Showing papers in "Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory in 2000"

C. L. R. James, Moby-Dick, and the Emergence of Transnational American Studies

Abstract: ? N june io, 1952, men in black suits from the Immigration and Naturalization Services abruptly interrupted C. L. R. James' research for the book he intended to write that summer on Herman Melville and removed him to Ellis Island where he was detained for the next four months awaiting deportation hearings. As warrant for his internment, the state agents cited the McCarran-Walter Act, which, despite the fact that it was passed two years after James had completed the examinations qualifying him for citizenship, would nevertheless ultimately become the juridical instrument invoked by the state to justify James' detainment.1 At a time in which the U.S. was increasingly dependent on third world labor, the McCarran-Walter Act put into place regulations concerning the legal and economic conditions for citizenship that ratified neocolonial distinctions. The bill authorized ins officials to apply different combinations of rules and norms for the purpose of sorting immigrants into economic and political classifications. The taxonomy to which ins officials subordinated their clientele invoked racialized cate-

Restraining Order: The Imperialist Anti-Violence of Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Abstract: <$(£~\\7?? see, they had . . . no wars. They had . . . no kings, and JL no priests, and no aristocracies. They were sisters\" (Herhnd 61). As sisters, the denizens of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's novel Herhnd ostensibly embody a utopia of non-violence, non-hierarchy, and, as a result, an unparalleled level of cultural fertility and social concord. It should net be surprising that Herland, which had not seen the light of day since its original 191 5 publication in Oilman's self-produced magazine The Forerunner, was instantly canonized by Anglo-American feminists when a 1979 edition appeared. The novel helped to fulfill two of the central desires of second-wave feminism: Utopian maps of worlds free from male violence and Utopian chronologies of feminist mothers and daughters signaling the continuity of the feminist tradition. But the topographies of Gilman's anti-violent agenda, which American feminism has embraced as its own, reveal a different sort of ideal of continuity, one which embraces the logic of American imperial domination, secured through cool maternal violence.1 Gilman's work, and the body of academic criticism it has spawned, participate in a long history of feminist fantasies about power; in fact, the disavowal of the exercise

"The Genuine Indian Who Was Brought Upon the Stage": Edwin Forrest's Metamora and White Audiences

Abstract: Beginning in the 1820S and continuing through the next decades, \"Indian dramas,\" a designation that refers to plays written by whites about American Indians, were one of the hottest phenomena on the American stage.1 With the roles of American Indians played by white actors, Indian dramas were the first theatrical form to put a supposedly genuine version of the racial other before the American public.2 As such, they bring crucial questions of race, representation, and audience reception sharply into focus. I aim to illustrate, through the example of the most enduting of the Indian dramas, how the staging of an imagined redness enabled audiences to reaffirm their sense of their own whiteness. At the same time, the instabilities inherent in performance potentially unsettled that process of racial identification, challenging the behavior of a white American citizenry which acted and legislated out of a sense of its racial superiority. Metamora, or Last of the Wampanoags (1829), a play called \"wholly American in its character and incidents\" (\"Tribute to Edwin Forrest\"), was one of the most popular and longlasting plays in American theater history.3 Opening on the eve of the passing of Indian removal legislation, Metamora exerted long-lasting influence on American culture, especially in shaping white conceptions of American Indians and enabling the solidification of white racial identities during a period of

Manhattan Transfer and the Metropolitan Subject

Abstract: The book's covers are an icon: steamships, sailboats, tugs against a background of skyscrapers. The style of the piece—watercolor or gouache—owes something to John Marin and other American painters working off the New York skyline in the period. But the picture-puzzle treatment, with irregular cut-outs patched in white, is unique to the artist, the author of Manhattan Transfer. He is assembling the puzzle, trying to make the view come together. White patches rhyme with the sails of a boat in the harbor, with the prow of another arriving in the corner. These blanks lie in the same plane as deep blue, pink and green, as much a part of the picture as warehouses, smokestacks. A plane of light and color, the covers herald the world's second metropolis, as a newspaper will call it on the morning Bud Korpenning arrives by ferry, taking in something like this view. His circulation dramatizes the incessant motion of the metropolitan elements. The prospect before him as he lands, a watery mirage, reflects its shimmering flux. The book's image repertory, what Bud and others see, is its most radical and convincing feature, the source of its enduring interest. Its verbal pictures can be assimilated to modern art that its author knew and perhaps drew on in his mind's eye (Spindler 392-400). These give Manhattan Transfer its period flavor but hold up the story at every turn. The author's gallery of urban images afflicts the narrative develop-

Reading White Trash: Class, Race, and Mobility in Faulkner and Le Sueur

Abstract: The Oxford English Dictionary defines the word \"trash\" as \"a worthless or disreputable person; now, usually, such persons collectively . . . white trash, the poor white population in the Southern States of America,\" including British usages of \"trash\" that denote poverty and worthlessness. The American examples, however, include the addition of \"white,\" creating the racialized term \"white trash,\" as in an 183 1 usage: '\"You be right dere,' observed Sambo, 'else what fur he go more 'mong niggers den de white trash?'\" Another usage appears in a white man's 1833 journal entry: \"The slaves themselves entertain the very highest contempt for white servants, whom they designate as 'poor white trash.'\" Although this example attempts to trace the term \"white trash\" to slaves, I suggest that whatever the origin of the expression, it was most likely the invention of middle-class whites, who attributed it to slaves and encouraged animosity among slaves and poor whites in order to prevent cross-racial alliances that would challenge white hegemony. Indeed, the OED etymology cites a white man's journal entry, in which the term is ascribed to African Americans by whites, who most benefit from it. According to Eugene Genovese's history of slavery, Roll, Jordan, Roll, middle-class whites \"explained away the existence of such racial contacts and avoided reflecting on the possibility that genuine sympathy might exist across racial lines\" (23). Fear of slave rebellion with the aid of poor whites who resented the planter class fostered the hostile atti-

Between Conquest and Care: Masculinity and Community in Stephen Crane's The Monster

Abstract: The Monster (1897) was penned while Stephen Crane lived in exile in England and shortly before he made his mark as a front-line reporter during the Spanish-American War. The novella records Crane's ambivalence toward the strenuous ethos of white masculinity that Theodore Roosevelt championed and came to embody, and that Crane often represented in his journalism during the 1890s. TR's triumph over his own sickly Victorian adolescence and then over the bodies of racial others to become a \"Rough Rider\" is perhaps the Anglo-American story of masculinist ideology the nation has inhetited from the cultures Crane experienced. Roosevelt, in his zeal to spread his message of Anglo-Saxon, masculine superiority, had even written to Crane in 1 896 suggesting: \"Some day I want you to write another story of the frontiersman and the Mexican Greaser in which the frontiersman shall come out on top; it is more normal that way!\" (qtd. Correspondence 1: 128). This passage is brief and blunt, yet it sets forth the racial mandate implicit to the strenuous ethos. According to Roosevelt's logic, the \"Mexican Greaser\" is to serve as a foil, as a figure less than fully manful, against which to construct the \"frontiersman.\" As in The Winning of the West (1889-1896) and his other writings and speeches advocating for imperial engagement, Roosevelt's vigorous emphasis here is that the \"frontiersman,\" the \"peculiarly American\" (qtd. Bederman 191) individual who could only be a white man, has \"to come out on top\" if fiction, life, and national identity are to be \"normal.\" Roosevelt stresses

"It is uncertain where the Fates will carry me": Cotton Mather's Theology of Finance

Abstract: In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, first published almost a century ago, Max Weber argued that Puritan commercial energy was fueled by the spiritual anxiety that accompanied predestinarían theology. Calvinist predestinarians, Weber wrote, in trying to cope with the uncertainty of their spiritual destinies, often succumbed to the temptation to see material blessings as potential manifestation of God's blessing. Though they insisted that prosperity was the result of—and not the cause of—salvation, Puritans strove nevertheless to prove or \"justify\" publicly their divine election through the industrious and profitable pursuit of a calling.' As Weber and his scholarly successors also observed, such attempts to identify providential design were vexed at the outset, because predestinarianism ultimately denied the possibility of ever discerning God's plan with any certainty; these attempts were carried out, then, both as a result of and in contradiction to their belief that spiritual fate was predetermined and immutable. Though this thesis, as I will discuss, does not apply so easily to all American Puritans, the writings of Cotton Mather show signs of the bind Weber describes. While Mather insisted that God's grace brought \"prosperity\" in all its forms, he also maintained that economic culture offered no clues, no consolation for the individual looking to know the status of his or her soul. As I shall argue, this bind was complicated by

Troping in Zitkala-Sa's Autobiographical Writings, 1900-1921

Abstract: The number of texts constituting Zitkala-Sa's autobiographical writings remains an essential issue primarily due to the peculiar history of their publication and critical reception. It is important to trace this history because assessments of Zitkala-Sa's artistic integrity have been often based on the perception that her autobiography is formally incomplete. In January 1900, the Atlantic Monthly printed "Impressions of an Indian Childhood," an autobiographical essay by the then twenty-four-year-old Zitkala-Sa (Gertrude Simmons Bonnin) to be followed by "The School Days of an Indian Girl," and "An Indian Teacher Among Indians" in February and March of the same year.1 Later, in December 1902, "Why I Am a Pagan" also appeared on the pages of the Atlantic Monthly. Zitkala-Sa then opened her 1921 collection of short writings American Indian Stories with the four autobiographical essays, arranged in the order in which they were originally published in the Atlantic Monthly, only "Why I Am a Pagan" featured a new ending and a new title, "The Great Spirit."2 The two years intervening between the initial publication of the first three essays and the fourth, as well as the changes in the republished version of the fourth essay, have caused them to be read and anthologized separately. In her groundbreaking dissertation on Zitkala-Sa, Alice Poindexter Fisher calls only the first three essays "autobiographical" (20).3 Following Fisher and the 1985 edition of American Indian Stories, some critics have considered the 1 900 essays as a self-contained trilogy and have drawn conclusions about Zitkala-Sa's autobiographical writings on them, completely disregarding the fourth essay.4

"Enough to Make a Body Riot": Pansies and Protesters in Himes' Harlem

Abstract: I was writing some strange shit. Some time before, I didn't know when, my mind had rejected all reality as I had known it and I had begun to see the world as a cesspool of buffoonery. Even the violence was funny. . . . All of reality was absurd, contradictory, violent and hurting. . . . The only time I was happy was while writing these strange, violent, unreal stories Chester Himes, My Life of Absurdity

Hawthorne and Pynchon on the Line

Abstract: For over 150 years, wired communications have enabled individuals to transmit messages across distances at great dispatch; whether telegraph, telephone, or internet, these teletechnologies involve people in networks that minimize or even transcend the limitations of time and space. Cultural texts that figure this tèletechnology abound in the late twentieth century, particularly in the cyberpunk genre, whose inception is frequently established as the publication of Neuromancer in 1984. But how do earlier texts anticipate and imagine the wired communications that we have inherited? As the telegraph, telephone, and computer networks insinuate themselves into people's everyday lives, these technologies seep into the peripheral vision of literature. This essay examines two texts, Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables ( 1851 ) and Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 (1965), that not only peripherally illuminate wired communications—the telegraph and telephone, respectively—but prefigure the next stage of cultural development around these technologies. Their treatment of wired communications, however, goes further than simply topic or style, implicating their very structure and interpretation. It is no accident that the settling of an estate is at stake in both of these books, for inheritance is a material realization of the problem of communication. Hawthorne and Pynchon bring the failures of communication together with the representation of the very technology designed to augment individual communication; this ironic convergence, reiterated over a century apart, shows the devolution of the technological imagination. At the same time, these novels are confounding the presuppositions of communica-

Morton Minsky Reads The Bridge: Hart Crane and the Meaning of Burlesque

Abstract: Hart crane readers turn up in unlikely places. Morton Minsky, for instance, recalls Crane several times in Minsky's Burlesque, his memoir of the years between 191 2 and 1937 when he and his brothers ran several of New York's most celebrated burlesque theaters. In the course of boasting about the cultural highbrows who frequented their National Winter Garden theater at Houston Street and Second Avenue during the 1920s, he focuses on Crane and the \"National Winter Garden\" section of The Bridge:

"Chickamauga" as an Indian-Wars Narrative: The Relevance of Ambrose Bierce for a First-Nations-Centered Study of the Nineteenth Century

Abstract: For over one hundred years, these last lines of Ambrose Bierce's stunning short story \"Chickamauga\" have been taken as an ironic commentary on the ineffable carnage produced by the U.S. Civil War. This argument is wholly convincing and indisputably prominent in terms of the context of the story's composition, but it is not the only compelling argument. While Bierce was witness to the slaughter at the Battle of Chickamauga Creek in September 1 863 that left 40,000 dead and wounded (Davidson 555), and while the narrative constitutes just one of dozens of Civil War stories executed by him, not one piece of internal evidence from the text securely situates its events as occupying the 1 860s period at the border of Georgia and Tennessee. Not one piece, that is, connects the story to the Civil War, except for the title

Whitman's Leaves of Grass and the Problem of the One and the Many

Abstract: eaves of Grass represents a life-long endeavor. Between 1855 and '1892 Whitman produced nine distinct editions of Leaves, not simply expanding it by incorporating new poems but extensively revising and rearranging the predecessor-text.1 Considering the differences between editions in format, typography, and content, and the changes in tone and subject matter introduced by new clusters as diverse as Calamus, Sea-Drift, Drum-Taps, and Autumn Rivulets, one might be led to argue that Whitman's compositional \"theory\" changed just as often (PW 2: 739). 2 On the other hand, it would be difficult to dispute the fact that, whatever motive one can ascribe to any particular edition, Whitman remains faithful throughout to at least one \"object\" (PW 2: 738).' In his own words, that object is the \"combination of] these Forty-Four United States into One Identity, fused, equal, and independent\" (PW 2: 738).4 To resolve the paradox of this chain of adjectives—how disparates can be at once \"fused, equal, and independent\"—would be to work out the one-and-the-many problem differently than the federal model (as epitomized by E Pluribus Unum and the founding documents), to conceive of unity neither as the relation of an abstract (Union) to particulars (states) not as a structural compromise between centralization (Congress) and decentralization (state legislatures), but instead as a relation of pluralization whereby integrity, identity, and differentiation are guaranteed.1 The difference pluralization makes—its advantage over decentralization—is that it never risks, as the Articles of Confed-

Canetti and Hitchcock, Crowds and Power and North By Northwest

Abstract: Since its publication in i960, Elias Canetti's monumental Masse und Macht (translated as Crowds and Power, 1962) has attracted admirers around the world, but in general has not yet been much reckoned with. Given the originality of Canetti's work, and the difficulty of classifying it and finding a place for it among structuralist and postmodern theories, its neglect is not wholly mystifying. On the other hand, the twentieth century is widely acknowledged as a century of crowds and concurrently of massive abuses of power. Within that context, one might have expected more impact from what J. S. McClelland called the \"first masterpiece\" of crowd theory.' Richie Robertson, writing on \"Canetti as Anthropologist,\" observes that \"much of the book anticipates trends in the human sciences that have developed only since its publication.\"2 He concludes by hoping that if Canetti missed his moment, his time may nonetheless be yet to come. The publication during the '90s in Germany of a dozen books on Canetti indicates that his importance is growing there; and a number of nonGerman contributors to a 1995 volume of essays on Masse und Macht suggests that the wave of his influence is propagating elsewhere as more readers experience the power of his thought and writing.3 Who was Elias Canetti and what might scholars of film (and other arts) find in Crowds and Power7. Born in Bulgaria into a community of Sephardic Jews in 1905, Canetti moved with his family to England when he was about six. After his father suddenly died a year later, the

Dead Man, Dead West

Abstract: N 1976, Thames Television produced a 30-minute documentary Death in the West which examined the most famous and successful cigarette advertising campaign ever made, Philip Morris's Marlboro Man. Featuring interviews with American cowboys, the film showcased a breed of \"hard-working, hard-living, hard-smoking\" men now suffering the ravages of emphysema and lung cancer after their decades-long smoking addictions. Watching one cowboy at his ranch, an air tank roped to his horse and nose tubes strapped in place as he makes his morning round-up, viewers are reminded of the reasons Philip Morris employed what has become perhaps the most enduring icon of American national identity. As \"missionaries\" for Marlboro, cowboys symbolized the company's confidence and certainty, while cigarettes themselves aided in the production of cowboy mythology, particularly in notions of manly toughness and vigor. The documentary indicates, however, the ways denial and repression go a long way in shoring up the image of the tobacco company and the real \"Marlboro men\" featured in the film. One Philip Morris executive, for instance, in refuting the dangers of smoking, explains \"anything can be harmful . . . applesauce can be harmful if you eat enough of it.\" Later in the film, a 55-year-old cow-

Prophecy, Racial Paranoia, and the Figure of Egypt in Antebellum America

Abstract: In many things we Americans are driven to a rejection of the maxims of the Past, seeing that, ere long, the van of the nations must, of right, belong to ourselves. . . . Escaped from the house of bondage, Israel of old did not follow after the Egyptians; to her were given new things under the sun. And we Americans are the peculiar, chosen people—the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world. . . . (177)

Rhetorical Suspense, Sexuality, and Death in Whitman's "Calamus" Poems

Abstract: Across the 39-poem span of “Calamus,” Whitman creates and sustains thematic and rhetorical suspensions. He manifestly dismisses the reader, as we will see in “Whoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand,” reserves his affections for a particular reader, in “These I Singing in Spring” and “To a Western Boy,” declares himself unreachable, in “Are You the New Person Drawn toward Me,” or dares “not tell in words” the core of his motivation and emotion, in “Earth, My Likeness” (270–1; 272–3; 277; 284; 285). These are only several of the most obvious examples. Simultaneous with these forthright rejections of the reader, Whitman’s poems declare that the reader is holding “him,” not his book, in hand, and that for the right person he is wholly available. Similarly, he opines that the crucial ingredient that would make any man the proper recipient of his poems and affections “has always been waiting, latent in all men” (285).

Humor's Body: Jackie Gleason, Roseanne, and Some Others

Abstract: 1 very affliction has its hall of fame. Anyone seriously impaired 'or singularly afflicted knows his or her hall of fame. Stuttering has Demosthenes, dealer of phillipics, right there at its entrance. Epilepsy has St. Paul, Julius Caesar, Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Satyriasis, a vast hall, has its row upon row of greatly brooding Demented Ones. Some afflictions, like Lou Gehrig's Disease, have only modest pantheons, a single

Mere Illustrations: Maurice Sendak and Melville

Abstract: The most significant recent study of visual art in relation to literary texts is J. Hillis Miller's Iiiustration (Harvard 1992). Among several perceptions to be found in this study, perhaps the most fundamental concerns doubleness. After noting that a picture and a text in juxtaposition will always have different meanings, will always conflict irreconcilably, Miller goes on to claim that each separate picture or text is dialogical within itself and, therefore, double in meaning. \"The warfare between media is doubled by an internal warfare intrinsic to each medium in itself\" (95). This leads to an even larger claim: \"the difficult, perhaps impossible, task of reading works in eithet medium consists, in part, of identifying in each case this othet by way of tracks it has left within the work\" (96). What can be more attracting than that which has been designated as difficult, pethaps impossible? Accordingly, I shall attempt this task with specific application to Maurice Sendak's pictures as reproduced in Hershel Parker's Kraken edition of Melville's Pierre: Or The Ambiguities