetoric. In addressing the lack of critical attention paid to his early oratory and evangelism, the essay argues that these speeches, which he delivered to audiences in the US North and Europe, offer an incisive transatlantic critique of the religious roots of American exceptionalism by attacking American Protestantism and the growing mythology of the nation’s Puritan origins. Douglass’s early speeches undercut the celebration of Puritan ancestry by Daniel Webster, George Bancroft, and others; provide a thick description of US antebellum religious persecution in both the North and South; and deploy missionary rhetoric to call on European Protestant churches to remake their US counterparts. For 1840s Douglass, slavery in the United States was not a result of the country failing to live up to its founding republican principles, an argument he would make in subsequent decades. Rather, the more radical and zealous appraisal of the country he offered at that time was that the country’s founding reliance on slavery and servitude meant that it was, at core, an apostate nation in need of Christian conversion.

Nancy and the Queer Adorable in the Serial Comics Form

Abstract: This essay presents in dialogue two renditions of the Nancy comics by original creator Ernie Bushmiller and the later poet and visual artist Joe Brainard. Arguing for a generative consideration of these seemingly disparate versions on a continuum, this comparison addresses the ongoing seriality of Nancy as offering a complex queer adorability that destabilizes modes of identification in the Nancy comics and beyond. Both Brainard’s and Bushmiller’s Nancy texts draw on the controlled miniature and the unwieldy additive catalog, which are characteristic of the long-running serial comics form. As queer texts that oscillate between popular iconographies, these iterations of Nancy provide resistance to expectations for normativity, narrative closure, static character performance, and bound space in relation to twentieth-century American collective identities.

“Everything Is Alive”: Moving and Reading in Excess of American Freedom

Abstract: Focusing on the minor details of suffering cats, I read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer as an exemplary illustration of the way in which American novels of individual development destabilize around the movement of minor bodies and minor characters. This destabilization allows not only an interrogation of the limits of US citizenship but also an exploration of how narratives may register something in excess of the citizen and the subject. Distinguishing between the antebellum (boy) characters’ violent play with cats and the postbellum narrator’s ludic play as cat, I argue that cats emerge in Tom Sawyer as captive bodies (among many hard-to-see captives). In the constrained but spectacular movements of these captive bodies, the novel troubles the particularly American freedom actualized in Tom’s play and gestures to a fugitive or feral movement that, though necessary to Tom’s development, always leaps beyond and in the way of efforts to produce a free, individual subject.

Unsuitable for Children? Adult-erated Age in Underground Graphic Narratives

Abstract: This article explores expressions of eroto-abject desire in two collaborative graphic narratives: Kathy Acker, Diane DiMassa, and Freddie Baer’s Pussycat Fever (1995) and David Wojnarowicz, James Romberger, and Marguerite Van Cook’s 7 Miles a Second (1996). Reflecting the resistance to heteronormative logics of age categorization, “adult-erated age” names the ways that childhoods in the texts are adult oriented but also characterizes how they, in their respective contexts, revise and reflect notions of impurity and being worsened as singularly queer ways of being and representing. This is accomplished by turning to traumatic memory and ill embodiment via graphic textual form.