Showing papers in "American Literature in 2019"

“Time Enough, but None to Spare”: The Indispensable Temporalities of Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition

Abstract: This essay argues that the African American literature of the nadir, written during a moment when concepts of evolution and departures from linear time were deployed to the detriment of black life as well as in its defense, is a rich archive for analyzing the unpredictable politics of multiple temporalities. I discuss several books from the period before focusing on Charles W. Chesnutt’s 1901 novel The Marrow of Tradition, in which white supremacists weaponize nonlinear temporalities while punctual black characters express faith in linear progressive historical time. This novel, I argue, ultimately suggests a genre of temporality that neither appears as a type of linear time nor ruptures it utterly, and the book implies that temporal suspensions or holds can potentially be useful—not as inherently liberatory but as means of making way for productive disagreement. Within the novel, I identify a provocative fermata, theorized here (drawing on the work of Christina Sharpe, Hortense Spillers, and Edouard Glissant) as a temporal hold, that both exists within and ruptures linear time. This essay, then, responds to the common association of linear time with oppressive institutions and nonlinear time with liberation; instead, I argue for an expansive conception of critical temporality.

Racial Abstraction and Species Difference: Anthropomorphic Animals in “Multicultural” Children’s Literature

Abstract: This essay explores anthropomorphism in contemporary children’s literature, books in which animals model racialized behaviors in order to promote racial resilience and “teach tolerance.” Unveiling the unintended consequences of invoking species difference as a form of racial abstraction, the essay contextualizes “multicultural” picture books that enlist animal surrogates within the “here and now” innovations of Lucy Sprague Mitchell’s Bank Street Writers Lab and the animal stories of Margaret Wise Brown. In keeping with studies in developmental psychology that explain how children acquire and unlearn biases, the work engages two arenas: books that imagine the adoptive family as cross-species alliance and those that depict biodiversity as a visual metaphor for multiculturalism. In looking at the adult’s ventriloquism of imaginary figures for the imagined child, the essay explores the imperfect correspondence between pedagogic aims and fantastical form, the fissures that arise in turning to nonhuman figures to express adult anxieties over racial difference. Anthropomorphic animals reconcile the paradox of diversity at the millennium: envisioning democratic inclusion without invoking the divisiveness of US racial history.

Super Fly: François Makandal’s Colonial Semiotics

Abstract: In this article I collate vernacular and elite academic stories about Francois Makandal, focusing particularly on his production of fetishes, which I (following his usage) call macandal. I show that the codes at work in macandal artifacts involve a materialism and semiotics that together constitute a critical methodology. I then use the methodology at work in macandal artifacts to read one key piece of the archive pertaining to Makandal: his judge and executioner Sebastien-Jacques Courtin’s Memoire.

Lovelorn Columns: A Genre Scorned

Abstract: The newspaper advice column has shaped the American imagination in unacknowledged ways. Using Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) as a lens into a wily, underestimated genre, I juxtapose West’s riff on the newspaper advice column with readings of the real thing. I review the lovelorn column’s distinctive features and situate West’s satiric novella in that context. I also examine the racial dynamics of both the novella and the genre, touching briefly on the careers of two lovelorn columnists: the well-known Dorothy Dix, who was white, and the now-obscure Princess Mysteria, who was African American. In the process, I show that literary critics have allowed the misogyny of West’s novella to define one of the most enduring of all women’s popular genres. Advice columns have been dismissed as a morally bankrupt product of consumer capitalism, but they did more than simply render irrelevant the question of genuine emotional expression. Using a complex masquerade of gender and race, columnists shifted counsel outside the bounds of interpersonal exchange, forged an anonymous, recursive imaginative field, and generated glimmers of an ethics of intimacy.

Transforming Geographies of Black Time: How the Free Southern Theater Used the Plantation for Civil Rights Activism

Abstract: This essay examines the cultural and political work of the Free Southern Theater, specifically how this company used plantations, porches, and cotton fields in order to build a radical black southern theater in the civil rights movement. Staging plays like Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot for black southern audiences, the theater challenged a violent structure of time at the heart of global modernity that I call black patience. By this I mean an abiding historical demand for black people to wait: whether in the hold of the slave ship, on the auction block, or for emancipation from slavery. Focusing on the centrality of the plantation to the spatializing logics of black patience, I consider how the Free Southern Theater used performance to demand “freedom now” and to revise the oppressive histories of time rooted in the material geographies of the US South. Mounting time-conscious plays, the theater used temporal aesthetics to transform the region’s historical geographies of black time (e.g., the labor time of black slaves and sharecroppers working in cotton fields) into radical sites of black political action, aesthetic innovation, and embodied performance. Engaging and reinvesting the meanings of the South’s plantation geographies, the theater revealed how one hundred years after emancipation, time remained essential to procuring the afterlives of slavery and colonialism and to shoring up the region’s necropolitical attachments. Examining these aesthetic and political experiments illuminates the importance of time to the emerging field of black geographies and to the field of black studies more broadly.

Dehumanizing Slave Personhood

Abstract: Afrohumanism is crucial to the forward-looking “project of thinking humanity from perspectives beyond the liberal humanist subject, Man” (Weheliye 2014: 8). It is another question, however, whether such a humanist approach provides the best historical analytic for understanding slavery and its carceral afterlives. This question becomes particularly pressing when we consider that today’s prison-industrial complex, like the American slaveholder of the past, extracts profits by strategically exploiting—rather than denying—the lucrative humanity of its captive black and brown subjects. To illustrate these claims, this article examines a seldom-discussed slave case, United States v. Amy (1859), which was tried before Supreme Court chief justice Roger B. Taney two years after his infamous decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857). Centering on the figure of the legal person rather than the human or the citizen, United States v. Amy alerts us to the lethal legacy of slave personhood as a debilitating mixture of civil death and criminal culpability. Nowhere, perhaps, is that legacy more evident than in viral videos of police misconduct. And nowhere do we see a more vivid assertion of black counter-civility than in the dash cam video of the late Sandra Bland’s principled, outraged response to her pretextual traffic stop by Trooper Brian Encinia. The essay closes by considering Bland’s arrest and subsequent death in custody in the context of her own and other African Americans’ efforts to achieve and maintain a civil presence in an American law and culture where black personhood remains legible primarily as criminality.

The History of Jewish American Literary History: A Critical Genealogy of Emergence

Abstract: This article takes the cliche of Jewish American literary breakthrough in the late 1950s as an opportunity to examine the perverse professional legibility of the Jewish American literary field: everyone knows about it, but few scholars outside the field take it seriously according to the reigning canons of scholarly importance. If early critics of the Jewish American literary field celebrated this emergence, its ethic of assimilation was starkly at odds with an increasingly influential multiculturalism, even as these critics relied on an implicit multicultural logic in justifying the field. A critical exploration of this paradox—and a critical genealogy of how the field got to this point—shows how the marginalization of Jewish American literary study in the contemporary academy reveals an important story about the origin and development of a currently dominant concept of identity in the humanities, even as it reveals how the Jewish American literary field continues to operate in the shadow of this cliche.

Introduction: The Plantation, the Postplantation, and the Afterlives of Slavery

Abstract: This special issue focuses on the plantation, the postplantation, and the afterlives of slavery to consider how we have inherited and continue to be structured by the plantation form. The essays here rethink the biopolitics of plantation slavery and its legacies to interrogate the plantation as a form, logic, and technology by which inequalities of power, personhood, and value are realized. They consider the plantation from a variety of points across the geographic and temporal ranges of American literary studies, including the spaces of the Caribbean, Latin America, and the United States and the periods of plantation slavery proper in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to its subsequent iterations in the Jim Crow and civil rights eras, and up to the neoliberal present in which the carceral state props up fantasies of postracialism. This is not to say that we can simply map the plantation’s form onto all contemporary forms of racial injustice or that the slave past wholly determines our present, the meaning of blackness, or the grounds for political affiliation. Rather, there is something to be gleaned from interrogating this structure and resistances to it, not perhaps for liberal humanism’s heretofore failed project of human rights and racial equality but to change the ground (sometimes literally) of the discussion, to approach the archive aslant, and to imagine different possibilities of relation. This reconsideration of the plantation heeds recent calls to challenge the omission of race in much current theory of biopolitics and bare life. As Alexander G. Weheliye (2014: 32–36) and Zakiyyah Iman Jackson (2013: 670) note, Michel Foucault’s biopolitics and Giorgio

Reconstructing Revenge: Race and Justice after the Civil War

Abstract: This essay reconsiders the politics of African American literature after the Civil War by focusing on revenge as a response to the wrong of slavery. Though forgiveness dominates literary and historical scholarship, I assemble an archive of real and imagined instances of vengeance in black-authored texts from the period following formal emancipation to the dawn of the twentieth century: the petitions of the freedmen of Edisto Island, South Carolina; the minutes of the 1865 Virginia State Convention of Colored People; the narrative of the ex-slave Samuel Hall; and the Colored American Magazine’s coverage of the lynching of Louis Wright. Reading these works alongside Pauline E. Hopkins’s Winona (1902), I show how her novel develops a philosophy of righteous revenge that reclaims the true meaning of justice in a democracy. Ultimately, this archive can help us not only to examine anew a neglected literary period but also to reimagine racial justice, then and now.

How to make a queer: the erotics of begging; or, down and out in the Great Depression

Abstract: Across the fiction and poetry of the Great Depression, when the focus turns to men on the down and out, unable to find work and not knowing where they will find their next meal or place to sleep, a series of representative scenes reappears from one now often-forgotten story, novel, and poem to another. Collectively such scenes, recurring across the literature of the 1930s, offer something like a cousinly alternative, on a far smaller scale, to the 1930s ascendency of documentary and the 1920s and 1930s movement for a proletarian literature. Stories of begging for money or food, for example, took a variety of forms, and they also took on erotic connotations. This article reads the erotics of begging in little-known literature from the Great Depression, especially Tom Kromer’s Waiting for Nothing (1935), and argues that when a man on the down and out “makes” a queer, in effect also queering himself, he queers as well the masses of down-and-out unemployed men whose unloosed gender stirred up a national anxiety about precarious masculinity.

The Shining and the Media Conglomerate; or, How All Work and No Play Made Jack a Creative Artist in the 1970s

Abstract: In the 1970s the large multinational entertainment conglomerates that gained control of both publishing and Hollywood traded the rights to creative works across different media, hoping for a single moneymaking hit. This new emphasis on blockbuster productions led to a “winner-take-all” labor market with a few superstar earners and many struggling unknowns. Both Stephen King and Stanley Kubrick used their respective versions of The Shining to describe the conditions of the 1970s media industries. Each told the story of a would-be middle-class writer grappling with the Overlook Hotel, the larger, phantasmal structure of capital that surrounds him. In King’s version the hotel represents publishing and other aspects of the literary field, whereas Kubrick identifies it more closely with Warner Brothers, which distributed and financed the film. Understanding The Shining as a narrative of artistic production will ultimately help us understand not only the interlocking structure of the publishing and film industries in the late 1970s but also the ways in which the inequality in the media industries during that time prefigured and helped to justify the growing social inequality across society under neoliberalism.

Exporting Manhood: Adaptation and the Post-NAFTA Latinx Novel

Abstract: This essay examines the figure of the vanishing male in a trio of novels—Cristina Rivera Garza’s La muerte me da, Luis Alberto Urrea’s Into the Beautiful North, and James Canon’s Tales from the Town of Widows—whose circa-2007 publication speaks to the fifteen-year legacy of the North American Free Trade Agreement. The essay argues for a notion of “adaptive belonging” as a formal and political strategy for coping with neoliberal policies’ hemispheric shift.

The Plantation Countermelodies of Dunbar and Du Bois: Writing Agropolitical Subjecthood in the Nadir

Abstract: With attention to representations of the land and labor in the postslavery agricultural South of the nadir—a period when American apartheid was at its most violent—this essay uses Paul Laurence Dunbar’s plantation poems and W. E. B. Du Bois’s cotton novel, The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911), to explore counternarratives of black subjecthood. Agriculture’s focus on productive collaborations with the nonhuman, on cycles of decay and rebirth, and on the potential for self-determination provides a generative vocabulary for conceptualizing nadir-era experiences of the human. Under this model, literature provides a venue wherein the legacies of the plantation might be imaginatively transposed from a Jim Crow necropolitics of violent constraint and dispossession into vectors of agropolitical possibility. To that end, the essay uses Dunbar and Du Bois to propose potentially radical processes of black subject formation wherein physical and imaginative instances of reclamation give rise to fresh mergers of epistemic and embodied selfhood.

A Poetics of Dissociability: Poetry and Punk in Los Angeles, 1976–83

Abstract: In this article I consider the impact of New York school poetry and New York punk rock on the Los Angeles literary scene of the 1970s and 1980s. I explore a distinct group of poets that emerged around a Venice Beach, California, literary arts center but was profoundly East Coast in orientation: the so-called punk poets of LA, who are the subject of this article, revered the New York school poetry of John Ashbery, Ted Berrigan, and Joe Brainard but also idolized downtown punks like Patti Smith. Focusing in particular on Dennis Cooper, his punk poetry periodical, Little Caesar, and his reading series at Beyond Baroque, I examine and contextualize his attempts to draw together a poetic community whose style and ambition were radically different from previous generations of LA poets.

Race Leaders, Race Traitors, and the Necropolitics of Black Exceptionalism in Paul Beatty’s Fiction

Abstract: This essay examines two oppositional figures in Paul Beatty’s debut novel, The White Boy Shuffle (1996), and most recent novel, The Sellout (2015): the exalted race leader and the excoriated race traitor. Positioned at extreme ends of the spectrum of exceptionalism, these figures function to perpetuate a phenomenon that the essay’s author terms the necropolitics of black exceptionalism, the paradox of justifying the violent oppression of the majority of black people by celebrating or censuring a single black figure. In exploring the absurd dimensions of these extreme figures through the lens of satire, both novels denounce black exceptionalism as a necropolitical tool of oppression that entrenches the social death and civic exclusion of black people in a modern US society that purports to be color-blind and postracial. Emerging within the postmodern turn of the African American literary tradition, these novels take on a nihilistic tone to raise questions about how the black community might effectively (if at all) achieve civil progress in the contemporary age. Ultimately, these satirical novels reimagine historically necropolitical spaces, such as the basketball court, the plantation, and the segregated urban neighborhood, as potential, albeit vexed sites of black agency, empowerment, and community building.

Beyond Protest: Voice and Exit in Contemporary American Poetry

Abstract: In liberal political economy, voice (voting, complaining, etc.) and exit (dissociating, boycotting, etc.) are the two primary feedback mechanisms for improving large organizations. When it comes to the political state, however, exit is off the table: no one leaves the state, so dissenters must articulate their dissatisfaction within systems of representation. For any politics opposed to the state, voice is all one has. This essay reads Juliana Spahr’s This Connection of Everyone with Lungs (2005) and Well Then There Now (2011) and Nathaniel Mackey’s Splay Anthem (2006) as exemplars of an impetus in contemporary American poetry to enable exit from the state. However, this project inevitably fails, and the poetics of exit resorts to a renewed voice. Rather than a complaint addressed to authority, these poets’ voiced demand for exit now forms the potential basis of new political collectivities, people joined by a shared desire to leave the state.

The Thin White Line: Veterans and the White Racial Politics of Creative Writing

Abstract: This essay considers how the creative writing workshop transformed the white Vietnam vet into a minority writer. The MFA system, which organized the group-based politics of post–civil rights American literature, originated as a space geared toward white combat veterans. Some of the first graduate programs in creative writing were founded in the years after World War II, and their classes were dominated by white vets attending college on the GI Bill. The vets received the now-cliched advice to write what they know, to turn their war experiences into war stories. The next wave of program building followed the passage of the Higher Education Act of 1965 and the Vietnam Veterans’ Readjustment Benefits Act of 1966, which brought Vietnam vets into a changing workshop, where students still learned to write what they know but also, as pre–civil rights racial liberalism turned to post–civil rights liberal multiculturalism, write who they are. The trauma of combat allowed white men to situate themselves within late twentieth-century literary culture by writing not as white men but as “veteran-Americans.” Veteran-American literature set white men within the pluralist institution but without forfeiting the cultural center, or the front seat in the classroom.

A Corporate Plantation Reading Public: Labor, Literacy, and Diaspora in the Global Black South

Abstract: This essay reconstructs the history of the Cotton Farmer, a rare African American newspaper edited and published by black tenant farmers employed by the Delta and Pine Land Company, once the world’s largest corporate cotton plantation located in the Mississippi delta. The Cotton Farmer ran from 1919 to circa 1927 and was mainly confined to the company’s properties. However, in 1926, three copies of the paper circulated to Bocas del Toro, Panama, to a Garveyite and West Indian migrant laborer employed on the infamous United Fruit Company’s vast banana and fruit plantations. Tracing the Cotton Farmer’s hemispheric circulation from the Mississippi delta to Panama, this essay explores the intersections of labor, literacy, and diaspora in the global black south. What do we make of a reading public among black tenant farmers on a corporate cotton plantation in the Mississippi delta at the height of Jim Crow? How did the entanglements of labor and literacy at once challenge and correspond with conventional accounts of sharecropping in the Jim Crow South? Further, in light of the Cotton Farmer’s circulation from Mississippi’s cotton fields to Panama’s banana fields, this essay establishes the corporate plantation as a heuristic for exploring the imperial logics and practices tying the US South to the larger project of colonial domination in the Caribbean and Latin America, and ultimately reexamines black transnationalism and diaspora from the position of corporate plantation laborers as they negotiated ever-evolving modes of domination and social control on corporate plantations in the global black south. In so doing, it establishes black agricultural and corporate plantation laborers as architects of black geographic thought and diasporic practice alongside their urban, cosmopolitan contemporaries.

Choosing Death: The Making of Martyrs in Early American Criminal Narratives

Abstract: In 1701 Puritan minister John Rogers published the criminal narrative of Esther Rodgers, who had been convicted of infanticide and executed. Esther Rodgers appears in Rogers’s Death the Certain Wages of Sin not as a depraved criminal or even a repentant sinner but as a courageous Christian martyr. Much of the productive recent scholarship on Rodgers studies the way her criminal status operated in the public sphere generally or print culture specifically, but the literary construction of her legal criminal status reveals a larger negotiation over marginalized individuals’ ability to consent and dissent in early New England and an unexpected orientation toward choice in early American literature. Rogers and his contemporaries engaged the conventions of the early modern criminal narrative to organize the chaos of maternal tragedy according to fictions of choice and the conventions of ancient and antique scripture to recast execution as a prelude to salvation. But in the ill-fitting spaces between the criminal’s story and the forms to which these authors suited it, readers could see a character who was something more—or less—than murderer or martyr: a sympathetic victim granted the ability to consent only in order to certify her legal culpability, religious conversion, and complicity in the macabre spectacle of her own public execution.

A New Chapter in the Story of Trauma: Narratives of Bodily Healing from 1860s America

Abstract: Scholars tracing the genealogy of trauma generally place its emergence in the 1870s, when the condition began to be conceptualized as mental rather than physical injury, treatable through psychological measures. This essay locates a complicating earlier engagement. Oliver Wendell Holmes’s The Guardian Angel (1867), Louisa May Alcott’s Hospital Sketches (1863), and Walt Whitman’s war entries in Specimen Days (from 1863) represent mental breakdown but propose a radically different therapy: the mind may be healed by acquiescing to the body’s physiological functions. This therapy is recommended in the course of narratives that are insistently conclusive, without the fragmentation usually assumed to distinguish representations of trauma. Thus, this essay challenges the premise that narratives of trauma formally resemble the condition’s broken mind, instead imagining how such texts may be analogized to the organic body.

Revising Ho Chi Minh: Diasporic Historical Fiction in The Book of Salt and The Zenith

Abstract: Through a reading of Vietnamese American author Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt (2003) and Parisian writer-in-exile Duong Thu Huong’s The Zenith (2012), this essay examines the ways in which the two diasporic Vietnamese novels revise modern Vietnam’s founding father Ho Chi Minh and thereby challenge the Communist Party’s official historiography. Resisting both the lingering civil war’s Manichaeanism and the militant anti-Communism of the diaspora, the texts present Ho as a figure of hope through which to imagine national reunification and an alternative future for Vietnam.

What’s in a Name? Vincent Ogé, Toussaint Louverture, and George Boyer Vashon’s Revision of the Haitian Revolution

Abstract: This essay argues that George Boyer Vashon’s epic poem, “Vincent Oge” (1854), reframes the Haitian Revolution by aligning two moments of imminent revolution—Saint-Domingue in the late eighteenth century and the United States in the mid-nineteenth century—to suggest the free black people of the United States might activate the volcanic latency of racial discontent in their country just as Oge had in his. At the same time, Vashon’s revision of John Greenleaf Whittier’s poem “Toussaint L’Ouverture” (1833) offsets the way in which Louverture’s name had become overburdened within the transatlantic antislavery discourse of the mid-nineteenth century. In doing so, “Vincent Oge” shifts attention from the singular heroism of Louverture to the plurality of contributors that shaped the long history of the Haitian Revolution.

Region, Capitalism, and the Jew in the Post-Tom Plantation Novel

Abstract: This essay focuses on the consistently deployed but previously unnoticed figure of the Jew in the post–Uncle Tom’s Cabin plantation novel, whether “anti-Tom” or abolitionist in orientation. I argue that this character does complex ideological work in these novels, in particular as they stage economic tensions between the North and the South. On the one hand, the Jew as depicted in this work embodies the threat of Northern capitalism, which many in the South viewed as an overwhelmingly powerful force. On the other hand, the Jew of these novels acts as a figure for Southern ambivalence about capitalism; indeed, he was in many instances a projected form of economic envy and self-division. In this the Jew was the figure through whom the South could, however reluctantly, come to terms with the capitalist underpinnings of the Southern slave economy and thus its own inextricable relationship to the North and, indeed, the many countries involved in the global slave trade.

Beyond the “Proper Notice”: Frederick Douglass, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and the Politics of Critical Reprinting

Abstract: This essay takes the critical reception of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Frederick Douglass’ Paper as an occasion to rethink modern constructions of critical authority while arguing for a print culture approach to literary criticism. Although scholars of antebellum culture typically focus on critical responses that are most readable by twenty-first-century standards (lengthy, signed reviews by readily identifiable critics in prestigious journals), paradoxically the less authoritative liminal critical forms (unsigned, unoriginal criticism circulated as reprinted reviews) displayed the centrality of criticism to nineteenth-century social and political life in the United States. Drawing on an expanded archive of eclectic critical forms, this essay denaturalizes and expands our sense of antebellum critical culture, examining the ways Frederick Douglass exploited the material diversity of contemporary print culture as part of his antislavery strategy, reprinting responses to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel in an array of nontraditional critical forms to achieve pragmatic political goals. In so doing, Douglass transformed literary criticism from evaluation and entertainment into a powerful weapon in the war against slavery and the promotion of the interests of African Americans, applications that reaffirm the essay’s claim for the importance of a material approach to critical culture.

Lines in the Dirt (c. 1969): Postwar Literalism and the Failure of Technology

Abstract: This essay argues that what most characterizes the late twentieth century is not, as is often assumed, the threat posed to the human by technology but rather that imposed by technology’s failure. The essay does so by tracking the development of a postwar literalism that is neither modernist nor postmodernist. This literalism emerges as an aesthetic in the earthworks and writings of Michael Heizer and Robert Smithson and is isolated as a cultural logic by Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973). Backed by the rise of cybernetics, this literalism reconfigures the Aristotelian conception of the artifact. Through the lines in the dirt they feature, the works discussed in this essay bracket off the axes of the subject, the human, and the machine. To that end, they generate “failed artifacts” by isolating the exposures of human-made things to their environments as junctures for rendering the empirical limits of technology and putting its conceptual coherence into question. Here, then, technology fails not only in fact but in principle.