Showing papers in "American Literature in 2020"

Rehearsing for Reconstruction: The Archipelagic Afterlives of the Port Royal Experiment

Abstract: This essay traces the cultural legacy of the Port Royal Experiment, the Civil War–era social experiment in free labor conducted by Union forces on the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia. Whereas literary and cultural historians typically focus on the “discovery” of slave spirituals by Northern missionaries and educators at Port Royal, this essay tracks how later writers, performers, and sociologists returned to the Sea Islands to reimagine the promise of free labor. The archive thus assembled includes Civil War–era ethnographies, memoirs, and reports; the scholarly monographs in UNC Press’s Social Study Series; and DuBose Heyward’s popular “Negro novel” Porgy (1925). Across this interdisciplinary tradition, writers of various stripes seek by turns to celebrate and contain the threat of the free but noncapitalist black body. The latter figure, recalling the disability category’s historical role in sorting people into work-based or need-based systems of social distribution, is commonly represented as disabled. Ultimately, the essay documents a dual development in US political economy as the marginalization of contraband slaves as capitalist laborers on the Sea Islands—the “failure” of the Port Royal Experiment—gives way to the consolidation of “black culture,” a success of a different kind.

Touching The Scarlet Letter : What Disability History Can Teach Us about Literature

Abstract: This essay demonstrates the value of disability history for literary and cultural studies. It develops historical cripistemology as a method through which to examine the historical experiences and epistemologies, rather than representations, of disability in particular times and places and emphasizes the vast and varied entanglements of those experiences and epistemologies with mainstream US culture. To do so, “Touching The Scarlet Letter” turns to perhaps the most canonical American novel to show how returning disability history to a text—here Nathaniel Hawthorne’s connections to and interest in blind education as well as the extensive cultural influence of the Perkins Institution and Massachusetts School for the Blind in the 1840s and 1850s—can reframe fundamental aspects of our analyses, such as how we understand reading and interpretation. In so doing, this essay argues for and begins to uncover a hidden disability history of US literature and culture.

Plague Time (Again)

Abstract: This essay probes literary representations of pandemic temporalities to argue that plague reshapes our sense and experience of time in specific ways: It opens contact with the epidemic past to restructure historical understanding and attendant forms of identity; it promotes utopian or cosmopolitan fantasies of shared vulnerability and future inoculation; it marks survivors with a kind of zombie consciousness in an unending, limitless present. Drawing on American works from Charles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn (1799–1800) to Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939) to Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (1992–95), this essay situates their discussions of plague time within broader traditions stretching from Thucydides to Daniel Defoe to Albert Camus.

The Chronopolitics of COVID-19

Abstract: This paper examines the temporal politics of the COVID-19 pandemic, arguing that despite the emphasis on digital real-time coverage and epidemiological forecasting, the pandemic has been understood as a historical event, even as it has been unfolding. The paper considers the implications of this ambiguous temporality, suggesting that COVID-19 has made visible a new heterotemporality, wherein real time, history, and the future intermesh. The paper concludes by focusing on Hong Kong, a former British colony and Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China since 1997, showing how the pandemic has become an uncanny rendering of the city’s uncertain future.

“Split by the Moonlight”: Beethoven and the Racial Sublime in African American Literature

Abstract: As Nathan Waddell has recently argued of the literary modernists whose aesthetic incorporation of the Beethovenian legend complicates the dominant view of modernism as an antitraditionalist enterprise, Ludwig van Beethoven’s music has in fact left a more significant and complicated mark on African American literature relating to the sublime properties of his musical aesthetic than has previously been recognized. As a point of departure, I apply Michael J. Shapiro’s definition of the racial sublime as a confrontation with the “still vast oppressive structure that imperils black lives” to the setting of twentieth-century African American literature, where Beethoven’s Romantic sublime often stands in for the racial sublime. This transference, I argue, is not an expression of the artist’s repressed instinctual conflict, the mere sublimation of their devotion to “white” culture and the cult of genius, as Amiri Baraka once suggested. Rather, Beethoven’s music formed a persistent and powerful political allegory of the racial sublime for many prominent twentieth-century authors in their literary works, where the sublime constitutes a sublimation of direct forms of power into a range of aesthetic experiences. This can be observed in the Beethovenian ekphrasis featured in prose works by James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, and Ralph Ellison—four writers whose works have also been considered indebted to blues and jazz musical influences and who approach the racial sublime not through language but by appealing to music’s nonsignifying suggestiveness, in order to capture the intensities that radiate out of these encounters. As this article reveals, their allegorical uses for Beethoven are not unitary. The forcefield of the racial sublime is registered allegorically through the performative sublime of Sonata “Pathetique” in Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912); the sublime melancholy of the “Moonlight” Sonata in Hughes’s tragic short story “Home” (1934); the spiritual sublime of Beethoven’s piano concerti and the Ninth Symphony in Baldwin’s short story “Previous Condition” (1948); and the heroic sublime of the Fifth Symphony in Ellison’s bildungsroman Invisible Man (1952).

Lost Archives, Lost Lands: Rereading New Mexico’s Imagined Environments

Abstract: This article describes how Nuevomexicanas/os have used texts, images, and other media to reclaim the lands they lost in the US-Mexico War. Along the way, it models a method for reading “imagined environments”—the frameworks through which human groups have represented, related to, and resided in their more-than-human worlds. This article focuses on two generations of writer-activists. In the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, Adelina Otero-Warren and Fabiola Cabeza de Baca situated themselves in the Precarious Desert, an imagined environment of constraints, contingencies, and struggles for survival. Then, in the 1960s and 1970s, the Alianza Federal de Mercedes revived the Pueblo Olvidado, an imagined environment saturated with laws, treaties, and cultural traditions. Despite many differences, both generations shared a desire to settle on and profit from Native lands. But though they never became environmentalists, they experimented with environmental writing and politics. By recovering these experiments, this article shows how media produce—rather than simply portray—lands and waters. Ultimately it tells the story of the borderlands as a series of struggles over what environments are, whom they can contain, and how they should be used.

An Overstory for Our Time

Abstract: Care is the intimate and necessary labor required to sustain those who are dependent, but it is also about acting in ways that sustain other species and the lives of strangers distant in time and space. The COVID-19 pandemic shines a spotlight on the vulnerabilities and gaps in global care networks. It creates a crisis of care on multiple levels—the immediate, the dispersed, and the systemic—and it is exceedingly difficult to keep them all in focus. Although Richard Powers’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, The Overstory (2018), is not about illness or pandemic, it can illuminate varied scales of care at the level of form, by moving from individual stories that are the typical subject of literary realism to a grand vision of the webbed planetary systems—the environment, the internet, the global economy—in which they are enmeshed. This essay argues that, read through the lens of pandemic, the overstory of Powers’s novel is the networks of interdependency that have put the world in grave danger and that gesture to an uncertain future.

Under Description: The Fugitive Slave Advertisement as Genre

Abstract: This essay analyzes the discourse of the fugitive slave advertisement (FSA) to argue that these texts form what I call a “genre of personhood.” Centered on physical and behavioral descriptions of escaped slaves, FSAs offer a window into the heuristics that slaveholders used to identify, explain, and anticipate slaves’ behavior in the antebellum era, constructing an implicit model of enslaved personhood by means of consistent syntactic patterns and semantic tropes. I argue for the continuity of these texts’ descriptive and scriptive (or instructive) functions, finding that FSAs conscript the white reader into searching for a fugitive not only through overt appeals but by structuring the reader’s perceptual experiences via linguistic cues. Ultimately, the essay not only excavates the opportunistic and incomplete construction of personhood from heterogeneous materials but also reveals the interdependence of literary description and extraliterary genres like the FSA.

The Stock Ticker in the Garden: Frank Norris, American Literary Naturalism, and Capitalocene Aesthetics

Abstract: This essay argues that American literary naturalism engages with the Anthropocene at the moment it began to be visible, the turn of the twentieth century, and specifically identifies the role of finance in precipitating the crisis. Frank Norris’s The Octopus (1901) and The Pit (1903) offer a case study of a naturalist Capitalocene aesthetics, one capable of capturing global capitalism’s destructive planetary agency. As a student at the University of California at Berkeley, Frank Norris was exposed to Joseph LeConte’s influential theory of the Psychozoic era, a proto-Anthropocene theory from 1877 that named a new unit of geologic time in light of humanity’s status as a transformative planetary force. Norris adapted this theory into a critique of a rapidly globalizing capitalism’s effects on the planet and the natural world, particularly the structures of agricultural capitalism in which complex financial transactions led to destructive wheat monocultures. This critique anticipated the Capitalocene, a contemporary offshoot of the Anthropocene theory arguing that capitalism (rather than humanity per se) is responsible for the present planetary crisis. The vehicle of Norris’s critique is his multimedia landscape descriptions, which invoke and subvert Romantic landscape aesthetics through painterly language and visual paradox. At the center of this aesthetics is a contradiction in individual and collective agency that is also central to life and art in the Capitalocene: confronted with an anthropogenic landscape that is both destroyed and made sublime by the structures of capitalism, individual viewers both feel powerless in the face of the force it represents and feel themselves implicated in its creation, despite different levels of responsibility.

Agonistic Audiences: Comic Play in the Early National Theater

Abstract: This essay considers how rowdy theater audiences contributed to a broader cultural understanding of democratic politics in the early United States, showing how raucous and occasionally riotous theater patrons enacted a form of popular rule that was predicated on the paying audience’s sovereign right to pleasure. Agonistic audiences thrived on the conflictual dynamics of disorder and dissidence, but their unruly practices only rarely devolved into mob violence, precisely because theatergoers largely understood themselves to be at play. I examine various accounts of theatrical disturbance, including Washington Irving’s famous depiction of a disorderly audience, to demonstrate how patrons cultivated a comic mode of sociality, one that foregrounded and maintained the essential playfulness of social contest. Such comic play acknowledged a horizon of popular enjoyment that stood in excess of rational-critical public discourse. The comic mode has long been undertheorized in literary and cultural studies of the early United States, yet it holds key insight into the practices of both early national theater and early national politics. By way of example, I offer a comic reading of Royall Tyler’s The Contrast (1787) that reveals the imprint of the agonistic audience on the repertoire of the period, shedding new light on nineteenth-century genealogies of performance.

Writing with Pencils in the Antebellum United States: Language, Instrument, Gesture

Abstract: This essay argues that the pencil, which became increasingly available in the United States during the antebellum decades, allowed writers to break from scriptural conventions and explore alternative selves because it afforded them the ability to write quickly, continuously, and on the move. Through readings of the manuscripts of John Washington, Margaret Fuller, and Walt Whitman, this article demonstrates how the pencil facilitated such exploration by configuring language, instrument, and corporeal gesture in ways that suited the modernizing nation. The essay draws its method from a theoretical model known in Germany as the Schreibszene (writing scene), which demonstrates how archival scholars can explore the specific affordances of writing media and the scriptural experiments that may emerge from their use.

How Do We See COVID-19? Visual Iconographies of Racial Contagion

Abstract: Contagion media have historically performed the dual functions of scientific and ideological persuasion, often deploying an iconography of racial contagion that combines these two functions. In efforts to halt the spread of the virus, health, science, and media organizations create visual imagery to teach the public to imagine we can see and therefore avoid contaminants that are invisible to the naked eye. Comparison of COVID-19 with other global disease outbreaks shows how a core set of contagion media visualizations are repeatedly deployed with subtle adaptations for unique diseases and display interfaces. The variations among different corpora of contagion media point to the interplay among persistent, transhistorical tropes, particular sites of meaning production, and novel technical affordances. This article will examine a subset of these representational techniques, including microscopic images of the virus, close-ups of disease vectors, global and local maps of contagion, health workers in biohazard suits, and visibly ill patients. The essay argues that techniques for visualizing the invisible produce a narrative logic of causality in COVID-19 that reinforces racist and xenophobic discourses of containment and control with direct and deadly consequences. Mitigation of this pandemic and future pandemics will require not only medical but also representational interventions.

How Quarantine Attempts to Universalize the Black Condition

Abstract: This essay establishes similarities between control over Black bodies’ movement under chattel slavery and social distancing measures employed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Its primary concern is how protecting public health necessitates undesired movement on the part of marginalized, historically disenfranchised populations to secure supply chains and ensure access to basic goods, foodstuffs, and medicines for those sheltering at home. Structuring its claims within the critical race theories of Saidiya V. Hartman, Achille Mbembe, and Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, it draws attention to how an enslaved condition in which one lacked the right to choose to move or hold still is now being extended to a class of workers deemed essential.

Immunity’s Racial Empire: Virality, Melancholy, Whiteness

Abstract: Writing in 1991 and 1994, respectively, Donna J. Haraway and Emily Martin argued that in the postwar decades the immune system became a material pedagogy for neoliberal and postmodern thought. In its depiction as a decentralized network of response, the immune system modeled life in late liberalism’s dematerialized time-space compressions. Moreover, if the immune system reified life in this radical expansion, its preternatural competency for discrimination between self and other simultaneously availed a means of retaining racial hygiene in this brave new world of empire. Yet curiously neither Haraway nor Martin acknowledged the extent to which the arrival of HIV in the early 1980s constituted a radical desublimation of what Roberto Esposito identified as the immune system’s salvational image. This essay posits that the arrival of HIV did not simply constitute a neutralization of the immunological fetishism of the postwar period. Rather, the loss of immunity precipitated a biopolitical melancholia. Having lost access to its privileged topos—the immune system itself—immunological governance in turn proximately cathected the object responsible for its trauma, namely, HIV itself. I understand Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992) and Chuck Hogan’s The Blood Artists (1998) to think, in submerged literary form, an incremental embrace of virality as, ironically, the most viable vehicle for conserving the fantasies of both neoliberal competency and racial containment reified initially by immunity itself.

Richard Wright and the Black Metropolis: From the Great Migration to the Urban Planning Novel

Abstract: Early twentieth-century Black literature on the city from the likes of Paul Laurence Dunbar, James Weldon Johnson, and Nella Larsen pondered questions of what it meant to be Black and urbane and also how to reformulate Black identity from a new position removed from the violent history of the South. While hints of criticism toward northern segregation appeared in those early works, Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) offered the first intensive prognostication and condemnation of the ad hoc, discriminatory, and de facto system of segregation appearing in cities like Chicago in response to the Great Migration and used Wright’s informal study of sociology with the Chicago school to animate its project. Native Son, for all of its flaws, first considered how narrative can help explain and unspool the “neutral and egalitarian” guise behind the truly discriminatory urban planning-related practices and policies—from real estate to neighborhood covenants to zoning—that grew up with the start of the twentieth century and that continue to impact American cities through today.

Public Humanities in the Reconstructed University

Abstract: Colleges and universities that can withstand the fallout of the COVID-19 crisis will need to redouble their efforts to engage students in the kinds of intellectual and social experiences that cannot be attained remotely or in isolation. Public humanities, which promotes collaboration, civic and community engagement, and inter-institutional alliances, can be one such reparative force for the reconstructed university. This essay describes the work of graduate student researchers in an interdisciplinary public humanities seminar at Emory University who partnered with a large regional theater on a project involving dramaturgy and audience engagement for a spring 2020 production of Lynn Nottage’s play Sweat (first performed in 2015). The graduate seminar and the project—both before and in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak—offer a compelling model for critical humanistic pedagogy and research that counteracts the isolation and insularity exacerbated by the pandemic.

Can You Tell by Looking? A Postvisible Definition of Asian American Literature

Abstract: This essay identifies a need for a postvisible definition of Asian American literature. Traditionally Asian American literature has been identified by the racial descent of the writer and recognizable “Asian American” content, but such qualifications are no longer sufficient and prompt the question, “But is it Asian American?” In order to theorize a postvisible definition, this essay engages twentieth-century philosophy of art to delineate three distinct approaches to definition in Asian American literary history: a “real” definition in its founding period that pursued exactitude and empiricism in substantiating a new category of art called Asian American literature, to an anti-definition in the 1990s, and to the pluralist, nonnormative definition since 2000 in which identifying a text as Asian American is an exercise in persuasively situating the text within the Asian American literary artworld, not in identifying visibly “detectible” properties.

COVID-19: Pandemic Reading

Abstract: In 1832, a global cholera pandemic reached US shores Like COVID-19, cholera was a wholly new disease in the United States (although considerably deadlier), and it was, like the novel coronavirus, a poorly understood one that disproportionately affected immigrants and African Americans The cholera pandemic began immediately following Nat Turner’s rebellion, which had triggered a wave of punitive laws against Black Americans The early 1830s was, in other words, a time of brutal devastation for the African American community, particularly in the South How, we might wonder, when faced with horrific violence, systemic injustice, and a descending global pandemic, could an enslaved fifteen-year-old Frederick Douglass do anything but despair? Crucially, he did not Instead, Douglass’s understanding of Nat Turner’s murder, the racist legal retribution that followed, and the horrors wrought by cholera appear in the context of his awakening to the

Enslavement and the Temporality of Childhood

Abstract: This article explores how thinking about the time of childhood through the lens of US slavery forces us to rethink both phenomena. According to many of the people who lived through it, enslaved childhood was a shifting, episodic phenomenon that had multiple points of definition. Throughout the nineteenth century, as their adult selves looked back on their early years, formerly enslaved people adopted a number of different strategies to understand and narrate how they came to be who they were and what their formative experiences meant in terms of the trajectory of their lives. They wrote within a literary culture that was itself partially responsible for creating (and certainly was instrumental in promoting and perpetuating) the temporal understanding of childhood as unidirectional, progressive, and only tangentially connected to material reality. But they also described quite different temporal patterns for slave childhood. These patterns are the focus of my analysis here: how African American narrators negotiated their vexed relationship to childhood as both never- and always-children in order to challenge the growing consensus on how childhood could and should be staged in literary texts. My primary sources are narratives by formerly enslaved people, written, as most slave narratives were, primarily but not exclusively for white readers.

Who Counts? Old Age in COVID Times

Abstract: People over sixty-five have been singled out as a uniquely vulnerable risk group for the novel coronavirus. Yet the discourse of risk obscures (and exacerbates) socially created dangers of congregate care in the United States: poorly paid workers holding down multiple jobs and the endemic “plagues” of loneliness, boredom, and hopelessness. Humorous memes about who counts as old point out structural inequalities, while millions of able-bodied “shut-ins” (due to lockdowns and job losses) may experience forced empathy: fuel for new imaginings about how to care for—and value—elders moving forward.

Makandal and Pandemic Knowledge: Literature, Fetish, and Health in the Plantationocene

Abstract: espanolPlantation project, agronomy, anti-colonial epistemology, human-environmental relations, Black radical tradition EnglishKey aspects of the plantation economy, centered in the early Caribbean, include the theft of Indigenous land, agricultural monocropping, and racial capitalism as well as an epistemological effort to separate out humans, animals, and plants into discrete species. This essay identifies the current pandemic as a crisis in knowledge—one in which assumptions such as Linnaean categories and species boundaries need re-examining—and explores historical and disciplinary means of challenging the limited and often deadly knowledge regime of the Plantationocene. Turning to the historical revolutionary figure of Francois Makandal, the essay explores alternative knowledge systems that help us to understand modes of human-environmental connection, semiotics of relation, and text networks of literature and oral history. These alternative ways of knowing the world are fugitive from, and revolutionary with respect to, racial capitalism and the plantation project and are traceable within a line of literary Makandal texts.

Postcritical Howells: American Realism and Liberal Guilt

Abstract: This essay explores the concept of liberal guilt in William Dean Howells’s fiction, focusing especially on his 1888 novel Annie Kilburn. Genealogies of liberal guilt rarely mention Howells, and yet no American writer has more painstakingly elaborated the embarrassing predicament of middle-class complicity in social arrangements that entail the widespread suffering of others. I provide a summary of theoretical positions on liberal guilt as a structure of feeling that entails what Richard Rorty calls “doubt about [one’s] own sensitivity to the pain and humiliation of others, doubt that present institutional arrangements are adequate to deal with this pain and humiliation.” Howells felt these doubts profoundly, and yet he understood liberal guilt as a productive emotional and intellectual predicament. Put simply, Howells viewed liberal guilt, like realism itself, as an attitude of resigned acceptance of persistent social injustices but an attitude capable of animating, rather than dissipating, liberal commitments and public agendas.

Dread: a Journal of Literary History, Criticism and Bibliography

Abstract: Reinterpreting nineteenth-century philosopher Soren Kierkegaard’s theory of “dread,” this essay situates the fear surrounding COVID-19 within a larger historical framework to consider the affective dimension of the virus’s emergence for African Americans

An Ethics Debate for the Ages: American Individualism and the Dilemma of the Healthy Carrier

Abstract: Many public health ethics debates are construed as the rights of the collective versus the rights of the individual. This essay demonstrates that in the context of diseases which are transmitted by healthy carriers, the issue is more complex than this. Instead of arguing about competing rights, this essay argues that such debates are first about competing visions of reality, in which the individual is asked to substitute a collective understanding of their body for their own personal experience of their body. Understanding this first layer of the ethics debate in such healthy carrier situations allows us to redirect persuasive energies, moving away from a beginning-point of compliance to one of understanding, which may ultimately find a more willing public audience.

A Storied Place: Jonathan Carver’s Travel Narrative and the Indigenous Map of the Upper Mississippi River Valley

Abstract: This essay recognizes the totality of practices by which Native peoples of the upper Mississippi River valley for centuries oriented themselves to place as an Indigenous map. After limning the map and its material and nonmaterial components, I then place it at the center of a comparative Indigenous-colonizer literary analysis and argue that the manuscript of Euro-American Jonathan Carver’s 1760s travel narrative written in the region is in constitutive relationship to the map. I conclude by turning to printed versions of his narrative to consider how they extend and shape colonialist orientations to the Indigenous map. Attending to how the land has been shaped in partnership with Indigenous text making transforms American literary studies by demonstrating one way that Euro-American texts always were, are, and will be in relation to Native genres.

Loving Gorillas: Segregation Literature, Animality, and Black Liberation

Abstract: Deeply rooted racial logics of Western culture have long used animal metaphors and affiliations as a method for negatively coding the species permeability between black people and nonhuman animals. Responsively, many black cultural producers have sought to acquire access to the category of the human by crafting narratives that shuttle black being away from the animal. Rejecting both negative affiliations and shifting away from the animal, this article explores the movement toward the animal in black segregation-era literature. I argue that animals and animal care in Richard Wright’s Black Boy and primate liberation in Gwendolyn Brooks’s Maud Martha provide new modes of imagining black humanism on the cusp of US racial desegregation.

Readerly Revisions: Letters to the Editor in the Crisis

Abstract: This essay examines how the editorial staff of the Crisis positioned readers as collaborators and literary activists. Looking at letters to the editor, I argue that readers helped reevaluate representations of blackness in American literary taste. These letters bridge past, present, and future issues of the magazine and, therefore, evoke a temporality that exceeds the critical capacities of close reading. To address how editors, readers, and authors responded to each other over time, I combine close reading with topic modeling, a method of computational text analysis. This mixed methodology shows how readers participated in the magazine’s cultural campaign against racism by calling for socially progressive depictions of blackness.

The Biology of Intimacy: Lamarckian Evolution and the Sentimental Novel

Abstract: This article explores the enabling intimacy between sentimentalism and biopolitics by turning to a less-than-obvious and yet characteristic example of the sentimental mode: the ubiquitous orphan tale of the mid- to late nineteenth century. It argues that individual orphan heroines of domestic plots not only function as tropes of domestic and national belonging, as has been widely recognized, but also of population regulation at the biological level of species. Sentimentalism functions as a mode of evolutionary theory, one that articulated the Lamarckian belief that sensory impressions shape the development of the individual body and of the species. Sentimental Lamarckism extended across literature, reform, and scientific theory and preceded naturalism’s deep engagement with evolutionary thought by decades. The sentimental orphan trope figures as a key aesthetic technology for regulating the growth of the population. Sentimental novels about orphans are not just about children who transform through their experiences; they were also directed at children readers and crafted to elicit emotional identification that could spur similar changes off the page.