Timelines of American Literature 9781421427133, 1421427133

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part One. Prehistories and Transitions
Prologue. What’s in a Date?
Prehistories
1833–1932: American Literature’s Other Scripts
1922–1968: The Disenchanted Literature of Homeownership
1830–1924: The Literatures of Sovereignty
600 BCE–1830 CE: The Book of Mormon and the Lived Eschatology of Settler Colonialism
Transitions
1629–1852: American Literature, Democracy, and the Patroons
1973: When It Changed
The Three Burials of Confederate Nationalism
1819–1857: Romantic Cycles from the Panic of 1819 to the Panic of 1857
Reimagining 1820–1865
Part Two. Ages and the Long Present
Prologue. The Anthropocene, 1945/1783/1610/1492–???? (or, I Wish I Knew How to Quit You)
Age
The Age of US Latinidad
The Age of Van Buren
The Ages of Appalachian Literature
The Civil War in the Age of Civil Rights
The Age of Warhol
The Long Present
All of It Is Now: Slavery and the Post-black Moment in Contemporary African American Literature
Propaganda and the Movement of American Literary History
De-ciphering American Literature: 1840←1945→2018
Methodological Individualism and the Novel in the Age of Microeconomics, 1871 to the Present
1980 to the Present: Formalism and the New Authoritarianism
American Captivity Narratives from the Colonial Era to the Present: A New Timeline
Afterword. The Newer Newest Thing: Reperiodizing, Redux
Appendix. Sample Syllabi
Contributors
Index
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z

Citation preview

Timelines of American Lit­er­a­ture

This page intentionally left blank

TIMELINES OF A M E R IC A N L I T­E R­A­T U R E Edited by Cody Marrs and Christopher Hager

Johns Hopkins University Press Baltimore

© 2019 Johns Hopkins University Press All rights reserved. Published 2019 Printed in the United States of Amer­i­ca on acid-­free paper 9 ​8 ​7 ​6 ​5 ​4 ​3 ​2 ​1 Johns Hopkins University Press 2715 North Charles Street Baltimore, Mary­land 21218​-­4363 www​.­press​.­jhu​.­edu Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Marrs, Cody, editor. | Hager, Christopher, 1974–­editor. Title: Timelines of American lit­er­a­ture / edited by Cody Marrs and Christopher Hager. Description: Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018013351 | ISBN 9781421427126 (hardcover : acid-­free paper) | ISBN 9781421427133 (pbk. : acid-­free paper) | ISBN 9781421427140 (electronic) | ISBN 1421427125 (hardcover : acid-­free paper) | ISBN 1421427133 (pbk. : acid-­free paper) | ISBN 1421427141 (electronic) Subjects: LCSH: American lit­er­a­ture—­History and criticism. | Criticism—­ United States—­History. | Lit­er­a­ture and society—­United States—­History. Classification: LCC PS121 .T48 2019 | DDC 810.9—­dc23 LC rec­ord available at https://­lccn​.­loc​.­gov​/­2018013351 A cata­log rec­ord for this book is available from the British Library. Special discounts are available for bulk purchases of this book. For more information, please contact Special Sales at 410-­516-­6936 or specialsales@press​.­jhu​.­edu. Johns Hopkins University Press uses environmentally friendly book materials, including recycled text paper that is composed of at least 30 ­percent post-­ consumer waste, whenever pos­si­ble.

Contents

List of Illustrations vii  Acknowl­ edgments ix Introduction.............................................................................................................1 Cody Marrs and Christopher Hager

Part One. Prehistories and Transitions Prologue. What’s in a Date?.................................................................................. 11 Sandra Gustafson Prehistories 1833–1932: American Lit­er­a­ture’s Other Scripts.................................................21 Erica Fretwell 1922–1968: The Disenchanted Lit­er­a­ture of Homeownership.........................37 Adrienne Brown 1830–1924: The Lit­er­a­tures of Sovereignty.........................................................53 Phillip Round 600 BCE–1830 CE: The Book of Mormon and the Lived Eschatology of Settler Colonialism..................................................................................... 67 Jared Hickman Transitions 1629–1852: American Lit­er­a­ture, Democracy, and the Patroons.....................85 Jennifer Greiman 1973: When It Changed........................................................................................ 97 Gerry Canavan The Three Burials of Confederate Nationalism............................................. 109 Coleman Hutchison 1819–1857: Romantic Cycles from the Panic of 1819 to the Panic of 1857......... 123 Andrew Kopec Reimagining 1820–1865.......................................................................................134 Robert S. Levine

Part Two. Ages and the Long Pres­e nt Prologue. The Anthropocene, 1945/1783/1610/1492–­???? (or, I Wish I Knew How to Quit You)..........................................................147 Dana Luciano

vi  Contents

Ages The Age of US Latinidad.................................................................................... 159 Jesse Alemán The Age of Van Buren.........................................................................................170 Justine S. Murison The Ages of Appalachian Lit­er­a­ture.................................................................189 Rachel A. Wise The Civil War in the Age of Civil Rights......................................................... 202 Michael LeMahieu The Age of Warhol.............................................................................................. 213 Bryan Waterman The Long Pres­ent

←

←

All of It Is Now: Slavery and the Post-­black Moment in Con­temporary African American Lit­er­a­ture............................................. 228 Yogita Goyal Propaganda and the Movement of American Literary History................... 243 Russ Castronovo 1945 De-­ciphering American Lit­er­a­ture: 1840 ←  → 2018........................................253 Caroline Levander Methodological Individualism and the Novel in the Age of Microeconomics, 1871 to the Pres­ent.......................................................... 264 Annie McClanahan 1980 to the Pres­ent: Formalism and the New Authoritarianism...................283 Rachel Greenwald Smith American Captivity Narratives from the Colonial Era to the Pres­ent: A New Timeline....................................................................295 Birgit Brander Rasmussen Afterword. The Newer Newest ­Thing: Reperiodizing, Redux..................... 307 Susan Gillman Appendix. Sample Syllabi  317 Contributors 329  Index 337

I l lu s t r at i o n s

“Six Principal Systems of Embossed Type” (1913)  22 Writing frame with pin-­prick sorts  28 P. J. Doody writing guide  28 Hall braillewriter (ca. 1892)  29 Malling-­Hansen writing ball (ca. 1867)  30 Verso side of ­Table of Contents, The Woodman’s Nanette (1885) 34 A. E. Blackmar (publisher), “The Conquered Banner” (1866) 112 Edward William Clay, “Matty’s Dream” (1840)  176 Henry Robinson (publisher), “All Fours—­Impor­tant State of the Game—­The Knave About to Be Lost” (1836)  177 Andy Warhol, Superman (1961)  218 Andy Warhol, Popeye (1961)  218 Allan Kaprow’s Words, performed at Smolin Gallery, New York, Allan Kaprow, 1962  221

This page intentionally left blank

A c k n o w l­e d g m e n t s

Our contributors, of course, have made this book what it is. By thinking together with us about how we do what we do in American literary studies, they have also revitalized our convictions about why we do it. ­Those convictions have much deeper roots, though, and for tilling the soil in which they have flourished we are indebted to many ­people, especially Doug Anderson, Kathleen Diffley, Marcy Dinius, Jay Grossman, Paul Lauter, Bob Levine, Sam Otter, Elizabeth Renker, Jane Schultz, Julia Stern, and Tim Sweet. Generous mentors, kindred spirits, and inspiring thinkers, they have influenced beyond mea­sure our conception of the profession and our intellectual lives. David Rosen and Aaron Santesso deserve special thanks for their astute reading of the book’s introduction and for together being our lodestar of academic collaboration. We also wish to thank the anonymous readers whose comments helped refine the volume, as well as the team at Johns Hopkins University Press, whose ­labor, ingenuity, and patience helped bring the book into being, especially Matt McAdam, Catherine Goldstead, W ­ ill Krause, Julie M ­ cCarthy, Kim Johnson, freelance indexer Tom Broughton-Willett, and freelance copyeditor Jeremy Horse­field.

This page intentionally left blank

Introduction

cody marrs and christopher hager

Literary history is messy. Movements d ­ on’t just replace each other in succession. They coexist, buckle, or veer off in strange directions. Authors fade or get rediscovered. Genres rise, fall, and get repurposed in countless ways. Literary history is e­ very bit as dynamic as history itself, which is why, as teachers and scholars, we need timelines. The concept of the timeline derives from the eigh­teenth ­century, when it emerged as an impor­tant tool for discerning historical meaning.1 In the twenty-­ first ­century, it has a wide variety of forms and applications. Logarithmic timelines map out long-­developing phenomena, such as the history of evolution or the formation of the cosmos. Synchronoptic timelines place multiple histories on a single chart, revealing surprising overlaps and divergences. Elastic yet anchored in the unyielding logic of the line, they render vast, overlapping swaths of time imaginable. And, like any repre­sen­ta­tion of knowledge, e­ very timeline harbors a narrative and an argument. In literary history, timelines ordinarily reflect periodization, a practice that has come u ­ nder considerable scrutiny in recent years. One can certainly see why: neatly plotting “colonial American lit­er­a­ture” or “modernism” seems to reinforce the supposed coherence and naturalness of such periods. According to many critics, periodization flattens or falsifies the very textures that make literary culture in­ter­est­ing and meaningful. In this volume, we argue other­ wise. Bringing together twenty-­three leading scholars of American literary and cultural studies, this book shows that timelines can revise, expand, and enliven our understanding of literary history in countless ways. The essays that follow start and end at very dif­fer­ent points, but they all provide novel periodizations through which American lit­er­a­ture can be remapped and reconceived by scholars and students alike.

2   Timelines of American Literature

The scholarship on periodization is substantial, and several of our contributors engage this scholarship with striking insight.2 But the goal i­ sn’t to intervene in debates on periodization or to theorize periodicity per se. It is, rather, to explore the generative potential of timelines drawn in unorthodox ways. The act of setting date ranges can revise old ideas, fuel insights, and create new arenas for debate. By extending, contracting, or curving literary history in unexpected ways, ­these essays reveal fresh approaches to reading American lit­ er­a­ture—as when Michael LeMahieu considers how modernism might appear if we stretch it from 1865 to 1965 instead of 1890 to 1945. Linear arrangements of literary works can reframe our understandings of genre—as when Adrienne Brown, plotting lit­er­a­ture on a timeline informed by the economics of homeownership, finds that many twentieth-­century novels are examples of “thirty-­ year mortgage realism.” Drawing new timelines can also bring to light archives other­wise overlooked, ­silent, or unseen—­such as the texts that blind p ­ eople read in embossed print, as Erica Fretwell shows. “Even seemingly neutral analytic categories like genre and periodization,” Birgit Brander Rasmussen writes in this volume, “have surprising ethical consequences.” The adventuresome essays gathered h ­ ere respond to recent scholarship that has revised our understanding of American literary history. Ideas about where, when, and how American literary history takes place have been radically transformed by recent work on transnationalism, print culture, media studies, and ecol­ogy. Back in the American C ­ entury, when US literary studies was established and disseminated, it was comparatively easy to see a succession of eras that eventuated in the pres­ent. The field now has new bound­aries, which require new eras and counter-­eras. This volume thus proposes timelines for a field more attuned to the prodigious mixtures, exchanges, and transitions that define American literary and cultural history. Scholars have also shown how lit­er­a­ture scrambles, reorders, or other­wise twists standard chronologies, from the “temporal experimentation” that sometimes occurs on the level of the sentence to the “structures of belonging and duration” that take shape in numerous pieces of writing.3 Indeed, American lit­er­a­ture, besides being in history, has its own history. Even individual texts can scarcely be confined to the single year of publication that usually stands in parentheses a­ fter their titles, as Russ Castronovo’s essay reminds us. This “default move of Text X (date),” Castronovo remarks, “anchors interpretation with social real­ity as a reference point, lest our readings of American lit­er­a­ture become too speculative, anachronistic, or presentist. But it is worth asking ­whether this anchor might also be dragging down American lit­er­a­ture,

Introduction  3

keeping it tethered to the shoals of the past by limiting its ability to speak to historical conjunctures that lie outside its moment.” This volume reckons with other changes as well. The past half ­century has witnessed the discovery and recovery of numerous archives and texts. ­These recuperated authors, works, and genres have revolutionized our understanding of American lit­er­a­ture’s scope and variety, yet they have tended to be inserted into existing periodic frameworks—­contesting the canon while reinforcing its historical par­ameters. Moreover, ­because of ­these recovery efforts and the dizzying pace of digitization, we are now confronted, for the first time, with a kind of textual surplus, an “evidentiary superabundance” (as Maurice Lee puts it), which makes it both necessary and timely to reconsider the shape of American literary history writ large.4 ­These attempts to reperiodize American lit­er­a­ture also respond to pressures beyond our discipline. Most periodization practices emerged out of the twentieth-­century heyday of American higher education, a time of robust faculty hiring and institutional growth. In very real ways, the established periods of American lit­er­a­ture have been broken up by the Age of Austerity we now inhabit. Mass disinvestment in the humanities and neoliberal bud­get cuts make it increasingly untenable to be a subspecialist—to imagine oneself as a scholar whose area of expertise lies in something as small and discrete (and institutionally unsupported) as, say, “modernist poetry” or “post–­World War II fiction.” The field’s periods already have largely been unraveled for us. It is certainly pos­si­ble to hold firm against t­hese encroachments, defending the periods that have long provided the field with a sense of stability and coherence, but many essays in this volume take what is already broken and piece it together in new ways. From a still wider viewpoint, this volume’s rationale involves the climatological crisis that is upending prior understandings of ­human history. The manifold changes to the earth, induced or mediated by h ­ uman activity, include “marked acceleration of rates of erosion and sedimentation; large-­scale chemical perturbations to the cycles of carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus and other ele­ments; the inception of significant change in global climate and sea level; and biotic changes including unpre­ce­dented levels of species invasions across the Earth.”5 ­These transformations are so massive and extensive, scientists have argued, that we no longer inhabit the geological era we thought we did: we are not in the Holocene, but the Anthropocene, an era in which the earth’s biota and climates are determined by h ­ uman activities. And we prob­ably have been living in the Anthropocene for quite some time, but we are only just now

4   Timelines of American Literature

realizing it.6 In the context of such a profound misapprehension—­this belated realization that ­human civilization has been unleashing a seismic shift in planetary history—­any effort to sort the past o ­ ught to be undertaken with humility. The scale of climate change, as Dipesh Chakrabarty puts it, throws “our usual historical practices for visualizing times, past and f­ uture, . . . ​into a deep contradiction and confusion.”7 Was the po­liti­cal separation of E ­ ngland’s North American colonies—an event we expect all our students to know—­really more consequential than the adoption of coal power in En­glish industries, which bears scarcely at all on narratives of cultural history? As Dana Luciano’s contribution dramatizes, it is hard in our pres­ent moment not to be seduced or awed by the stark, “empty time of stratigraphy”; however, the “dense, complicated entanglements” that are literary texts call for “multiple vectors of analy­sis,” the attention to “multiple pres­ents” that the essays gathered ­here represent.

Though its contents span American literary history, this book emerges from debate about one date in par­tic­u­lar. In 2013, we published an essay titled “Against 1865: Reperiodizing the Nineteenth ­Century.” We argued that the ­great divide between “antebellum” and “postbellum” lit­er­a­ture—­the division that brackets so much scholarship and teaching about the nineteenth-­century United States—­ had been overhyped. While not gainsaying the Civil War’s po­liti­cal or historical impact, we suggested that as an event within literary history it is best considered “less an endpoint than a crucial link in the raucous, irregular unfolding of literary forms, practices, and c­ areers across the nineteenth c­ entury.”8 Shortly ­after the article appeared, we began receiving feedback about it and catching wind of its being discussed in vari­ous corners of the profession, all of which was gratifying if a l­ ittle surprising. It seemed as though we had touched a nerve, but the modest notoriety of the piece also got us feeling self-­conscious about being so publicly against something without clearly being for something e­ lse. We sat down to talk about it at the end of a convention day at the Modern Language Association’s annual meeting. Although we felt that our article had articulated alternatives to the antebellum/postbellum divide, we also realized that what we ­were ­really for was not something we could straightforwardly assert in an article. It was something we could try to spark in a volume like this. What we w ­ ere for was a continuing reexamination of widely accepted eras and a scholarly conversation featuring multiple, interpenetrating periodizing efforts.

Introduction  5

Rigorous scholarly endeavors often do involve a novel timeline, at least in their frame. Developing an original rationale for a period, rather than accepting one as given, is part of determining the par­ameters for an archive or an inquiry. Take the example of Elizabeth Hewitt’s Correspondence and American Lit­er­a­ture, 1770–1865. The date range in the title hardly raises an eyebrow, but within her introduction Hewitt offers a more striking and unusual formulation: “from the Articles of Confederation to the Confederate Constitution.”9 Strictly speaking, that would be from about 1777 to 1861, and neither that span nor the rounded-­off titular one is radically dif­fer­ent from a stalwart Revolution-­ to-­the-­Civil-­War periodization. But that familiar period by default points ­toward the existence of a nation-­state called the USA. Reconceiving it as “Articles of Confederation to the Confederate Constitution”—­from one government that ­didn’t last a de­cade to another—­instead highlights the instability of nationality during a period in which, as Hewitt argues, American writers ­were using correspondence to work out the contested and uncertain meanings of federalism and ­union. We had our own notions about what forms new timelines of American lit­er­a­ture might take—­“1867 to 1977: Lit­er­a­ture in the Age of the Typewriter”? “1790 to 1891: Lit­er­a­ture from the Copyright Act to the Chace Act”?—­but we did not ask contributors to undertake set tasks. We asked them to fashion new periods in the spirit of glimpsing a literary-­historical narrative from a fresh ­angle. Some turn their attention ­toward a neglected rationale for a well-­known era. Andrew Kopec’s “1819–1857,” for instance, resembles a standard periodization for American Romanticism but focuses on financial panics, reframing Romantic lit­er­a­ture as an “art of high finance.” Other essays offer up a decidedly strange chronological chunk, such as Annie McClanahan’s “1871 to the Pres­ ent” (another periodization influenced by economics) and Jared Hickman’s “600 BCE–1830 CE” (the historical imaginary of The Book of Mormon). Together, the essays collected ­here, we think, vindicate our instinct that it would take a legion of thinkers to carry out the multivector reperiodizing work that we hoped would run against some of the field’s orthodoxies. Some of the essays in this volume extend or shorten well-­known periods, while ­others define new ones. The four subsections reflect dif­fer­ent types of timelines hatched in the essays. Prehistories are timelines in formation: streams of literary history that flow across multiple eras. Transitions underscore ruptures in literary history—­points of departure through which lit­er­a­ture was transformed, such as the rent wars of the 1840s and the politico-­cultural watershed of 1973. Ages, from Bryan Waterman’s “The Age of Warhol” to Jesse Alemán’s

6   Timelines of American Literature

“The Age of US Latinidad,” pres­ent new epochs of literary coherence or­ga­nized around vital but frequently overlooked patterns of connection. Fi­nally, The Long Pres­ent explores dif­fer­ent ways of tracing the genealogy of our con­ temporary moment, reframing the pres­ent through the history of race and information networks, as well as long-­evolving genres such as propaganda and captivity narratives. Across ­these subsections, the essays show how traditional periods’ frequent recourse to the milestones of the nation-­state—­founding, Civil War, World Wars I and II—­elides other, more compelling contexts, including milestones in economics (the shift t­ oward neoliberalism around 1973, as Gerry Canavan posits), or in Native history (1830–1924, from the Indian Removal Act to the granting of Native American citizenship, as Phillip Round explains), or in the evolution of information networks (as in Caroline Levander’s essay about the nineteenth-­century origins of twentieth-­century cryptography). Alternative periodizations also reveal forgotten or obscured power structures, as in Jennifer Greiman’s essay on 1629–1852 (the era of Dutch patroon land owner­ship in New York State). The volume also showcases how periods can be re­imagined by redefining, rather than discarding, their traditional endpoints, as in Robert S. Levine’s essay about the “synergistic creative energies” that characterize 1820– 1865. Although a majority of our contributors’ periods include some portion of the nineteenth c­ entury, taken together they range from 600 BCE to the pres­ent, and our authors include scholars who specialize in all historical periods of American lit­er­a­ture. ­These timelines have curricular implications. If, as this volume insists, American lit­er­a­ture cannot be neatly segmented into its traditional divisions (modern vs. postmodern, pre-1865 vs. post-1865, e­ tc.), then we need to rethink how it is taught, from lower-­division introductory classes all the way through gradu­ate seminars. Syllabi can be approached as timelines in miniature: attempts, at once pedagogic and scholarly, to chart multiple threads of literary-­historical development. Curricular possibilities abound in t­ hese essays. From Yogita Goyal’s “All of It Is Now: Slavery and the Post-­black Moment in Con­temporary African American Lit­er­a­ture” to Coleman Hutchison’s “The Three Burials of Confederate Nationalism,” it is easy to envision each of t­ hese essays becoming a class unto itself. For that reason, we have included an appendix, which features syllabi inspired by some of the volume’s essays. This volume demonstrates that ­there is room in literary studies for multiple and overlapping ideas about periodization. As Sandra Gustafson writes in our

Introduction  7

first entry, t­ here is no single date that could satisfactorily “divide early from ­later American lit­er­a­ture.” Each of the pos­si­ble markers of the end of the “early” period—1789, 1800, 1820, 1830—­“generates an engaging and impor­tant narrative. . . . ​Each one highlights some literary movements, authors, and works while diminishing ­others.” By launching speculative gestures—by playing with dates—­our contributors seek not to establish definitive periods but to illuminate the dif­fer­ent narratives that dif­fer­ent timelines generate. Nothing ­here is the final word. We hope that Americanists w ­ ill find in ­these pages inspirations to undertake many new proj­ects of reperiodization, which can enrich our knowledge of the pres­ent and produce a more reflexive relation to our con­temporary moment. Particularly when they are rigorously drawn and redrawn, literary periods not only let us gauge the past’s effects; they illuminate the still-­running streams of literary history—­the timelines that, in their very multiplicity, open possibilities for understanding the origins of our world. Notes 1. ​Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton, Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline (New York: Prince­ton Architectural Press, 2010), 14. The timeline’s roots are, of course, even older than the eigh­teenth ­century. As Rosenberg and Grafton argue, “the prob­lem of giving visual form to chronological information” is almost coterminous with written history—­lists, t­ables, and trees have been used from ancient history onward to provide events with a visual form—­but the practice was revitalized and expanded with the onset of the Enlightenment (15). 2. ​The extensive lit­er­a­ture “on periodization and its discontents” (to borrow from ­Virginia Jackson’s introduction to the proceedings of the 2008 En­glish Institute, which was devoted to the subject) includes ­Virginia Jackson, ed., On Periodization: Selected Essays from the En­glish Institute (Cambridge, MA: The En­glish Institute; ACLS Humanities E-­book electronic edition, 2010); Joyce Warren and Margaret Dickie’s collection, Challenging Bound­aries: Gender and Periodization (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000), which opens with the assertion that “one of the most obdurate institutional restraints in lit­er­a­ture is its periodization” (ix); and a March 2012 PMLA forum entitled “The Long and the Short of It: Prob­lems in Periodization,” which includes our contributor Susan Gillman’s “Oceans of Longues Durées,” PMLA 127, no. 2 (Mar. 2012): 328–34. Russ Castronovo has contributed to this conversation as well in “Death to the American Re­nais­ sance: History, Heidegger, Poe,” ESQ 49 (2003): 179–92. Among the most strenuous recent critiques of periodization are Eric Hayot, “Against Periodization; or, On Institutional Time,” New Literary History 42, no. 4 (2011): 739–56; and Rita Felski, “Context Stinks!,” New Literary History 42, no. 4 (2011): 573–91. Where scholars in En­glish have intently reconsidered periodization, their work has attended mostly to British lit­er­a­ture’s long-­standing and precise periods. See, e.g., Ted Underwood, Why Literary Periods Mattered: Historical Contrast and the Prestige of En­glish Studies (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013); Lawrence Besserman, The Challenge of Periodization: Old Paradigms and New Perspectives (New York: Garland, 1996); and James Chandler, ­England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

8   Timelines of American Literature 3. ​Cindy Weinstein, Time, Tense, and American Lit­er­a­ture: When Is Now? (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 3; Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 4. ​Maurice Lee, “Falsifiability, Confirmation Bias, and Textual Promiscuity,” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-­Century Americanists 2, no. 1 (Spring 2014): 171. 5. ​Jan Zalasiewicz et al., “The Working Group on the Anthropocene: Summary of Evidence and Interim Recommendations,” Anthropocene 19 (Sept. 2017): 55–60. 6. ​A ­great deal of evidence (such as the green­house gases trapped in Arctic ice cores) suggests that the Anthropocene began in the late eigh­teenth and early nineteenth centuries, with the emergence of industrial capitalism, and then underwent a “­great acceleration” in the twentieth ­century. Yet that transition might have been less of a rupture than a shift in scale and intensity. CO2 levels, for instance, w ­ ere significantly impacted by colonialism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and h ­ uman migrations have precipitated megafauna extinctions across millennia. On the anthropogenic changes wrought by industrialization, see W ­ ill Steffen et al., “The Anthropocene: Conceptual and Historical Perspectives,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 369 (2011): 842–67. On the g­ reat acceleration, see W ­ ill Steffen et al., “The Trajectory of the Anthropocene: The ­Great Acceleration,” Anthropocene Review 2, no. 1 (2015): 81–98. On colonialism and CO2 levels, see Simon L. Lewis and Mark A. Maslin, “Defining the Anthropocene,” Nature 519 (2015): 171–80. Jon M. Erlandson and Todd J. Braje propose an even earlier origin point—­roughly ten thousand years ago—in “­Human Acceleration of Animal and Plant Extinctions: A Late Pleistocene, Holocene, and Anthropocene Continuum,” Anthropocene 4 (2013): 14–23. 7. ​Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History,” Critical Inquiry 35 (Winter 2009): 198. 8. ​See Christopher Hager and Cody Marrs, “Against 1865: Reperiodizing the Nineteenth ­Century,” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-­Century Americanists 1, no. 2 (Fall 2013): 259–84. 9. ​Elizabeth Hewitt, Correspondence and American Lit­er­a­ture, 1770–1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 4.

pa rt o n e

P R E H I ST O R I E S A N D T R A N SI T IO N S

This page intentionally left blank

prologue

What’s in a Date?

s a n d r a g u s ta f s o n

It’s time for a pop quiz. You have ten minutes. (Is your heart racing? Take a deep breath.) What major events in American lit­er­a­ture and American history took place in and around the following years? (1) 1789 (2) 1800 (3) 1820 (4) 1830 Time’s up. Now for some answers. (1) The chief historical event of 1789 should not be too hard to identify. What landmarks of American lit­er­a­ture occurred as the war for in­de­pen­dence was winding down and a new federal government established? Letters from an American Farmer appeared in 1782. Phillis Wheatley died prematurely in 1784, when she was in her early thirties. Other notable poets, including Annis Boudinot Stockton and Philip Freneau, wrote some of their better-­known works in the 1780s. Thomas Jefferson wrote Notes on the State of ­Virginia in the early 1780s. He included Logan’s speech, which helped spark a long-­lasting vogue for Native American eloquence. Reluctant to publish, Jefferson at first circulated his work in manuscript, but a­ fter it appeared in a pirated version, he prepared the authorized edition of 1787. In the same year Royall Tyler’s The Contrast was performed for the first time. Benjamin Franklin returned to the proj­ect of writing his life story in the late 1780s, a­ fter an extended hiatus caused by the war. In 1789 William Hill Brown brought out The Power of Sympathy, which is sometimes described as the first American novel. Deliciously coinciding with the ratification of the Constitution, this salacious tale of incestuous desire and

12   Prehistories and Transitions

suicide had literary resonances for the Werther crowd and real-­life antecedents among the Boston power elite. (2) 1800 is a watershed year in the development of American civilization. That year marks the high point of Charles Brockden Brown’s achievements as a novelist and literary theorist. The four novels that Brown wrote between 1798 and 1800—­Wieland, Ormond, Edgar Huntly, and Arthur Mervyn—­drew international attention and established him as a writer’s writer. The novel decisively emerged as a major new form in the years leading up to the ­century’s turn. Shifting from drama to fiction, Tyler published The Algerine Captive in 1797, the same year that Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette appeared and three years ­after the first American edition of Charlotte ­Temple, by Susanna Rowson. Hugh Henry Brackenridge first published Modern Chivalry in the 1790s and brought out a revised edition in 1815. The central historical event of 1800 was the election of Thomas Jefferson, whose defeat of the one-­term won­der John Adams was seen by many to mark a decisive break from a quasi-­ aristocratic po­liti­cal culture based on hierarchy and deference. Adams’s fearful response to the French Revolution contrasted with Jefferson’s willingness to ­water the tree of liberty with the blood of patriots and tyrants. His election is sometimes seen as setting the United States on a course t­oward Jacksonian democracy—­that is, democracy understood as universal white manhood suffrage tied to national expansion, Indian removal, and slavery. Thus, it is significant that nine editions of Olaudah Equiano’s In­ter­est­ing Narrative appeared between 1789 and 1794. The first American edition, an unauthorized one, came out in 1791. Equiano died in 1797, and the next edition of his narrative did not appear ­until 1809. Several more followed, including a Boston edition of 1837. (3) Twenty years a­ fter the historic election of 1800, lawmakers fashioned the Missouri Compromise as a temporary solution to the slavery prob­lem, which had emerged ­after the War of 1812 as an issue with serious potential to divide the United States for the first time since the passage of the Constitution. The best-­known living American writer in 1820 was prob­ably Washington Irving, who published the tales and essays that make up The Sketch-­book serially in the United States during 1819 and 1820 and collected them in a two-­volume British edition of 1820. The Sketch-­book included his most famous works, “The Legend of Sleepy-­Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle,” which reprise German legends, setting them in Hudson Valley Dutch communities, and celebrate cultural continuity. Many of the other sketches focus on British culture and customs, while “Traits of Indian Character” and “Philip of Pokanoket” consider

What’s in a Date?   13

the place of indigenous traditions in American society. William Cullen Bryant’s first collection of poems established his reputation for nature poetry and poetry with indigenous themes when it appeared in 1821. James Fenimore Cooper entered the literary scene in 1820 with the publication of Precaution. He quickly followed up this derivative novel of En­glish manners with works in the genres for which he became famous: tales of the Revolutionary War, sea novels, and frontier fiction. Cooper was joined in this last endeavor by Lydia Maria Child, who published Hobomok: A Tale of Early Times in 1824, and by Catharine Maria Sedgwick, whose novel Hope Leslie appeared in 1827. The debates over Indian removal during the de­cade a­ fter the Missouri Compromise contributed to the prominence of Native American themes and characters in t­ hese and other works, such as John Augustus Stone’s Metamora; or, The Last of the Wampanoags, and to the emergence of indigenous authors, including William Apess, who published the first edition of his autobiography, A Son of the Forest, in 1829, the same year as Metamora was produced. (4) By 1830 the trajectory of American history was set. Two landmark events in that year established the troubled course for the ­future: the passage of the Indian Removal Act and the Webster-­Hayne debate, in which the contest between North and South over the direction of the United States was laid out in stark terms. Polemical works published around this time by Apess and the black abolitionist writer David Walker projected the long-­term consequences of t­ hese legislative developments. Over the course of this de­cade Bryant turned increasingly to po­liti­cal concerns, and John Greenleaf Whittier wrote several of his most famous po­liti­cal poems. The 1830s also saw the appearance of two writers included in F. O. Matthiessen’s field-­defining work American Re­nais­sance (1941): Nathaniel Hawthorne, who published some of his best short fiction in the early 1830s, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, who brought out Nature in 1836, followed quickly by “The American Scholar” and “The Divinity School Address.”1 Edgar Allan Poe, whom Matthiessen notoriously excluded from his critical history, published some impor­tant poems and early stories at the beginning of the de­ cade. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, with its barely sublimated racial themes, appeared in 1838 and Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque in the following year. So how did you do on the quiz? Have a cookie. We have been covering dates that correspond to configurations of the early period in American literary history as it is constructed in anthologies, professional organ­izations, and scholarly periodicals. The Heath Anthology of

14   Prehistories and Transitions

American Lit­er­a­ture breaks the field at 1800, as do the MLA in its division structure and the Society of Early Americanists, while The Norton Anthology of American Lit­er­a­ture divides it at 1820. That is also the terminal date for the William and Mary Quarterly, the field’s leading historical journal. Early American Studies extends its consideration of history and culture through 1850. C19, the new society for nineteenth-­century Americanists, recently launched the journal J19, which takes as its purview the period from 1789 to 1914, a long nineteenth ­century bounded by the ratification of the Constitution and the beginning of World War I. This configuration of the field makes nation formation the signal event that separates earlier from ­later lit­er­a­ture. Early American Lit­er­a­ture, the journal of the MLA’s Division on American Lit­er­a­ture to 1800, which celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 2015, extends its purview through the early national period, to around 1830. This capacious period definition claims every­thing prior to the American Re­nais­sance writers, marking a literary rather than a po­liti­cal watershed. My quiz is intended to suggest some of the stakes, literary and more generally cultural, of choosing one field definition over another. T ­ here is a consensus that early American lit­er­a­ture ends before the emergence of the American Re­nais­sance writers and the Civil War. Dividing the field at 1800 highlights the rise of the novel, a genre often associated with cultural democ­ratization, while breaking at 1820 foregrounds a shift in repre­sen­ta­tional energies from the Atlantic rim t­oward the continental interior. If 1789 is the beginning of a long nineteenth c­ entury, then the lit­er­a­ture that comes before that date is defined by its coloniality, not by the protonationalism of the Puritans. Falling a bit before that date, Letters from an American Farmer looks backward, as perhaps befits the Loyalist tendencies of its author, rather than forward to an in­de­pen­dent United States. Franklin’s Autobiography and Jefferson’s Notes straddle the Treaty of Paris compositionally and conceptually, while Wheatley falls entirely, and uneasily for such a forward-­looking writer, on the colonial side of the divide. Cleaving the field around 1830, as Early American Lit­er­a­ture does, tends to amplify the novelty of the American Re­nais­sance writers. The impact of Irving on Hawthorne or of Cooper on Melville can be lost in the rush to celebrate the Emersonian spirit of innovation and cultural in­de­pen­dence. ­These competing narratives of American literary history translate into numbers of pages and volume divisions in anthologies, as well as defining the par­ameters of survey courses. They also have the potential to shape scholarship at a deeper level. The fresh and exciting perspective opened by J19’s periodization risks an overemphasis on the nation, at the expense of power­ful

What’s in a Date?   15

inter-­, trans-­, and non-­national ele­ments, such as the evolution of the revolutionary era’s recuperation of classical republicanism into a mode of republican thought that is self-­consciously modern and cosmopolitan. Another new journal, Lit­er­a­ture in the Early American Republic: Annual Studies on Cooper and His Contemporaries, reframes the period around a major author who is only now receiving full biographical treatment and the beginnings of a much-­needed comprehensive reconsideration. Born with the Constitution in 1789 and ­dying in the year a­ fter the Compromise of 1850, Cooper provides an orientation to the lit­er­a­ture of his period that cuts across many conceptual bound­aries in American literary studies in potentially fruitful ways. His tremendous influence on the fiction of Honoré de Balzac and Joseph Conrad makes his work an impor­tant vector for the global impact of early American lit­er­a­ture. What about the Atlantic world and hemispheric paradigms that have become increasingly prominent challengers to the nationalist paradigm in American literary studies? How do they sit with ­these competing periodizations? In A New World of Words (1994), William Spengemann made the provocative claim that early American lit­er­a­ture should be understood to include writings in En­ glish that evince the effects of the Euro-­American encounter, an imperative made practicable with Myra Jehlen and Michael Warner’s anthology The En­ glish Lit­er­a­tures of Amer­i­ca, 1500–1800 (1997).2 By this mea­sure, Paradise Lost is early American lit­er­a­ture, as are many other works in the British canon. Spengemann advances his proposal in a compensatory spirit. What is the value of “early” American lit­er­a­ture—­lit­er­a­ture chosen to fill the gaps in a curriculum, lit­er­a­ture read mainly for the way it points forward to the greater achievements of “timely” American lit­er­a­ture? Who would not rather read the stately blank verse of Paradise Lost than the folkish prosody of The Day of Doom? Put this way, the choice seems obvious. The first version of Milton’s g­ reat Christian epic appeared a mere five years a­ fter Wigglesworth’s 1662 poem, yet in poetics it achieves a level of sophistication unmatched by the New ­England poet’s use of common hymn meter. Bouncing rhythms, end-­stopped lines, and strong rhymes contributed to the im­mense popularity of The Day of Doom in New E ­ ngland. No copy of the first edition of the poem exists ­because copies ­were literally read to pieces, and many p ­ eople committed Wigglesworth’s lines to memory. The work was impor­ tant to con­temporary poets such as Edward Taylor, and its themes influenced ­later writers including Jonathan Edwards and Phillis Wheatley. Two centuries ­after The Day of Doom, Emily Dickinson’s formal experiments with common hymn meter transformed Wigglesworthian fourteeners into something

16   Prehistories and Transitions

dramatically dif­fer­ent. Our appreciation for Dickinson’s aesthetic achievement is enhanced by an understanding of the tradition from which it sprang—­and for this purpose Milton is no substitute. A better parallel for Wigglesworth than Milton might be John Bunyan, whose Pilgrim’s Pro­gress (1678, 1684) profoundly ­shaped En­glish prose. A rougher work than Paradise Lost, Pilgrim’s Pro­gress continues to influence the narrative expectations of readers, including many who encounter it in one of the numerous redactions or simplified versions for ­children that remain popu­lar. Like Bunyan, Wigglesworth created a work that engaged countless readers and that provided a model and a provocation to writers whose artistry surpassed his own. The distinguished historian Bernard Bailyn, in his essay “Politics and the Creative Imagination” (2004), suggests a view of the aesthetic significance of early American lit­er­a­ture that differs from Spengemann’s. Bailyn argues that the innovations such as a written constitution that w ­ ere introduced by the American found­ers and that have now become commonplace around the world ­were enabled by the distance of the colonies from the metropole. Creativity often thrives on the margins.3 Bailyn draws for his argument on the work of the art critic Kenneth Clark, who makes a case for the liberating and enlivening effects that provincialism can have on the creative artist or intellectual. The metropolitan artist drinks straight from the well of cultural authority, but the best provincial artists have a freshness and simplicity that comes from sipping at the streams of experience. The provincial’s commonsense perspective and interest in the ordinary facts of existence, sometimes infused with a visionary intensity, contrast positively with the overrefinement and scholasticism that can diminish the art of the metropole. In the words of an earlier aes­the­ti­cian of the provinces, the artist seeks an original relation to the universe, and it is easier to achieve this originality at the margins—on the peripheries of power. A comparison of Paradise Lost with the religious poetry of Anne Bradstreet illuminates the contrast between the metropolitan poet and the provincial one. Milton announces in his opening lines his intention to update the tradition of Homer and Vergil by writing an En­glish Christian epic; Bradstreet dwells on the divine as it is vis­i­ble in the natu­ral world for ten stanzas of “Contemplations” (1678) before turning to Genesis. Her poem highlights the effort involved in relating the scriptural creation tale to her surroundings and the psy­chol­ogy of maintaining an old faith in a radically new setting. The inward-­looking and domestic aspects of Bradstreet’s poetry have appealed to many modern poets and readers, including most famously Adrienne Rich, who find her work more

What’s in a Date?   17

relatable than that of her contemporaries—­even such a g­ reat con­temporary as John Milton. As another approach to the question of how best to parse the field of American literary history, consider turning Spengemann’s argument around: at what point does American lit­er­a­ture offer writers of sufficient stature and distinctiveness to merit its own tradition? Jonathan Edwards would be a ­viable candidate if the only criteria w ­ ere a substantial corpus of high-­quality work and a wide and long-­lasting influence. But Edwards’s major genres, the sermon and the theological treatise, are peripheral to literary studies. The literary significance of Benjamin Franklin is difficult to separate from his po­liti­cal reputation. Susanna Rowson and Charles Brockden Brown ­were prolific contributors to a solidly literary genre, the novel, as well as producing other forms of literary and paraliterary writing. At pres­ent neither one has the name recognition of a Daniel Defoe, though their level of popu­lar visibility is prob­ably similar to that of Samuel Richardson and Frances Burney or Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. That could change. I have long contended that Wieland could be made into a riveting film (Tim Burton, are you paying attention? How about it, Quentin Tarantino?), and if Ismail Merchant and James Ivory or the Austenites are looking for fresh material, they would do well to consider Charlotte ­Temple. What other fictional heroine has a gravestone in Manhattan? With Irving and Cooper we turn a corner in international visibility, though the alleged derivativeness of ­these writers has kept from them the status conferred on the next generation of American writers by Matthiessen. It has long been a mainstay of American literary history that while formal po­liti­cal ties between the United States and G ­ reat Britain ended in 1783, the two countries remained culturally close for many de­cades afterward. Matthiessen based his claims for the significance of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman on their literary merit and their engagement with the meaning of democracy, which he saw as a distinctively American contribution. In a recent study of Emerson, Lawrence Buell locates Matthiessen’s foundational figure in Victorian sage culture to demonstrate how this most independence-­ minded of mid-­century American writers was s­ haped by the British literary tradition that he claimed to renounce. We c­ an’t ­really understand Emerson, Buell plausibly suggests, without understanding Thomas Carlyle, his friend and interlocutor and a ­great critic of American democracy.4 So did the United States ever ­really achieve cultural in­de­pen­dence? Recent studies suggest new dimensions to this question. Leonard Tennen­house

18   Prehistories and Transitions

describes American lit­er­a­ture as diasporic En­glish lit­er­a­ture in The Importance of Feeling En­glish (2007). In Anglophilia (2008), Elisa Tamarkin makes a case that cultural ties between the United States and ­Great Britain ­were refreshed during the nineteenth c­ entury and had an especially deep impact in universities, where a genteel Anglo­centrism permeated many departments. Her analy­sis is especially helpful for understanding the long hegemony exercised by the study of British lit­er­a­ture in American higher education. In a dif­fer­ent but complementary fashion, the book historians Meredith McGill and Trish Loughran each examine the intertwined literary worlds of Britain and the United States as social and material phenomena. They document American literary Anglophilia as an effect of copyright law, local printing practices, and the slow development of a national infrastructure in the United States. Even as the imperial center continued to hold cultural authority, however, the provinces exercised increasing sway. Not only the United States but also India, Africa, the Ca­rib­ bean, and Australia produced English-­language lit­er­a­tures that revitalized the lit­er­a­ture of the metropole, transforming it into lit­er­a­tures in En­glish.5 En­glish was only one of the literary languages of early Amer­i­ca. Arguably the first “American” epic poem was written by Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá, whose Historia de la Nueva México (1610) describes Juan de Oñate’s conquest of New Mexico’s indigenous ­peoples, including the first Acoma Pueblo revolt and recapture in 1599. T ­ hese events remain a source of conflict in the region, lending Villagrá’s Historia ongoing relevance. Elsewhere colonial American writers dreamed of transforming linguistic multiplicity into a source of social and spiritual unity. As Patrick Erben discusses in A Harmony of the Spirits: Translation and the Language of Community in Early Pennsylvania (2012), Francis Daniel Pastorius wrote the title of his manuscript book “Bee-­Hive” (ca. 1696–1719) in seven languages (Greek, Latin, En­glish, Dutch, German, Italian, and French) and followed it with a verse that opens, “In t­ hese Seven Languages I this my Book do own.” Orature in indigenous languages adds dozens of tongues to the New World Babel that Cooper described. The anthologies Early American Writings (2001), edited by Carla Mulford and her collaborators, and The Lit­ er­a­tures of Colonial Amer­i­ca (2001), edited by Susan Castillo and Ivy Schweitzer, offer classroom-­ready multilingual approaches to the field.6 Of the Eu­ro­pean languages in the Amer­i­cas, Spanish most fully integrates the products of its provincial artists in its lit­er­a­ture. This may be b ­ ecause, as Barbara Fuchs observes in “Golden Ages and Golden Hinds; or, Periodizing Spain and E ­ ngland,” early modern Spanish lit­er­a­ture is backward-­looking, focused on a lost golden age, while during the same period En­glish lit­er­a­ture is

What’s in a Date?   19

aggressively forward-­looking and expansive. Fuchs argues for the transnational framing of literary periods and notes that “the twinning of military and literary activities as hallmarks of Elizabethan greatness” extended into the twentieth ­century.7 From Shakespeare’s day ­until the ­middle of the twentieth ­century, En­glish literary achievement was linked to imperial expansion. Meanwhile, the lost golden age of Spanish power became a real­ity ­after the defeat of the Armada, and provincial artists ­were less threatening to a metropolitan society whose cultural hegemony was already much diminished. Paul Giles has recently proposed that early Americanists draw on the aesthetic concept of the baroque as a way to reframe British North American writers such as Cotton Mather, who have typically been considered protonationalists, and to relate them instead to their southern counter­parts.8 The characteristic pessimism of late-­seventeenth-­century colonial Puritan writers fretting over the alleged declension in their communities and over mounting British control suggests a fruitful comparison with similar themes in the lit­er­a­ture of Spain and its colonies. By this time it should be amply apparent that I have no answer for the “right” date that could divide early from ­later American lit­er­a­ture. Each time frame I examine ­here generates an engaging and impor­tant narrative (the emergence of the nation, the rise of democracy and the novel, the shift from transatlantic to continental perspectives, and the belated achievement of cultural in­de­pen­ dence). Each one highlights some literary movements, authors, and works while diminishing o ­ thers. Each carries with it opportunities for treating American literary history in relation to methodologies that cut across the narrative of a national literary tradition, including Atlantic-­world, hemispheric, multilingual, and postcolonial approaches. The variety of fresh perspectives on this fertile period that have opened up in recent years makes it an especially stimulating area for scholarship and teaching. Viva the provinces! Notes Reused by permission of copyright owner, the Modern Language Association of Amer­ic­ a, from “What’s in a Date? Temporalities of Early American Lit­er­a­ture,” PMLA 128, no. 4 (2013): 961–67. 1. ​See F. O. Matthiessen, The American Re­nais­sance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941). 2. ​William Spengemann, A New World of Words: Redefining Early American Lit­er­a­ture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994); Myra Jehlen and Michael Warner, eds., The En­glish Lit­ er­a­tures of Amer­i­ca, 1500–1800 (New York: Routledge, 1997). 3. ​Bernard Bailyn, “Politics and the Creative Imagination,” in To Begin the World Anew: The Genius and Ambiguities of the American Found­ers (New York: Vintage, 2004), 3–36.

20   Prehistories and Transitions 4. ​See Lawrence Buell, Emerson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). 5. ​See Leonard Tennen­house, The Importance of Feeling En­glish: American Lit­er­a­ture and the British Diaspora, 1750–1850 (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2007); Elisa Tamarkin, Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum Amer­i­ca (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Meredith McGill, American Lit­er­a­ture and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834–1853 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); Trish Loughran, The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770–1870 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009). 6. ​Patrick Erben, A Harmony of the Spirits: Translation and the Language of Community in Early Pennsylvania (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2012); Carla Mulford et al., eds., Early American Writings (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Susan Castillo and Ivy Schweitzer, eds., The Lit­er­a­ tures of Colonial Amer­i­ca: An Anthology (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001). 7. ​Barbara Fuchs, “Golden Ages and Golden Hinds; or, Periodizing Spain and ­England,” PMLA 127, no. 2 (2012): 325. 8. ​Paul Giles, The Global Remapping of American Lit­er­a­ture (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2010).

1833–1932 American Lit­er­a­ture’s Other Scripts

erica fretwell

For almost a ­century, Braille has been the universal print system for blind p ­ eople. But in the United States it was far from an instantaneous success. Between 1833, when Jacob Snider printed the first embossed book in Amer­i­ca, The Gospel According to St. Mark, and 1932, when Congress made Standard En­glish Braille the official embossed print system, many print types vied for dominance in the new arena of blind literacy. So fierce was the competition that blind activist Robert Irwin, assessing this tumultuous period from the vantage point of 1955, called it “The War of the Dots.”1 Unlike the wars that punctuate American literary history, the War of the Dots was fought along typographic rather than territorial fault lines. Also, no one has heard of it. Embossed print dates back to 1786, when French educator Valentin Haüy in­ven­ted raised alphabetic letters. But the war d ­ idn’t start in earnest u ­ ntil 1829, when blind teacher Louis Braille published his system of raised points. Many systems vied for dominance in the small but significant arena of blind pedagogy and print. They are classified as line types or point types. The former simulates the Roman alphabet; the latter assigns letters to symbols. The most successful types in Amer­i­ca ­were reformer Samuel Gridley Howe’s Boston Line Letter, from the 1830s to the 1870s; educator William Bell Wait’s New York Point, from the 1870s to the 1890s; blind teacher Joel Smith’s American Braille, from the 1890s to the 1910s; Standard En­glish Braille Grade 1½, from the 1910s to the 1930s; and, since 1932, Standard En­glish Braille Grade 2, a­ dopted by the American and British Uniform Type Committees. B ­ attles about which script to implement as the uniform print system for blind Americans w ­ ere also about the readers and writers that scripts invent. Embossed print hailed an entirely new readership. Before its invention, “no blind person in the Western world had a ready means of reading, writing, or becoming educated,” disability historian Catherine Kudlick notes. “The

22   Prehistories and Transitions

“Six Principal Systems of Embossed Type.” From Catholic Encyclopedia (1913). Haüy’s, Gall’s, and Howe’s systems are alphabetic or line types, while Moon’s, Braille’s, and Wait’s systems are arbitrary or point types. Moon and Braille are still in use.

overwhelming majority of blind p ­ eople [­were] illiterate, uneducated, and unemployed, often relegated to . . . ​begging on the street.”2 Embossed print helped transform blindness from a private experience into a public identity. In their pursuit to perfect a tactile technology for linguistic repre­sen­ta­tion, author-­inventors raised questions about pedagogy, perception, and citizenship: the spiritual “light” that literacy afforded, epistemological differences between seeing and touching words, and ­whether embossed print was exclusionary or inclusive. In theory, embossed print would expand literacy and thus unify the public sphere, à la Jürgen Habermas.3 But in practice it was a variegated and vertiginous endeavor. At any given moment numerous print types—­each requiring a dif­fer­ent set of reading skills—­were in simultaneous use. Thus arose a veritable Tower of Babel that decentered a nascent reading public. The ­century between 1833 and 1932 thus had sweeping implications for what could be represented on the page and who could be literate. ­Today it has broad implications for how scholars narrate the history of reading, writing, and repre­ sen­ta­tion. What I call “other scripts”—­texts experienced as neither inkprint grapheme nor inscriptive groove, but as embossed protrusion—­have long been displaced from critical discussion. From the Romantic belief in transcendent vision to the invention of photography, the primacy of visuality in Americanist scholarship has turned literary culture into an emblem of Emerson’s transparent eyeball, the organ of judgment that is nothing and sees all. As literary historians, to attend to other scripts is not to displace the ocular but to include the tactile as an analytic for reading across the nineteenth ­century. By ­doing so, we also push against the “teleological tug” that successful technologies exert.4 Media histories in par­tic­u­lar have overlooked the tactile print technologies

1833–1932: American Literature’s Other Scripts   23

that Braille eventually—­but not inevitably—­“beat.” The very assumption that early Americans “thought themselves a nation” through “their ritualized collocation as readers of a shared press” elides t­ hose excluded from that “shared” press.5 Thus, to examine embossed print types and their users is to remediate ocular-­centric and teleological tugs in American cultural, literary, and media histories. Moving away from ocular analytics and teleological arcs, this essay posits a radial rather than linear timeline of American lit­er­a­ture, for tactile reading is itself a radial rather than linear experience of time and space. As experimental psychologist Susanna Millar explains, tactile reading involves the user’s two hands moving together ­until halfway through the line, when the right hand “reads to the end of the line, while the left hand [moves] in a diagonally downwards direction. As soon as it touche[s] text on the next line, the fin­ger move[s] sharply further leftwards beyond the first letter to the blank margin and then back to the first letter of the new line. The fin­ger remain[s] stationary . . . ​­until the right forefinger move[s] beyond the last letter of the previous line.”6 Unlike the forward eye movements of reading inkprint, with embossed print hands move outward in opposite directions, return to meet at an ever-­sliding center, then move outward again, and so on. This essay takes the radial movement of tactile reading as an object of study and as a thinkable concept for reperiodizing American lit­er­a­ture. The War of the Dots is a central node from which multiple lines of thought—­print culture, media history, and aesthetic form—­ radiate. It is also a central node from which other literary canons radiate: an embossed print para-­canon that moves beside, and a mixed-­media subcanon that moves below, the inkprint canon with which literary history is more familiar. From line types and point types, typewriters and writing balls, braille notes and mendicant memoirs emerges a radial narrative of American letters, a literary period that has a central point rather than a starting point.

A History of the Embossed Book Whereas printing for the blind was widely discussed in the nineteenth ­century, ­today that recognition has faded from public memory and literary studies.7 In the encyclopedic A History of the Book in Amer­i­ca (2000–2010), for instance, embossed print goes unmentioned. This lacuna canonizes inkprint as the sole mode of printing and privileges vision as the sole mode of reading. Alternatively, examining embossed print helps reconfigure conventional ideas about literacy and perception. ­Doing so de-­ocularizes book history by according the link between the skin and the page the same epistemological authority as the

24   Prehistories and Transitions

link between the eyes and the page.8 It also invites us to historicize theories of the skin—­what Steven Connor calls an “always written” organ—by situating tactile knowledge in material culture.9 Embossed print is the site where book history and theories of touch merge. Indeed, the War of the Dots involved ideological debates about w ­ hether embossed print should be legible to the skin and the eyes (line type) or legible to the skin only (point type). ­These debates about print and perception constructed as they constricted an embossed print para-­canon. Blind Americans practiced literacy primarily in state-­run institutions. But high cost, low distribution, and numerous print systems made it difficult for ­these schools to build an extensive library. The 1840 Annual Report of the Ohio Institution for the Blind described how its pupils “constantly [inquire] for more books. Whenever any volumes arrive, the first ­eager inquiry is, ‘Are they in our print?’ On this account it is to be regretted that we have not a uniform print for the blind. The dif­fer­ent characters now employ two presses; one at the institution at Boston, the other at Philadelphia; whereas, one press would be sufficient, with a uniform letter, to do double the work with the same expense.”10 ­Until the establishment of the American Printing House for the Blind (APH) in 1863, the Perkins School for the Blind in Boston and the Philadelphia Institution for the Instruction of the Blind ran the only printing presses. Each used the print type it had in­ven­ted: Howe, Perkins’s director, worked with printer Samuel Ruggles on Boston Line, and Philadelphia’s director, Julius Friedlander, worked with Jacob Snider on Philadelphia Line. The alliance of print type and institution engendered “an entrenched rivalry between the [two] schools,” exacerbating this prohibitively expensive enterprise.11 For most of the c­ entury, line types dominated embossed print, partly to unite blind and sighted readers and partly ­because sighted teachers w ­ ere uncomfortable “ceding control over books they could not read,” Kudlick states.12 Indeed, in 1867 reformer Mary Titcomb affirmed that the “­great advantage” of line type was that its “alphabet resembles as nearly as pos­si­ble that in ordinary use among the seeing,” although she conceded that point type is “infinitely more s­ imple” for blind readers.13 Educator Edward Allen rebutted, “Who should be the judges of this ­matter if not the intelligent blind themselves? Truly, the embossed Roman letter systems are but efforts to adapt the fin­gers of the blind to the alphabet of the seeing.”14 Line types w ­ ere legible to both sighted and blind readers: the former could see the raised letters, and the latter could feel them. Point types ­were easier to read by touch, but they could be read only by touch, thus requiring sighted teachers to learn to read with their hands. For blind ­people, it was hard enough

1833–1932: American Literature’s Other Scripts   25

to get an embossed book, let alone the embossed book you wanted, printed in the type you could read. It was equally difficult to get embossed books in certain literary genres. Reformers had long been deemed a crucial tool for leading blind ­people out of intellectual and theological “darkness.” Thus, religious organ­izations such as the American Bible Society—­a major funding source for embossed print—­ dictated not only the format but also the content of embossed lit­er­a­ture. Consider, for instance, a primer for Boston Line, in which learning to read means learning to be grateful for having access to the Bible: “It is a good t­ hing to learn to read. You should try to learn. A few years ago ­there ­were no books for the blind. Now t­ hese are a g­ reat many. The bible has been printed for them.”15 The central genres in which embossed print presses trafficked w ­ ere edifying ones: biblical verse, textbooks, ­children’s fables, and literary anthologies such as The Poetry of Amer­i­ca.16 As a mass market of leisure reading took root in Amer­i­ca, embossed print remained steadfastly functional in content. In 1878 Howe’s successor at the Perkins School, Michael Anagnos, assured trustees that “history, biography, travels, and science ­will prove sure antidotes to the somnambulic paroxysm produced by our pres­ent popu­lar lit­er­a­ture” and ­will aid the “growth of the aesthetic sense and of a fine taste in the community for the good, the pure, and the beautiful.”17 But the presses printing popu­lar lit­er­a­ture did not print embossed books, so Anagnos’s students never risked suffering from such paroxysms. With tactile reading occurring in institutional rather than domestic settings, schools “saved” blind p ­ eople not only from street life but also from street lit­er­a­ture. In addition to being printed in line type and consisting of instructive material, embossed lit­er­a­ture was fragmentary in its composition. In his preface to The Reader of Extracts in Prose and Verse from En­glish and American Authors, Howe aimed “to give you in­ter­est­ing and useful knowledge”—­Marvell, Longfellow, Hemans, and o ­ thers—­but conceded that although “­there are objections to books of extracts in general use, I think they do not apply in your case. Your library must always be of comparatively limited extent.”18 The expense of printing entire texts limited the “library,” which of necessity featured genres that lent themselves to excerpting: poetry, essays, drama, and short stories. The novel—­arguably the c­ entury’s dominant form—­resisted easy extraction. It was also too closely associated with “popu­lar pres­ent lit­er­a­ture” for the “unenlightened” readers of embossed print. The entire genre is nearly absent from the archive.19 Blind readers knew Nathaniel Hawthorne not for his instantly famous romance The Scarlet Letter but for his obscure story “Feathertop.” Reformers,

26   Prehistories and Transitions

invested in moral edification and in line types they could read, and presses, printing in dif­fer­ent line types, colluded to create an American para-­canon: a patchwork of literary samples all printed in dif­fer­ent embossed systems. The only way institutions ­were able to expand their libraries was by establishing student-­run periodicals. The Philadelphia Institution’s Students’ Magazine (1838–1845) and blind printer Napoleon Kneass’s Philadelphia Magazine for the Blind (1867–1900) w ­ ere printed in line type, to expose blind readers to canonical writers and sighted readers—­potential donors—to blind writers. A given issue might include an excerpt of Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale, a student essay entitled “Amer­i­ca,” and blind-­deaf celebrity Laura Bridgman’s poem “Holy Home.” The Perkins Alumni Association’s The Mentor (1891–1894) and the American Association of Workers for the Blind’s The Outlook for the Blind (1907–1941) provided a lively forum for debate—­pressing topics like the War of the Dots—­and for conveying practical information to connect blind ­people to sighted allies. But printed in ink, ­these periodicals ­were accessible only to sighted readers. Only the privately owned Matilda Ziegler Magazine for the Blind (1907–2014), which included poetry, news, and sheet ­music, was printed for a blind audience; initially it ran New York Point and American Braille editions. Blind ­people thus exerted some autonomy over their reading material in the periodicals they helped print, but the institutions funding t­ hese periodicals ensured that the material remained instructive and informational. ­After many de­cades, blind readers and their allies prevailed on state institutions and presses to teach and print in point type. Anagnos conceded that “the blind . . . ​would undoubtedly adopt it in preference to all ­others, if they ­were left ­free to make their own choice,” further adding that its use in Eu­rope “has caused a large amount of . . . ​fine lit­er­a­ture” to be printed in it, “which the blind of this Institution and of Amer­i­ca in general can ill afford to lose.”20 In 1874, the APH began printing in New York Point, and in 1878 the Perkins School added Braille to its curriculum without dropping its older methods. Such was the shift away from assimilationist models of reading, for whereas line types compelled blind bodies to adapt to the alphabet, point types compelled the alphabet to adapt to blind bodies. But while the success of point type was a success for blind Americans, institutional, ideological, and technological forces continued to shape a canon that cut out “popu­lar” writing, cut up literary texts, and consisted of multiple tactile alphabets. Constructed largely by reformers, the blind “library”—­primers, anthologies, periodicals—­not only mediated the complex politics of typography but also engendered a para-­canon that existed alongside the “standard” canon for sighted readers.

1833–1932: American Literature’s Other Scripts   27

Other Writing Machines Point type “beat” line type ­because it was easier for blind ­people to read, though perhaps more importantly ­because it could be “written as well as printed,” instructor William Chapin noted.21 Whereas reformers used the press to expand blind readership, blind ­people used textual media to expand blind authorship. Writing machines facilitated long-­standing efforts by blind p ­ eople to communicate with each other. They also played a crucial role in popularizing Braille. In surveying “Writing Machines for the Blind,” Popu­lar Science Monthly explained that Braille was uniquely “adapted to manuscript work and to printing; it can be applied to orthographic writing, to stenography, to mathe­matics, and to m ­ usic.”22 The War of the Dots thus helps recover the tactile origins of textual media. Although it is by now axiomatic that textual media “are socially embedded sites for the ongoing negotiation of meaning,” media history loses some of its nuance when it values vision and sound over touch as a basis of textual mediation.23 Braille’s points w ­ ere as much an experiment in linguistic repre­sen­ta­tion as Morse’s dots and dashes. Excavating the earliest machines for blind writers shows how disability ­shaped the nineteenth-­century mediascape and how textual media s­ haped the forms that disability writing took. Institutions taught blind students to write primarily for the sighted, with pencil, paper, and grooved stylus. Unable to see the text they produced, blind writers ­were alienated from their own words. To teach line type was easy for sighted instructors, but to write in line type was cumbersome for blind ­people. One of the earliest technologies for ­doing so was George Gibson’s 1827 typograph, which used prick type: the user begins at the bottom left of a rectangular wooden frame and, moving left to right and bottom to top along guide bars, presses into place letter-­shaped blocks that have pins at the end, which puncture the paper to create embossed letters on the reverse side. Writing thus required ­mental acrobatics, for it was produced “in inverted fashion, the author’s front being the reader’s back, the text composed from bottom to top, each ‘letter in points’ the upside-­down version of the one actually felt on the block by the author.”24 Braille handwriting applied the same princi­ple. With a special slate, text was composed from right to left so that the dots read in the customary left-­to-­right order. Blind “hand-­reading” pushed textual space radially outward, while handwriting technologies inverted textual space and time: the writer’s verso the reader’s recto, the writer’s end the reader’s beginning. ­These and other modes of handwriting overlapped with the invention of the first writing machines “that printed in any way like a modern typewriter

28   Prehistories and Transitions

Writing frame with pin-­prick sorts. AG94-0026. Courtesy of Perkins School for the Blind Archive.

P. J. Doody writing guide. AG10-0007. Courtesy of Perkins School for the Blind Archive.

[which itself] stemmed from the idea of a writing machine for the blind.”25 Indeed, the Remington, the first successful commercial typewriter, can be traced back to Pellegrino Turri’s 1808 inkprint typing machine, in­ven­ted to help his blind patron write letters to her sighted friends. Conversely, educator Frank Hall’s 1891 braillewriter, the most successful writing machine for the blind, itself

1833–1932: American Literature’s Other Scripts   29

Hall braillewriter (ca. 1892). Courtesy of Iowa Department for the Blind, Artifact no. 53.

can be traced back to the Remington. Hall, in fact, did not intend to make a writing machine for Braille. He preferred New York Point, but its dots “­were not of uniform length.” Braille used “precisely the same amount of longitudinal space,” as “the ‘i’ in the Remington occupies exactly the same space as the ‘m,’ ” and thus was “the only proper system on which to attempt to make a machine to write for the blind,” Hall l­ ater explained.26 Since then, historians have maintained that the braillewriter “was a significant ­factor in giving braille a commanding edge over its principal competitor, New York Point.”27 But ­there was nothing inevitable about the success of Braille. It simply lent itself to technification—to uniform spacing—in ways other point types did not. The eventual dominance of Braille and the braillewriter does not fit an easy linear timeline that moves from line type to point type, from manual writing to machinic writing. At the turn of the c­ entury, institutions taught American Braille alongside—­not instead of—­Boston Line and New York Point, and “pencils, puncturing devices, and typewriters w ­ ere used in tandem.”28 Like tactile print formats, the machines for blind writing w ­ ere many, including Pierre Foucault’s rapigraphe (which used a series of vertical punches to pierce paper), William Bell Wait’s kleidograph (a “braillewriter” for his New York Point), and Elizabeth Townsend’s punctograph (a typewriter for Braille and New York Point that could be operated with one hand). In 1867, Danish pastor Rasmus Malling-­ Hansen designed a typewriter with fifty-­four concentric keys in a hemispherical

30   Prehistories and Transitions

Malling-­Hansen writing ball (ca. 1867).

arrangement. The ball used a “radial-­strike design,” whereby type bars impress alphabetic letters on a sheet of paper that scrolls below the keys on a semicylindrical platen. Although the type it produced was inkprint, the writing ball’s design was “more amenable to tactile navigation than keys arranged in a plane.”29 Malling-­Hansen’s machine thus proved that even sighted writers benefited from the bodily orientations to language advanced by blind writers. Although its popularity did not spread to Amer­i­ca, in its very design the writing ball materializes a nondeterministic media history, one that moves around rather than forward. If the braillewriter decenters sound and vision from media history, then the writing ball decenters the braillewriter from the history of disability writing. In the nineteenth ­century an array of writing machines s­ haped radically dif­fer­ent embodied interactions between blind users and their words. Taken as a w ­ hole, writing machines for the blind index a dynamic, “radial-­strike” textual culture in which writing practices proceed in multiple directions, from multiple positions. The War of the Dots was about not only the forms of reading that embossed print formats made pos­ si­ble but also the kinds of writers that textual media made pos­si­ble. When we approach writing machines through their implementation rather than the

1833–1932: American Literature’s Other Scripts   31

metrics of success, we see how blind p ­ eople used them to create a canon of lit­er­a­ture, a library, apart from the “limited” one available at their educational institutions.

Cultures of Tactile Letters ­ ecause line types dominated the first fifty years of embossed print, users of B Braille likely learned it themselves. In fact, students at the Missouri School for the Blind “surreptitiously employed [Braille] to pass notes among themselves, to the utter confusion of their seeing teachers.”30 This secretive authorship—­ subversive in form and content—­reframes disability writing as an underground lit­er­a­ture. As opposed to the official “para-­canon” that blind students ­were taught, a subcanon of blind writing emerged that put pressure on institutionally and culturally sanctioned forms of writing. More than about print format, the War of the Dots was about the literary forms that print and writing technologies engender. Blind Americans most frequently wrote letters, often from their institution to friends and ­family at home. In so ­doing, they recontextualized mainstream lit­er­a­ture. In a handwritten letter, for example, blind pianist Jennie Partridge thanks her patron Helen Slack Mitchell for a new piano, but she does so by citing Louisa May Alcott’s domestic and didactic novel ­Little ­Women, the “right” kind of lit­er­a­ture of which reformers approved: “If the spirits above permitted know aught of earthly ­things as I believe they are: how gladly ­will my ­Father witness your goodness to me, his child. Like ­Little Beth in ­Little ­Women I feel as if I must throw my arms around your neck, and kiss the joy and thanks I cannot utter.”31 Partridge likens her relationship with Mitchell to the March f­ amily’s relationship with their beneficent neighbor Mr. Laurence, who invites the frail girl to play piano at his h ­ ouse: “Beth blushed like a r­ ose . . . ​ and gave the hand a grateful squeeze b ­ ecause she had no words to thank him for the precious gift he had given her.”32 Partridge’s letter too is a “grateful squeeze.” It uses Beth, a domestic “angel” who is also disabled and a pianist, to authorize her manual dexterity at the keyboard and to affirm her worthiness as a recipient of charity. Beth’s gender normativity places Partridge’s disability in the legible confines of Victorian sentimentality. The critical purchase that Partridge’s letter offers is in reconceiving how domestic novels use disability less as a sentimental trope than as a per­for­mance predicated on an economy of beneficence. Whereas the letter of thanks adheres to generic convention by featuring a single authorial voice, mendicant writing—­autobiographical books and

32   Prehistories and Transitions

pamphlets—­pushed at the bounds of generic convention by melding a number of marginalized voices. As Susan Schweik has shown, in the nineteenth c­ entury poor disabled ­people authored and peddled their stories, printed in ink for sighted consumers, to earn a living and to avoid the criminal charge of begging. Blind mendicant writers frequently spoke for themselves and on behalf of their friends. For instance, Mary Day’s The World as I Have Found It (1878) is street lit­er­a­ture about street lit­er­a­ture: she recounts her travels around the country selling her first memoir, Incidents in the Life of a Blind Girl (1859).33 However, her autobiography morphs into anthology, concluding with poems by “Ellenor Jones, of the Indiana Institution” and “Morrison Heady, of the Kentucky Institution for the Blind,” among o ­ thers. The inclusion of other blind writers turns the act of self-­authorization into communal authorization. Likewise, Lansing Hall and William Artman’s Beauties and Achievements of the Blind pres­ents biographies of and excerpts from blind writers both famous and obscure: Homer, Milton, “Miss Frances Jane Crosby, an American authoress,” and “Miss Margaret Belches of the Indiana Institution for the Blind.” Insofar as the editors are “marginalized disability historians writing marginal disability history,” in Schweik’s words, Beauties is an autobiography of a ­people.34 Thus, blind authorship is also editorship, ­every memoir or history a collection of other ­people’s words. Composed of fragments, inkprint mendicant writing in fact resembles the embossed anthologies that the Perkins School and the APH printed. This formal correspondence between underground and official lit­er­a­ture can be attributed to the economy of print, for institutions could not afford embossed type any more than disabled individuals, working with private printers, could afford inkprint. The print economy thus dictated the abbreviated, multigeneric form of what blind p ­ eople not only read but also wrote. While the print economy ­shaped the form that mendicant writing took, blind writing frequently incorporated typographic variety into its form. Indeed, The World as I Have Found It was printed in ink but features a sample page of embossed line type: “Onward, onward, we Press / In the path of duty / Virtue is true happiness / Excellence true beauty.” Similarly, a biblical quote in Philadelphia Line precedes the title page of Beauties and Achievements. Hall’s poetry collection Voices of Nature also includes a sample of line letter: “FIN­GERS VS. EYES. With fin­gers alone, the fair field of Science may be gleaned, and many golden grains of truth gathered in the darkness.” Printed in inclusive line type rather than exclusive point type, t­ hese pages encourage sighted readers to read with their hands—to “blind read.” They also announce their texts as blind

1833–1932: American Literature’s Other Scripts   33

writing in ways inkprint cannot. To read the embossed page in Day’s memoir is to literalize the idiomatic “pressing onward” that her disability autobiography narrates. In the same way, Partridge’s handwritten letter becomes part of the story of her gratitude. Whereas a typewriter would efface bodily differences between her and her patron, her stilted penmanship—so clearly s­ haped by a grooved stylus—­reinscribes her disability. The interarticulation of type format and literary form is perhaps clearest in a par­tic­u­lar edition of The Woodman’s Nannette and Other Tales (1885) held at the Library Com­pany of Philadelphia.35 Printed in Boston Line, this collection of c­ hildren’s religious stories transformed over the course of forty years from an embossed text into a scrapbook. Layered atop raised alphabetic letters are portraits of ­silent film stars, a postage stamp of President Harding, and stickers bearing the image of fruits, among other cultural objects. Nannette thus implicates blind reading with a collagist authorship that Ellen Gruber Garvey calls “writing with scissors.”36 The stamp, stickers, and cinematic stars recontexutalize the ­children’s book; ­these materials turn it into a meditation on popu­lar culture and twentieth-­century femininity. In other words, the figure of the w ­ oman writer that t­ hese artifacts evidence replaces the figure of the child reader that Nannette imagines. But it is not simply that the user wrote on embossed print; it is that she did so on line type, a system that was nearly obsolete by the 1920s. What likely lent the book to reuse was its “useless” print form. Yet the cutouts do not paper over Boston Line so much as they make an ornament of it. Far from useless, line type gives literal texture to the drama of young adulthood, as represented by the visual abundance of the pop culture “scraps.” By treating embossed print as the foundational material of authorship, the author-­user of Nannette writes herself into a culture of tactile letters. Moreover, the embossed scrap/book circles around and returns to the moment of (para-)canon formation, the embossed print books that cut up and cut out larger, longer texts. In this way, the tension between the tactile and the visual on the palimpsestic page performs the radial shape of the War of the Dots. The scrapbook thus joins secret notes, mendicant writing, and letters to patrons as a subcanon, a body of blind writing that reformist institutions excluded from the “official” textual body curated for blind readers. From the antebellum to the interwar period, Amer­i­ca’s many embossed print systems, their users, and their attendant technologies not only tethered the tactile to the textual but also made the tactile a textual experience. A timeline of other scripts tells the story of forgotten forms of reading and writing, as well as of the readers and writers t­hose forms engendered. Comprising the

34   Prehistories and Transitions

Verso side of ­Table of Contents, The Woodman’s Nanette (1885).

institutional origins of embossed print, the machines that turned blind readers into blind writers, and the forms that that writing took, it also tells the story of canon formations. Indeed, if the Norton Anthology and the Heath Anthology have inscribed a central, if ever expanding, canon, then a radial timeline approaches the canons that push literary history outward. The War of the Dots helps us to unearth two canons that move literary history in directions beside and below: the official para-­canon that anthologized instructive and already-­ canonical writers, and the unofficial subcanon of “popu­lar” writing that ­escaped anthologization: the mendicant memoirs, personal letters, secret notes, and teenage scrapbooks that circulate alternative histories of American lit­er­a­ture.

1833–1932: American Literature’s Other Scripts   35

Notes Special thanks to archivists Erika Piola and Rachel D’Agostino at the Library Com­pany of Philadelphia for their expertise and generosity. 1. ​Robert B. Irwin, As I Saw It (New York: American Foundation for the Blind, 1955). 2. ​Catherine Kudlick, “Our Ancestors Sighted: Making Blind ­People French and French ­People Blind, 1750–1991,” in Civil Disabilities: Citizenship, Membership, and Belonging, ed. Nancy Hirschmann and Beth Linker (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 154. 3. ​German phi­los­o­pher Jürgen Habermas theorized the public sphere as a discursive space in which ­people discuss certain issues and reach a common judgment about them. Benedict Anderson built on Habermas’s ideas to argue that media and communication (specifically, the newspaper) create new kinds of publics. 4. ​Lisa Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 5. 5. ​Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 26. 6. ​Susanna Millar, Reading by Touch (New York: Routledge, 2003), 74. 7. ​See American Encyclopedia of Printing, ed. John Ringwalt (1871); and “The First ­Century of the Republic,” Harper’s Monthly, Mar. 1875. 8. ​The ostensible death of print has inspired many to valorize the tactile qualities of print. Andrew ­Piper remarks, “To think about the f­ uture of reading means, first and foremost, to think about the relationship between reading and hands, the long history of how touch has ­shaped reading and, by extension, our sense of ourselves while we read.” Andrew P ­ iper, Book Was ­There: Reading in Electronic Times (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 3. 9. ​Steven Connor, The Book of Skin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 51. 10. ​William Chapin, “Director’s Report,” in Fourth Annual Report of the Trustees of the Institution for the Instruction of the Blind of the State of Ohio (Columbus, 1840), 9. 11. ​Elizabeth Harris, In Touch: Printing and Writing for the Blind in the Nineteenth ­Century (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1981), 13. 12. ​Kudlick, “Our Ancestors Sighted,” 158. 13. ​Mary Titcomb, “Blind ­People,” Harper’s Monthly 35, no. 210 (Nov. 1867): 768. 14. ​Edward Allen, “Tangible Writing of the Blind,” New ­England Magazine 9, no. 3 (1890): 329. 15. ​Samples of raised-­letter line types for printing for the blind (1833–1853), Michael Zinman Collection of Printing for the Blind, Library Com­pany of Philadelphia. 16. ​The writers canonized w ­ ere overwhelmingly British and American. The Poetry of Amer­i­ca includes Barlow, Bryant, Dana, Longfellow, Poe, and Sigourney, among ­others. 17. ​Michael Anagnos, “Report of the Director,” in Forty-­Sixth Annual Report of the Trustees of the Perkins Institution and Mas­sa­chu­setts School for the Blind (Boston: Perkins, 1878), 64. 18. ​Samuel Gridley Howe, introduction to The Reader of Extracts in Prose and Verse from En­glish and American Authors (Boston: Perkins, 1839), 1. 19. ​The few novels printed reveal preference for British over American novels: Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield, Eliot’s Silas Marner, and Scott’s Ivanhoe. Dickens funded Perkins’s printing of The Old Curiosity Shop, at the cost of $1,700. 20. ​Anagnos, “Report of the Director,” 70. 21. ​William Chapin, “Report of the Principal,” in Forty-­Third Annual Report of the Man­ag­ers of the Pennsylvania Institution for the Instruction of the Blind (Philadelphia, 1876), 13. 22. ​Arthur Good, “Writing Machines for the Blind,” Popu­lar Science Monthly 33 (1888): 644. 23. ​Gitelman, Always Already New, 6. Many scholars tend to focus on vision and sound as the basis of textual mediation. An impor­tant exception is Mara Mills’s innovative disability

36   Prehistories and Transitions history of communications. See Mara Mills, “On Disability and Cybernetics: Helen Keller, Norbert Wiener, and the Hearing Glove,” differences 22 (2011), as well as “Media and Prosthesis: The Vocoder, the Artificial Larynx, and the History of Signal Pro­cessing,” qui parle 21, no. 1 (2012). 24. ​Lillian Nayder, “Blindness, Prick Writing, and Canonical Waste Paper: Reimagining Dickens in Harriet and Letitia,” Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth ­Century 19 (2014): 13. 25. ​Darren Wershler-­Henry, The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 45. 26. ​Frank Hall, “Superior Legibility of Braille,” Outlook for the Blind 3, no. 1 (1909): 43. 27. ​Frances Koestler, The Unseen Minority: A Social History of Blindness in the United States (New York: American Foundation for the Blind Press, 1976), 99. 28. ​Jan-­Eric Olsén, “Vicariates of the Eye: Blindness, Sense Substitution, and Writing Devices in the Nineteenth ­Century,” Mosaic 46, no. 3 (2013): 85. 29. ​Wershler-­Henry, Iron Whim, 49–50. 30. ​Gabriel Farrell, The Story of Blindness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956), 110. 31. ​It was common for blind ­people to “read” lit­er­a­ture by having a sighted friend read to them. ­Because rec­ord of the novel’s printing in embossed type has not (yet) been found, likely someone read ­Little ­Women aloud to Partridge. 32. ​Louisa May Alcott, ­Little ­Women, ed. Elaine Showalter (New York: Penguin, 1989), 60. 33. ​In its phrasing the title keeps com­pany with H. F. Tingley’s Incidents in the Life of Milton W. Streeter (1850), Charles B. Taylor’s Incidents in the Life of an En­glish Bishop (1850), Jacob Barker’s Incidents in the Life of Jacob Barker (1855), Solomon Bayley’s slave narrative Incidents in the Life of Solomon Bayley (1859), and most famously Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). 34. ​Susan Schweik, The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public (New York: NYU Press, 2009), 260. 35. ​Sarah Baker, The Woodman’s Nannette and Other Tales (Louisville: American Printing House for the Blind, 1885). Michael Zinman Collection of Printing for the Blind, Library Com­ pany of Philadelphia. 36. ​Ellen Gruber Garvey, Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Re­nais­sance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

1922–1968 The Disenchanted Lit­er­a­ture of Homeownership

adrienne brown

The 1936 cartoon short “She Wronged Him Right” features the iconic Betty Boop on stage playing another familiar archetype from the thirties—­a farmer facing foreclosure. Boop and her animals pace a farm stage set to the melancholic accompaniment of “Home Sweet Home” in response to receiving a letter that reads “Pay Mortgage ­today, or e­ lse.” When the villainous mortgage holder arrives, Betty pleads poverty, prompting him to gruffly insist that she marry him to save her farm. Repelling his unwanted advances, Boop calls out for her boyfriend to save her. And though he ultimately does with absurd flourish, the fate of her property remains unresolved. In many ways, “She Wronged Him Right” is a piece of its time. Boop’s impending foreclosure reflects the circumstances many Americans found themselves in during the ­Great Depression, when a third of farmers lost their land to foreclosure and nearly half of all residential loans w ­ ere delinquent. And yet the short riffs on a genre that predates the Depression by almost a ­century. The mortgage melodrama, originating on the Eu­ro­pean stage in the early nineteenth c­ entury, revolved around the efforts of a ­family to hold on to ancestral estates threatened by dispossession, usually with a detour through a marriage plot. Though mortgage melodramas w ­ ere originally written to appeal to bourgeois anx­i­eties of displacement in France and Ireland, they found an ­eager American audience in the late nineteenth c­ entury primed to feel outrage at the violation of allegedly inalienable property rights.1 In American adaptations of the genre, Eu­ro­pean ancestral estates morph into small western farms and decaying southern plantations. Mortgage melodrama describes a range of texts around the turn of the twentieth ­century, from the embattled farmers described in Frank Norris’s realist epics and the sentimental plantation tales of Thomas Nelson Page to the plight of Dorothy’s beleaguered ­Uncle Henry in Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz, who in the sixth installment of the series

38   Prehistories and Transitions

mortgages his Kansas farm following the damaging tornado, causing him, Auntie Em, and Dorothy to move to Oz to escape their creditors. The mortgage melodrama ebbed somewhat in the early twentieth ­century as the attention of both American lit­er­a­ture and its readers turned ­toward expanding urban centers, where it was often easier to rent than to buy. Whereas owning one’s land, a site for generating income and sustenance, signaled the capacity for economic in­de­pen­dence in the nineteenth ­century, the growth of manufacturing complexes and consumer markets in the twentieth ­century reconfigured the value of homeownership.2 Within the new American economy, homes w ­ ere less common as places for making a living and increasingly seen as rewards for having made a living elsewhere. Following the rise in homeownership in the 1920s and its dramatic fall during the G ­ reat Depression, mortgage melodramas resurged once more. Films such as Gone with the Wind (1939), It’s A Wonderful Life (1946), and the aforementioned The Wizard of Oz (1939) each revolved around the quest to return to or retain life-­sustaining property threatened by debt-­holding villains. The mortgage melodrama proved similarly popu­lar on stage in this period, with no fewer than five Broadway plays staged between 1927 and 1935 using mortgage debt as a plot device.3 As timelines go, the mortgage melodrama remains relatively minor within the study of American lit­er­a­ture. Coined by scholars of drama who first identified the genre, the conceit of the mortgage melodrama has not traveled very far beyond per­for­mance studies. A similar marginality haunts the broader canon of homeownership lit­er­a­ture in the United States, to which the mortgage melodrama belongs. Works showcasing property relations have generally been absorbed into literary canons of place or­ga­nized by region (New E ­ ngland, the West, the Midwest, the South), typology (the urban, rural, and suburban), or migratory patterns (westward expansion, the G ­ reat Migration, white flight)—­ each with discrete timelines all their own. But organ­izing works by place has helped to obscure the practices of financing and owner­ship superseding ­these regional and typological distinctions. Charting the evolution of the lit­er­a­ture of homeownership helps trou­ble homeownership’s status as a timelessly desirable norm, foregrounding how this desire was produced and, at times, refused at vari­ous points in the twentieth c­ entury, even as property was becoming central to the American Dream. To return to “She Wronged Him Right,” we might understand this short as belonging to not one but two categories of homeownership lit­er­a­ture in the United States, each with its own distinct timeline. This short could be

1922–1968: The Literature of Homeownership   39

classified as a mortgage melodrama—­a genre that, as I’ve already suggested, has an expansive timeline ebbing and waning with the fortunes of the private housing market. At its core, the mortgage melodrama reifies homeownership as the cornerstone of liberal subjectivity, echoing the notion that life, liberty, and residential property form the core of individual sovereignty. Even when staging the trauma of actually or potentially losing a home, t­ hese works stop short of questioning the absolute value of private homeownership even as they indict the economic systems that leave families vulnerable to its dispossession. But if we consider “She Wronged Him Right” as a deformation of the mortgage melodrama—­treating the mortgage melodrama’s ossified emotional responses to property and its dispossession as farce—­the short shares affinities with a body of lit­er­a­ture most energetically produced in the United States between the 1920s and the late 1960s that questioned the transformative capacity of homeownership and its melodramatic import. It is the timeline of this more ambivalent and disenchanted lit­er­a­ture of homeownership that this essay charts. Attempting to disrupt cele­bration of owner­ship encouraged by realtors, developers, and the federal government, the lit­er­a­ture I track in what follows interrogates the mortgage melodrama’s foundational tenet—­that owning property is inherently noble, wise, or moral. By contesting homeownership’s status as the bedrock of the American Dream, ­these works dispute not only the meaning and utility of homeownership but also the systems of valuation, debt, appraisal, heteronormativity, and white supremacy often reified by its promotion. Falling short of a bona fide genre, the disenchanted lit­er­a­ture of homeownership is rangy; it was produced by writers on the left and the right, shares few stylistic markers, spans a number of genres and de­cades, and overrides traditional divisions among farmsteads, suburban single-­family homes, and urban housing. This scaled-­out literary history makes vis­i­ble the broader critique of the ideology of owner­ship under­lying vari­ous regional lit­er­a­tures of owner­ship. What unites this other­wise varied and disparate canon is the shared effort of the lit­er­a­ture it contains to disentangle home from homeownership, marking a dissatisfaction with the promises of residential property while exploring other ways of valuing modes of dwelling.

The 1920s and the Facade of Homeownership That Amer­i­ca would become a nation of homeowners in the twentieth c­ entury was not preordained. The majority of Americans did not own their own homes or necessarily even desire to for much of the nation’s history. Though aspirations

40   Prehistories and Transitions

for the United States to be populated by property o ­ wners originated in Jeffersonian agrarianism, by 1920 only 43 ­percent of Americans fell into that category. It is only when the federal government began actively encouraging homeownership in the 1920s within expanding urban and suburban corridors that, as housing historian Lawrence Vale writes, “the ideological under­pinnings of homeownership reached full flower.”4 The federal government began producing its own version of cheery mortgage dramas in a series of campaigns in the twenties celebrating homeownership as a patriotic enterprise ­toward which all good citizens should strive. In the wake of the Rus­sian Revolution, as well as efforts by reformers such as Jacob Riis and Jane Addams to encourage investments in detached single-­family homes as antidotes to tenements, the federal government entered the home booster business in 1919 with the Department of ­Labor’s participation in the “Own Your Own Home” campaign. Attempting to draw a moral distinction between renters and o ­ wners, the campaign passed out buttons to schoolchildren; commissioned songs, dances, and lectures touting homeownership’s benefits; and even staged a wedding in a model home. The government would deepen its involvement with private real estate markets in 1921, when then secretary of commerce Herbert Hoover became head of the “Better Homes in Amer­i­ca” movement, selling the benefits of homeownership to the public through pamphlets, magazines, and editorials. T ­ hese government-­endorsed efforts made the case that buying a home was not only a smart financial investment but also an honorable one, linking homeownership to the development of “moral muscle” and the integrity of the ­family unit. Though by the 1920s the home was no longer seen as the key to economic autonomy, ­these campaigns argued that homeownership signaled the spatial sovereignty of one’s f­ amily life, serving as proof of its ­owners’ dignity, fitness, and civic-­mindedness. But ­these campaigns also reeked of propaganda and adspeak, belying their entanglement with profit-­driven private industry. It is this slickness that Sinclair Lewis’s 1922 best seller, Babbitt, satirizes. The novel unflatteringly depicts its titular character’s role as realtor at a time when the field of real estate was attempting to legitimate itself by touting the nobility of its product. Not only does Babbitt live in a new residential housing development characterized by sterile uniformity; his com­pany also buys, develops, and sells property in neighborhoods in and around the fictional midwestern town of Zenith—­often colluding to buy in advance of street extensions. The novel is filled with ads and speeches emphasizing the ideological contortions used to make real estate appear to be a sound financial and moral investment.

1922–1968: The Literature of Homeownership   41

The rabidity of Babbitt’s deflation of homeownership ideology points ­toward the broader ambivalences about its value and meaning in the early twenties. Before the amortized long-­term mortgages that would become standard in the following de­cade, mortgages ­were generally five-­year balloon loans covering only one-­half to two-­thirds of a home’s value, requiring buyers to provide down payments as large as 50 ­percent and thus putting owner­ship out of reach for a good deal of Americans. As a result of their onerous financing, homes ­were not yet considered a foundational life purchase, but one of many speculative securities in which one might invest. Though Babbitt delivers speeches insisting on homeownership’s merits, the novel continually deflates his proclamation of serving as a “prophetic engineer” and a “seer of the ­future development of the community.” When we are first introduced to Babbitt, we are told by the narrator that “he made nothing in par­tic­u­lar” but was “nimble in the calling of selling ­houses for more than ­people could afford to pay.” Despite Babbitt’s insistences to the contrary, the novel finds l­ ittle difference between the realtor and the speculator, or between the renter and the buyer for that ­matter.5 While lacking Babbitt’s satirical tone, The ­Great Gatsby (1925) approaches homeownership with similar ambivalence. Unlike his ally Nick Carraway, who is, it turns out, rightfully skeptical of homeownership’s capacity to secure Gatsby’s assimilation into the Anglo-­moneyed class, Gatsby believes deeply in the transformative power of property to trump his lesser origins. Before he even meets his ­great love Daisy, Gatsby is described as falling first for her ­family home in Louisville. “It amazed him—he had never been in such a beautiful ­house before.” Gatsby is awed by her home’s coolly beautiful bedrooms, its busy corridors, and even the ­imagined presence of Daisy’s previous suitors, whose presence he felt “all about the ­house.” His l­ ater curation of his Normandy mansion in West Egg is an attempt to ensconce Daisy within his own version of an ancestral estate. But for all its bells and whistles, what Gatsby seems to love most about his West Egg mansion is the fact that he owns it. He inadvertently admits with pride to Nick, for instance, that it took him three years to accrue the capital needed to purchase his home, undermining his own origin story as a moneyed inheritor. Upon Gatsby’s death, his f­ ather proudly shows Nick the photo­graph his son sent of his home, presenting him with a beat-up picture “cracked in the corners and dirty with many hands” that belies the value both ­father and son placed in its possession.6 Gatsby’s hunger for homeownership marks him as a striver newly on the make. Nick, Tom, and Daisy, however, do not share Gatsby’s fixation on homeownership as a magical medium. Nick rents a “weatherbeaten bungalow at

42   Prehistories and Transitions

eighty a month” described as “squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season,” while Tom and Daisy own a “cheerful red-­and-­white Georgian Colonial mansion,” a tastefully conservative style that evokes the Anglo-­American exceptionalism Tom espouses. Even though Nick rents his bungalow and Tom and Daisy own their mansion, their shared Anglo heritage outranks homeownership as a mea­sure of their standing. Despite Gatsby’s best efforts, his home validates neither his wealth, nor his standing, nor, ultimately, his whiteness in their eyes. When Tom attends his first party at Gatsby’s, he sneers that its owner “must have strained himself to get this menagerie together” before proclaiming, “I’d like to know who he is and what he does,” insinuating that his ­house is not enough to vouch for his character or, as other critics have argued, his race.7 Homeownership in Gatsby is yoked to the specter of racial passing, Amer­i­ca’s other g­ reat literary obsession. A purchased home cannot yet account for its inhabitant’s character. This would change following the Second World War, but in the twenties, where you came from mattered more than where you came to live, no m ­ atter w ­ hether you rented or owned ­these dwellings. Homeownership appears in Gatsby and Babbitt as one more site of con­spic­u­ous consumption, not yet laden with the kinds of moralism or long-­term investment it would accrue in the following de­cade.

The ­Great Depression and the Ache of Owner­ship Despite the ambivalences expressed in texts like Babbitt and Gatsby, homeownership rates r­ ose in the 1920s. But the G ­ reat Depression would bring this trend to a stark halt. Not only could many mortgagees not repay their home loans, but credit also dried up. As foreclosure rates r­ ose, home values declined 30 ­percent between 1928 and 1933. In response to this crisis in the mortgage markets, the Roo­se­velt administration created the Home Own­er’s Loan Corporation (HOLC) in 1933 to refinance troubled mortgages, legislation followed by the establishment of the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) in 1934 and the United States Housing Authority (USHA) in 1937. Whereas mortgage melodramas, which experienced a revival a­ fter the ­Great Depression, ­were premised on the indebted successfully fighting back against their exploiters to hold on to their land, a subset of the lit­er­a­ture of foreclosure emerging in this period upended this formula.8 Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath is one such example of a mortgage melodrama gone awry. The Joad farm is repossessed before the novel begins. Instead of narrating the Joads’ fight to retain their seized property, Steinbeck instead follows their move westward,

1922–1968: The Literature of Homeownership   43

leading them to the mi­grant camps, where they discover more collectivist modes of living. Though it is set into motion by the dispossession of property, the novel’s object by its conclusion is not the reacquisition of the homestead but a form of re­distribution not necessarily routed through private property. Foreclosure tales both before and ­after the Depression largely centered on rural farmsteads, but urban properties ­were not immune to dispossession. By 1934, roughly 44 ­percent of the first mortgages on urban owner-­occupied homes ­were in default. Urban foreclosure is the subject of Josephine Lawrence’s best-­ selling novel If I Have Four Apples (1935), which treats foreclosure as a moral failing of undisciplined Americans taking on debt to fund their consumerist lifestyles. The book centers on the Hoe ­family, solidly m ­ iddle class before the ­Great Depression but now deep in debt. Though the salary of the f­ amily’s patriarch has been greatly reduced, the ­family still lives the way it did prior to the crisis. M ­ other Hoe and her c­ hildren are enchanted with consumer goods, costly leisure activities, and dreams of college despite lacking the talent or work ethic to make t­ hese investments pay off. Mr. Hoe’s bad object is his home. Despite the repeated advising of the bud­get columnist for the local newspaper (a job Lawrence herself held at the Newark Sunday Call) that he sell his home as soon as pos­si­ble given his level of indebtedness, Mr. Hoe has so bought into the ideology of homeownership pushed by the Babbitts of the world that he refuses. “Show me a renter and I’ll show you a shiftless cuss,” he proclaims. The narrator explains of Hoe that “the princi­ple of home owner­ship has been intensively drilled into him,” with Hoe buying into platitudes about homeownership as fulfilling his duty to “his Maker, his country, and his ­family.”9 We soon learn that ­these words, which he repeats as a mantra of sorts, ­were fed to him by the realtor who sold him his home. Mr. Hoe’s last hope for holding on to his home is for the HOLC to step in and purchase his loan, giving him a chance to refinance at a lower interest rate. But the agency refuses to aid him, assessing that he is not “the type of man to own a home. Refinance him, get him on his feet, he’d only get himself into another jam.” Lawrence’s stand-in, reflecting her own fiscal conservatism, chides the HOLC’s misguided mission. “Must the taxpayers who h ­ aven’t as yet been ruined, be forced to undertake the support of five p ­ eople who c­ ouldn’t strug­gle through a world that ­didn’t include oil burners and Venetian blinds?”10 And yet, despite her unsympathetic portrayal of the Hoes as selfish dolts for whom homeownership should be out of reach, Lawrence nonetheless shares with the more progressive Steinbeck a disdain for the hollow ideology of property as the engine of a masculinist patriotism.

44   Prehistories and Transitions

­ oward the end of The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck describes the anxiety T of property-­owning Californians regarding the encroachment of Okies, whom they viewed as having “no sense of property rights.” “A man without property,” the landed insist, fails to “know the ache of owner­ship.” Lawrence and Steinbeck c­ ounter, however, that the ones who most strongly feel the ache of owner­ship are ­those who have been dispossessed of their property. In both ­these novels, the ache of owner­ship appears as not only a hunger but also an injury, generating wounds that may not be tolerated for much longer. As one character warns another at the end of If I Have Four Apples, when the dream of property dries up, “then we have revolutions.”11 For t­ hose who left the Depression deeply disillusioned by property’s promises, both Steinbeck and Lawrence won­der ­whether their disgruntled energy might be repurposed to fuel more revolutionary visions.

The Golden Age of Homeownership and Its Discontents The federal government, too, recognized the financial and ideological instability of the mortgage markets precipitating the ­Great Depression. Whereas the HOLC was created to staunch the Depression’s immediate impact, purchasing close to one million defaulted loans between 1933 and 1935, the FHA was tasked with looking to the ­future of the mortgage in the United States. Its efforts, along with ­those of the 1944 GI Bill to stabilize mortgages through insurance, put homeownership within reach for a new class of Americans. But this expansion was predicated on the exclusion of certain new immigrants and, more totally, African Americans, whom ­these government policies frequently disenfranchised. From the broken promises of 40 acres and a mule to the capacity for white southerners to strip African Americans of their property at any time, as well as the exploitative practice of sharecropping, the denial of property rights to African Americans was the bedrock of the Jim Crow system in the South. In the North, realtors’ codes and emerging redline practices helped corral blacks within crowded quarters in urban centers. The rise of urban renewal at midcentury would lead to the destruction of already-­scarce black housing, offering occupants ­little compensation and inferior relocation options. This is not to suggest, however, that blacks w ­ ere completely excluded from homeownership. In addition to the roughly 150,000 African American farm ­owners in the United States in 1900, a growing number of blacks owned homes on the suburban peripheries of northern and southern cities, as well as in urban black enclaves, as the real estate empires of Carl Hansberry in Chicago and Philip A. Payton

1922–1968: The Literature of Homeownership   45

in Harlem partially attest.12 But the gap between black and white homeownership rates remained sizable. Only 22.8 ­percent of African Americans owned their homes in 1940, compared to 45.6 ­percent of whites. Although black and white homeownership rates increased in the United States in the 1940s, the gap between ­these rates remained. The steep increase in white homeownership was largely due to government interventions insuring fixed-­rate long-­term mortgages, decreasing the frequency of refinancing, as well as the size of both down payments and monthly mortgage payments. The GI Bill further expanded homeownership for whites, providing even more insurance for loans to veterans, making them especially good bets for lenders. But African Americans w ­ ere largely left out of this boom. Not only w ­ ere potential black home buyers more likely to be denied mortgages and made to pay higher rates for the privilege when they did secure financing, but neighborhoods where African Americans lived ­were also viewed by the FHA and mortgage lenders as bad investments.13 Home buyers, white or black, w ­ ere discouraged from purchasing in neighborhoods with the potential to “change over,” further intensifying residential segregation. Although homeownership’s centrality to the American Dream was cemented in the forties and fifties, the lit­er­a­ture of homeownership in t­ hese de­cades emphasizes the compromises, complications, and corruptions that accompanied this expansion, as well as the changing meaning of homeownership in this age of redlining and suburban expansion. Two works by Richard Wright in 1940 and 1941 emphasize the extent to which access to residential property was racialized in both the North and the South. The first half of Native Son (1940) connects the propertied world of the white Daltons, who own the South Side Real Estate Com­pany, to the horrible living conditions of the black Thomas f­amily, who rent one of their rat-­infested properties. Protagonist Bigger Thomas’s fugitive route through the South Side takes the reader deeper into that region’s dilapidated housing, which feels all the starker in comparison to the amenities of the Dalton estate sitting only a few blocks from the crumbling buildings that finance its lushness. A year ­later, Wright would paint a more structural portrait of black alienation from property in 12 Million Black Voices, linking the profitable sharecropping practices of southern “Lords of the Lands” and the exploitative rental markets benefiting northern “Bosses of the Building” as interchangeable overlords benefitting from black oppression. Wright demonstrates that w ­ hether Africans Americans resided in the North or the South or w ­ ere subject to de facto or de jure segregation, the economic incentives b ­ ehind the subordination of black property rights remained largely the same.

46   Prehistories and Transitions

But rather than suggesting that greater access to property was the solution to black disenfranchisement, as many propertied black homeowners increasingly did in the postwar period, Wright remains skeptical in his early writings about the privileged place of private property within the platform for civil rights. In Native Son, for instance, the police grill Bigger about his views on property rights in order to ascertain his politics and by extension his guilt, asking him, “Do you think the government ­ought to build ­houses for ­people to live in?”14 The criminalization of public housing, Wright suggests, is part of the apparatus that puts money in the Daltons’ pockets and leaves the Thomases living in hovels. Wright’s praise for the Harlem River public housing complex in both his journalism for the Daily Worker and his work for the Federal Writer’s Proj­ect further suggests his commitment to thinking about alternatives to property as a foundation for politics.15 The promise of public housing that Richard Wright and John Steinbeck entertained earlier in the c­ entury was already starting to sour by the time Frank London Brown set his 1959 novel, Trumbull Park, in a housing proj­ect. Following the plight of several African American families to integrate a public housing complex in order to escape the dilapidated housing available to them on the South Side, the novel suggests that t­ hese families have merely traded one inferno for another, given their frequent harassment by their white neighbors. The continuous bombings ­these families endure ultimately help to birth a new solidarity between them. In an echo of the Joads before them, the families of Trumbull Park have their faith shaken not just in private housing but also in public housing in its current state, leading them to seek comfort and the inklings of a new politics in and with each other. Yet the most prominent residential lit­er­a­ture to emerge at midcentury centered on the rise of the suburbs. Whereas the Daltons maintain their home in the white urban enclave of Chicago’s Kenwood neighborhood in the 1940s, by the 1950s the Daltons of the world ­were leaving such places ­behind for expanding suburban corridors ringing older metropolitan areas. A growing body of lit­er­a­ture arrived in the 1950s to capture their experience. Works like Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1954), John Cheever’s The House­ breaker of Shady Hill (1958), John Updike’s Rabbit Run (1960), and Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road (1961), as well as dozens of middlebrow novels long out of print, gave rise to the image of the suburbs as places of white middle-­class discontentment, this time replacing much of the satire of Babbitt with a more melancholic mixture of angst and tragedy.16

1922–1968: The Literature of Homeownership   47

­ hese suburban works ­were part of the first generation of lit­er­a­ture to repT resent the new experience of the thirty-­year amortized mortgage introducing Americans to a new, restructured form of indebted homeownership. Buying a home at midcentury was billed as a lifelong investment, locking its o ­ wners not just into long-­term debt but also into ­careers and ­family structures optimal for securing its repayment. Mortgages, moreover, became a sanctioned mechanism for segregation, reordering racial categories by assimilating certain ethnic and once immigrant bodies into whiteness while continuing to exile ­others from its privileges. The thirty-­year mortgage even changed the ways Americans read, creating new commuting cultures that affected the time and space of literary consumption. If the genre of the mortgage melodrama is or­ga­nized around the immediate crisis of imminent displacement, thirty-­year mortgage realism foregrounds its characters’ bumpy attunement to the spatial and temporal rhythms this new financial mechanism demanded of them. Its protagonists grapple with the emotional price of the security offered by t­ hese mortgages, contingent on the insecurity of persons and property beyond the suburb’s borders deemed bad investments. Of the canonical lit­er­a­ture of the suburbs, John Cheever’s Shady Hill stories from the late fifties stand out for their attention to the racialization of homeownership and security at midcentury. Whereas homeownership fails to secure Gatsby’s whiteness in Long Island thirty years prior, in Cheever’s fictional Westchester suburb of Shady Hill—­the setting for the stories collected in his 1958 book, The House­breaker of Shady Hill—no one knows where their neighbor is from, and every­one is busy remaking themselves through housing.17 The ability to secure a mortgage, to buy a home, and to appear white and exclude ­those who do not is Shady Hill’s racial litmus test. T ­ here are no networks of old money or racial lineages to keep track of in Cheever’s world—­only freshly minted suburbanites who have all left urban enclaves for new starts in ­these suburban frontiers. By buying a home in Shady Hill, its inhabitants have invested in whiteness, financially tethering themselves to its maintenance and incentivizing the devaluation of blackness as a drain on property value. With realtors and mortgage lenders racially vetting borrowers, Cheever captures the declining importance of the one-­drop rule. Race is no longer an epistemological truth to be hunted down, as Tom Buchanan does in Gatsby. Passing is encouraged in Shady Hill if it allows its inhabitants to better hold up the social contract of whiteness. In his attention to the ways homeownership impacted the perception and definition of race, Cheever is in many ways closer to a writer like Lorraine

48   Prehistories and Transitions

Hansberry than the suburban writers with whom he is often lumped. Hansberry’s 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun, like Cheever’s Shady Hill stories, approaches homeownership as both a dream and a burden. In this twist on the mortgage melodrama, rather than struggling to make their ­house payments, the Younger ­family strug­gles to be allowed to make them, hoping to trade their cramped kitchenette for a detached home in a white neighborhood. But the play falls short of championing homeownership as a definitive marker of pro­gress. Walter’s obsession with commercial property in the form of a longed-­for liquor store echoes Mr. Hoe’s detrimental fixation with homeownership de­cades prior. When Walter gives up on his dream of the store at the play’s end to support his ­family’s dream of homeownership, this moment is sold as one of redemption. But while Hansberry sympathetically pres­ents the Youngers’ desire for decent accommodations, the play is careful to avoid casting the home they ultimately purchase—at g­ reat emotional and financial cost to themselves—as an inherently good object. Mama Younger’s tortured heaving at the end of the play suggests the extent of her previous experience of displacement. She clings to a small potted plant as she leaves the apartment for the final time, an act that points to her capacity to feel an attachment to land that ­isn’t necessarily determined by its status as owned property. Given the harassment the ­family is sure to encounter in the neighborhood they are integrating, the audience holds their breath at the play’s end, unsure ­whether the Youngers’ newfound unity ­will be able to withstand their coming persecution. The audience is left wondering ­whether the fight for property rights is in fact identical to the fight for civil rights and ­whether the pursuit of decent living conditions must necessarily be routed through the suburbs.

The Fair Housing Act and Homeownership Resignation Writers in the 1960s continued to question homeownership’s promises of happiness, security, and belonging. However, the dependence of t­ hese promises on racial exclusion became increasingly undeniable within fiction as well as beyond it. Though the suburbs remained a topic of interest for writers in this period, a growing number of them w ­ ere representing t­ hese spaces not as isolated enclaves but as part of broader regional flows, depicting the intimate relationship between suburbanization and the neglect of urban spaces. Philip Roth’s “Goodbye Columbus” (1959), Joyce Carol Oates’s “How I Contemplated the World from the Detroit House of Correction and Began My Life Over Again” (1969), and the yoked works of Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) and “A Journey into the Mind of Watts” (1965) connect the development of

1922–1968: The Literature of Homeownership   49

the suburbs and the expansion of whiteness it facilitated to the waning resources of the ethnic enclaves in the inner city. ­These texts depict metropolitan ecosystems that, despite their relative differences in wealth, resources, and owner­ ship rates, remain spatially and socially woven together. ­These writers insist that the story of suburban ennui cannot be understood without reference to urban cores on which suburban protagonists eco­nom­ically and affectively depended. Suburban lit­er­a­ture from the 1960s, continuing to chart the journey white Americans w ­ ere making from urban enclaves to single-­family developments, deepened the understanding of ­these “third spaces” as sites of white diaspora, a term critic Catherine Jurca coined to describe the “reinvent[ion of] white flight as the persecution of ­those who flee.”18 But in her 1966 novel The Landlord, African American author Kristin Hunter subverts this trajectory, focusing instead on a white suburbanite’s efforts to use residential property to better integrate himself into the city. Better known t­ oday as the basis for the quirky film adaptation by Hal Ashby, The Landlord details the change in heart of Elgar Enders, a white thirty-­something son of a wealthy developer who in an act of rebellion purchases a small apartment complex in a black neighborhood with the idea of both turning a profit and finding a purpose. Enders ends up moving into this apartment building, where his burgeoning interest in building a community with and for his tenants complicates his earlier desires for property-­oriented stability. Enders goes from being an owner, described as “his only designation on the most glorious day of his life ­until now,” to making risky investments in both the property where he resides and the ­people with whom he shares this residence.19 By the novel’s end, Enders joins his tenants in resisting an urban renewal proposal to tear down the apartment and relocate its residents, fighting with them to improve the place in which they already live. Novels like The Landlord, openly referring to rental properties as the “machinery of dispossession,” would become less prevalent in the de­cades that followed.20 Following a series of urban riots in the sixties, the further waning of faith in the transformative possibilities of public housing, and the passage of the Fair Housing Act in 1968 (making discrimination in housing markets illegal), we find writers focusing less intently on homeownership’s pitfalls as a property relation. Disenchantment with homeownership, of course, does not dissipate in the 1970s—­later works by Gloria Naylor, Richard Ford, John Edgar Wideman, Jonathan Franzen, Chang Rae Lee, Mat Johnson, and Angela Flournoy attest to the sustained interest by fiction writers in the complications

50   Prehistories and Transitions

of homeownership. But in lit­er­a­ture written ­after the 1970s, ­there is a greater sense of resignation to homeownership as a normative aspiration. Disgruntlement with one’s living situation supersedes more specific attention to housing as a financial mechanism dictating how one lives. With the majority of Americans investing a good deal of their wealth and aspirations into their homes, walking away or forsaking this option seems harder to entertain even in fiction. We might also connect the waning lit­er­a­ture of property disenchantment with the perceived success of the Fair Housing Act of 1968, outlawing discrimination in the private housing market. Though far from eliminating racial steering, this legislation helped grant African Americans who could afford it access to residential property in neighborhoods from which they ­were once barred, deepening the divide between black property ­owners leaving urban centers and ­those who remained in inner cities as ­either renters or ­owners of devalued property.21 If writers in the late sixties openly grappled with the relationship between homeownership and racism, the Fair Housing Act, like the Civil Rights Act four years prior, proffered a l­egal solution to discriminatory practices while failing to dismantle the financial structures dependent on their entrenchment. The Fair Housing Act, it could be argued, inadvertently cleared the way for homeownership to fi­nally become the normative state of dwelling in the United States, increasing the number of total home buyers on the private market while removing the last hurdle preventing the broader embrace of homeownership as the solution to economic and, now, racial disparity. And yet, given the plight of both homeowners and dislocated public housing residents attempting to rebuild and return following the destruction wrought by Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, the mass foreclosures following the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis, and the lead-­contaminated ­water piped into rented and owned homes alike in Flint, Michigan, the failures of homeownership to guarantee one’s health, happiness, or security are currently on display as never before. Notions of sovereign owner­ship seem less and less equipped to deal with the entwined natu­ral, infrastructural, financial, and social crises and ongoing situations disrupting where and how we live. The stalwart setting of the single-­family home steadied by the thirty-­year mortgage, which was variously enshrined and resisted by a good deal of American lit­er­a­ture in the ­middle of the twentieth ­century, is being increasingly usurped within the con­temporary literary imagination by tent cities, refugee camps, military encampments, and reservations. The lit­er­a­ture of dispossession, which has historically shadowed

1922–1968: The Literature of Homeownership   51

the lit­er­a­ture of residential owner­ship in the United States, is progressively becoming a genre all its own. Notes 1. ​For more on the history of mortgage melodramas, see Robert Brustein, Theatre of Revolt (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1964); and Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-­Atlantic Per­for­mance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). 2. ​For accounts of mortgage systems in the late nineteenth-­century city, see Margaret Garb, City of American Dreams: A History of Homeownership and Housing Reform in Chicago, 1871–1919 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 3. ​­These plays include Porter Emerson Browne’s The Bad Man (1920), Samuel Shipman’s Creoles (1927), Louis Weitzenkorn’s First Mortgage (1929), Lawton Campbell’s Solid South (1930), Channing Pollock’s The House Beautiful (1931), and Stephen Gross’s One Good Year (1935). 4. ​Lawrence Vale, “The Ideological Origins of Affordable Homeownership Efforts,” in Chasing the American Dream: New Perspectives on Affordable Homeownership, ed. William M. Rohe and Harry L. Watson (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 17. 5. ​Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt (New York: Collier & Son, 1911), 38, 6. Catherine Jurca finds Lewis critiquing not only Hoover’s homeownership boosterism but also arguments Lewis Mumford and ­others made about the inane contentedness of suburban homeowners. See Catherine Jurca, White Diaspora: The Suburb and the Twentieth-­Century Novel (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2011), 52. 6. ​F. Scott Fitzgerald, The ­Great Gatsby, ed. Kathleen Parkinson (New York: Penguin, 1988). 7. ​Fitzgerald, 5, 7, 82. See Walter Benn Michaels’s claim in Our Amer­i­ca: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993) about Gatsby’s status as not entirely white (25). 8. ​For more on rural novels featuring foreclosure in the early twentieth ­century, see Florian Freitag, The Farm Novel in North Amer­i­ca: Genre and Nation in the United States, En­glish Canada, and French Canada, 1845–1945 (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2013), 228. 9. ​Josephine Lawrence, If I Have Four Apples (New York: F. A. Stokes, 1935), 73. 10. ​Lawrence, 301, 104. 11. ​Lawrence, 303. 12. ​For more on black homeownership, see Andrew Weise, Places of Their Own (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); and N. D. B. Connolly, A World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). 13. ​Geographer Amy Hillier suggests that the role played by HOLC maps in redlining has been overstated. See Amy Hillier, “Redlining and the Home ­Owners’ Loan Corporation,” Journal of Urban History 29, no. 4 (May 2003): 394–420. Historian David Freund ­counters, however, that one cannot deny that “the HOLC was inextricably linked to extensive institutional networks that created and disseminated appraisal practices” rooted in race. See David Freund, Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban Amer­i­ca (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 431. 14. ​Richard Wright, Native Son (New York: Library of Amer­i­ca, 1989), 200. 15. ​See Earle V. Bryant, ed., Byline Richard Wright: Articles from the Daily Worker and New Masses (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2015); and Richard Wright and Claude McKay, “A Portrait of Harlem,” in New York Pa­norama: A Comprehensive View of the Metropolis (New York: Harpers, 1938). 16. ​­These novels include William Manchester’s City of Anger (New York: Ballantine Books, 1953), David Karp’s Leave Me Alone (New York: Knopf, 1957), Keith Wheeler’s Peaceable Lane

52   Prehistories and Transitions (New York: Signet, 1960), Christopher Davis’s First ­Family (New York: Coward McCann, 1961), and John McPartland’s No Down Payment (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1957). 17. ​For more on Cheever’s racial imaginary and its relationship to The ­Great Gatsby, see Adrienne Brown, “We Wear the White Mask: John Cheever Writes Race,” MFS Modern Fiction Studies 64, no. 1 (Spring 2018): 52–78. 18. ​Jurca, White Diaspora, 8. 19. ​Kristin Hunter, The Landlord (New York: Scribner’s, 1966), 210. 20. ​Hunter, 213. 21. ​Preston H. Smith studies the politics produced by this divide in Racial Democracy and the Black Metropolis: Housing Policy in Postwar Housing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012).

1830–1924 The Lit­er­a­tures of Sovereignty

phillip round

My friends ask, w ­ hether t­ here are any Americans?—­any with an American idea,—­ any theory of the right f­uture of that country? Thus challenged, I bethought myself neither of caucuses nor congress, neither of presidents nor cabinet-­minister, nor of such as would make of Amer­i­ca another Eu­rope. I thought only of the simplest and purest minds; I said, “Certainly yes; but ­those who hold it are fanatics of a dream which I should hardly care to relate to your En­glish ears, to which it might be only ridicu­lous,—­and yet it is the only true.” So I opened the dogma of no-­government and non-­resistance, and anticipated the rejections and the fun. Ralph Waldo Emerson, En­glish Traits (1848)

When pressed by En­glish friends in 1848 to offer one example of a truly American contribution to Western civilization, Ralph Waldo Emerson hit on a rather curious locution: “no-­government and non-­resistance.” I say “curious” ­because Emerson conspicuously avoids more obvious categories of American social thought—­liberty, representative democracy, and religious freedom. But the Sage of Concord lived in a strangely inverted age. Po­liti­cal parties like the Locofoco Demo­crats and the “Know-­Nothings” largely defined themselves by what they w ­ ere not. The Locofoco platform was composed of laissez-­ faire economic policy (a kind of “no-­government and non-­resistance”) and any ­thing that was opposed to Tammany Hall. The Know-­Nothings, on the other hand, found their voice through re­sis­tance to racial difference, espousing nativist xenophobia based in arguments about Anglo-­Saxon sovereignty over American culture. Closely related to t­hese po­liti­cal parties was the broader anti-­government movement known as “nullification.” Adherents to this philosophy argued that nullification was a ­legal position that justified a state’s right to ignore federal law, thus “nullifying” the efficacy of the central government.

54   Prehistories and Transitions

Their efforts sparked the Nullification Crisis of 1832–1833, a sectional schism that pitted South Carolina against the federal government over the m ­ atter of the federal tariffs of 1828 and 1832. Nullification would haunt American politics down through the conclusion of the Civil War and shadow l­abor uprisings and Native American rebellions through the end of the ­century. Emerson’s Amer­i­ca was thus a place profoundly s­ haped by what the historian Daniel Walker Howe has called a “conspiracy paradigm” that encouraged citizens to doubt that ­either governments or individuals could root out evil and corruption and to assert that only some moral combine of the ­people—­“of the ­people, by the ­people, for the ­people”—­could guarantee the protection of the sovereign rights granted u ­ nder the Constitution.1 Both Whigs and Demo­ crats embraced the ­people, if with very dif­fer­ent emphases. The Whig Daniel Webster, when arguing Luther v. Borden before the Supreme Court, outlined his party’s position with his usual elegance: “Let all admit, what none deny, that the only source of po­liti­cal power in this country is the ­people. Let us admit that they are sovereign, for they are so; that is to say, the aggregate community, the collected ­will of the p ­ eople, is sovereign.”2 The devil was in the details. If Webster and his fellow Whigs believed that “the aggregate community is sovereign,” they had no intention of granting individuals the same freedoms. Sounding very much like a Federalist from a generation before, Webster reasoned that ­because the ­people “cannot act daily as the ­people,” they “must establish a government, and invest it with so much of the sovereign power as the case requires: and this sovereign power being delegated and placed in the hands of the government, . . . ​what is popularly called THE STATE.”3 Demo­crats like George Bancroft, however, put the emphasis on the plurality of citizens, on “the p ­ eople and not on the few, on persons and not on property, on the f­ ree development of public opinion and not on authority.” For Bancroft and other Demo­crats, the p ­ eople constituted an idealized “mind [that] eludes the power of appropriation. It exists only in its own individuality; it is a property which cannot be confiscated and cannot be torn away; it laughs at chains; it bursts from imprisonment; it defies mono­poly. A government of equal rights must, therefore, rest upon mind; not wealth, not brute force, the sum of the moral intelligence of the community should rule the State.”4 A stark contrast indeed, but one ­thing the two parties could agree on was the fact that the ­people was a po­liti­cal category that did not include ­women, blacks, and indigenous nations. Nonetheless, t­ hese groups also began to assert their rights through negation, in “no-­government,” in forms of sovereignty that attempted to constitute communities and co­ali­tions by defining them by

1830–1924: The Literatures of Sovereignty   55

what they ­were not. In 1830, for example, the Cherokee went to court to assert their sovereign rights to land and nationhood and fight against the state of Georgia’s intervention in their affairs. The tribal nation defined its po­liti­cal autonomy by showing that it was neither a state in the ­union nor a defeated ­people, but a sovereign nation ­under the law. The Marshall Court held, however, that while the Cherokee ­were indeed to be understood as “a distinct community occupying its own territory, with bound­aries accurately described, in which the laws of Georgia can have no force” (Worcester v. Georgia, 1832), they ­were still “domestic, dependent nations” (Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, 1831), thus neither an in­de­pen­dent government nor a hodgepodge collection of individuals, but a sovereign ­people who answered only to the federal government.5 In the same year that the Cherokee demanded Supreme Court recognition of their sovereignty, the African American abolitionist David Walker published An Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World (1830), a book that advocated racial solidarity as the best route to self-­determination. Walker structured his argument for po­liti­cal and bodily sovereignty in terms of the con­temporary “wretchedness” of the “coloured ­people of ­these United States of Amer­i­ca.” His is a rhe­toric that focuses on privation, and it finds its polemical voice primarily in opposition to white authority. The book itself is arranged to resemble the US Constitution, with a preamble and several articles. Walker, in turn, identifies the text’s collective voice as “we (coloured ­people of ­these United States),” in a defiant rejection of the US Constitution’s exclusive collectivity. When coupled with its peroration, a direct repetition and rebuttal of Jefferson’s rights language in the Declaration, t­ hese formal ele­ments of the work pres­ent readers and auditors with a sort of textual sit-­down strike of civil disobedience, asserting the very liberties that the Declaration had assured and that the Constitution had denied. Significantly, Walker petitions especially the illiterate members of his audience, expanding the public sphere specifically to include them: “Try to procure a copy of this Appeal and read it, or get some one to read it to them, for it is designed more particularly for them.”6 In 1842, workers sought status as “the p ­ eople” when the Mas­sa­chu­setts Supreme Court heard arguments in Commonwealth v. Hunt and held that ­labor combinations ­were ­legal. At issue was ­whether laborers (in this case, Mas­sa­chu­setts’s boot makers) could band together in a combine of the sort we now call a u ­ nion. Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw, though a Whig and not partial to laborers, wrote the majority opinion, noting that boot makers ­were “­free to work for whom they please, or not to work, if they so prefer. . . . ​We cannot perceive that it is criminal for men to agree together to exercise their own

56   Prehistories and Transitions

acknowledged rights, in such a manner as best to subserve their own interests.”7 Initially defined as “conspirators” by the economic elites who brought suit against them, the boot makers emerged as a community—­individuals who formed a combine based in a sensus communis. Just six years ­later, w ­ omen gathered at Seneca Falls, New York, to argue for their rights, thus establishing what became a yearly meeting of National ­Women’s Rights Conventions. Sojourner Truth’s famous speech at the 1851 convention in Akron, Ohio (“­Ain’t I a ­Woman?”), defines her equality by mea­sur­ing it against a man’s. Hers is a “non-­resistant” argument—­men are a quart and ­women are a pint, but “why ­can’t she have her l­ ittle half-­measure full?”8 In each of the above cases, negation and civil disobedience mark the politics of a marginalized group. In ­every instance, ­whether they ­were propertied white males or ­women of color, Americans of the 1830s sought a kind of sovereignty over their bodies and selves and constructed “literary” works that voice that sovereignty in dialects of difference, corporate authorship, and readerships. Facing the emergence of an undifferentiated “mass of men” (as Thoreau called them), writer a­ fter writer confronted the conundrum of a rapidly industrializing representative democracy that was producing individuals faster than it was communities. What, exactly, could make an individual a citizen? Melville’s scrivener, Bartleby, flourishes in isolation, his inscrutable and adamantine subjectivity the negation of his fellow office workers’ proffered community. Poe’s speaker in “The Raven” finds only the echo chamber of his own subjectivity (or, possibly, finds in the raven the sovereignty of nature in all of its terrible alterity: something Emerson himself defined by negation—­nature is the “not-me”). In another version, Hawthorne’s “My Kinsman Major Molineux” (1832) locates citizenship in the shared derisive laughter of a mob tarring and feathering an aristocrat. The year 1830 anchors the era of “the lit­er­a­ture of sovereignty” b ­ ecause it is the date when the Jackson administration legislated a sweeping negation of American Indian sovereignty and nullified Native ­peoples’ right to live in lands east of the Mississippi. Termed “the Removal Act,” Jackson’s law codified in its euphemistic title the spirit of this American age of conspiracy, negation, and “no-­government.” In 1830s American En­glish, “to remove” meant simply to cause a person or ­people “by law to move to another place,” but in its application, the Removal Act actually violently forced Native p ­ eoples into a harsh nonstate domain called “Indian Territory,” where they ­were subjected to extrajudicial forces and deprived of immediate federal redress, as a result of their ­great distance from the nation’s capital and the corrupt practices that characterized government supervision in the territory. The Removal Act thus institution-

1830–1924: The Literatures of Sovereignty   57

alized an American po­liti­cal discourse that defined individuals as members of groups whose standing in American society was somehow less than, dif­fer­ent from, or unequal to that of property-­owning white males. This discourse, in turn, gave rhetorical cover for settler colonialism in all its genocidal rage. With the establishment of the Indian Territory, Amer­i­ca euphemistically ushered in a “post-­frontier” era, in which Native communities ­were meta­phor­ically “dis­ appeared” and their polities opened for exploitation and settlement.9 It is a discourse and a rhe­toric that animates American understandings of the p ­ eople’s sovereignty from the Removal Act through Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), encompassing literary works as diverse as William Apess’s Eulogy for King Philip (1838) and Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson (1896). Seen from this perspective, American lit­er­a­ture entered an era in 1830 in which it engaged in a spirited conversation with the discourse of sovereignty, an exchange that bridged two periods of literary history that the Norton Anthology of American Lit­er­a­ture pres­ents as quite distinct: 1820–1865 and 1865–1914. Yet it makes goods sense to posit another timeline that traverses the antebellum and postbellum eras if only to reaffirm and embrace the continuities that do indeed exist among the romance writer in Hawthorne, the social realist in Rebecca Harding Davis, and the fabulist satirist that was Mark Twain. Where Henry James saw in Hawthorne a facile allegorist who avoided exploring the depths of moral depravity by neutralizing it in the “mists” of romance, with the luxury of hindsight and other uses for the literary past, we might instead see a staunch Demo­crat who praised his friend Franklin Pierce for staying above the fray of states’ rights and slavery, yet who believed near the end of his life that “no author . . . ​can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where t­ here is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, . . . ​nor anything but commonplace prosperity, . . . ​in broad and ­simple daylight.”10 Understood as a commentary on his own tangled relationship to the discourse of sovereignty and the failure of art to reconcile its contradictions, Hawthorne is perhaps closer to Stephen Crane’s “inevitable sunlight” than James supposed.11 Critical historical facts certainly support this approach. For one t­ hing, the states’ rights debates that ­were embedded with the enslavement of African ­peoples did not die with Reconstruction. Was “Jim Crow” ­really new? Or was it merely the “­union” of the South’s a­ ctual practice of racial degradation and segregation with the North’s euphemistic embrace of equality even as it privately performed the same double standard in relation to its black citizens? For another, a full one-­fourth of the states in the United States would not be granted statehood ­until 1912. As the historian Richard White observes, “this

58   Prehistories and Transitions

long territorial interlude, during which the federal government dominated western government, [created] . . . ​conditions of patronage, factionalism, and boosterism.” ­These conditions, in turn, established corrupt combines of politicians and businessmen that came to be known as “territorial rings.” Both local and national interests w ­ ere served by the continuation of territorial (rather than state) systems. Although the settler colonialism that dominated Amer­i­ca’s westward expansion is usually attributed to a coherent state-­sponsored nationalism (as Manifest Destiny), in real­ity, it was the nonstate status of the territories, including Indian Territory, that allowed such rings to flourish and permitted the “conspiracy paradigm” of the antebellum period to continue to inform American po­liti­cal and literary culture through the end of the nineteenth ­century.12 In fact, it is in the West that the Romantic antebellum literary tradition found fertile terrain ­after the Civil War, cohering into a popu­lar canon in some ways more relevant than the one Vernon Parrington created in Main Currents in American Thought (1928). The two-­period nineteenth ­century proposed by the Norton Anthology has its roots in Parrington’s paradigm of literary production in the United States, which argued that “the Boston Brahmins and their ‘love of standards’ ­were unseated by itinerant, gritty, self-­made writers based in New York.”13 For Parrington, this literary restaging of the American Revolution, in which Old World aristocratic power fell at the hands of an American pop­u­ lism, was best exemplified by Mark Twain, “a native writer thinking his own thoughts, using his own eyes, speaking his own dialect—­every­thing Eu­ro­pean fallen away.”14 Every­thing except satire and romance, that is. How could one consider A Connecticut Yankee as anything but dystopian fabulist romance? Although Twain posed as a “native” and a rustic, William Dean Howells recalled how the Missourian “was fascinated with Looking Backward and had [Edward Bellamy] to visit him; and from the first he had a luminous vision of or­ga­nized ­labor as the only pres­ent help for working-­men.”15 What of the rise of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West spectacles? They w ­ ere a smash hit when Cody toured his show in Eu­rope. Queen Victoria loved them. Henry Nash Smith long ago noted the critical cultural role of the Beadle “Dime Novel outfit” in the construction of such “territorial” romances. The firm averaged sixty thousand copies of most of its titles from 1858 u ­ ntil the 1890s. Although Nash called such books “subliterary,” he admitted that they served a critical role in realizing “the dream life of a vast inarticulate public.”16 American lit­er­a­ture, it seems, contained inherent contradictions throughout the nineteenth ­century. Both populist and elitist, it survived the

1830–1924: The Literatures of Sovereignty   59

Civil War largely intact. Perhaps even more impor­tant than its popularity, however, is the fact that both highbrow and lowbrow books shared one common ideological thrust, their sleight-­of-­hand dismissal of the sovereignty of Native p ­ eoples and other “outsiders.” Setting an end date for the saliency of sovereignty discourse in literary production is less certain. I offer 1924 ­because it marks the year in which Native Americans ­were granted citizenship, early in the de­cade that saw ­women enfranchised for the first time. By the second de­cade of the twentieth c­ entury, the United States was a superpower, and its role in global cultural production, in the form of film, print, and radio—­along with its growing overseas imperialist designs—­had once again shifted its discursive posture t­ oward sovereignty into t­hose exceptionalist channels opened by the Monroe Doctrine. Of course, debates about individual and states’ rights, personal and national sovereignties did not end in 1924, but their literary modes and forms transformed considerably, as aesthetic fashions (modernism) and broader social dislocations (the ­Great Depression and the Dust Bowl) shifted the nature of the discourse. Pound’s rallying cry (“make it new”) demanded more than “no-­ government and non-­resistance.” It energized a centrifugal cosmopolitanism and expatriate communities that cast lit­er­a­ture in the role of hierophant in a godless cosmos. The American Indian’s role became that of primitive archetype, as when Mary Austin located the rhythm of American modernism “in the swift pattern of its unaccented dub dub, dub dub, dub dub, in the plazas of Zuñi and Oraibi,” which she called “the very pulse of emerging American consciousness.”17 By the 1930s, American social life invited more federal intervention in local affairs, not less, and writers became a con­spic­uo ­ us population in the bureaucratic machinery of the New Deal. Viewing the periodization of American lit­er­a­ture through this lens yields a po­liti­cal and literary field stretching from 1830 to 1924 in which the fundamental questions ­were framed in terms of the right to associate with local, racial, and other po­liti­cal and cultural entities over and against the federal government, and from t­ hese new social o ­ rders to seek fulfillment and meaning. Yet by selecting the term sovereignty as the guiding concept for my attempt to shake up the timelines of American lit­er­a­ture, I have self-­consciously framed my historical period with two federal statutes that s­ haped Native American lives and histories in radical ways, primarily so that literary historians can begin to envision a canon in which American Indian ­peoples ­matter. In this way, I follow the lead of a group of Americanist historians who recently collected a set of essays ­under the title Why You ­Can’t Teach United States History without American Indians. Their

60   Prehistories and Transitions

reasoning is quite ­simple: “When teachers embed Native American history more fully in the American story, students are challenged to think in new ways about larger themes in American history such as nation building, economic empowerment, citizenship and multiculturalism,” instead of “treat[ing] Indian history as a sidebar to Euro-­American expansion.”18 The same holds true for American literary history. Indians are most often treated as the subjects of American lit­er­a­ture, repre­sen­ta­tions constructed by the Coopers and Thoreaus of the canon whose own alphabetic literacy signifies ­little more than assimilation or inauthenticity—­in­ter­est­ing and worthy of inclusion, but of l­ittle influence in the greater narrative arc of “tradition and the individual talent.” But even as we still believe in a “flowering of New ­England” (despite our subsequent journeys “beneath the American Re­nais­ sance”), and even as we agree that the Civil War and chattel slavery represent monumental forces in the development of American lit­er­a­ture, we must admit that they ­were not alone in shaping it, and the more I have studied the historical rec­ord and the literary canon (even the old-­fashioned one), the more I encounter what the historian Steven Conn has called “[American] history’s shadow.”19 Like a paranoid Eu­ro­pean interloper in this land, I find American Indians not only b ­ ehind e­ very tree in the forest, e­ very butte in the West, but also ­behind ­every one of the historical events and literary texts that have been deemed turning points in the period. And while I dislike using the term “shadow” to characterize Native p ­ eoples (are they “disappearing” yet again?), the history of American lit­er­a­ture is indeed, to use Philip Deloria’s words, a history of “Indians in unexpected places.”20 Even if we consider only the case of the American nineteenth ­century’s two “biggies”—­the Civil War and slavery—we find American Indians and their media everywhere. In 1862, taking advantage of the Union’s distractions in the early days of the war, several disgruntled Dakota bands in Minnesota, recently stripped of their lands in hasty treaty negotiations, attacked and killed more than two hundred Eu­ro­pean settlers over a six-­week period, thereby opening a small “western front” in the broader conflict between the states. ­After the Minnesota militia fi­nally defeated them, thirty-­eight ­were executed by order of President Lincoln in the largest mass hanging in US history. Two hundred and fifty other men, w ­ omen, and c­ hildren w ­ ere incarcerated at Camp McClellan, a Union post in Davenport, Iowa, ­until 1868. Their imprisonment directly resulted in the sudden and unpre­ce­dented expansion of alphabetic literacy among Dakota-­speaking p ­ eoples, when missionaries taught the prisoners how to read and write their own language for gospel solace; the prisoners also

1830–1924: The Literatures of Sovereignty   61

learned to use reading and writing to communicate with the diasporic Dakota community in the West and their colonial captors in the East. Charles Eastman, the Dakota physician and writer who penned From the Deep Woods to Civilization (1910) and other books, owed his authorship to this very set of events. His f­ ather had been a prisoner, had converted to both Chris­tian­ity and alphabetic literacy, and had urged his son to follow his lead. Similarly, the Cherokee Nation found itself deeply divided by the war, as slaveholding Cherokees w ­ ere forced to choose sides in the other­wise non-­Indian conflict. Writing to his old friend Stand Waitie in 1853, the Cherokee writer John Rollin Ridge, who fled Oklahoma for California b ­ ecause of the murder of his ­father and u ­ ncle as a result of growing unrest within the po­liti­cal factions of the Cherokee Nation, unashamedly described his work in the California mines as having been harder than that of “any slave I ever owned.”21 His correspondent would himself become a general in the Confederate Army and be the last Confederate leader to surrender. Rollin Ridge became a newspaper editor and the author of The Adventures of Joaquin Murieta (1854), a sort of protoplantation fiction that depicted California’s Mexican ranches as a kind of agrarian utopia, substituting the “poor Digger Indians” for the South’s enslaved Africans. I have not called my proposed timeline “the lit­er­a­tures of American Indians,” however, ­because I am interested in something more than the inclusion of Native texts and voices in the American literary canon. Indeed, con­temporary Native American critics such as Jace Weaver have forcefully argued that “Native American literary output [is] separate and distinct from other national lit­er­a­tures” and “proceeds from dif­fer­ent assumptions and embodies dif­fer­ent values from American lit­er­a­ture,” thus demanding a very dif­fer­ent model of periodization.22 I employ the term sovereignty to suggest a broader archive (in the Foucaultian sense) of discursive possibilities. Viewing literary productions as both constitutive of and constituted by the discourse of sovereignty rather than ethnicity enables us to imagine forms of historical agency in American Indian lit­er­a­ture that cut across the barriers imposed on them by current modes of periodization.23 It also supports a fresh set of relations between texts and readers, hermeneutics and citizenship. By defining this canon as one deeply informed by questions of sovereignty, I thus affirm Patrick Wolfe’s foundational formulation of settler colonialism as “structure . . . ​[,] not . . . ​event,” and therefore devalue strictly historical (or chronological) periodization in f­ avor of something more akin to what Pierre Bourdieu has called “ge­ne­tic structuralism.” Applying Bourdieu’s theory of

62   Prehistories and Transitions

“field[s] of cultural production” to nineteenth-­century American lit­er­a­ture enables us to discern commonalities in the relations between authors and publishers, authors and readers, and texts and history that have shifted on the surface but have si­mul­ta­neously sustained a kind of historical amnesia when it comes to the foundational princi­ple of all American sovereignty discourse: settler colonialism.24 Lit­er­a­ture written in the United States consistently engages with the country’s elemental squatter culture as a return of the repressed, often turning to fervidly nationalist mythologies in its attempts to euphemistically elide the fact of settler colonialism and its own erasure of indigenous sovereignty. The lit­er­a­ture of sovereignty thus describes a North American field of cultural production that engaged in voicing the subterranean realities of the country’s settlement. This is precisely the point María Amparo Ruiz de Burton makes in The Squatter and the Don (1885) when she has the second-­generation American interloper, Clarence Darrell, express his own dissatisfaction with his ­father’s narrative of land grabbing in California: “I d ­ on’t like this fashion of taking ­people’s lands, and I would like to pay . . . ​for what has been located by us, but at the same time I do not wish my ­father to know that I have paid for this land, as I am sure he would take my action as a reproach—as a disclaimer of his own action, and I ­don’t wish to hurt his feelings, or seem to be disrespectful or censorious.”25 The lit­er­a­ture of sovereignty is precisely this: an ongoing “disclaimer” of the structure of the country’s settlement. Let me conclude by offering two short case studies of the lit­er­a­ture of sovereignty in action. The first is Indian Nullification (1835), a collaboratively written pamphlet defending the Mas­sa­chu­setts Mashpee Pequot’s right to sovereignty. It exemplifies not only how Native writers developed within the emerging discourse of sovereignty but also how they engaged intertextually with the larger body of sovereignty lit­er­a­ture that surrounded them. Indian Nullification opens with a public letter to “the White ­People of Mas­sa­chu­setts” that is signed by the selectmen of the Mashpee Pequot tribe—­Israel Amos, Isaac Coombs, and Ezra Attaquin. The epistolary mode, performative and personal, is presented as republican gesture: “we send this forth to the world in love.” But it also underscores the Mashpee’s commitment to recognizing the po­liti­cal differences between themselves (whom they describe as “of the soil”) and the settler colonial institutions set up by “whites [who came] from across the ­water seeking refuge from tyranny.” From the outset, Indian Nullification thus grounds its rhe­toric in Euro-­American nationalist my­thol­ogy. An affidavit of sorts by Benjamin Hallett follows. It also situates the Mashpee’s search for sovereignty within the broader discourse of American liberty,

1830–1924: The Literatures of Sovereignty   63

likening their strug­gle to the Boston Tea Party. Though termed a “riot” by outsiders, the Mashpee, Hallet argues, see their collective action as a “combine.” Hallett’s letter is also significant in that he was the head of the Demo­cratic Party in Mas­sa­chu­setts and would argue the case against Daniel Webster. The body of the tract is given over to a narrator who calls himself “the writer” and whose narration closely follows historical events in the life of Pequot minister William Apess. Apess’s narrative is similarly punctuated by the discourse of sovereignty. His opponents in the white community are “enemies of liberty [who would] reserve it exclusively to themselves.” His theology is very nearly “Demo­ cratic,” arguing, “God has given to all men equal right to possess and occupy the earth.”26 His description of the events leading up to the Mashpee nullification decision epitomizes the “conspiracy paradigm.” The schoolbooks donated for Mashpee ­children’s education have “been given to white scholars.” Interspersed within this narrative are po­liti­cal declarations made by the community as a ­whole: “Resolved. . . . ​That we, as a tribe, ­will rule ourselves and have the right to do so; for all men are born f­ ree and equal says the Constitution of the country.” Calling themselves “freeborn sons of the forest,” the Mashpee invoke the name of the Mas­sa­chu­setts lieutenant governor “to nullify the existing laws, arguing that they have . . . ​acted in accordance with the spirit of the Constitution, u ­ nless that instrument be a device of utter deception.”27 William Apess, as a figure in the text, fades in and out as the specter of solitary genius (“the writer”) who is fi­nally subsumed by the voice of the larger community. Nearly one hundred years ­after the Mashpee penned their nullification manifesto, the Dakota writer Gertrude Bonnin revisited the subject of sovereignty in her short story “The Widespread Enigma of Blue Star ­Woman” (1921). H ­ ere Bonnin thematizes the destruction of community sovereignty through the federal government’s imposition of individualism in the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887.28 The tale’s fifty-­three-­year-­old protagonist, Blue Star ­Woman, is a ­woman without a country in the western plains of the 1880s. The narrator tells us that the question “Who am I?” had “become the obsessing riddle of her life.” According to the rules of the Dawes Act, she would have “to give proof of membership in the Sioux tribe” in order to stay on the land she now occupied. But ­because she was orphaned at an early age, and given “the lack of written rec­ords of a roving p ­ eople,” she can only tell herself, “I am a being. I am Blue Star ­Woman. A piece of earth is my birthright.”29 The story’s plot follows the historical rec­ ord quite closely, so that Blue Star ­Woman stands in for hundreds of Native ­peoples disenfranchised and defrauded by the territorial rings that took advantage of the allotment of individual parcels of tribal land to line their own

64   Prehistories and Transitions

pockets. Bonnin’s story features two Native men who dress like Eu­ro­pe­ans and offer to help Blue Star ­Woman gain an allotment—in exchange for half its value. “We fight crooks with crooks,” they say. By the tale’s end, the community’s leader, Chief High Flier, has been imprisoned for fighting the corrupt system, only to be released when his son agrees to a deal just like the one Blue Star W ­ oman signed. As he leaves his jail cell, the two young men who “helped” Blue Star ­Woman appear, holding out an ink pad: “­Here, press your thumb in this pad. . . . ​ He pressed his indelible thumb mark, his signature it was, upon the deed and drove home with his son.”30 In a sense, Bonnin closes a circle of sovereignty lit­er­a­ture that commenced with Indian Nullification and continued to find voice in works like Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson (1895). Considered a dolt for his hobby of collecting fingerprints, the eponymous hero of Twain’s story redeems himself by using fingerprints to reveal a killer. Twain’s murderer, however, is no ordinary criminal; he is a black man who has passed for white ­until his “indelible” mark reveals his true self. A periodization that could account for ­these overlaps and intertexts might go a long way t­ oward rectifying the omission not only of Indian authors and texts from the traditional canon of American lit­er­a­ture but also of the arcane body of works on property and politics to which both non-­Native and Native-­ authored books, speeches, and pamphlets refer. With the lit­er­a­tures of sovereignty in place, we might thus offer a materially grounded riposte to Vernon Parrington, recovering one of the many “main undercurrents” in American thought that animated a ­century of literary output in this country. Notes Epigraph. Ralph Waldo Emerson, En­glish Traits, in The Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston, 1909), 273. 1. ​See Daniel Walker Howe, The Po­liti­cal Culture of the American Whigs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979): “Instead of thinking of the conspiratorial interpretation of events as a ­mental disease, it makes better sense to treat it as a paradigm, that is, a conceptual framework which defines prob­lems and points to their solutions. . . . ​The conspiracy paradigm arranged events into patterns and attributed the patterns to moral agents” (79–80). 2. ​Daniel Webster, The Rhode Island Question in the Supreme Court of the United States in the Case of Martin Luther v. Luther M. Borden and O ­ thers (Washington, DC: J. & G. S. Gordon, 1848), 7. 3. ​Webster, 7. 4. ​George Bancroft, “The Office of the ­People in Art, Government, and Religion: An Oration Delivered before the Adelphi Society of Williamstown College, in August 1835,” www​.­swarthmore​ .­edu​/­SocSci​/­rbannis1​/­AIH19th​/­Bancroft​.­html.

1830–1924: The Literatures of Sovereignty   65 5. ​Worcester v. Georgia, 31 U.S. 515 (1832), https://­supreme​.­justia​.­com​/­cases​/­federal​/­us​/­31​/­515​ /­case​.­html; Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, 30 U.S. 1 (1831), https://­supreme​.­justia​.­com​/­cases​/­federal​ /­us​/­30​/­1​/­case​.­html. 6. ​David Walker, Walker’s Appeal, in Four Articles (Boston, 1830), 2, http://­docsouth​.­unc​.­edu​ /­nc​/­walker​/­walker​.­html. 7. ​“Commonwealth vs. John Hunt & o ­ thers,” 4 Met. 111, 45 Mass. 111, Mar. 1842, 130, http://­ masscases​.­com​/­cases​/­sjc​/­45​/­45mass111​.­html. 8. ​Sojourner Truth, “­Ain’t I a ­Woman?,” Modern History Sourcebook (Fordham University), 1, http://­legacy​.­fordham​.­edu​/­halsall​/­mod​/­sojtruth​-­woman​.­asp. 9. ​Quoted in Alex Trimble Young, “Settler Sovereignty and the Rhizomatic West, or The Significance of the Frontier in Postwestern Studies,” Western American Lit­er­a­ture 48, nos. 1 and 2 (Spring/Summer 2013): 114–15. 10. ​Quoted in Henry James, Nathaniel Hawthorne (1879; repr., Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1956), 33. 11. ​For a parallel failure to combat sovereignty’s norms, see Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Wakefield” (1837). 12. ​Richard White, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993), 176–77. 13. ​Claudia Stokes, “Copyrighting American History: International Copyright and the Periodization of the Nineteenth ­Century,” American Lit­er­a­ture 77, no. 2 (June 2005): 291. 14. ​Vernon Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought, vol. 3, The Beginnings of Critical Realism in Amer­i­ca, 1860–1920 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927), 86. 15. ​William Dean Howells, “My Mark Twain,” in Literary Friends and Acquaintance: A Personal Retrospect of American Authorship (New York: Harper & ­Brothers, 1911), 347. 16. ​Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), 91. 17. ​Mary Austin, The American Rhythm (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1923), 11. 18. ​Susan Sleeper-­Smith et al., eds., Why You ­Can’t Teach United States History without American Indians (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 4, 1. 19. ​See Steven Conn, History’s Shadow: Native Americans and Historical Consciousness in the Nineteenth ­Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 20. ​See Philip Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2004). 21. ​John Rollin Ridge to Stand Waite, Oct. 9, 1854, John Ridge Letters to F ­ amily, the Huntington Library (MSS FAC 1676–1678). 22. ​Jace Weaver, “Splitting the Earth,” in American Indian Literary Nationalism, ed. Jace Weaver, Craig Womack, and Robert Warrior (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005), 15–17. In fact, reperiodization is often a priority for Native studies scholars. James Cox’s Red Land to the South (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), for example, focuses on the thirties, a period of Native lit­er­a­ture which has often been neglected and overshadowed by the so-­called Native American Re­nais­sance of the 1960s and 1970s. Jace Weaver’s The Red Atlantic: American Indigenes and the Making of the Modern World, 1000–1927 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014) claims the years 1000–1927 (from Vinland to Lindbergh’s first transatlantic flight) to be the relevant temporal frame for Atlantic studies. 23. ​Matt Cohen comments, “Sovereignty revolves at the center of debates about the freedom to associate and to wield associative power across racial, kinship, and other bound­aries as much as along them. It’s impossible to understand the history of sovereignty e­ ither as only a m ­ atter of land or as only a ­matter of indigenous rights. And lit­er­a­ture is the place where you can see ­these conjunctions in startling ways” (personal communication with the author).

66   Prehistories and Transitions 24. ​See Patrick Wolfe, “Nation and MiscegeNation: Discursive Continuity in the Post-­Mabo Era,” Social Analy­sis 36 (1994): 96; Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 179. 25. ​María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, The Squatter and the Don (1885; repr., Houston: Arte Publico, 1992), 97. 26. ​William Apess, Indian Nullification, in On Our Own Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess, a Pequot, ed. Barry O’Connell (Amherst: University of Mas­sa­chu­setts Press, 1992), 168. 27. ​Apess, 175, 179–80. 28. ​The Dawes Act refers to the 1887 General Allotment Act, which required most Indian reservations to be divided into 160-­acre parcels distributed to individual Native ­people as land held in trust by the US government for a period of twenty-­five years, ­after which time the ­owners would be awarded the land in fee s­ imple and given American citizenship. The act required that inhabitants of allotted reservations “prove” that they ­were Indians; this, as Bonnin’s story dramatizes, was often an unrealistic demand. 29. ​Gertrude Bonnin [Zitkala Sa], “The Enigma of Blue Star ­Woman,” in American Indian Stories (1921; repr., Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 159. 30. ​Bonnin, 182.

600 BCE–1830 CE The Book of Mormon and the Lived Eschatology of Settler Colonialism jared hickman

My timeline is drawn from the internal chronology of the main narrative of The Book of Mormon, the self-­proclaimed scripture of the ancient Israelite inhabitants of the Amer­i­cas, published by Joseph Smith in Palmyra, New York, in March 1830—­just a few weeks before the US Senate passed the bill that would remove their modern Indian descendants (as early Mormons understood them to be) from lands east of the Mississippi River.1 To be clear, my timeline is not at all meant to suggest, as some Mormon commentators do, that The Book of Mormon is an au­then­tic historical rec­ord of the ancient ­peoples of the Amer­ i­cas. In fact, as I have suggested elsewhere, it is not clear to me that The Book of Mormon even asks to be read in this way. Hence, my use of The Book of Mormon as the basis of this alternative periodization is not at all predicated on the exceptionalism ascribed to it by some of its most devoted readers—an exclusive claim to tell the truth of American history. On the contrary, my enlistment of The Book of Mormon is prompted by the extreme sort of exemplarity it exhibits. Put another way, yes, I am proposing a ­wholehearted canonization of The Book of Mormon as a classic of the so-­called American Re­nais­sance, a move that has long been contemplated and for good reason—­The Book of Mormon is arguably “the only impor­tant second Bible produced in [the United States]” and thus the high-­water mark of the “literary scripturism” Lawrence Buell pinpoints as an animating impulse of the antebellum literary boom in the United States, and it is “the foundational document” of what is undeniably “one of the nation’s most successful, domestically produced religions.”2 But for me The Book of Mormon’s canonization is ultimately a means to an end rather than an end in itself. What opening the canon to The Book of Mormon promises is precisely the fulfillment of this collection’s purpose—to unsettle prevailing periodizations, which are premised first and foremost on the content of the

68   Prehistories and Transitions

canon. It is the recovery and elevation of an unnoticed or disregarded object that reconstellates the field of objects around it, shifting our sense of history’s flows and forces. According to Walter Benjamin, such unearthings make pos­si­ble messianic ruptures of the time homogenized by our habituation to its rhythms. The Book of Mormon, as Adam Miller, Gillian Sayre, and I myself have argued (and w ­ ill further argue h ­ ere), purports to fit this bill quite literally.3 Hence, this is an essay not about The Book of Mormon but about the forms of historical and theoretical reflection that might be liberated by presupposing it as a crucial object of Americanist study. The central questions asked ­here, amplifying ­those posed by The Book of Mormon’s spectacular emergence on the scene, are the following: When should American literary history be understood to begin in the first place, and what is its end, in terms of not necessarily temporality but intentionality? On what ethico-­political and methodological grounds can American literary history—­assuming it even ­ought to—­locate itself somewhere in the vast tract of indigenous time that encompasses and dwarfs the era of “settler colonialism”?4 The Book of Mormon can ­here be taken as implicitly informative of this inquiry even as it is explic­itly illustrative of it only intermittently, as the ­whole point is to show how taking The Book of Mormon seriously might usefully lead us to alternative canons (i.e., a collection of objects beyond itself) and radical reformulations of the very field of American literary history. Specifically, The Book of Mormon can helpfully conduct us to an American literary history rebirthed through settler colonial and indigenous studies. The reason is that The Book of Mormon embodies and enacts in especially extravagant ways the historical dynamic governing what James Belich has recently delineated as the nineteenth-­century “settler revolution.”5 In Belich’s scheme, this settler revolution is powered by “booms” of “explosive colonization,” which he distinguishes as t­ hose cycles of settlement in which a minimum settler population of twenty thousand at least doubles over a de­cade. In the period between the War of 1812 and the Civil War, three such booms occurred in the United States (1815–1819, 1825–1837, 1845–1857), signaled by the massive growth of cities like Chicago, Cincinnati, New Orleans, St. Louis, and San Francisco.6 This time frame encompasses what Renée Bergland has described as the twinned Indian removals, po­liti­cal and literary, perpetrated by the US state and the cultural nationalists who inspired the American Re­nais­sance.7 Not coincidentally, right at its heart is the coming forth of The Book of Mormon and its eponymous movement, which, in response to its sacred text’s instructions,

600 BCE–1830 CE: The Book of Mormon  69

moved progressively westward away from US state control and t­ oward Indian Territory.8 As a text that both bears the marks of its production by a Euro-­ Christian settler—­most obviously in its valorization of American Indians to the extent that they are Israelites—­and, by means of this very identification, supplies indigenous ­peoples (and their allies) with a handy defense of their sovereign inhabitation of their homelands (a defense historically deployed by many indigenous Mormons across the Amer­i­cas and in the Pacific),9 The Book of Mormon sits in especially illuminating relation to the settler revolution that has constituted the United States both po­liti­cally and culturally. To sharpen the point, the instrumental value of The Book of Mormon is that it captures in a comprehensive way—­and so makes accessible to critical reflection—­the phenomenology of ­these “boom-­times” for both settlers and natives. Belich, citing a variety of texts from multiple locations, shows that the experience of a boom suggested to many “a change in history’s speed . . . ​‘magic’ was the most frequently employed popu­lar interpretation of the rise of cities in the New World.”10 This “capacity of explosive colonization to compress time” convinced many settlers that they must be participants in an eschatological realization, agents of a transformation so massive and evidently unstoppable as certainly to be a divine providence.11 But, as Belich duly notes, ­these settlement booms also registered in another way: they “changed the nature of the prob­lem facing indigenous ­peoples from a scale they could often ­handle to a scale they could not” and thus “correlated with climactic indigenous re­sis­tance, often pan-­tribal.”12 Such re­sis­tance should be understood as “climactic” not ­because it was last-­ditch but b ­ ecause it had its own eschatological impetus. ­These movements—­whether that of Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa in the Ohio River Valley in the lead-up to the first boom of the Anglo settler revolution ­after the War of 1812, or the Ghost Dance across the western United States in 1890—­were articulated and implemented as messianic interruptions of the irresistible tide of history with a capital H that many settlers understood themselves to be. In other words, the messianism of climactic indigenous re­sis­tance involved not just confrontation in the pres­ent in order to secure an alternative ­future but also—­again, in Benjaminian fashion—­a ­whole theory of history u ­ nder which settler colonialism, despite its undeniable immediate force, was construed as a mere blip to be reversed or traversed in view of long-­sustained and sustaining Native histories on the land.13 I afford The Book of Mormon this pride of place only ­because it highlights the dually lived eschatology of settler colonialism, which I, following Belich, take to be the undergirding condition of not only Amer­i­ca’s recent past but

70   Prehistories and Transitions

also, in a way, the much more im­mense precontact past that is renewed by indigenous counterrevolutions against the settler revolution. In sum, the reason to canonize The Book of Mormon—in its unabashedly apocalyptic attempt to conscript Euro-­Christian Gentiles into the ser­vice of Indian Israel—is to push American literary history to interrogate the secularist and Eurocentric assumptions that prevent it from recognizing itself as a proj­ect immanent to the dually lived eschatology of a colonial settlement that is, of course, ongoing.14 In practical terms, such a proj­ect might well provoke a ­wholesale reperiodization of recent American literary history according to the tense interplay of settler revolution and indigenous counterrevolution around booms, as well as, in light of the alternative temporalities entailed by indigenous counterrevolution, an even more fundamental reconsideration of the ontological status, as it ­were, of an object called “American literary history.” The latter effort would systematically follow up the gestures ­toward American lit­er­a­ture’s “deep time” and “the archives of American time” made, respectively, by Wai Chee Dimock and Lloyd Pratt.15 To reframe this essay’s main concerns (as facilitated by but not reducible to The Book of Mormon’s par­tic­u­lar time-­bending program): How do we best historicize the cultural output attending settler colonialism, the raison d’être of which is the attempted elimination of indigenous populations?16 To what extent should Americanists foreground the terrible successes of that elimination and concede that the history of American lit­er­a­ture in large part redounds to a settler colonial history? To what extent should Americanists underscore the failures of such elimination and privilege cultural output that attests to and deepens t­ hose failures, perhaps even to the point of redefining American literary history as an indigenous history engrafted with a settler colonial branch? Such questions are already pres­ent, in a way, in one of the first manifestos of US literary nationalism, Walter Channing’s 1815 “Essay on American Language and Lit­er­a­ture,” which somewhat anxiously acknowledges that “the country has a lit­er­a­ture notwithstanding all that has been said . . . ​to the contrary. But it is not the least indebted for it to the ­labour of its colonies. . . . ​I . . . ​refer to the oral lit­er­a­ture of its aborigines.”17 In tracing American literary history to indigenous media,18 whose ultimate origin precedes settler colonialism—as The Norton Anthology of American Lit­er­a­ture halfheartedly does by opening with a handful of creation myths drawn from across Native North Amer­i­ca—do we responsibly highlight the recency and contingency of settler colonialism, highlighting the long-­standing prior culturings of and claims to lands that have come to be known as “Amer­i­ca”?19 Or is this gesture itself the essence of settler

600 BCE–1830 CE: The Book of Mormon  71

colonialism, an appropriation of indigenous media for a manifestly postcontact, colonialist cultural geography (“Amer­ic­ a”)? Further, does this gesture threaten to neutralize a vital oppositionalism potentially inhering in indigenous media developed u ­ nder the auspices of cultural geographies before and beyond “the invention of Amer­i­ca,” as Edmundo O’Gorman called it, and the consequent elaboration of a cap­i­tal­ist world-­system?20 The question is how what has been called American literary history should address the brute fact of indigenous preexistence and survivance of settler colonialism. Bergland, Philip Deloria, and many o ­ thers have persuasively shown just how profoundly constituted the settler colonial lit­er­a­ture we typically teach is by this fact, and more work in this vein is certainly needed.21 But ­there are opportunities for even deeper methodological self-­examination. For instance, to what extent should—or could—­so-­called Americanists redefine what they do as, say, Turtle Island media history, taking as their default space-­time the longue durée of indigenous culturings of the continent up to the pres­ent? What would that involve? What training would it require? What institutional (re-­or de)formations would it demand? What would be the cornerstones of its canon? Confining ourselves just to the postcontact period, maybe the documents, discourses, and per­for­mances in and around the treaty-­making milieu would become proper objects of literary study in ways Jeffrey Glover has begun to model in his recent Paper Sovereigns.22 Perhaps Tuscarora writer and artist David Cusick’s groundbreaking Sketches of Ancient History of the Six Nations (1827) would come to stand as a salient example of the creative, nonlinear practice of historiography that Charles Brockden Brown claimed for the “romance,” a category foundational for Americanist literary studies (and also for which The Book of Mormon, it happens, might be the instructive limit case).23 Certainly, one would have to grapple with what Penelope Myrtle Kelsey, building on the work of Robert Allen Warrior, Craig Womack, and ­others, has recently encapsulated as “tribal theory”—­the reading of Native text and per­for­mance through the intellectual lenses of the par­tic­u­lar Native communities in which it arises.24 To do Turtle Island media history would involve not just new ­angles of approach but also new forms and levels of literacy for most Americanists. As I’ve suggested, t­ here are debates to be had about w ­ hether it is plausible or desirable for indigenous studies to be fully normalized in universities, most of which are, of course, themselves settler colonial institutions. Part of the difficulty resides in reconciling the irreversible (but not, I hasten to add, irremediable) formation of a global modernity through contact and colonialism, to a real extent creating “new worlds for all,” as the eminent

72   Prehistories and Transitions

historian of Native North Amer­i­ca, Colin Calloway, has put it,25 and the irrevocable (and irreplaceable) claim of colonized indigenes to long-­held and cherished lands and resources unjustly stolen in the course of that formation. The trou­ble, Mark Rifkin has warned, is that the first thought typically tends to overshadow the second: the very sense of a globally inclusive “now,” historically enabled by colonial ventures, tends to perpetuate the basic structures of in­equality t­ hose ventures created, beginning with the effects of viral decimation and primitive accumulation, so devastating to the indigenous ­peoples of the Amer­i­cas.26 Put another way, one must ask w ­ hether the very countenancing of the formation of a global modernity—of a common time—­entails envisioning the eventual extinction if not necessarily of indigenous ­peoples themselves then of the distinctive claims to land and resources underpinning their cultural identities.27 If so, decolonization, as both a theory and a practice, would require radically alternative temporalities—­and that, in turn, poses the question ­whether temporal alterity is best understood in terms that are epistemological (a m ­ atter of admitting dif­fer­ent narrative scales or evidentiary standards for history), phenomenological (a ­matter of appreciating dif­fer­ent perceptions and per­for­ mances of time), or ontological (a m ­ atter of apprehending dif­fer­ent “temporal force-­fields” that make pos­si­ble forms of becoming irreducible to chance or probability). In recent temporality talk, the answer to that question is often left unclear, even though it carries significant implications for how historicization and prognostication proceed and how agency is theorized and its exercise strategized.28 Or, if one considers “nativist” prophetic insurgencies, such as the Ghost Dance or The Book of Mormon and its eponymous movement (phenomena that historian Gregory Smoak has deemed “forever linked”), this temporal alterity might be seen as in some sense theological or cosmological, leading one to won­der how this could be taken up in the secular acad­emy.29 Another approach would be to concede a common time of global modernity but conceive it as more malleable and multivalent than is sometimes suggested.30 Alternatively, the common time of global modernity might be seen as having crystallized in par­tic­u­lar ways that have arguably foregrounded indigenous histories and that logically suggest privileging indigenous perspectives. For example, the material and spiritual crisis engendered by global capitalism might prompt us to contemplate the deeply felt sense that pan-­indigenous protests of the Dakota Access Pipeline represent a fulfillment of Lakota prophecies that an alliance of Native ­peoples would save the world from a devouring black snake.31

600 BCE–1830 CE: The Book of Mormon  73

And so we find ourselves returned to the dually lived eschatology of settler colonialism, which I ­will take as occasion to revisit the text I have suggested perhaps most swiftly escorts us to this point. Produced, published, and initially propagated to ­great effect amid the cycles of explosive colonization in early nineteenth-­century North Amer­i­ca, The Book of Mormon is deeply attuned to the experience and per­for­mance of history’s end invited by such booms. Indeed, it can help us refine our model, apprehending this eschatology as lived in a dialectical tension between two dif­fer­ent senses of ending: what I ­will call an anti-­messianic thought of extinction—­that is, of irrecuperable loss—­and a reactive, last-­ditch messianic thought galvanized but also enervated by this thought of extinction. This distinctly modern form of messianism, as Anna Glazova and Paul North have recently characterized it, is elicited by “the pos­ si­ble loss” of what they call “the messianic model of loss,” which provides for the ultimate redeemability of any loss.32 In other words, modern messianic thought is activated by the specter of the irretrievable loss of the notion that nothing is ever r­ eally lost; it represents “a last and most desperate attempt to return to the idea of loss as the redeemable.” But this attempted return, Glazova and North emphasize, cannot be a ­simple one—­one ­can’t unthink the thought of extinction. “Once eschatological certainty is depleted or shaken,” they go on, “the messianic thought asks to be rethought or replaced. Two possibilities readily pres­ent themselves: ­either to understand history as a gradual pro­cess of fulfillment without reference to a super­natural order or to posit history as constitutionally lacking a purpose.” The prob­lem is that neither possibility allows for radical transformation or turnabout; history ­either progresses in an uninterrupted straight line (which may be fine for t­ hose the ongoing direction of history f­ avors, but not so much for every­body ­else) or proceeds as “an endless succession of events, a perpetuation of the finite as its negative double, infinity.” In this way, as Glazova and North put it, “discontinuity comes to be the only hope for history,” and modern messianic thought takes the form “in effect [of] a species of discontinuity,” but without ready recourse to any deus ex machina.33 Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida, perhaps the most familiar exemplars of this mode, in dif­fer­ent ways provide this discontinuity, Benjamin finding “hope stuck somewhere between past and pres­ent” and Derrida finding it “in a f­uture that, when it arrives, postpones itself again, though not without affecting us now.”34 Although the phrase is Derrida’s, both can be said to seek forms of “messianicity without messianism.” Put crudely, the question is how to retain certain indispensable benefits of the messianic without invoking a literal, definitive messiah

74   Prehistories and Transitions

whose appearance can no longer be taken for granted and, even if it ­were assured, might not be deemed adequate to the transformation that is desired given that figure’s per­sis­tent historical articulations. Working in the grain of a Eurocentric intellectual history, Glazova and North predictably trace this distinctly modern messianic thought to the confrontation with “catastrophe . . . ​as a noncausal and atelic force” occasioned by the 1755 Lisbon earthquake—­think of the philosophe Voltaire’s critique of theodicy.35 Glazova and North’s narrative thus chimes nicely with the story Charles Taylor has told of the emergence of an “immanent frame” in “a secular age.”36 But what if we ­were to find our immanent frame quite literally in the finite planet initially disclosed by Eu­ro­pean discovery of the Amer­i­cas, that is, to narrate ourselves in a global age? In the emergent context of an enclosed and limited global space, the anti-­messianic thought of extinction to which modern messianic thought addresses itself might instead be derived from almost simultaneous shocks: the conundrum of the unforeseen existence of the indigenous ­peoples of the Amer­i­cas and the contemplation of their potential nonexistence. The missing link between our now-­commonsensical connection of the anti-­messianic thought of extinction and the real­ity of planetary finitude is the experience and spectacle of Native genocide in the Amer­i­cas. In fact, the planet itself would seem to say so if one follows Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin’s recent dating of the Anthropocene to 1610 on the basis of Arctic ice cores indicating dips in atmospheric carbon dioxide attributable to the massive death rate among indigenous populations of the Amer­i­cas over the preceding ­century and the consequent decline in ­human activities such as farming and fire burning.37 Taking the historical revelation of planetary finitude around and through Native genocide as the point of departure, modern messianic thought might be tracked in manifestations familiar to Americanists: for one, a sacralized settler colonialism that redeemed the loss of the Indian by representing and enacting itself as the millenarian consummation of history; for another, a prophetic indigenous and/or indigenist anti-­c olonialism that willed the revitalization—­and even resurrection—of Native ­peoples in the teeth of a supposedly Manifest Destiny. Thanks to the work of Hilton Obenzinger, Steven Salaita, Eran Shalev, and Warrior, we can neatly frame t­ hese opposed responses in terms of the biblical story of the Israelite conquest of Canaan.38 Euro-­Christian settler colonialism in North Amer­i­ca, Shalev helps us see, depended on “a radical typological sensibility,” “an extreme biblicism” that “disposed” its adherents “to pres­ent their nation as concretely and historically related to Old Testament

600 BCE–1830 CE: The Book of Mormon  75

history”—­they w ­ ere not “content with rendering Amer­ic­ a as a meta­phorical 39 Israel.” In apocalyptic fashion, many Euro-­Christian settlers understood themselves to be not just carry­ing or even continuing Judeo-­Christian metanarrative but also culminating it. Their extermination and exile of the Canaanites they found occupying what they took to be their promised land w ­ ere not only justified by biblical pre­ce­dent but also sublimated by their climactic participation in sacred history. The very extremity of this biblicism might in part be explained by the felt need to ward off the anti-­messianic thought of extinction arising from Native genocide. One perhaps senses something like this in William Bradford’s infamous description of the Pequot massacre, which Catharine Maria Sedgwick quotes in Hope Leslie (her own richly ambiguous and ambivalent attempt to sacralize Euro-­Christian settler colonialism in kinder terms): “It was a fearful sight to see [the Pequots] thus frying in the fire, and the streams of blood quenching the same, and the horrible scent thereof; but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave the praise thereof to God.”40 However, anti-­colonialist messianic responses to the terror of Native attrition and anathematization take dif­fer­ent forms. Some ­counter an Israelitish eschatology with a Canaanitish one, (re)routing sacred history through indigenous, indigenist, and/or indigenized metanarratives in explicit opposition to dominant forms of Judeo-­Christian metanarrative (nativist movements, Handsome Lake, the Ghost Dance, ­etc.), while o ­ thers displace one Israelitish eschatology with another, seizing on certain obscurities in the Bible (the ten lost tribes, the “other sheep” of which Jesus speaks) brought into focus by its failure definitively to account for the Amer­i­cas and its inhabitants in order to make American indigenes rather than Euro-­Christian settlers into Israelites. Importantly, in the latter strain of anti-­colonialist messianism, to which The Book of Mormon belongs, ancient Israelite diaspora—­scattering by e­ ither the Assyrian or the Babylonian empire—­rather than settler colonialism (i.e., the conquest of Canaan) is the basis for indigenous claims to American lands, which, in The Book of Mormon at least, are depicted as uninhabited when the Israelite patriarch Lehi arrives with his f­ amily.41 Thus, not only could imagining Indians as Israelites give their claim to American lands a divine imprimatur Euro-­Christians would have to consider, but by purging indigenous claims to the land of the taint of settler colonialism,42 it could also throw into relief just how dirty Euro-­Christian inhabitation of the Amer­i­cas was. Let me conclude by putting my periodization into practice and forging an other­wise unlikely link it makes pos­si­ble. Joseph Smith’s The Book of Mormon and the writings of William Apess, a Methodist minister from that “celebrated

76   Prehistories and Transitions

tribe of Mas­sa­chu­setts Indians, now extinct as the ancient Medes,” as Melville called the Pequot in Moby-­Dick, come into view as modern messianic interventions elicited by and shot through with the anti-­messianic thought of Native extinction in par­tic­u­lar, signaled in their moment by that milestone of Euro-­ Christian settler colonialism, the 1830 Indian Removal Act.43 In The Book of Mormon, this anti-­colonialist messianism is expressed in the preemption and subsumption of the Christian messianic event by empty homogeneous space-­time, underlining the need for messianic events beyond and perhaps even against the Christian one.44 Put another way, The Book of Mormon might be said to homogenize Christian messianic time to the point of draining it of its radically contrastive—­and thus transformative—­potential. The very confidence many Euro-­Christian settlers felt around 1830 that they ­were living an eschatological unfolding is turned against itself: the ongoing experience and per­for­mance of settler colonialism as the immanent realization of the transcendent ironically routinize it and thereby call into question its significance. The homogenization of Christian messianic time in The Book of Mormon begins with the frankness and comprehensiveness of the text’s prolepsis. By the end of the 32nd of 239 total chapters and only forty or so years into its one-­thousand-­year main narrative—­that is, only one-­eighth of the way into the text and one twenty-­fifth into the time span of its main narrative (so around 560 BCE, according to the text’s internal chronology)—­the righ­ teous descendants of Lehi and the narrators of The Book of Mormon, the Nephites, are already worshipping Jesus Christ by name (2 Nephi 10:3), equipped with detailed foreknowledge of his birth by a virgin, his baptism, his crucifixion, and his resurrection and a thoroughly developed Christian soteriology (i.e., notion of salvation). In some passages, this anachronism becomes an explicit theme of the text, for instance, when Nephi offers an elaborate explanation for why the Nephites continue to obey the law of Moses even though they already know it’s ­going to be rendered obsolete by Jesus’s Gospel (2 Nephi 25). The pre-­Christian Nephites of The Book of Mormon, we are told, believe in Christ “as though he already was,” “as though he had already come among them,” which, we ­will see, he eventually does (Jarom 1:11; Mosiah 3:13). Consequently, the Nephite prophet-­narrators often find themselves somewhat humorously backing up to parenthetically acknowledge their anachronism, thereby drawing attention to it. The first naming of “Christ” in the narrative is, appropriately maybe, an afterthought. One of Lehi’s other prophet-­sons, Jacob, is discoursing and states, “Wherefore, as I said unto you, it must needs be expedient that Christ (for in

600 BCE–1830 CE: The Book of Mormon  77

the last night that the angel spake unto me that this would be his name) should come among the Jews [and be crucified]” (2 Nephi 10:3). Likewise, the prophet Abinadi, sermonizing about 150 years before Jesus’s birth, catches himself in the midst of his theological reasoning: “And now if Christ had not come into the world (speaking of ­things to come as though they had already come), ­there could have been no redemption” (Mosiah 16:6). This sustained repre­sen­ta­tion of lived messianic time—­people not only speaking of t­ hings to come as though they had already come but also living as though they had already happened—­ over hundreds of pages of narrative has the effect of homogenizing messianic time. It is as though, in the moment of eschatological fulfillment, the ostensibly transcendent has become almost completely immanentized. Nowhere is this clearer than when the messiah, Jesus, actually shows up in the text. B ­ ecause ­we’ve already heard so much about him—­his name, his history, the finer points of soteriology—he ends up being more or less just as advertised. To borrow a distinction from Paul North, it is as though “revelatory speech” anticipating the messiah has effectively stolen the thunder of the “redemptive speech” the messiah offers at his coming.45 This effect is only deepened when Jesus—­and, importantly, this is a glorified Jesus with form and comeliness in spades—­opens by reprising the Sermon on the Mount. This seems a strikingly unmessianic concession to mundane spatiotemporality, ­because the premise seems to be that t­ hese folks, being on the other side of the w ­ ater and all, ­haven’t had the chance to hear that excellent discourse, which r­ eally bears repeating. ­There’s an iterative itinerating on display h ­ ere that makes the chip of messianic time seem more like a chit of ministerial routine. T ­ here are more spectacular displays subsequently, and, as a result, a model Christian community is forged that lasts for two hundred years. But then subsumption: a­ fter the passage of good old empty homogeneous time, as generations arise for whom the memory of the visit is attenuated, this messiah-­touched collectivity collapses and dissension and war return, culminating in the extinction of the narrating white Nephites at the hands of the black Lamanites, the ancestors of the indigenous ­peoples of the Amer­i­cas. Within the narrative itself, then, messianic time is eventually overwhelmed by empty homogeneous time. Messianic time only returns—­and the loss of the narrating white Nephites made meaningful—­ through Smith’s recovery and dissemination of their rec­ord in the form of The Book of Mormon to the surviving scions of the Lamanites, who w ­ ill thereby be enabled to prevent their own extinction in the colonial pres­ent and reclaim the land of their inheritance. In sum, the anti-­messianic thought of extinction trumps the messianic in the narrative world of The Book of Mormon, but the

78   Prehistories and Transitions

book’s publication in what it understands to be its predestined moment of coming forth in 1830 enables in the real world of its reception the messianic halting of Euro-­Christian settler colonialism’s attempted extinction of Native ­peoples. On July 10, 1832, two Mormon missionaries, Orson Hyde and Samuel H. Smith, Joseph’s kid b ­ rother, peddled The Book of Mormon to none other than the Pequot Methodist minister, William Apess, in Boston. Smith reported the encounter in his diary: “visited by a man by the name of Apes an Indian of the Peqod tribe he was a Preacher though some unbelieving at first but became more believing and concluded to give the work [The Book of Mormon] a candid investigation & invited us to Preach in his hall that [he] hireed [sic] to Preach in himse[l]f & also invited us to pay him a visit.”46 Hyde, in his own entry, repeated the same details, adding that it was “quite an in­ter­est­ing time with him, in sitting down with an intelligent son of Abraham and conversing with him is something agreeable.”47 To the extent that we trust Smith’s account that Apess “became more believing” regarding The Book of Mormon as the men talked, it was ­because Apess believed himself to be “the son of Abraham” Hyde took him to be. In his appendix to his July 1829 autobiography A Son of the Forest (largely culled from Elias Boudinot’s Star in the West; or, A ­Humble Attempt to Discover the Long Lost Ten Tribes of Israel) and his 1831 The Indians: The Ten Lost Tribes, published along with his sermon The Increase of the Kingdom of Christ, Apess laid claim to an Israelite identity.48 In a way, Apess thus seemed to have beaten The Book of Mormon to the punch: without its aid, ­here was an Indian invigorated by the conviction that, in his words, he belonged to “a nation, peculiarly and emphatically blessed by God—[God’s] own highly favored and chosen ­people.”49 The Indians: The Ten Lost Tribes, like The Book of Mormon, ­couples a preoccupation with the anti-­messianic thought of Native extinction with a messianism animated but also haunted by that thought. The piece opens with a confident proclamation of the “infinite glory” of God over and against “the finite conceptions of men”—­one cannot “fathom a measureless depth with a mea­sured line,” a spatial meta­phor that can readily be translated into its temporal counterpart to yield chronos versus kairos, or empty homogeneous time versus messianic time. We ­don’t quite know where this is coming from, other than a place of general piety, ­until Apess poses a gut-­checking theodicy: he has been asked “time and again,” he writes, “­whether I did not sincerely believe that God had more re­spect to the white man than to the untutored son of the forest.”50 It is clear, then—­only in retrospect—­that Apess’s introductory paean to divine infinitude constitutes a pointed refutation of the providentialism of the

600 BCE–1830 CE: The Book of Mormon  79

victors. The question he reports being asked is, bluntly put, Given how t­ hings are ­going, ­don’t you think God loves white p ­ eople more? It is in this rhetorical context that he claims for Indians an Israelite identity. Ultimately, his answer to the question is, No, if anything, God loves us more, b ­ ecause w ­ e’re Israelites and ­you’re Gentiles.51 The claiming of Israelite identity makes Indians the subjects of messianic history and, in vari­ous ways, disrupts the seemingly self-­evident unfolding of the colonial pres­ent, suggesting that “finite conceptions” ­will shortly be challenged by infinite justice. But then the Israelite identity suddenly turns out not to be so auspicious—­ after all, the Jews crucified the messiah, and then Jerusalem was sacked by the Romans. The messianic promise is shaken, as in The Book of Mormon, by the convulsions of war and vio­lence. The rest of the brief tract proceeds to paint a portrait of Native attrition: “Hundreds of thousands perished before the face of the white man. Suffice it to say, what is already known, that the white man . . . ​grew taller and taller ­until his shadow was cast over all the land—in its shade the mighty tribes of olden time wilted away. A few, the remnant of multitudes long since gathered to their f­ athers, are all that remain; and they are on their march to eternity.” Hence, although the text opens with the “measureless depth” of divine justice, it closes with “the mea­sured line,” the death toll, the anti-­messianic thought of Native extinction, uttered by a man who identifies himself as “one of the few remaining descendants of a once power­ ful tribe of Indians.”52 When Apess returned to theodicy a ­couple years ­later in his Indian’s Looking-­ Glass for the White Man, the messianic thought of reparative justice does not alternate with the thought of extinction so much as it is suffused by it. Railing against the racism of whites, Apess suggests that such prejudice amounts to questioning Providence in light of certain key facts of global life: “If black or red skins or any other skin of color is disgraceful to God, it appears that he has disgraced himself a g­ reat deal—­for he has made fifteen colored p ­ eople to 53 one white and placed them ­here upon this earth.” The menacing messianic thought ­here is Malthusian, which is to say already pervaded by the anti-­ messianic thought of extinction: the disproportionate power of the global white minority is an obviation of the divine disposition evident in planetary demographics, and so, the implication is, we s­ houldn’t expect that power to last much longer. In The Book of Mormon and Apess’s writings, we see messianic thought inside theology,54 producing rich formulations and dynamic per­for­mances that are powerfully resonant with and relevant to the shaping of our global modernity with its inescapable thought of extinction. The

80   Prehistories and Transitions

timeline I’ve proposed suggests that a tradition of (self-)critique fundamental to American studies might best be served by turning to sources neglected by dominant modes of critique underpinned by Eurocentric and secularist assumptions—to media that challenge rather than presuppose the accomplishments of settler colonialism in idioms that disjoint time by joining themselves to alternative cosmic histories.55 Notes 1. ​Joseph Smith, The Book of Mormon: The Earliest Text, ed. Royal Skousen (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009). Hereafter cited by book, chapter, and verse in the text. This essay builds on other work I’ve done on The Book of Mormon, such as Jared Hickman, “The Book of Mormon as Amerindian Apocalypse,” American Lit­er­a­ture 86, no. 3 (Sept. 2014): 429–61; Jared Hickman, “The Perverse Core of Mormonism: The Book of Mormon, Ge­ne­tic Secularity, and Messianic Decoloniality,” in “To Be Learned Is Good”: Faith and Scholarship among the Latter-­day Saints, ed. J. Spencer Fluhman, Kathleen Flake, and Jed Woodworth (Provo, UT: Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, 2017); and Elizabeth Fenton and Jared Hickman, “Learning to Read with The Book of Mormon,” in Americanist Approaches to “The Book of Mormon,” ed. Elizabeth Fenton and Jared Hickman (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). 2. ​On The Book of Mormon as “second Bible,” see Philip L. Barlow, Mormons and the Bible: The Place of Latter-­Day Saints in American Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 41. On the context of American literary scripturism, see Lawrence Buell, New ­England Literary Culture: From Revolution through Re­nais­sance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 183. On The Book of Mormon’s status as the “foundational document” of Mormonism, see Elizabeth Fenton, “Open Canons: Sacred History and American History in The Book of Mormon,” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-­Century Americanists 1, no. 2 (Fall 2013): 341. For a review of Americanist gestures t­ oward The Book of Mormon’s canonization, see Fenton and Hickman, “Learning to Read with The Book of Mormon.” 3. ​For Benjaminian readings of The Book of Mormon, see Adam S. Miller, “Messianic History: Walter Benjamin and the Book of Mormon,” in Rube Goldberg Machines: Essays in Mormon Theology (Salt Lake City, UT: Greg Kofford Books, 2012), 21–35; and Gillian Sayre, “Books Buried in the Earth: The Book of Mormon, Revelation, and the Humic Foundations of the Nation,” in Fenton and Hickman, Americanist Approaches to “The Book of Mormon.” The most pertinent Benjamin text ­here is Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Selected Writings, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, vol. 4, 1938–1940 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 395–97. 4. ​Recent estimations of h ­ uman migration to the Amer­i­cas keep receding farther back in time; see Guy Gugliotta, “When Did H ­ umans Come to the Amer­i­cas?,” Smithsonian Magazine, Feb. 2013, www​.­smithsonianmag​.­com​/­science​-­nature​/­when​-­did​-­humans​-­come​-­to​-­the​-­americas​ -­4209273​/­​?­no​-­ist. For outlines of settler colonialism as a distinct object of analy­sis, see Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event (New York: Cassell, 1999). For an application of this category to American history, see Walter Hixson, American Settler Colonialism: A History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 5. ​James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-­World, 1783–1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).

600 BCE–1830 CE: The Book of Mormon  81 6. ​Belich, 85–89. 7. ​Renée L. Bergland, The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects (Hanover, NH: University Press of New E ­ ngland), 3, 21; see also Mark Rifkin, Settler Common Sense: Queerness and Everyday Colonialism in the American Re­nais­sance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). 8. ​On The Book of Mormon as a script for Mormon settlement in proximity to and alliance with Native p ­ eoples, see Samuel Morris Brown, In Heaven as It Is on Earth: Joseph Smith and the Early Mormon Conquest of Death (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 98–110. 9. ​For a brief survey of indigenous Mormon readings of The Book of Mormon, see Hickman, “The Book of Mormon as Amerindian Apocalypse” and the lit­er­a­ture referenced t­ here. Pacific Islanders’ claiming of The Book of Mormon is based on a brief mention of a group of American Israelites who set sail to the West (Alma 63:5–8). For a recent example of such a reading from Aotearoa (New Zealand), see Gina Colvin, “Me and the Book of Mormon: It’s Complicated,” KiwiMormon: Mormon Reflections from the Antipodes, Mar. 18, 2017, www​.­patheos​.­com​/­blogs​ /­kiwimormon​/­2017​/­03​/­book​-­mormon​-­complicated​/­. 10. ​Belich, Replenishing the Earth, 201, 203; the second part of the quotation is quoted from David Hamer, New Towns in the New World (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). 11. ​Belich, Replenishing the Earth, 201; see also Veracini, Settler Colonialism, 99. 12. ​Belich, Replenishing the Earth, 182, 181. 13. ​For one of indigenous critical theory’s classic articulations of the temporal orientation that decolonization demands, see Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous P ­ eoples, 2nd ed. (New York: Zed Books, 2012), 20–43. See also Chris Andersen’s distinction of indigenous nationalism from settler nationalism on the basis of the former’s “ability to envision a consciousness as Indigenous nations prior to the presence of settler nations”; Chris Andersen, Métis: Race, Recognition, and the Strug­gle for Indigenous Peoplehood (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2014), 101. 14. ​On the ongoingness of settler colonialism in North Amer­i­ca by way of a brilliant reconceptualization of Marxian “primitive accumulation” as a present-­rather than past-­tense pro­cess, see Glen Sean Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); see also Robert Allen Warrior, “Native American Scholarship and the Transnational Turn,” Cultural Studies Review 15, no. 2 (Sept. 2009): 119–30. 15. ​Wai Chee Dimock, Through Other Continents: American Lit­er­a­ture across Deep Time (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2006); Lloyd Pratt, Archives of American Time: Lit­ er­a­ture and Modernity in the Nineteenth ­Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009). 16. ​Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 387–409. 17. ​Walter Channing, “Essay on American Language and Lit­er­a­ture,” North American Review 1, no. 3 (Sept. 1815): 313. 18. ​I nod ­here to Matt Cohen’s refusal of the often pernicious oral/textual dichotomy in The Networked Wilderness: Communicating in Early New E ­ ngland (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), as well as earlier work in Native studies foregrounding “per­for­mance”: Joshua David Bellin, Medicine Bundle: Indian Sacred Per­for­mance and American Lit­er­a­ture, 1824–1932 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); Sandra M. Gustafson, Eloquence Is Power: Oratory and Per­for­mance in Early Amer­i­ca (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). Also noteworthy ­here is Lisa Brooks’s use of the Abenaki term to denote “the activity of writing”—­awikhigawôgan—to get at noncodex forms of Native inscription; see Lisa Brooks, The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).

82   Prehistories and Transitions 19. ​For a similar point, see Andrew Newman, “Indigeneity and Early American Lit­er­a­ture,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Lit­er­a­ture, http://­dx​.­doi​.­org​/­10​.­1093​/­acrefore​/­9780190201098​ .­013​.­141. 20. ​Edmundo O’Gorman, The Invention of Amer­i­ca: An Inquiry into the Historical Nature of the New World and the Meaning of Its History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1961). On the Fourth World’s opposition to a cap­i­tal­ist world-­system, see Arif Dirlik, “Globalization, Indigenism, and the Politics of Place,” ARIEL 34, no. 1 (Jan. 2003): 15–29; on the colonization of the Amer­i­cas as the beginning of the cap­i­tal­ist world-­system, see Aníbal Quijano and Immanuel Wallerstein, “Americanity as a Concept, or the Amer­i­cas in the Modern World-­System,” International Social Science Journal 134 (1992): 549–57. 21. ​Bergland, National Uncanny; Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999). 22. ​Jeffrey Glover, Paper Sovereigns: Anglo-­Native Treaties and the Law of Nations, 1604–1664 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014). 23. ​David Cusick, David Cusick’s Sketches of Ancient History of the Six Nations (Lewiston, NY: Cooley & Lathrop, 1827); on Haudenosaunee historiography in Cusick’s Sketches, see Daniel M. Radus, “Printing Native History in David Cusick’s Sketches of Ancient History of the Six Nations,” American Lit­er­a­ture 86, no. 2 (June 2014): 217–43; on romance as a species of historiography, see Charles Brockden Brown, “The Difference between History and Romance,” Monthly Magazine and American Review 2, no. 4 (Apr. 1800), and “Walstein’s School of History,” Monthly Magazine and American Review 1, no. 5 (Aug.–­Sept. 1799); on romance as foundational for Americanist literary studies, see Nina Baym, “Melodramas of Beset Manhood: How Theories of American Fiction Exclude W ­ omen Authors,” American Quarterly 33, no. 2 (Summer 1981): 123–39. 24. ​Penelope Myrtle Kelsey, Tribal Theory in Native American Lit­er­a­ture: Dakota and Haudenosaunee Writing and Indigenous Worldviews (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010); Robert Allen Warrior, Tribal Secrets: Recovering American Indian Intellectual Traditions (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994); and Craig S. Womack, Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). 25. ​Colin G. Calloway, New World for All: Indians, Eu­ro­pe­ans, and the Remaking of Early Amer­i­ca, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). 26. ​Mark Rifkin, Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-­Determination (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017). 27. ​I deliberately use the word extinction throughout for its ambiguity, encapsulated in the OED’s first definition: “The action of extinguishing; the fact or state of being extinguished.” “Extinction” can suggest both an activity that might other­wise be called “extermination” and the obfuscation of that activity ­under a notion of “coming to an end or ­dying out; the condition of being extinct.” In other words, “extinction” ­here refers to both settler colonialism’s systematic work of “extinguishing” indigenous ­peoples and its exculpatory attribution of the ultimate outcomes of that work to some higher agency’s appointment of indigenous ­peoples to “a pro­cess of becoming extinct.” 28. ​On the epistemic implications of temporal alterity, albeit by reference to African rather than Native American history, see Carrie Hyde, “Novelistic Evidence: The Denmark Vesey Conspiracy and Possibilistic History,” American Literary History 27, no. 1 (Spring 2015): 26–55; for a phenomenological approach, see Rifkin, Beyond Settler Time; for an ontological reworking of time, see William E. Connolly, A World of Becoming (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). 29. ​On “nativist” prophetic movements, see Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Re­sis­tance: The North American Indian Strug­gle for Unity, 1745–1815 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992); on Mormonism and the Ghost Dance, see Gregory E. Smoak, Ghost Dances and

600 BCE–1830 CE: The Book of Mormon  83 Identity: Prophetic Religion and American Indian Ethnogenesis in the Nineteenth C ­ entury (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). 30. ​This echoes Pratt’s account of temporality, modernity, and the relation between them in Archives of American Time. 31. ​For mainstream reportage, see Kevin Hardy, “Near Standing Rock, Pipeline Protest Meets a Spiritual Movement,” Des Moines Register, Oct. 8, 2016. Pertinent ­here is Arif Dirlik’s claim that the Fourth World, “for all its faults . . . ​remains” perhaps our most vital “reminder of pos­si­ble alternatives to the existing state of ­things”; Arif Dirlik, “Globalization, Indigenism, and the Politics of Place,” ARIEL 34, no. 1 (Jan. 2003): 25; see also Coulthard, Red Skins, White Masks, on how “Indigenous modes of thought and be­hav­ior” might “prove to be invaluable glimpses into the ethical practices and preconditions required for the construction of a more just and sustainable world order” (11–12). 32. ​Anna Glazova and Paul North, “Introduction: Saving Hope, the Wager of Messianism,” in Messianic Thought outside Theology, ed. Anna Glazova and Paul North (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 4. 33. ​Glazova and North, 4, 7, 8. 34. ​Glazova and North, 8–9. 35. ​Glazova and North, 6. 36. ​Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 37. ​Simon L. Lewis and Mark A. Maslin, “Defining the Anthropocene,” Nature 519 (Mar. 12, 2015): 171–80; Dana Luciano, “The Inhuman Anthropocene,” Avidly: A Los Angeles Review of Books Channel, Mar. 22, 2015, http://­avidly​.­lareviewofbooks​.­org​/­2015​/­03​/­22​/­the​-­inhuman​ -­anthropocene​/­. 38. ​Hilton Obenzinger, American Palestine: Melville, Twain, and the Holy Land Mania (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1999); Steven Salaita, The Holy Land in Transit: Colonialism and the Quest for Canaan (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2006); Eran Shalev, American Zion: The Old Testament as a Po­liti­cal Text from the Revolution to the Civil War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013); Robert Allen Warrior, “A Native American Perspective: Canaanites, Cowboys, and Indians,” in Voices from the Margin, ed. R. S. Sugirtharajah (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1991), 235–41. 39. ​Shalev, American Zion, 8. 40. ​Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Hope Leslie, ed. Mary Kelley (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987), 54. For an excellent discussion of messianism in Hope Leslie, see Pratt, Archives of American Time, 98–117; on settler colonial ethno-­providentialism more broadly, see Nicholas Guyatt, Providence and the Invention of the United States, 1607–1876 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 173–258; on Puritan discourse on the Pequot War as the “earliest full expression” of “the my­thol­ogy of the American frontier,” see Alfred A. Cave, The Pequot War (Amherst: University of Mas­sa­chu­setts Press, 1996), 168–78. 41. ​Elizabeth Fenton, “Nephites and Israelites: The Book of Mormon and the Hebraic Indian Theory,” in Fenton and Hickman, Americanist Approaches to “The Book of Mormon.” 42. ​Veracini discusses how one go-to justification of settler colonialism is the repre­sen­ta­tion of local indigenes as recent invaders/settler themselves; Veracini, Settler Colonialism, 35–36. 43. ​Melville’s comparison of the Pequot to the extinct Medes, who hailed from the region whence empires invaded Israel, is striking in this context, insofar as it tacitly aligns Indians with non-­Israelite aggressors and Euro-­Christian settlers with Israelites, with the extinction of the former implying providential judgment. 44. ​See Hickman, “The Book of Mormon as Amerindian Apocalypse”; and Hickman, “Perverse Core of Mormonism.” 45. ​Paul North, “Messiahs and Princi­ples,” in Glazova and North, Messianic Thought outside Theology, 195–220.

84   Prehistories and Transitions 46. ​Samuel Harrison Smith, Diary, 1832–1833 (MS 4213), LDS Church History Department (website), https://­dcms​.­lds​.­org​/­delivery​/­DeliveryManagerServlet​?­dps​_­pid​=I­ E1276421&usedforsort​ =­MS​_­4213​_­f0001. Thanks to Connell O’Donovan for this reference. 47. ​Orson Hyde, Journal, Feb.–­Dec. 1832 (MS 1386), LDS Church History Department (website), https://­dcms​.­lds​.­org​/­delivery​/­DeliveryManagerServlet​?­dps​_­pid​=­IE2434633&usedforsort​ =­MS​_­1386​_f­ 0001. Thanks to Connell O’Donovan for this reference as well. For the briefest speculation on Apess’s pos­si­ble familiarity with The Book of Mormon, without the benefit of Smith’s and Hyde’s diaries recording his ­actual encounter with it, see Randall Moon, “William Apess and Writing White,” Studies in American Indian Lit­er­a­ture 5, no. 4 (Winter 1993): 53n1. In his recent cultural biography of Apess, Drew Lopenzina passingly mentions the encounter with Mormon missionaries; see Drew Lopenzina, Through an Indian’s Looking-­Glass: A Cultural Biography of William Apess, Pequot (Amherst: University of Mas­sa­chu­setts Press, 2017), 191, drawing on Christopher, “ ‘A Son of the Forest’ and ‘An Intelligent Son of Abraham’: Orson Hyde and Samuel Smith Meet William Apess, 1832,” Juvenile Instructor: Organ for Young Latter-­Day Saint Scholars, Nov. 21, 2013, http://­juvenileinstructor​.­org​/­a-​ ­son​-­of​-­the​-­forest​-­and​-­an​-­intelligent​-­son​-­of​-­abraham​-­william​ -­hyde​-­and​-­samuel​-­smith​-­meet​-­william​-­apess​-­1832​/­. 48. ​William Apess, On Our Own Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess, a Pequot, ed. Barry O’Connell (Amherst: University of Mas­sa­chu­setts Press, 1992). Lopenzina suggests that “­later in life Apess apparently came to reject the lost tribes scenario,” but at the time of his meeting with Hyde and Smith, this theory “seems to have been a staple of his preaching”; Lopenzina, Through an Indian’s Looking-­Glass, 178. 49. ​Apess, Ten Lost Tribes, in O’Connell, On Our Ground, 113. 50. ​Apess, Ten Lost Tribes, 113. 51. ​As Hilary Wyss puts it, ­under Apess’s Indian-­Israelite theory, “Chris­tian­ity cannot be understood as a Euro-­American religion, since it is for [Indians] the very basis of their ethnicity as Native Americans.” Hilary Wyss, Writing Indians: Literacy, Chris­tian­ity, and Native Community in Early Amer­i­ca (Amherst: University of Mas­sa­chu­setts Press, 2000), 161. 52. ​Wyss, 114, 115, 114. 53. ​William Apess, Indian’s Looking-­Glass for the White Man, in O’Connell, On Our Ground, 157. 54. ​Tellingly, the title of Glazova and North’s collection, working as it does within a secularization narrative, is Messianic Thought outside Theology. 55. ​On American studies’ tradition of (self-)critique, see Winfried Fluck, Romance with Amer­ i­ca? Essays on Culture, Lit­er­a­ture, and American Studies, ed. Laura Bieger and Johannes Voelz (Heidelberg, Germany: Universitätsverlag, 2009), 69–104; for critical theory’s presupposition of settler colonialism, see Jodi Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011); and Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks.

1629–1852 American Lit­er­a­ture, Democracy, and the Patroons

jennifer greiman

“Time’s Tooth” To judge from the earliest publications of the New York Historical Society, it seems that Americans have been forgetting their Dutch origins for well over two hundred years. Founded in 1804 to challenge the Puritan origin myth and the En­glish foundations of the United States, the Society recovered, translated, and published voluminous archives documenting Dutch activity in North Amer­ i­ca from Henry Hudson’s failed 1609 search for a northwest passage to Peter Stuyvesant’s cession of New Netherland to the En­glish in 1664.1 But despite the efforts of the Society to install a narrative of Amer­i­ca’s Dutch found­ers, one director complained in 1818 that “the sketch of the early glories of the Dutch” not only remained “slight and imperfect” but also was being scandalously overshadowed by “the burlesque history of New York” that had been dedicated to the Society in 1809 by the pseudonymous Diedrich Knickerbocker.2 Ten years ­later—­and more than two de­cades into this vast archival proj­ect—­yet another director of the Society bemoaned the per­sis­tence with which New Yorkers continued to forget the Dutch: “Why should we, in this state, continue any longer heedless of our own glory, when we also can point to a body of illustrious annals?”3 Echoing through the Society’s anniversary addresses and volumes of “illustrious annals” throughout the nineteenth ­century, this lament became a trope of New Netherland historiography both earnest and burlesque. From Washington Irving’s satiric quest, in his History of New York (1809), “to rescue from oblivion the memory” of the Dutch colonists to Jaap Jacobs’s reminder, in The Colony of New Netherland (2009), that “visitors to New York City can walk the streets without being aware of its origins,” the history of New Netherland is always described as forgotten, ignored, inaccessible, or altogether unknown.4 Put another way, the story of Dutch North Amer­i­ca is

86   Prehistories and Transitions

that of a periodization that does not hold. Although it has been overnarrated by more than two centuries of historians claiming that it has been woefully undernarrated, the story of New Netherland keeps failing to dislodge ­those of Plymouth and Jamestown, and the Dutch keep being forgotten. But perhaps more remarkable than the per­sis­tence with which Americans have apparently forgotten New Netherland is the long survival of one of the most power­ful Dutch colonial institutions. Amid all the early nineteenth-­ century anxiety about the absent archive and forgotten history of Dutch colonization, ­there is ­little mention of the system of manorial land owner­ship and durable tenancy that thrived in the state of New York ­until the ­middle of the ­century. The patroonship system, created by the Dutch West India Com­pany in 1629 to expand settlements in the colony, not only survived the transfer of the colony from Dutch to En­glish rule—­and, l­ ater, from En­glish to American—­ but also thrived and expanded throughout the seventeenth, eigh­teenth, and nineteenth centuries. By 1839, twenty estates controlled 2 million acres of the state’s land, worked by nearly 250,000 tenant farmers.5 That is to say, while the members of the New York Historical Society w ­ ere fretting about the lost legacy of the Dutch, one-­twelfth of the population of New York State continued to live ­under terms of land owner­ship and tenancy originally devised by the West India Com­pany in 1629. In what follows, I do not propose that we once again try to remember New Netherland and adjust our narratives of early American literary production accordingly. Instead, I want to highlight the ways in which the most enduring legacy of the Dutch colonial proj­ect in North Amer­i­ca, the manorial model of landownership that originated with the patroons, defies periodization by seeming to warp time itself. If the Dutch challenge to Amer­i­ca’s En­glish origins is a long history of failed reperiodization, this is in part owing to the gap between the storied absence of Dutch history and the continued presence of colonial Dutch property relations in nineteenth-­century New York. The estate system bound tenant farmers to landowners in contracts that covered multiple generations and ­were based on title claims dating back to the seventeenth ­century. As Herman Melville writes in Pierre, ­these “estates seem to defy Time’s tooth, and by conditions which take hold of the indestructible earth seem to cotemporize their fee-­simples with eternity.”6 Defying “Time’s tooth,” the manorial system not only outlasts the colonial period to which a revisionary narrative of Dutch foundings would relegate it; it also disrupts a synchronous conception of historical time through which even the pres­ent could appear con­temporary to itself.7 ­Under such a warped temporality, the Dutch colonial

1629–1852: American Literature, Democracy, the Patroons   87

period keeps slipping away, as well as the eras that, according to many scholars, divide and define the first half of the nineteenth ­century. The early national period, the Jacksonian era, the age of reform, the antebellum period—­each of ­these eras loses some distinction once situated within the longue durée of patroonship, failing both to cohere internally and to fall into clear succession, as all of them remain bound to a partition of land and a social order dating to the 1620s. Preserving purportedly feudal social relations 150 miles from the center of nineteenth-­century American finance capital, and exposing overlapping relations of production and accumulation, the estate system created an illusion of eternity outside of history while making it appear as if multiple historical periods ­were colliding within a single moment. Yet the enduring presence of patroonship only began to appear in the de­ cade of the estate system’s collapse. American lit­er­a­ture discovered the patroons at the beginning of their end. Within a few years of the 1839 death of the last patroon, Steven van Rensselaer III, and the start of the anti-­rent movement that broke up the large estates, James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, and Herman Melville all began to engage seriously with the history and influence of the patroons. In 1845 and 1846, as the anti-­renters achieved a series of po­liti­cal victories in the state legislature, Cooper hastily published his epic, pro-­landowner Littlepage trilogy, “treating the subject of anti-­rentism with the utmost frankness.”8 In 1848, as anti-­renters began to reach the limits of legislative remedy, Washington Irving added a comic portrait of the first patroon, Kiliaen van Rensselaer, to the Author’s Revised Edition of A History of New York. In 1852, with the estate system all but dead and the most radical aims of the anti-­renters still unrealized, Melville opened Pierre with a revisionary history of American democracy among the landed aristocracy of upstate New York. In this common attention to the patroons, three authors who often stand as exemplary figures of discrete literary periods (the early national, the Jacksonian, the antebellum) all come to narrate the history of a system that challenges such periodic distinctions while foregrounding the temporal warp that patroonery creates. Writing histories of a nonsynchronous pres­ent from widely diverging perspectives on landownership and anti-­rentism, Cooper, Irving, and Melville find in the patroons an emblem of permanence, whose collapse lays bare a set of crises over property and the conflicting temporalities of democracy. More precisely, Cooper, Irving, and Melville all tell the story of patroonery and anti-­rentism by attending to the doubled temporalities of both property (as the fruit of entitled descent and ongoing ­labor) and politics (as an activity that occurs before history and within it) that the anti-­renters

88   Prehistories and Transitions

exposed. In seeking to abrogate centuries-­old titles and calling attention to the temporal distortions of patroonery, the anti-­renters introduced a radically demo­cratic notion of time—­one of overlapping epochs, duplicitous origins, and alternative f­ utures—in which Irving, Cooper, and Melville meet as asynchronous contemporaries.

“Haughty Rent-­Deeds” The Charter of Freedoms and Exemptions of 1629 created the patroonships to negotiate the increasingly competitive interests of the Dutch West India Com­ pany’s North American settlements and its beaver trade—or, as Jaap Jacobs puts it, as a compromise between colonization and commerce.9 Reserving for itself “the island of the Manhattes” and the trade in all “peltry,” the com­pany recognized ­those as “patroons” who would “plant a colony of 50 souls, upwards of 15 years old, within the space of four years” a­ fter having declared an intent to s­ ettle a tract of land. If a settlement proved v­ iable a­ fter four years, the charter declared, the patroon “­shall forever own and possess and hold from the com­ pany as a perpetual fief of inheritance, all the land lying within the aforesaid limits.”10 Descending as a “perpetual fief ” through primogeniture, the right to claim both the land and title of patroon produced the expansiveness and longevity that became hallmarks of the estates in the nineteenth ­century. Although only Rensselaerwyck survived undivided from 1629 to 1839, similar land grants u ­ nder the En­glish in the late seventeenth and early eigh­teenth centuries expanded the landholding system, so that millions of acres ­were owned by only a handful of families in 1776, most of whom maintained their titles ­after the Revolution, while the total number of tenant farmers tripled by 1800.11 “Consider ­those most ancient and magnificent Dutch manors at the North,” Melville writes in Pierre, “whose perches are miles—­whose meadows overspread adjacent counties—­and whose haughty rent-­deeds are held by their thousand farmer tenants, so long as grass grows and ­water runs; which hints of a surprising eternity for a deed, and seems to make ­lawyer’s ink as unobliterable as the sea.”12 Just as the landowners’ titles ­were rooted in a “perpetual fief of inheritance” that gave the estates a patina of ancientness, so too w ­ ere the leases written in “unobliterable” ink. “Durable leases” covered multiple generations of a f­ amily, binding farmers legally to landowners while granting them a degree of owner­ship over their lands provided that they pay rent and a portion of all improvements and sales to their landlords. If this system of perpetual titles and durable leases proved stable through the Revolution and into the early

1629–1852: American Literature, Democracy, the Patroons   89

national era, Reeve Huston argues, this was in large part due to the elaborate “rituals of benevolence and deference,” through which landlords suspended many of their financial claims on their tenants in exchange for some rental income and po­liti­cal loyalty. Reproducing “their families and their mode of living across time,” demanding deference, granting benevolence, and drawing their wealth directly from the l­ abor of their tenant farmers, t­ hese landowners appear to have maintained a feudal po­liti­cal and economic system well into the nineteenth c­ entury. But in Huston’s account, the estate system is better understood as an “engrafting” of modern capitalism and electoral politics onto a system of familial l­ abor and manorial proprietorship. That is, the West India Com­pany’s original compromise of colonization and commerce became a delicate compromise of feudalism and capitalism that continued ­until the financial panic of 1819, when landlords began to call in outstanding rent debts to cover their losses.13 By the time of Steven van Rensselaer III’s death in 1839 and the division of Rensselaerwyck between his two eldest sons, the landholding system was in crisis: heavi­ly indebted landowners pressed farmers for long-­suspended rents as overfarming exhausted the soil and wheat prices fell. Tenants began to or­ ga­nize, first to petition the landowners for forgiveness or abatement of past-­due rents and then, when that failed, to challenge the right of landlords to collect at all. By the fall of 1839, five hundred Rensselaerwyck farmers (many disguising themselves as “Indians”14) or­ga­nized into a demonstration of force sufficient to prevent the county sheriff from entering the Helderberg hill towns west of Albany to deliver eviction notices. Governor William Seward called in the militia to support the landowners and the sheriff, all the while pressing the farmers—­ literally at gunpoint—to pursue their grievances through “legitimate” judicial and po­liti­cal means. As Huston argues, the anti-­rent movement quickly developed from this discrete uprising into “one of the most power­ful social movements of the antebellum era” through a strategy that combined direct action against landlords and their agents with l­ egal and po­liti­cal remedies and a radical ideological critique of the land titles themselves. Faced with landowners’ claims to the antiquity and perpetuity of the titles and leases, anti-­renters proposed an alternative temporality. While the landlords sought to hold the tenants to the terms of contracts signed by their forebears, the tenants insisted that pres­ent conditions—­dead patroons, soil exhaustion, declining wheat prices—­should instead dictate the terms ­under which they labored and lived.15 At stake in this dispute was not only a contest over ­labor and property but also a fundamental paradox of democracy. Does

90   Prehistories and Transitions

the past govern the pres­ent in a binding contract with the dead, as Edmund Burke insists, or must the pres­ent always be emancipating itself from the past, as Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson claim?16 Put another way, is a community constituted in a primordial act of foundation, or is it always constituting itself within historical time? By refusing to be bound by the terms of dead men’s contracts and demanding that their landlords produce ­legal proof of their titles before they would renegotiate their lease terms, the anti-­renters lodged a potentially revolutionary challenge to the constitution of rule in the state. As Roger Hecht puts it, “if property titles are illegitimate, then the social and po­liti­cal systems built on them are equally illegitimate.”17 But more than that, as tenants exposed the duplicitous temporality of t­hese “haughty rent-­ deeds” and demanded the abrogation of title altogether, they put into practice a ­simple but expansive vision of democracy as the power of ­those who have no title to disrupt the rule of ­those who do.18

“A Fact Most Suggestive Two Ways” James Fenimore Cooper’s seething repudiation of anti-­rentism in the Little­ page Manuscripts is a fair mea­sure of how radical the anti-­renters’ challenge to durable leases and original titles was. A full-­throated defense of perpetuity through proprietorship, Satanstoe, The Chainbearer, and The Redskins address the “­great New York question of the day” by narrating the provenance of a fictive tract of upstate land through multiple generations of its o­ wners and tenants. But while the novels trace eighty years of the Littlepage f­ amily’s owner­ ship of Ravensnest, the prefaces respond almost in real time to the ongoing anti-­rent challenge, binding a trilogy that is deeply invested in permanence to the contingency of an unfolding po­liti­cal crisis.19 Satanstoe, “a tale of the colony,” begins with the assertion that “true liberty” follows from “the perpetuity of institutions,” which depends, in turn, “on putting down, wholly, absolutely, and unqualifiedly, the false and dishonest theories and statements that have been boldly advanced in connection with [anti-­rentism].”20 The Chainbearer resumes the ­family narrative two generations ­later to describe Ravensnest’s per­sis­tence through the Revolution, while its preface defends the landlords in light of the electoral successes of anti-­rent parties in 1845: “The plot has thickened in the few short months that have intervened since the appearance of the first portion of our Manuscripts.”21 Responding directly to the anti-­rent platform, Cooper argues that, far from being “opposed to the spirit of the institutions,” durable leases preceded the republic and its institutions, both of which w ­ ere formed around them and in defense of the estates.

1629–1852: American Literature, Democracy, the Patroons   91

“The capital error is becoming prevalent, which holds the pernicious doctrine that this is a government of men, instead of one of princi­ples.”22 In the Burkean view Cooper advances h ­ ere, durable leases are as much an inheritance as the land itself, proceeding from primordial contracts, preceding all extant po­liti­cal institutions, and exceeding the power of living men to change them. The novels fi­nally catch up with their motivating crisis in The Redskins. Once again, Cooper’s preface argues for the continuity of titles and leases, but The Redskins opens with a break in what Michael Warner calls “repronarrative”: the story of perpetuation through paternity that promises a transcendence of death.23 ­Under the proprietorship of an aging expatriate bachelor in the early 1840s, Ravensnest is threatened by a hiatus in descent on one side and an anti-­rent challenge from its tenants on another, both of which test the durability of the estate against the rights of living men. Throughout all three prefaces, Cooper casts his defense of the perpetuation of estates, institutions, and princi­ples in po­liti­cal rather than economic terms. In The Redskins preface, Cooper, reiterating his claim that land titles and leases “belong” to the po­liti­cal institutions of New York, invokes a demo­cratic “sentiment” to argue for the capacity of contracts and princi­ples to survive and command the living: “Democracy is a lofty and noble sentiment. It does not rob the poor to make the rich richer, nor the rich to ­favor the poor. It is just and treats all men alike. It does not ‘impair the obligations of contracts.’ ” Cooper proposes a definition of democracy that is compatible with perpetual titles: a “noble sentiment” of equal treatment that applies as much to contracts as to men. ­Under such a sentiment, the Littlepages can secure their perpetuity through the ­triple entitlement of land, name, and leases. But Cooper suggests that tenants can also secure their perpetuity through such a “demo­ cratic” view of contract: bound to the obligations incurred by their ancestors, tenants might transcend death through the perpetuation of their obligation. Thus, what is “demo­cratic” in Cooper’s narrative of perpetual title, durable leases, and the equal treatment of contracts is the claim that perpetuation through descent might be available to rich and poor alike, yoking democracy to all the mechanisms of repronarrative. But with this, the “demo­cratic sentiment” fails to “treat all men alike.” If the estate system becomes a demo­cratic institution by surviving the Revolution to secure perpetual rights and obligations to ­owners and tenants, it is not the only such system to do so: “it would be just as true to affirm that domestic slavery is opposed to the institution of the United States as to say the same of the leases.” With an opacity worthy of Melville, Cooper claims that the leases are as compatible with democracy as slavery is. What­ever his ambiguity h ­ ere, Cooper’s preface ultimately describes

92   Prehistories and Transitions

a transgenerational descent of whiteness by title and lease that the novels bear out. In one of the strangest details of Cooper’s multigenerational trilogy, two characters survive into impossibly old age to appear in all three novels: Jaaf and Susquesas, the black slave and Onondaga ally to multiple generations of Littlepages. White aristocrats transcend death through title, and white farmers by honoring the terms of their great-­grandfathers’ contracts, but Jaaf and Susquesas can only do so by never ­dying.24 Cooper responds to the anti-­rent challenge by naturalizing perpetuity and continuity, so that the undying bodies of Jaaf and Susquesas stand witness to the ­legal repronarrative that secures property and contract for generations of white landowners and tenants. For Washington Irving, too, the anti-­rent crisis prompts a meditation on perpetuation, but in the revised edition of Knickerbocker’s History of New York continuation is secured by a form of cultural reproduction that passes between patroons and tenants. Though Irving’s overwhelmed Dutch historian makes no mention of the patroons in the early editions of A History of New York, the 1848 edition includes two chapters on the “lordly descent” of “Killian van Rensellaer [sic]” upon the continent (a descent that is as counterfactual as it is lordly, since the historic Killiaen van Rensselaer never left the Netherlands). Wearing “an insufferably tall hat” and wielding the power of “wapen recht” (“the right of the club”), the first patroon establishes “Rensellaerstein,” a feudal fortress that challenges the primacy of New Amsterdam. When the pipe-­smoking leaders of New Amsterdam send a diplomatic mission up the Hudson River to negotiate, they are met with an army of Helderberg tenants and a “cabalistic gesture” of thumb to nose, which the baffled emissaries duly relay to the equally puzzled governor. Like Cooper, Irving reads his account of colonial rivalry through the events of the pres­ent, but whereas Cooper casts the rent wars as a decisive break from the past, Irving finds in the conflict an expressive form of historical continuity: “Still to the early affair of Rensellaerstein may be traced the remote origin of ­those windy wars of modern days which rage in the bowels of Helderberg and have well nigh shaken the ­great Patroonship of van Rensellaer [sic] to its foundations; for we are told that the bully boys of Helderberg . . . ​carried back to their mountains that hieroglyphic sign . . . ​so that to the pres­ent day the thumb to nose and fin­gers in the air is apt to be the reply of the Helderbergers whenever called upon for any long arrears of rent.”25 The descent of this hieroglyph from the first patroon to the anti-­renters speaks to what Michael Warner calls Irving’s interest in forms of perpetuation that are “historical rather than reproductive, achieved rather than naturalized in estates.”26 As Knickerbocker passes this gesture from seventeenth-­century patroons

1629–1852: American Literature, Democracy, the Patroons   93

to nineteenth-­century anti-­renters, Irving proposes a descent that is not only historically achieved but also disruptive in its very continuity. In thus highlighting dissent as a form of continuity, Irving suggests, the “windy wars of modern days,” like the nose-­thumbing tenants, may perpetuate the past with more legitimacy than the estates do. Whereas Cooper posits the end of the patroonships as a break from a naturalized past secured by po­liti­cal institutions, and Irving connects the anti-­rent challenge to a history of expressive defiance, Melville supplies his own “cabalistic gesture” in response to the recent wars between landlords and tenants. It is, Pierre’s narrator claims, “a fact most suggestive two ways; both of which ­shall remain nameless h ­ ere.” Rather than one of Pierre’s many appeals to ambiguity, however, this insistence on a fact that is both doubly suggestive and nameless is fully in keeping with the theory of democracy that Melville’s narrator advances in the first book of Pierre. To explain the “very long uninterrupted possession” of the estate of ­Saddle Meadows by the Glendinning ­family, Melville attributes it not to a feudal aristocracy but to a potent and productive democracy that is “forever producing new ­things by corroding the old.” In an extended chain of analogies, Melville develops a theory of demo­cratic history where past and pres­ent constantly meet through a pro­cess that is at once artificially natu­ral and naturally artificial. Democracy, he claims, is “natu­ral” in the manner of “one kind of green paint . . . ​produced by grape-­vinegar poured upon copper plates.” It is “intensely artificial” in the manner of a po­liti­cal institution, which nonetheless “possesses the divine virtue of natu­ral law . . . ​ that out of Death she brings Life.” In this way, perpetuation and inheritance become as “natu­ral” as the air itself, “for all the breath in our lungs is hereditary” and survives in the “empty air of a name”—­“mere names, which are also but air, do likewise revel in this endless descendedness.” Such an “endless descendedness,” Melville suggests, proceeds from narratives of perpetuity through which the pres­ent is continually being manufactured as the natu­ral product of the past. Thus, the narrator concludes, “­those most magnificent Dutch manors at the North” are able to “defy Time’s tooth” quite naturally through the “unobliterable” ink of a “haughty rent-­deed” and the force of the state militia: “But our lords, the Patroons, appeal not to the past, but they point to the pres­ent. One ­will show you that the public census of a county is but part of the rolls of his tenants. Ranges of mountains high as Ben Nevis or Snowdon are their walls; and regular armies, with staffs of officers . . . ​have been sent out to distrain upon three thousand farmer tenants of one landlord at a blow. A fact most suggestive two ways; both of which ­shall remain nameless ­here.”27

94   Prehistories and Transitions

Only u ­ nder a pro­cess set in motion by the “demo­cratic ele­ment” can two distinct temporalities (i.e., the past and the pres­ent) coincide with two distinct ontologies (i.e., the natu­ral and the artificial). In such a view, democracy is less a founded po­liti­cal institution than a pro­cess whereby two times, two spaces, two “facts” come to coincide. Most of Melville’s extended analogies elaborate on this pro­cess, through which the past is made pres­ent and the dead are made to live and breathe, but in his final comment on the militia’s march on the Helderbergs in 1839, he seems to gesture ­toward another temporal paradox. Unlike Cooper and Irving, both of whom wrote their histories of patroonship as the anti-­renters’ challenge to leases and titles was still unfolding, Melville’s Pierre appears in 1852, a­ fter the leasehold system was broken and the leases w ­ ere renegotiated u ­ nder terms more favorable to circulation and speculation. Reeve Huston borrows a figure from Moby-­Dick to describe the defeat of the anti-­renters’ most radical challenge: “it was upon the law of fast-­fish that the tenants’ movement fi­nally found­ered. . . . ​They could not compel the government to abrogate the tangle of laws and l­egal rules that made landlords’ property inviolable.”28 When Melville describes the conflict between patroons and tenants as pres­ent and ongoing in the early pages of Pierre, he does so in a counterfactual vein that is, indeed, most suggestive two ways. In one reading, the continuity of leases even in the absence of patroons stands as one more analogy for the copresence of perpetuation and change ­under the demo­cratic ele­ment, for “mighty lordships” do continue and “are now owned by their pres­ent proprietors as any peasant owns his ­father’s old hat.” In another, though, Melville’s focus on the events of 1839 that began the anti-­rent movement freezes that movement in the moment of its fullest potential and holds open ­every pos­si­ble outcome. A fact that is both doubly suggestive and nameless is one whose meaning rests on two distinct, possibly incommensurate ­things that cannot be contained within the “empty air of name.” If names carry the past into the pres­ent, what remains nameless is instead oriented ­toward a par­tic­u­lar kind of ­future, even one that has been foreclosed.

Notes 1. ​Joyce Goodfriend, “Pres­ent at the Creation: Making the Case for the Dutch Found­ers of Amer­i­ca,” Early American Studies 7, no. 2 (2009): 261. 2. ​Giulian C. Verplanck, An Anniversary Discourse, Delivered before the New-­York Historical Society, 7 December 1818 (New York: James Eastburn, 1818), 63, 65.

1629–1852: American Literature, Democracy, the Patroons   95 3. ​James Kent, “An Anniversary Discourse, Delivered before the New-­York Historical Society, by the Honorable James Kent, 6 December 1828,” in Collections of the New-­York Historical Society, 2nd ser. (New York: H. Ludwig, 1841), 1:11–12. 4. ​Washington Irving, A History of New York (New York: Penguin, 2008), 5; Jaap Jacobs, The Colony of New Netherland: A Dutch Settlement in Seventeenth-­Century Amer­i­ca (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), ix. 5. ​Reeve Huston, Land and Freedom: Rural Society, Popu­lar Protest, and Party Politics in Antebellum New York (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 3. 6. ​Herman Melville, Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (Chicago: Newberry Library; Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1971), 11. 7. ​Cast in Fredric Jameson’s terms, the patroonship system disrupts periodization in both a diachronic view of time (“in which history is seen in some ‘linear’ way as a succession of such periods, stages, or moments”) and a synchronic view (in which a period is “so seamlessly interrelated that we confront ­either a total system or an idealistic concept of one”). See Fredric Jameson, The Po­liti­cal Unconscious: Narrative as Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 28. 8. ​James Fenimore Cooper, Satanstoe; or, The Littlepage Manuscripts: A Tale of the Colony (New York: Townsend, 1860), vi–­vii. 9. ​Jacobs, Colony of New Netherland, 69. 10. ​“Charter of Freedoms and Exemptions: June 7, 1629,” in Rensselaer Bowie Manuscripts, trans. A. J. F. van Laer (Albany: University of the State of New York, 1908), 139, 141. 11. ​Huston argues that the westward migration of settlers from New E ­ ngland ­after the Revolution vastly increased the rolls of tenants, as landlords consolidated their po­liti­cal clout u ­ nder Federalist policies that favored the wealthy (Huston, Land and Freedom, 13–14). 12. ​Melville, Pierre, 11. 13. ​Huston, Land and Freedom, 18, 36, 6, 78. 14. ​For an analy­sis of Indian costumes in rural tenant rebellions in New York and New E ­ ngland, see Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 38–43. 15. ​Huston, Land and Freedom, 92–94, 5, 91–92. 16. ​Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (New York: Penguin, 1986), 194; Thomas Paine, Rights of Man (New York: Penguin, 1985), 42; Thomas Jefferson, letter to James Madison, Sept. 6, 1789, in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian Boyd et al. (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1950–). Jefferson’s letter is also available at http://­press​-­pubs​.­uchicago​ .­edu​/­founders​/­documents​/­v1ch2s23​.­html. 17. ​Roger Hecht, “ ‘Mighty Lordships in the Heart of the Republic’: The Anti-­rent Subtext to Pierre,” in A Po­liti­cal Companion to Herman Melville, ed. Jason Frank (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013), 147. 18. ​I’m relying ­here on Jacques Rancière’s rereading of Derrida’s notion of a “democracy to come” as a practicable and historical ­future that is always occurring with new challenges to ruling ­orders by ­those who are subject to them. See Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, trans. Steve Corcoran (New York: Verso, 2006), 51 and 59. 19. ​In a definitive new reading of t­ hese novels, Dana Nelson argues that the politics of the trilogy is more complicated than the prefaces suggest: “What­ever the biases of the citizen Cooper, the novelist Cooper is, as usual, fascinated by the details of the conflict,” giving lengthy sections of narrative over to the claims and critiques of settlers, squatters, anti-­renters, and Native American characters. Dana Nelson, Commons Democracy: Reading the Politics of Participation in the Early United States (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 161. 20. ​Cooper, Satanstoe, vi. 21. ​James Fenimore Cooper, The Chainbearer, in The Works of James Fenimore Cooper (New York: Greenwood, 1969), 6:227.

96   Prehistories and Transitions 22. ​Cooper, 6:227. 23. ​Michael Warner, “Fear of a Queer Planet,” Social Text 29 (1991): 3–17. 24. ​James Fenimore Cooper, The Redskins, in The Works of James Fenimore Cooper (New York: Greenwood, 1969), 6:462, 464, 497. 25. ​Washington Irving, Knickerbocker’s History of New York (New York: Putnam, 1860), 257. 26. ​Warner, “Fear of a Queer Planet.” 27. ​Melville, Pierre, 9–11. 28. ​Huston, Land and Freedom, 175–76; see also Hecht, “Mighty Lordships,” 157–58.

1973 When It Changed

g e r r y c a n a va n

Critical theorists of the US acad­emy, like American culture writ large, have long been preoccupied with the collective sense that ­there has been a break in time. T ­ oday we find ourselves post-­everything (postmodernity, poststructuralism, postcoloniality, postraciality, postfeminism, post-9/11), beset on all sides by the frighteningly new (neoconservativism, neoliberalism, neofeudalism), and mired in the murky and unhappy space of the “­after” (­after the American ­Century, ­after US exceptionalism, a­ fter theory, a­ fter the university, ­after the idea of the ­future itself). This essay proposes that the short period roughly corresponding to the calendar year 1973 represents the crucial hinge point for this sense of a transformed world, the dividing line that separates their period from ours. Perhaps a bit unexpectedly, one discovers that all of the major po­liti­cal, economic, and cultural crises of our age seem to originate or inflect at precisely this moment, retrospectively creating the sense that some irrevocable threshold between then and now has been suddenly and irrevocably crossed. Of course, one might, as ­others have, uncover a concatenation of similarly impor­tant capital-­E events in such anni horribili as 1968 or 1979/1980 and perhaps propose one of ­these as the crucial year instead. For my part I am not seriously proposing that our postmodern moment can be said to have suddenly snapped into focus, fully formed and forever entrenched, on some par­tic­u­lar day in 1973. As Raymond Williams’s famous articulation of the dominant, the residual, and the emergent suggests,1 historical periods fade in and out across small events and through tiny, often unnoticed social transformations, which may not in isolation seem all that discontiguous from what is g­ oing on around them, but which taken together suggest the emergence of something genuinely new—­something like the static slowly building on a car radio u ­ ntil it is suddenly all that you can hear. As we reflect back on the year 1973 from the

98   Prehistories and Transitions

standpoint of the twenty-­first ­century, what we hear is the static of the postmodern as it first begins to crackle. Already in 1991, in Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Fredric Jameson was pointing to 1973 as the crucial moment “when-­it-­all-­ changed.”2 Jameson proposes 1973 not only as the end of the “brief ‘American ­century’ ” but also as the “­great shock” of crisis that, “now that the dust clouds have rolled away, disclose[s] the existence, already in place, of a strange new landscape” called postmodernity.3 In The Condition of Postmodernity (1990), David Harvey similarly dates the emergence of the postmodern as an economic condition—­post-­Fordism—to a series of structural changes in the domestic and global economy that coalesced around 1973: “I broadly accept the view that the long postwar boom, from 1945 to 1973, was built upon a certain set of ­labour control practices, technological mixes, consumption habits, and configurations of political-­economic power. . . . ​The break up of this system since 1973 has inaugurated a period of rapid change, flux, and uncertainty.”4 ­There are, of course, myriad names for this post-1973 economic turn. ­There is Harvey’s preferred term, flexible accumulation, which denotes the new strategies of monetization embraced by corporations as manufacturing work in the United States gave way to automation, outsourcing, and two-­tiered ­labor systems that increasingly saw a u ­ nion workforce “grandfathered in” while a younger workforce operated according to dif­fer­ent, more exploitative rules. (If the focus is on the conditions of l­ abor u ­ nder this new, post–­labor ­union economic regime, the word “post-­Fordism,” which Harvey also uses, is frequently preferred.) The “flexibility” of Harvey’s term is intended to contrast with the “rigidity” of the Fordist regime, both on the level of production and on the level of the state, which has fixed commitments to social spending without the ability to encourage economic growth when necessary to expand its coffers. But “flexibility” also nicely suggests how workers in all classes have been forced, since the 1970s, to reor­ga­nize their lives for a post-­Fordist world, having not only multiple ­careers over the course of their lives but also frequently multiple jobs at the same time, while new constant-­contact communication technologies such as overnight delivery (Federal Express, we might note, begins overnight delivery in April 1973), pagers, computers, email, and cell phones (first prototyped by Motorola in 1973) and “gig economy” companies like Uber and Airbnb have conspired to swell the working day across all twenty-­four hours and e­ very domain of con­temporary life. Much of the discourse around this period of economic transformation has focused on the shift to a so-­called ser­vice economy—in which an increased

1973: When It Changed   99

(though not total) share of physical manufacturing is now done outside the geographic bound­aries of the United States, whose workers now provide more managerial and nonmaterial ­labor—­and a post-­union economy of just-­ in-­time workers with the “right to work” but fewer and fewer workplace guarantees. In light of the 2008 economic crash, however, t­here also has been a pronounced interest in understanding the early 1970s as a period of “financialization” instead—­a third pos­si­ble name for the economic era that begins in the early 1970s. As Harvey details at length in The Condition of Postmodernity, “­after the traumas of 1973”—­the devaluation of the US dollar, the slide into deflation between 1973 and 1975, and a severe economic recession—­financial deregulation becomes de rigueur in eco­nom­ically advanced nations, leading ultimately to the rise of the paper profits and ­bubble economies that would repeatedly throw the global economy into crisis in 1987, 2000–2001, 2007–2008 . . . ​5 To the extent that finance capital becomes the “co-­ordinating power” of flexible accumulation, debt becomes the animating engine of that power, with an explosion in the rate of expansion in governmental, corporate, and especially consumer debt beginning around 1973, which has led to a con­temporary regime of widespread and nearly universal indebtedness. At the same time, the “extraordinarily loose monetary policy” that had sustained the postwar expansion of the welfare state in the United States and Britain following 1945 gave way around 1973,6 when attempts to control inflation and overvaluation of the dollar led to the breakdown of the post-­WWII Bretton Woods economic compact that had seen most of the world’s currencies pegged directly to gold. In early 1973 this breakdown intensified sharply when the US dollar was devalued 10 ­percent and Japan and the Eu­ro­pean Economic Community subsequently announced a floating currency—­signaling the transformation of US hegemony and the emergence of a truly global marketplace. T ­ hese f­ actors, all taken together, generated significant in­de­pen­dence on the part of capital holders from any par­tic­u­lar state, allowing private capital to “discipline” states to force friendly fiscal and monetary policy through the threat of fixed and monetary capital withdrawal. The pro­cess of financialization thus quickly intensified, as banks and other credit agencies used their new power to demand further deregulation, which gave them more power still. A list of the major economic developments in the period following the recession of 1973 linked to the global financial marketplace—­“the formation of a global stock market, of global commodity (even debt) ­futures markets, of currency and interest rate swaps”—­will fill any post-2008 reader with the dread of recognition, as one immediately sees that the roots of our economic crisis can clearly be found in the aftermath of theirs.7

100   Prehistories and Transitions

More common ­today than any of the above economic descriptors, however, is neoliberalism, which has become something of an all-­purpose shibboleth for leftist academics but which nonetheless remains useful as a way of naming the new relationship between the state and the economy as it transformed during and a­ fter the 1970s. The “welfare state” of traditional liberalism gives way in this moment to a new mode of economic policy in which the purpose of the state is not to intervene in markets (to prevent the formation of mono­poly capital, or ameliorate in­equality) but rather to facilitate markets. Speaking generally, the wide pattern of capitalism since the mid-1970s has been the retreat of the state from the economic sphere in f­ avor of the further development of markets, and in par­tic­u­lar the replacement of what used to be public goods with private profits. From the shift away from public education (in ­favor of charter schools and voucher programs) and defined benefit pensions (in ­favor of stock-­market-­invested 401(k) plans), to the widespread elimination of ­tuition “grants” and the inauguration of the con­temporary student debt regime, to the rise of privately run prisons, highways, public utilities, parking meters, and the like, the neoliberal transformation of the state moves forward on ­every conceivable front almost unopposed. Even that ­great liberal achievement of the Obama administration, the Affordable Health Care Act—­widely criticized on the right as socialism—­replaces the single-­payer dream of the old liberalism with an insurance mandate requiring ­people to purchase their health insurance from private insurers! In the transition to neoliberalism, too, 1973 looms quite large. As Harvey himself reminds us in his Brief History of Neoliberalism, 1973 marks the “first experiment with neoliberal state formation” beginning on that other September 11: the US-­backed military coup in Chile that saw General Augusto Pinochet installed as dictator.8 The coup in Chile and the subsequent economic “reforms” inaugurated by the incoming Pinochet regime would provide a proving ground for the global development of neoliberalism and the extension of ­these reforms across the globe, culminating in the mania for austerity that gripped Eu­rope and North Amer­ic­ a in the 2010s and prolonged the ­Great Recession. The growing importance of neoliberal market theory, as championed by the “Chicago School,” would be registered when neoliberal par excellence Fredrich Hayek won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1974 and Milton Friedman won in 1976.9 Outside the realm of economic structure, 1973 is a crucial year for wider cultural shifts as well. The year 1973 is the year of Watergate—­not the year of the Watergate break-in, but the year the break-in began to entangle and pull down the Nixon White House. From the trial of five burglars in January 1973 in

1973: When It Changed   101

almost cinematic parallel to his second inauguration, the story only gets worse and worse for Nixon, from Senate hearings, to the so-­called Saturday Night Massacre, to the discovery of the famous eighteen-­and-­a-­half-­minute gap in Nixon’s tapes, to his infamous declaration that “I am not a crook” that November. Nixon w ­ ouldn’t resign u ­ ntil the next August, though his vice president, Spiro Agnew, would resign in October 1973 on unrelated charges, eventually leading to the inauguration of Gerald Ford as Amer­i­ca’s first unelected president, as well as a larger transformation of the level of trust and re­spect held by the office of the presidency. The year 1973 is also the year that the Paris Peace Accord is signed (in January) and US forces begin withdrawing from Vietnam (in March), with all US forces out by August. (The bombing of Cambodia would end ­later that same year, also in August.) This marked the end of over twenty years of involvement in the conflict and a sea change in Amer­i­ca’s opinion of itself, which would haunt the nation for de­cades. Amer­i­ca’s military policy would be chastened by the legacy of Vietnam, causing it to prefer military operations that did not require long-­term occupation for the next three de­cades and inaugurating a popu­lar sense both domestically and globally of Amer­ic­ a as a defeated (or at least chastened) hegemon. But Amer­i­ca’s war making would be transformed in another way as well: 1973 marks the end of the draft and the creation of the United States’ all-­volunteer military, a concept that has significantly shifted the class composition of the army and turned the army from a structurally demo­cratic and representative body largely constituted by draftees into a structurally bureaucratic and careerist institution dominated by professional soldiers. The end of the draft also coincided with the emergence of a new flexible ideology of warfare that sees the suffering of soldiers as si­mul­ta­neously both more and less worthy of consideration for the larger body politic—as this or that momentary po­liti­cal argument requires—­because they “chose” to serve. It would of course be reductive to locate the new American conception of power within a single man, but it seems impor­tant to note that Henry Kissinger became secretary of state in 1973, as well as the recipient of a controversial Nobel Peace Prize that same year, serving in that capacity concurrently as national security advisor ­until 1975. The year 1973 is similarly a transformative year in the so-­called culture wars: it is the year of the Roe v. Wade decision on abortion, which would polarize American politics for the coming de­cades, as well as the year that the executive board of the American Psychiatric Association voted, 13-0, to remove homo­ sexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of ­Mental Disorders. Both

102   Prehistories and Transitions

of ­these events would continue to reverberate and have major repercussions for life in the United States. The year 1973 is also an impor­tant benchmark for the explosion of the prison-­industrial complex in the United States: the passing of the Rockfeller drug laws in New York State ­after a speech by Governor Nelson Rockfeller calling for life imprisonment for all drug dealers without the possibility of plea bargain, and the founding of the Drug Enforcement Agency at the federal level for the purpose of “an all-­out global war on the drug menace.”10 The war on drugs would be a leading ­factor in the transformation of Amer­i­ca ­toward our con­temporary mass incarceration society, in which over a million ­people are b ­ ehind bars for nonviolent crimes, often with quite lengthy sentences—as well as the growing militarization of urban police departments. The year 1973 is the year the World Trade Center opens and the year the Sears Tower was completed, both in their own way the biggest buildings Amer­ i­ca ­will ever build (and thus, at least symbolically, tokens of a shift away from a lost heroic age of postwar prosperity and wealth). It is also the year of the first oil shock, the OPEC (Organ­ization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) embargo on nations that had supported Israel in the Yom Kippur War, which made inescapably vis­i­ble the United States’ dependence on ­Middle Eastern oil to sustain its way of life. The oil shock led to rationing, price controls, and long lines at gas stations, as well as to an economic recession that lasted u ­ ntil the mid-1980s. The oil shock led to the institution of ele­ments of American life that quickly came to seem natu­ral, like the 55 mph speed limit on highways and the creation of the Department of Energy. But it also fostered a general perception of the fragility of the con­temporary US economy, especially when the embargo was repeated with similar results in 1979—as well as the depressed recognition that nothing could replace oil, at least in the short term, that might similarly fuel its global consumer cap­i­tal­ist prosperity. Threats of a coming world “­after oil” have been po­liti­cally salient ever since. Other major events in 1973 speak to a concern about futurity. The Endangered Species Act was passed in 1973, and thus this marked the year that the American state officially recognized that its lifestyle was killing off the rest of the planet’s inhabitants and the year the state began (however partially or inadequately) to respond. The year 1973 is also directly in the m ­ iddle of two widely circulated reports from the Club of Rome (1972 and 1974) suggesting that Western capitalism could soon be hitting its real and permanent “limits to growth”—as well as the year that scientists began to realize that chlorofluorocarbons (a then-­ubiquitous chemical in refrigerants, propellants, and solvents) ­were a significant danger both to the ozone layer and to the global

1973: When It Changed   103

climate. The year 1973 is furthermore the first year since the 1960s without a planned NASA mission to the moon, following the successful return of Apollo 17 in December 1972, and humanity has not yet gone back. Instead of extending Kennedy’s “New Frontier” to Mars, the asteroid b ­ elt, and beyond—­the Star Trek ­future—­Amer­i­ca launched Skylab, beginning in May 1973, with an eye ­toward the much more ­humble goal of permanent ­human inhabitance of low Earth orbit.11 The optimistic ideals of futurity implicit in the Space Race and other “Golden Age” science fictions turn sour in the jaundiced “New Wave” science fiction of 1973, which reacted against the techno-­optimism of 1950s and 1960s science fiction with an overawing mood of pessimism, hopelessness, suspicion, and fear. John Brunner’s The Sheep Look Up, published in 1972 and nominated for a Nebula Award in 1973, depicts a delirious, dumb Amer­i­ca falling into total ecological collapse, though no amount of pollution and mass poisoning can convince the nation to change course. (The book that won that year had parallel ecological themes and a similar, though somewhat more muted, mood of impending annihilation: Isaac Asimov’s The Gods Themselves, which takes its title from the dyspeptic proverb “Against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain.”) In Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly, also from 1973, the ecstasy of invention turns toxic, producing instead of joy and the elimination of ­human suffering a highly addictive drug called Substance D—­“D” for “Death.” In Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, written in 1973 and published in May 1974, the book’s portrayal of an “ambiguous utopia” on a far-­distant binary planetary system Urras-­Anarres becomes complicated in its final chapters by a visit from the “Terran ambassador,” who reveals that neither the Urras nor the Anarres ­future is pos­si­ble for ­human beings: My world, my Earth is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the ­human species. We multiplied and gobbled and fought u ­ ntil t­ here was nothing left, and then we died. We controlled neither appetite nor vio­lence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first. ­There are no forests left on my Earth. The air is grey, the sky is grey, it is always hot. It is habitable, it is still habitable, but not as this world is. This is a living world, a harmony. Mine is a discord. You Odonians chose a desert; we Terrans made a desert.12

The unexpected revelation that The Dispossessed’s articulation of an exciting, open, expansionist ­future of radical possibility—­space travel, moon colonies, interstellar trade!—­carries within itself a secret, second ­future of maximum deprivation for an ecologically destroyed ­future Earth mirrors the larger

104   Prehistories and Transitions

ideological trajectory of science fiction as it transitioned from the “Golden Age” to “New Wave.” That f­uture, the good f­uture, went bad; now ­we’re all stuck with this one. A similarly bleak trend can be seen in film and tele­vi­sion from 1973, both within and outside the science fiction genre. Soylent Green depicts a ­future of mass deprivation following the exhaustion of capitalism, in which Americans are literally forced to turn to cannibalism to survive, while ­Battle for the Planet of the Apes (the last entry in the Apes film franchise) turns that series into a ­bitter rumination on the looping of history and the inability of mankind to pro­gress, ending on the shot of a tear rolling down from an eye. It is the ­bitter laugh of Woody Allen’s satirical Sleeper, a Rip Van Winkle story about awakening in a lunatic f­uture, though, that would win the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Pre­sen­ta­tion in 1974—­and when Star Trek relaunches in 1973, its optimistic vision of the f­ uture is recast as a story for c­ hildren, not adults, in the form of Star Trek: The Animated Series. A glance at major releases in other film genres in 1973 registers a similarly depressed sense pervading US culture, which is si­mul­ta­neously backward-­looking and nostalgic (e.g., The Way We ­Were, American Graffiti; Happy Days premiered on tele­vi­sion in January 1974), preoccupied with corruption and anti-­heroes (The Sting, Serpico, Papillon), and obsessed with vio­lence and with horrors (the Dirty Harry sequel Magnum Force, and the number one grossing film that year, The Exorcist). And the list could easily go on: 1973 marks not the date of the famous Nixon visit to China (that was 1972) but the year in which US-­Chinese relations began to be renormalized, with the opening of liaison offices in Beijing and Washington. It is a year in which US relations with its chief competitor, the Soviet Union, also begin to change: it is the first year a Soviet leader (Leonid Brezhnev) addressed the American ­people on tele­vi­sion, but more importantly the year that Soviet economic growth stopped outpacing growth in the United States and the West, presaging its eventual collapse. It is, as mentioned above, the year of the first cellular telephone, a prototype demonstrated by Motorola in April, as well as the year the Lexis-­Nexis online l­ egal database launched (early harbingers of the many innovations and disruptions that would be caused by the coming digital economy). The year 1973 is the year the American Indian Movement occupied Wounded Knee, surrendering to federal officials in May; the year George H. W. Bush became chairman of the Republican National Committee, bespeaking the growing importance of that ­family’s po­liti­cal dynasty in the coming de­cades; the year The Godfather won an Oscar, cementing the hold of the “New Hollywood” on the film industry; the year Gravity’s Rainbow

1973: When It Changed   105

was published and the year Pablo Picasso died, two suggestive indicators (among many pos­si­ble ­others) of the artistic transition from modernism to postmodernism. The year 1973 is also the first full year of the 1972–1976 moratorium on capital punishment (laid down by the June 1972 Supreme Court decision in Furman v. Georgia and ultimately reversed), as well as the year the ­Peoples ­Temple founded the mission in Guyana that would popularly be known, a­ fter a final, catastrophic mass suicide, as Jonestown, another signal of the final end of 1960s-­style counterculture. In the science fiction story from which this essay takes its subtitle, Joanna Russ’s “When It Changed”—­published in 1972, and winning the Hugo Award for Best Short Story in 1973—­the shattering moment of crisis that Jameson calls “the ‘when-­it-­all-­changed’ ” is framed as a tragedy, as pure loss. In the story, an extraplanetary colony called Whileaway, which is populated by only ­women, is visited, for the first time in centuries, by male astronauts. The reestablishment of contact with Earth, and with men, is presented to the w ­ omen as an exciting opportunity for “trade, exchange of ideas, education,” but the narrator knows better; she knows that her tiny utopia has been permanently punctured and ruined, and she thinks to herself, once it’s too late, that they should have killed the men the moment they emerged from their spacecraft.13 Discussion of the con­temporary moment frequently echoes the melancholic, lapsarian mood of Russ’s story: t­ hings ­were good then, before, and now t­ hey’re bad and getting worse. Kurt Vonnegut seems to capture the spirit of the times in his ­bitter and bizarre novel Breakfast of Champions, published in 1973, ­after his previous novel, Slaughterhouse-­Five, had fi­nally made a national literary sensation in 1969. Breakfast of Champions sees an aging Vonnegut “freeing” the familiar stable of literary characters he had used across his early c­ areer, as part of a pro­cess of “cleansing and renewing [himself] for the very dif­fer­ent sorts of years to come.” (The Vonnegut narrative persona compares this to Tolstoy freeing his serfs, or Jefferson freeing his slaves.) Kilgore Trout, Vonnegut’s failed-­writer alter ego, is the only one he tells. As Vonnegut leaves a shouting and furious Trout b ­ ehind, like God abandoning his creation, he passes through a mysterious void where he sees his dead ­mother and hears his dead f­ ather’s voice, a moment of emotional release the text depicts through a sketch of a single tear dripping from an eye. Vonnegut then realizes with sudden clarity that Trout’s voice is the voice of his f­ather, that the two are somehow the same—­and the text of the novel ends on the two intertwined men’s hopeless demand/prayer: “Make me young, make me young, make me young!” But the novel provides a final sketched

106   Prehistories and Transitions

image instead, g­ iant block letters taking up a quarter of the page suggesting that this prayer w ­ ill never be answered and that the f­uture promises only decline, disappointment, and the unhappy eternal return of the same: “ETC.”14 The early Cold War, though characterized at the time by a pervasive spirit of nuclear dread, retrospectively seems to many in the United States ­today to have been, at least, a boom time of growth and expansion of possibility, whereas the post-1973 milieu has been predominantly characterized by a depressed mood of contraction, withdrawal, and collapse. That “brief ‘American ­Century’ (1945– 1973),”15 and the moment of outsized postwar prosperity in which any achievement seemed pos­si­ble, has become a site of abiding nostalgia, even for ­those on the po­liti­cal left who other­wise decry the era’s racism and sexism and environmental disasters and the horrors of Vietnam and, of course, the threat of nuclear annihilation that hung over every­thing. The singular campaign promise of our time, perpetually denied, is that the American ­Century might be returned, that the right leader w ­ ill somehow make us proud again (Ford ’76), make it morning in Amer­i­ca again (Reagan ’84), keep hope alive (Jackson ’88), provide a cure for the blues (Clinton ’92), let Amer­i­ca be Amer­i­ca again (Kerry ’04), restore Amer­ic­ a now (Ron Paul ’12), make Amer­ic­ a g­ reat again (Trump ’16)—­somehow reverse time and make Amer­i­ca, or at least the gerontocrats who run it, young again. Of course, the old days w ­ ere not ­really so ­great ­either—­nor is our moment so totally without hope. B ­ ehind ­these dreams of restoration on both sides of the po­liti­cal divide ultimately lurks a vaguer utopian hope: that history, having changed once, could yet change again. In the 2000s and 2010s we see our own historical moment oddly rhyming with the tumult of the 1970s, pivoting around that crucial year of 1973. As Dan Berger puts it in the introduction to his edited collection The Hidden 1970s: Histories of Radicalism (2010), the Obama years w ­ ere uncannily defined by “the dominant po­liti­cal issues of the 1970s: war, economic devastation, and an energy crisis.”16 Every­thing seems deflated for us, too, now; our f­ uture seems an impossible choice between ­either inexorable slow decline or ­else catastrophic ­free fall. Why not, then, name this essay “1973–­,” as opposed to “1973”? ­Isn’t it somehow perverse to propose a “period” that is so fleeting, so short? Why not, to use the now-­standard academic maneuver, name our era “the long 1970s,” or even, perhaps, “the long 1973”? I frame this essay around a single year to foreground the importance of 1973 as the hinge that links the optimism and growth of the immediate postwar period to the more constrained neoliberal period that followed, an Archimedean point that is distinct from both. The year 1973

1973: When It Changed   107

marks not only the historical moment “when it changed” but also, by necessity, the historical moment where other sorts of changes would have been pos­si­ble, an imbricated moment of crisis and opportunity where other f­ utures than ours might have been built instead. Though it looks to us now like the bad beginning of our depressed and exhausted f­ uture, 1973 was a moment of alternative possibility, too. The year 1973 (like 2016) had its countermovements and countercurrents, its roads not taken. In Berger’s revisionist history of the 1970s, he points to Gil-­Scott Heron’s 1974 ­album Winter in Amer­i­ca (recorded in September and October 1973) as an apt description of the way the moment of the early 1970s has been popularly (mis)remembered as “bleak, boring, or both.”17 But as Heron’s own liner notes for that ­album suggest, in winter “we feel that spring is just around the corner. . . . ​ Every­one is moving, searching. . . . ​We approach winter, the most depressing period in the history of this industrial empire, with threats of oil shortages and energy crises. But we, as Black ­people, have been a source of endless energy, endless beauty and endless determination. I have many ­things to tell you about tomorrow’s love and light. We ­will see you in Spring.”18 ­Whether it would be better to say that 1973 has somehow come back around or perhaps instead to say that it never r­ eally ended in the first place, what the singular historical moment of 1973 pres­ents to us is an opportunity to understand more than just the origins of our pres­ent crises: how it all went wrong, yes, but also its other possibilities, its missed chances, its lines of flight. Notes 1. ​See Raymond Williams, Marxism and Lit­er­a­ture: Twentieth-­Century Dialectical Theories of Lit­er­a­ture (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1977). 2. ​Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), ix. The phrase is a quotation from William Gibson’s Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988). 3. ​Jameson, Postmodernism, xx–­xxi. 4. ​David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 124. 5. ​Harvey, 161. Harvey’s more recent work, such as The Enigma of Capital (2010) and Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (2014), has traced the near depression of 2008–2009 and the anemic economic growth since the post-1973 financialization of the economy in g­ reat detail. 6. ​Harvey, Condition of Postmodernity, 145. 7. ​Harvey, 161. 8. ​David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 7–8. 9. ​Harvey, 22.

108   Prehistories and Transitions 10. ​Reor­ga­ni­za­tion Plan No. 2 of 1973, 215, www​.­gpo​.­gov​/­fdsys​/­pkg​/­USCODE​-­2011​-­title5​/­pdf​ /­USCODE​-­2011​-­title5​-­app​-­reorganiz​-­other​-­dup96​.­pdf. 11. ​The Skylab proj­ect (literally) crashed and burned in 1979 ­after a delay in the development of the space shut­tle made necessary repairs impossible—­though its decades-­later successor, the International Space Station, has been continually occupied since 2000. 12. ​Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed (1974; repr., New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 347–48. 13. ​Joanna Russ, “When It Changed,” in Again, Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison (New York: Doubleday, 1972), 259–60. 14. ​Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions (New York: Delacorte, 1973), 293–95. 15. ​Jameson, Postmodernism, xx. 16. ​Dan Berger, ed., The Hidden 1970s: Histories of Radicalism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010), 2. 17. ​Berger, 3. 18. ​Gil-­Scott Heron, Winter in Amer­i­ca, liner notes.

The Three Burials of Confederate Nationalism coleman hutchison

We may say that only at the moment when Lee handed Grant his sword was the Confederacy born; or to state m ­ atters another way, in the moment of death the Confederacy entered upon its immortality. Robert Penn Warren, The Legacy of the Civil War (1961)

On the 150th anniversary of Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, the Atlantic published an article on its website entitled “The Civil War ­Isn’t Over.” Written by David W. Blight, the premier historian of the memory of the American Civil War, the article offers a nuanced yet accessible account of the ways “Americans are still fighting” the war a c­ entury and a half l­ ater. Blight argues that questions of racial equality and federalism “still occupy the nation, which has never truly gotten over that conflict. The g­ reat issues of the war w ­ ere not resolved on that April morning at Appomattox. In this sense, not only is the Civil War not over; it can still be lost.”1 While such claims may seem provocative to nonacademic readers, professional historians have long agreed on the continuousness of the American Civil War, the ease with which one can connect, for instance, the Civil War and civil rights eras, or Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., and Barack Obama’s understandings of the legacy of the conflict. Nonetheless, Blight’s Faulknerian insistence on the aliveness of the Civil War past is, I hold, instructive for rethinking the timelines of American lit­er­ a­ture. Blight concludes his article with characteristic grace: “Wars end loudly and in ruins, and sometimes on s­ ilent, beautiful spring landscapes such as the surrender field at Appomattox; but history keeps happening.”2 Never dead, not even past—­shall we call it, then, “The American Civil War, 1861 to the pres­ent”? As Christopher Hager and Cody Marrs have recently observed, such a sense of accrual and extension often proves vexing to literary historians, who have

110   Prehistories and Transitions

long favored finite end points—­especially ­those provided by wars: 1776, 1865, 1914, and 1945—­over what Hager and Marrs call the “raucous, irregular unfolding of literary forms, practices, and c­ areers.”3 But what happens when t­ hose accruals and extensions are a function of history happening, of something staying alive, refusing to die, or not remaining dead? Despite the recent vogue for “long histories,” we have few models for offering a literary-­historical account of such phenomena.4 In Apples and Ashes, I argued that lit­er­a­ture was an essential vehicle for Confederate nationalism; I also suggested that such a nationalism both predated and outlived the brief, ponderous life of the Confederate States of Amer­i­ca.5 Given ongoing debates about the memory of the Confederacy—­debates focused primarily on nationalist cultural objects like flags and monuments—­the timeline “Confederate nationalism, 1861–1865” ­will not suffice. We need to take seriously the troubling tenacity of Confederate national feeling, which persists despite one cataclysmic military defeat and several self-­conscious efforts to bury it. Although it might be too on the nose to call Confederate nationalism a zombie nationalism, this reanimated if not quite mindless public feeling simply ­will not go away. As a result, it remains part of a broader culture of “undead Souths” recently documented by Eric Gary Anderson, Taylor Hagood, and Daniel Cross Turner.6 ­Needless to say, the surprising resilience of Confederate national feeling is one of the primary reasons the Civil War remains unfinished. Blight admits as much: “As Americans disturbingly learn, generation ­after generation, many have never fully accepted the verdicts of Appomattox.”7 (The fact that Blight’s article appeared just two months before white supremacist Dylann Roof murdered nine parishioners at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, suggests the wisdom of such a comment, as does the horrific “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, V ­ irginia, on August 11–12, 2017.) In the following pages, I briefly consider three moments during which Confederate national feeling was ceremonially laid to rest: the immediate aftermath of the conflict (1865–1866), the Civil War centennial (1961–1965), and the Civil War sesquicentennial (2011–2015). In d ­ oing so, I examine three southern poets’ attempts to inter symbols of Confederate nationalism. ­These reburial efforts, undertaken by writers from disparate periods and politics, speak to the importunity of Confederate national feeling, which remains both out of time and increasingly relevant in the twenty-­first ­century. Taken together, ­these three burials of Confederate nationalism speak profoundly to the disjointed timelines of national belonging. They also remind us that, for all its

The Three Burials of Confederate Nationalism   111

requisite mediations and abstractions, nationalism is predicated on the imaginative actions of individual agents, whose attempts to entomb or exhume a given nationalism retain real social power.

Banner The fourth child of Irish immigrants, Abram Joseph Ryan (1838–1886) spent most of his childhood in the border states of Mary­land and Missouri, yet he felt a lifelong connection to the South. Ryan was trained as a Vincentian priest during the late 1850s and early 1860s but left the order in 1862 owing to his failing health and ideological differences with his superiors. Following the death of his b ­ rother in combat, “­Father Ryan” spent the second half of the Civil War writing poetry and serving as a freelance chaplain to Confederate soldiers, a dual profession that earned him the nickname “Poet-­Priest of the South.” By his own account, Ryan took the news of Appomattox hard, penning the poem “The Conquered Banner” on wrapping paper immediately a­ fter learning of Lee’s surrender.8 Although purportedly set to a Gregorian tune, as Donald Bea­gle and Bryan Giemza have noted, this sentimental and declamatory poem bears a striking metrical resemblance to Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven”9: FURL that Banner, for ’t is weary; Round its staff ’t is drooping dreary:   Furl it, fold it,—it is best; For ­there ’s not a man to wave it, And ­there ’s not a sword to save it, And ­there ’s not one left to lave it In the blood which heroes gave it, And its foes now scorn and brave it:   Furl it, hide it,—­let it rest!10

“The Conquered Banner” was first published on June 24, 1865, in a weekly Catholic newspaper, New York’s Freeman’s Journal. Attributed to “Moina,” a reference to James Macpherson’s Ossian poems, Ryan’s poem seems to have captured the zeitgeist. During 1865 and 1866, the poem was heavi­ly reprinted across the newly re-­United States, appearing u ­ nder vari­ous names in newspapers, anthologies, and illustrated prints. It was also given a number of musical settings, including one by the German composer Theodore La Hache that proved hugely popu­lar. (The figure below captures well the concatenation of poetic, musical, and visual cultures that attended Ryan’s poem.) By the end of Andrew Johnson’s contentious tenure as president, “The Conquered Banner” was one

112   Prehistories and Transitions

A. E. Blackmar (publisher), “The Conquered Banner” (1866). Courtesy of the Library of Congress, ­Music Division.

of the most familiar and beloved texts of the Civil War era. In the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s, Ryan’s lachrymose lyr­ics would adorn Confederate memorial plaques across the South, and the poem was recited and sung in southern schools well into the twentieth ­century. Not surprisingly, “The Conquered Banner” even makes an appearance in Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel Gone with the Wind.11 In light of this reception, historians such as Charles Reagan Wilson and Gaines M. Foster argue that the poem heralded the emergence of the “Lost Cause” ideology that came to dominate the memory of the American Civil War in the de­cades following the cessation of hostilities. Alan T. Nolan usefully

The Three Burials of Confederate Nationalism   113

anatomizes the forms of “southern advocacy” central to this ideology: “The Lost Cause is therefore an American legend, an American version of ­great sagas like Beowulf and the Song of Roland. Generally described, the legend tells us that the war was a mawkish and essentially heroic and romantic melodrama, an honorable sectional duel, a time of martial glory on both sides, and triumphant nationalism.”12 Cutting a melancholic, even pathetic postwar figure, F ­ ather Ryan and his poetry would become symbols of that melodrama. In addition to writing poems like “The Conquered Banner,” “The Sword of Robert Lee,” and “Cleburne,” Ryan also lectured extensively about the war and helped to edit the short-­lived newspaper The Banner of the South (1868–1870), based in Augusta, Georgia. All of ­these endeavors found Ryan promulgating the legend of the Lost Cause at ­every opportunity.13 As is often the case with well-­known poems, “The Conquered Banner” is poorly understood. Its meanings are at once subtler and more straightforward than many critics and historians have allowed. For instance, the poem’s rhe­ toric is by no means limited to southern advocacy. ­Father Ryan’s best biographers usefully read the poem in terms of Catholic theology. Focusing on the image of a flag laved in blood and a pun on the word host, Bea­gle and Giemza see the poem as a sacralization of Confederate defeat, arguing that Ryan’s speaker would have the flag “treated like the body of Christ.” Bea­gle and Giemza do well to “reconcile sacred and secular visions of the South’s defeat”;14 however, like many historians and critics, they also read past the poem’s literal or surface meaning. This is, fi­nally, a poem about putting away the Confederate ­battle flag, a potent symbol of a failed national experiment. While it may well encode Ryan’s Catholic faith and anticipate an emergent Lost Cause ideology, we need to attend to the action that the poem both describes and demands. Despite its dour tone, “The Conquered Banner” maintains the imperative mood across seven repetitive stanzas. The first stanza alone includes three exhortations: “FURL that Banner”; “Furl it, fold it”; and “Furl it, hide it,—­let it rest!” While the intervening lines use epistrophe (“it”) and prosopopoeia (“for ’t is weary”) to ­great emotional effect, the speaker’s directive remains clear: with the Confederacy now dead, it is time to bury its symbols. This command is in keeping with the overall tone of the poem. Foster usefully reminds us that “The Conquered Banner” is hardly “a defiant statement of southern resolve,” but instead a national dirge. Wilson concurs, noting the poem’s “quiet, proud despondency.”15 And, indeed, the poem pulls no punches about Confederate defeat. With “not a man to wave it,” the conquered banner has ­little practical use—­thus the sighs and cries of woe that pervade the poem.

114   Prehistories and Transitions

Even as the penultimate stanza of the poem reckons posterity, the speaker urges that the flag be taken down: Furl that Banner! True, ’t is gory, Yet ’t is wreathed around with glory, And ’t ­will live in song and story   Though its folds are in the dust! For its fame on brightest pages, Penned by poets and by sages, ­Shall go sounding down the ages—   Furl its folds though now we must.

The image of a flag in the dust may call to mind Faulkner, but it also circumscribes the “glory” of the “song and story” to be told. Similarly, the dash in the seventh line of the stanza brings the auditor up short, reintroducing the imperative immediately ­after prophesizing all t­ hose pages, sages, and ages. The conquered banner may yet have an afterlife, but first it needs to be interred. With five distinct exhortations in six lines, the concluding stanza of the poem is emphatic about what auditors must do—­and not do—­with the flag: Furl that Banner, softly, slowly! Treat it ­gently—it is holy,   For it droops above the dead. Touch it not—­unfold it never; Let it droop ­there, furled forever,—   For its ­people’s hopes are fled!

The rendering holy of a nationalist symbol is a power­ful poetic gesture: ­here, then, is the sacralization of the Confederate States of Amer­i­ca. However, the double exhortation in the stanza’s fourth line is even more authoritative. No ­matter his politics or faith, ­Father Ryan is insistent that the southern dead should bury their dead and never again touch or unfold the Confederate flag. While Ryan’s poem was widely praised in the nineteenth ­century, the specific demand that southerners “furl that banner” resulted in a number of respectful poetic rejoinders, including poems by Sir Henry Houghton (“A Reply to the Conquered Banner”) and James Ryder Randall (“The Unconquered Banner”) that urged southerners to, in Houghton’s words, “Keep that glorious flag which slumbers, / One day to avenge your dead.” Such fiery lines are a far cry from Ryan’s more resigned rhe­toric, suggesting the diversity

The Three Burials of Confederate Nationalism   115

of pro-­Confederate sentiment during and a­ fter the Civil War. T ­ hese poems also remind us of the immediate historical context of “The Conquered Banner”: the height of the poem’s initial popularity coincided with “an implied prohibition” on the display of Confederate flags during Reconstruction. Many Confederate sympathizers felt they had to keep their flags furled, no ­matter what ­Father Ryan said. But, as John M. Coski notes in The Confederate B ­ attle Flag: Amer­i­ca’s Most Embattled Emblem, ­after Reconstruction “white southerners soon unfurled their b ­ attle flags and in the pro­cess elevated the flag to an even more lofty importance than it had enjoyed during the war.”16 Despite Abram Joseph Ryan’s injunctions to the contrary, the conquered banner ­didn’t stay buried for long.

Soldier Robert Penn Warren (1905–1989) was born in Guthrie, Kentucky, forty years ­after ­Father Ryan published his ubiquitous poem. By 1961, Warren was well established as one of Amer­i­ca’s preeminent novelists, poets, and cultural critics, having won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1946 and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1958. (He remains the only writer to have won the Pulitzer in both genres.) But by the 1960s Warren’s art and politics w ­ ere in flux. In his earliest writing Warren had championed racial segregation; during the civil rights era, Warren “emerged as a major southern liberal voice, arguing that the South could accept racial integration without fatally surrendering its culture.”17 Not surprisingly, he used the occasion of the Civil War centennial to turn his attention fully to the war.18 In 1960 alone he completed two books focused on the conflict: a long essay, The Legacy of the Civil War: Meditations on the Centennial, and a novel, Wilderness. In June 1960, he also published in the Kenyon Review a pair of Civil War dramatic monologues entitled “Two Studies in Idealism: A Short Survey of American, and ­Human, History.” As with much of Warren’s Civil War poetry, this twelve-­stanza poem remains woefully underread. “Two Studies in Idealism” pairs the thoughts of a seemingly ­simple southern farmer with ­those of a high-­minded Harvard gradu­ate as they meet bloody at the ­Battle of Shiloh. R. W. B. Lewis reads the poem as a dramatization of one of the animating tensions of Warren’s The Legacy of the Civil War: the distinct psychological legacies of the war for the South and the North, “maiming legacies” that Warren dubs “the G ­ reat Alibi” and “the Trea­sury of Virtue,” respectively.19 While Lewis’s intertextual reading practice is an appealing way to approach “Two Studies in Idealism,” it also draws our attention away from

116   Prehistories and Transitions

the most arresting ele­ment of the poem—­the shift in voice from “down-­to-­ earth vernacular to upper-­class lofty.”20 ­Here are the opening stanzas of each section of the poem: I. Bear Track Plantation: Shortly ­after Shiloh Two ­things a man’s built for, killing and you-­know-­what. As for you-­know-­what, I reckon I taken my share, Bed-­ease or bush-­whack, but killing—­hell, three’s all I got, And he promised me ten, Jeff Davis, the bastard. ’Taint fair. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . II. Harvard ’61: ­Battle Fatigue I ­didn’t mind ­dying—it ­wasn’t that at all. It behooves a man to prove manhood by ­dying for Right. If you die for Right, that fact is your dearest requital, But you find it disturbing when ­others die who simply ­haven’t the right.21

A common rhyme scheme and shared stanzaic form draw attention to radical differences in diction and topic—­“you-­know-­what” versus “­dying for Right,” “the bastard” versus the “dearest requital.” Warren’s tongue-­in-­cheek subtitle, “A Short Survey of American, and H ­ uman, History,” suggests that he is thinking in broad, representative terms h ­ ere, but the poet also takes g­ reat care to develop his two characters—­thus the poem’s length and form of address. By the end of “Two Studies in Idealism,” both speakers have achieved a complex personhood. Critics of the poem—­fit audience, though few—­consistently privilege the northern over the southern soldier. For instance, a­ fter reminding readers that the poem has two parts, that it comprises not one but two studies in idealism, Cleanth Brooks admits he is much more interested in the Yankee: “If the member of the class of ’61 is being chided, it is not for his dedication or his bravery but for a too-­simple view of real­ity and a certain pharisaical self-­righteousness.”22 While that may well be the case, the uneducated, bawdy southern soldier is more than a mere function of the self-­righteous Yankee. ­After all, Warren opens with the voice of the Confederate; he also allows that rough voice to contaminate the Yankee’s more refined monologue: “And he said: ‘Why son, you done done it—­I figgered I’d skeered ye.’ / Said: ‘Son, you look puke-­pale. Buck up! If it ­hadn’t been you, / Some other young squirt would a-­done it.’ I stood, and weirdly / The tumult of ­battle went soundless, like gesture in dream. And I

The Three Burials of Confederate Nationalism   117

was dead, too.”23 With this confusion of tongues, Warren ensures that his two characters are in dialogue, not dichotomy. Given the historical context of the poem, Warren’s nuanced rendering of his “Johnny Reb” works to debunk one of the central tenets of Lost Cause ideology, which, one hundred years a­ fter “The Conquered Banner,” continued to shape how the Civil War was remembered. Alan T. Nolan identifies the figure of the idealized Confederate soldier as crucial to the Lost Cause myth. Although he is careful not to “in any way disparage the common soldier of the Confederacy,” whom he deems “the principal victim of the Lost Cause myth,” Nolan does call into question the common soldier’s repre­sen­ta­tion as “invariably heroic, indefatigable, gallant, and law-­abiding.”24 “Two Studies in Idealism” works in a similarly iconoclastic fashion, offering us a southern soldier obsessed with sex and death: “As for you-­know-­what, I reckon I taken my share, / Bed-­ease or bush-­whack, but killing—­hell, three’s all I got.” This decidedly ungallant interest is maintained across all five of the soldier’s stanzas and naturalized again and again: “Two t­hings a man’s built for, killing and you-­know-­what.” In the second and third stanzas, Warren’s Confederate assumes a more philosophical pose: ’Taint fair, a man rides and knows he ­won’t live forever, And a man needs something to take with him when he dies. ­Ain’t much worth taking, but what happens ­under the cover Or at the steel-­point—­yeah, that look in their eyes. That same look—it comes in their eyes when you give ’em the business. It’s something a man can hang on to, come black-­frost or sun. Come hell or high ­water, it’s something to save from the mess, No ­matter what­ever ­else you never got done.25

­ ater, the soldier even entertains a fleeting moment of self-­doubt, “worrying L what look my own eyes got / When that Blue-­Belly caught me off balance,” before concluding with another bout of nationalistic bluster. Like the Yankee in the succeeding monologue, who fathoms “life’s awful illogic, and the world’s stew,”26 Warren’s Confederate asks fundamental questions about mortality, meaning, and “the mess” of life. The difference lies in the latter’s willingness to speak impertinently, even obscenely, about the relationship between ideals and real­ity, about American and ­human history. While the Yankee may deem his ­enemy an “unprincipled wastre[l] of blood and profligat[e] of breath,” Warren clearly sees redeeming value in this unromantic rendering of a Confederate soldier.

118   Prehistories and Transitions

John Burt has argued that in his Civil War writings Robert Penn Warren “articulates a tragic, non-­ideological vision of the war, seeing it as the result of a conflict between the ideal of justice and the concrete institutions that are supposed to be ­shaped by that ideal.”27 The tragedy of this poem comes in its finale: both men die at the B ­ attle of Shiloh and speak, as it w ­ ere, from beyond the grave. Yet it is their nonideal characteristics that make t­ hese soldiers urgent figures for the Civil War centennial. ­Because neither man proves all that heroic or gallant, their repre­sen­ta­tion aims to bury the bones of the ideal Civil War soldier once and for all.

Anthem Frank X Walker was born in Danville, Kentucky, in June 1961, just a few weeks into the Civil War centennial. Growing up black in Appalachia, Walker accepted at a young age “the responsibility of challenging the notion of a homogeneous all-­white literary landscape” in his native region. Walker has written extensively about what he dubs “Affrilachia,” a portmanteau used to remind readers that “­people and artists of color are part of the past and pres­ent of the multi-­state Appalachian region extending from northern Mississippi to southern New York.”28 Like Ryan and Warren, Walker only writes occasionally about the American Civil War, and then from some distance. However, his 2013 collection, Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Edgars, elegantly limns the relations among the 1860s, 1960s, and 2010s. In an introduction to the collection, which was published at the midpoint of the Civil War sesquicentennial, Walker lays bare his aims: “I believe acknowledging and working to fully understand history can create opportunities to better understand racism. I offer t­ hese i­magined poems in hope that art can help complete the impor­tant work we continue to strug­gle with—­the access to economic and social justice that Medgar Evers and so many ­others died for, and ultimately the healing and reconciliation still needed in Amer­i­ca.”29 Turn Me Loose opens with a “­Dixie Suite,” in which Walker plays on the title of the minstrel song that would give the South its nickname and become the de facto Confederate national anthem. The section includes eight pieces, seven of which are persona poems written in the voices of Medgar Evers’s wife, Myrlie; an unnamed slave owner and slave; Evers’s assassin, Byron De La Beckwith; and Evers’s ­father, Charles. Working across a number of verse forms, Walker addresses an impossibly broad set of topics—­every­thing from Freedom Summer to the Confederate flag, Billie Holiday to Chuck D, the word “nigger” to the lynching of black men. Although it picks up on a

The Three Burials of Confederate Nationalism   119

previous mention of “­Dixie,” the section’s final poem does not seem to employ a persona: I’d Wish I Was in ­Dixie Too If your ­family’s wealth depended on ­those you enslaved and the cotton they spun into gold; if your intellectual superiority depended on hundreds of years of denying literacy to ­others while your color confirmed your right to do so; if the thought of being responsible for your own hoeing, planting, chopping, picking, smithing, raking, mucking, shoeing, milking, smoking, canning, baking, hauling, cooking, serving, sweeping, washing, ironing, fixing, nursing, mending, dusting, and cleaning makes you tired; then I understand why you love that song so much.30

While the poem’s speaker remains obscure, its intended audience is twofold: descendants of slave ­owners and fans of the song “­Dixie.” The poem’s cascading protatic clauses—­a sharp departure from Ryan’s endless imperatives—­builds tension while also implicating both groups in the condemnation to follow: “If your ­family’s wealth . . .”; “if your intellectual superiority . . .”; “if the thought . . .” The poem’s apodotic clause does not come u ­ ntil its final line, “then I understand why you love that song so much.” Grammarians would call this a zero conditional, a s­ imple implication that signifies, among other ­things, the speaker’s complete contempt for “­Dixie’s” nostalgic repre­sen­ta­tion of the antebellum South. As the old song says, “I wish I was in de land ob cotton, / Old times dar am not forgotten; / Look away! Look away! Look away! ­Dixie Land.” To wish to be in the pre–­Civil War South is, Walker avers, to partake of a certain form of white privilege and dependence—­that is, the privilege to be able to depend on o ­ thers for one’s money, power, and leisure. As the poem’s ironic title suggests, anyone might be nostalgic for ­those circumstances. What the poem lacks in subtlety it more than makes up for in rhetorical intensity. Particularly through its twenty-­three consecutive gerunds, “I’d Wish I Was in D ­ ixie Too” reenacts the monotony and exhaustion of slave ­labor,

120   Prehistories and Transitions

while also reminding readers of the power differentials on which such l­ abor was predicated. The mere thought of all that unperformed ­labor makes the implied auditor tired. More urgently, the poem forces readers to think about the sometimes-­insidious nature of popu­lar song. As I have discussed elsewhere, “­Dixie” remains one of the most popu­lar tunes in American history; as both an anthem and a nickname, “­Dixie” has played an outsize role in defining the South since its first per­for­mance on Broadway in 1859. In the 1860s, the song helped to sing the Confederate States of Amer­i­ca into existence; ­after the war, it offered consolation to crestfallen Confederates. In the 1960s, the song reemerged as an anti–­civil rights anthem. At the Civil War sesquicentennial, “­Dixie” remained an inescapable part of American cultural life—­despite its ongoing association with Confederate nationalism.31 Much like Ryan tried to furl the Confederate flag and Warren tried to inter the ideal Confederate soldier, Walker ­labors h ­ ere to silence the Confederate anthem. While the poem’s ironic tone suggests that the speaker is dubious about the permanence of any such burials of Confederate nationalism, Walker clearly thinks that “acknowledging and working to fully understand” “­Dixie” can help to bring about the “healing and reconciliation still needed” 150 years ­after the end of the American Civil War.

The three brief, largely “surface” readings offered above reveal poets and intellectuals from diverse backgrounds working in their own idiosyncratic ways to redirect and reimagine Confederate national feeling, a tenacious phenomenon that has survived countless attempts to bury it. This is the importunity of Confederate nationalism, as well as an example of history continuing to happen. While the end of the Civil War sesquicentennial witnessed a remarkable quickening of the pace of social change—in 2015 several Confederate statues and memorials ­were removed from public display in the wake of the Black Lives ­Matter movement and the horrific shooting at Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church—as David Blight reminds us, the Civil War “can still be lost.” That fact poses a significant prob­lem for American literary history, to say nothing of American society as a w ­ hole. In his ambivalent study Is Literary History Pos­si­ble?, David Perkins concludes that a “function of literary history is, then, to set the lit­er­a­ture of the past at a distance, to make its otherness felt.”32 But what happens when the lit­er­a­ture of the past feels intimately close, all too familiar? How can we give a literary-­historical account of texts from 1865, 1960, or 2013 that seem to bear so crucially on our con­

The Three Burials of Confederate Nationalism   121

temporary moment? At the very least, such texts require a more continuous understanding of the timelines of American lit­er­a­ture.

Notes This essay is dedicated to my colleagues and friends Thomas Whitbread (1931–2016), Barbara Harlow (1948–2017), and Wayne Lesser (1949–2017). 1. ​David Blight, “The Civil War I­ sn’t Over,” Atlantic, Apr. 8, 2015, www​.­theatlantic​.c­ om​/­politics​ /­archive​/­2015​/­04​/­the​-­civil​-­war​-­isnt​-­over​/­389847​/­. 2. ​Blight. 3. ​Christopher Hager and Cody Marrs, “Against 1865: Reperiodizing the Nineteenth-­Century,” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-­Century Americanists 1, no. 2 (Fall 2013): 260–61. 4. ​See, e.g., Leon Litwack, How ­Free Is ­Free? The Long Death of Jim Crow (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); and Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Po­liti­cal Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History 91, no. 4 (2005): 1233–63. In general, historians seem more comfortable than literary historians in arguing for such accruals and extensions. 5. ​See also Coleman Hutchison, “Surplus Patriotism: William Gilmore Simms’s War Poetry of the South and the Afterlife of Confederate Literary Nationalism,” in Literary Cultures of the Civil War, ed. Timothy Sweet (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2016), 141–64. 6. ​Daniel Cross Turner, Taylor Hagood, and Eric Gary Anderson’s collection, Undead Souths: The Gothic and Beyond in Southern Lit­er­a­ture and Culture (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015), studies “the pervading presence of diverse forms of undeadness—­ racial, ethnic, po­liti­cal, economic, historical—in ‘the South’ as we understand it” (1). They also make a power­ful, if passing, claim about the undead relations among slavery, Jim Crow, and Confederate reburial efforts (see esp. 1–2). Descriptions of the Civil War as an undead or spectral presence are ubiquitous. David Goldfield offers a representative example: “The Civil War is like a ghost that has not yet made its peace and roams the land seeking solace, retribution, or vindication. It continues to exist, an event without temporal bound­aries, an interminable strug­gle.” See David Goldfield, Still Fighting the Civil War: The American South and Southern History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 2013), 1. See also Thomas J. Brown’s introduction to Remixing the Civil War: Meditations on the Sesquicentennial (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), esp. 1–16. 7. ​Blight, “Civil War ­Isn’t Over.” 8. ​Donald Robert Bea­gle and Bryan Albin Giemza, Poet of the Lost Cause: A Life of ­Father Ryan (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2008), 104. 9. ​Bea­gle and Giemza, 110–11. 10. ​Abram Joseph Ryan, “The Conquered Banner,” in Selected Poems of F ­ ather Ryan, ed. Gordon Weaver (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1973), 17–18. 11. ​David O’Connell, Furl That Banner: The Life of Abram J. Ryan, Poet-­Priest of the South (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2006), 60–62; Bea­gle and Giemza, Poet of the Lost Cause, 106–13. 12. ​Alan T. Nolan, “The Anatomy of the Myth,” in The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History, ed. Gary W. Gallagher and Alan T. Nolan (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 12. 13. ​On Ryan’s relationship to an emergent Lost Cause ideology, see Bea­gle and Giemza, Poet of the Lost Cause, esp. 121–28. In Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South, 1865 to 1913 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), Gaines M. Foster

122   Prehistories and Transitions argues that Ryan’s poem and person came to stand in for the “pervasive melancholy” that characterized the postwar South (37). 14. ​Bea­gle and Giemza, Poet of the Lost Cause, 109, 103. 15. ​Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy, 36; Charles Reagan Wilson, Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865–1920 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009), 60. 16. ​John M. Coski, The Confederate B ­ attle Flag: Amer­i­ca’s Most Embattled Emblem (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 47, 46. Coski claims that the “unfurled ‘conquered banner’ ” became a dominant meta­phor for the era between World Wars I and II (77). 17. ​John Burt, “Robert Penn Warren’s Civil War,” in A History of American Civil War Lit­er­ a­ture, ed. Coleman Hutchison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 303. 18. ​For an informative account of the Civil War centennial, see Robert J. Cook, Troubled Commemoration: The American Civil War Centennial, 1961–1965 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007). Cook shows how broader national tensions over civil and states’ rights defined and delimited this “troubled commemoration.” It is worth noting that Warren’s “Two Studies in Idealism” is dedicated to the distinguished historian Allan Nevins, who was named chair of the Civil War Centennial Commission in the summer of 1961. 19. ​Robert Penn Warren, The Legacy of the Civil War: Meditations on the Centennial (New York: Random House, 1961), 75. “If the Southerner,” writes Warren, “with his ­Great Alibi, feels trapped by history, the Northerner, with his Trea­sury of Virtue, feels redeemed by history, automatically redeemed” (59). 20. ​R. W. B. Lewis, “Robert Penn Warren: Geography as Fate,” in The Legacy of Robert Penn Warren, ed. David Madden (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000), 19. 21. ​Robert Penn Warren, “Two Studies in Idealism,” in The Collected Poems of Robert Penn Warren, ed. John D. Burt (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998), 167, 168. 22. ​Cleanth Brooks, The Hidden God: Studies in Hemingway, Faulkner, Yeats, Eliot, and Warren (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963), 119. 23. ​Warren, “Two Studies in Idealism,” 169. 24. ​Nolan, “Anatomy of the Myth,” 17–18. Bell Irvin Wiley’s 1943 book Johnny Reb: The Common Soldier of the Confederacy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978) complicated this repre­sen­ta­tion nearly two de­cades before Warren’s poem. Wiley’s introduction to the 1978 edition of the book, which was based primarily on soldiers’ diaries, letters, and memoirs, pulls no punches: “This is not to state that such folk w ­ ere without blemish, for this class has its sprinklings of rogues, villains, croakers, and cowards” (11). For his part, Nolan focused on desertion numbers as a way to dismantle the myth of the idealized Confederate soldier (24–25). 25. ​Warren, “Two Studies in Idealism,” 168. 26. ​Warren, 169. 27. ​Burt, “Robert Penn Warren’s Civil War,” 303. 28. ​“About Frank,” Frank X Walker (website), www​.­frankxwalker​.­com​/­about​.­html. 29. ​Frank X Walker, Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Evers (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013), xv. 30. ​Walker, 12. 31. ​Coleman Hutchison, Apples and Ashes: Lit­er­a­ture, Nationalism, and the Confederate States of Amer­i­ca (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012), 143–72. 32. ​David Perkins, Is Literary History Pos­si­ble? (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 185.

1819–1857 Romantic Cycles from the Panic of 1819 to the Panic of 1857 andrew kopec

The Confidence-­Man, if not a dead-­end, marked at least the completion of a cycle. F. O. Matthiessen, The American Re­nais­sance (1941)

This essay reads American Romanticism as an art of high finance, a body of writing that considers the relation between lit­er­a­ture and temporality, money and subjectivity. More to the point, I argue that Romanticism’s outward turn to economic phenomena lends coherence to its status as a literary period. To pursue this claim is to re­orient Romanticism’s relation to economic history, a relation typically construed in terms of naive idealism, pastoral escapism, or, in the complicity criticism of the 1990s, scandalous affiliation. Walt Whitman’s 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass provides ballast for the former viewpoint, as it posits a corollary between the political-­literary fact that the “United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem” and the political-­economic one that the nation “need never be bankrupt while corn grows from the ground or the orchards drop apples or the bays contain fish or men beget ­children upon ­women.” For one critic, this passage might evince a residual agrarianism contained within the “market revolution,” to cite the historian Charles Sellers’s periodizing concept that has attained ­great purchase in historicist literary studies. And yet while Whitman’s terms h ­ ere are clearly agrarian, not to mention transcendental, they are also financial. We have come to expect the former, no doubt, but we should hardly be surprised to find Whitman in 1855 lauding nature’s ability to prevent bankruptcy, since, according to one historian, “the period from 1850 to 1856 was one of unbroken prosperity.”1 Not hard but flush times, not fears of scarcity but golden dreams of abundance—­not cries of panic but barbaric yawps.

124   Prehistories and Transitions

Leaves of Grass articulates, then, a poetics of prosperity—­a poetics, that is, of a phase of the business cycle.2 Reading cyclically, rather than chronologically, I proceed through the phases of prosperity, panic, and depression. ­Doing so, I suggest, indicates not only the economy of lit­er­a­ture but also the romance of economics—­the “golden dreams” writers like Washington Irving and Herman Melville understood to propel industrial capitalism.3 As occasions for periodization, however, cycles both clarify and potentially obscure the intelligibility of American Romanticism. On the one hand, using the Panics of 1819 and 1857 as bound­aries more or less reinforces the standard periodization of 1820–1865. On the other hand, cycles still risk concealing the extent to which writers like Irving and Melville—­most often used, in their putative differences, to punctuate the teleology of the period from the genteel imitator to the radical master—­similarly engaged, in Melville’s idiom, the “blackness” of economics. At once reinforcing the standard periodization and challenging field kinetics, cycles destabilize the presumption of a tidy transition not just from Irving to Melville but, more broadly, from romance to realism. While the “prosperity phase of the business cycle” typically expresses itself in optimistic chants, “the depression phase of the business cycle in par­tic­ u­lar inspired a voluminous lit­er­a­ture,” most of it world-­weary, pessimistic, and fearful in tone.4 Pivots between prosperity and depression, panics possess what Frederick Jackson’s insider parody A Week in Wall Street by One Who Knows (1841) terms “the power of motion.”5 The three major antebellum panics ­were no ­simple ­matters: the Panic of 1819 was caused in part by an overexpansion of the money supply and then a painful contraction by the Bank of the United States (BUS); the Panic of 1837, by overspeculation in western lands, President Andrew Jackson’s Specie Circular, and his war on the BUS; the Panic of 1857, by overinvestment in and then a precipitous downturn of railroad securities.6 Rather than track this complexity through the romantic “detailism” of postmodern historicism, I consider such events as themselves literary.7 ­After all, panics, in Mary Poovey’s words, offer “manifestations of the problematic of repre­sen­ta­tion” that investors blithely ignore during the prosperity phase. The extent to which finance flies or fails can thus be mea­sured by the “gulf between the apparent manifestation or sign of value and its ground.”8 In other words, panics pivot generically as well, figuring the moment in the economic cycle when the romance of prosperity morphs into the realism of depression. A fixture of Americanist literary history, this dualism of fact and fiction, of realism and romance, likewise structures the era’s financial writing. Published

1819–1857: Romantic Cycles   125

in 1848, a pamphlet entitled Stocks and Stock-­Jobbing in Wall-­Street, with Sketches of the Brokers, and Fancy Stocks, authored by “A Reformed Stock Gambler” (William Armstrong), promised to make legible a dizzying array of forms and institutions of high finance. Yet if the book aspires, as its subtitle reads, to a “full account of the nature of all kinds of stocks and securities,” its raison d’être is the very fact of the economy’s romance of prosperity: the gulf between manifestations of value and its ground—in other words, a flight of fancy stocks. “Fancy stocks,” Armstrong tells us, “are, generally speaking, of no par­tic­u­lar or known value, and represent worthless or embarrassed corporations. . . . ​Their real worth, or rather worthlessness, is so l­ ittle known, that it seldom interferes with an unlimited expansion or contraction in prices.”9 The “fancies” are fantastical precisely ­because, in the absence of reliable information, they become a blank page for the investor to write his own romance, to imagine the “unlimited expansion” of his wealth not as a phase in an unfolding cycle but as rigorously linear. Stocks and Stock-­Jobbing, in implying that the antebellum economy itself contains a dialectical tension between realism and romance, thus challenges in economic terms a literary historiography of rupture. Such a text lays bare the tensions between a “romantic optimism” and “mechanistic pessimism” within the romantic cycle itself.10 Perhaps one reason why the Civil War rather than the business cycle has reigned in apprehending Romanticism has to do with the psy­chol­ogy of mass financial trauma itself.11 If it’s true that the lit­er­ a­ture of the depression phase of the cycle is about the erasure of memory, though, this is another way of saying that depression-­era writing wants to turn the wheel once more t­ oward prosperity: to move beyond an overdetermined pres­ent to a panic-­less ­future of imaginatively prolonged freedom. Or, perhaps better, much of depression-­era lit­er­a­ture aims to erase the fact of cycles in the first place so as to restore, to borrow a phrase from Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s attempt at synthesis, the “romance in real life.”12

The Romance of Prosperity The romance of an inevitably bright ­future—­that is, noncyclical thinking—­ registers in the era as a fantasy of “­great expectations.” I am thinking h ­ ere not of Charles Dickens’s 1861 novel but of Washington Irving’s “Buckthorne: or, The Young Man of G ­ reat Expectations,” collected in Tales of a Traveller (1824), a follow-up effort to his previously successful efforts to recover from the Panic of 1819 and weather the ensuing depression. The eponymous Buckthorne tells

126   Prehistories and Transitions

us that he “was born to very ­little property, but to ­great expectations”;13 in response to the real­ity of a “decayed f­ amily,” he fantasizes about inheriting the wealth of a “rich u ­ ncle.” Buckthorne’s “delusions of fancy,” his lack of “prosaic good sense,” and his concomitant “poetical temperament” all conspire to feed ­these titular hopes. For his dreaming, Buckthorne finds himself “unexpectedly elbowed . . . ​out of [his] expectations” by his cousin.14 Yet, fortunately for Buckthorne, what looks like a sure bust becomes a boon when a felicitous “chance” leads to the death of his cousin: “my ­great expectations are realized!”15 Another tale from Tales of a Traveller, “Wolfert Webber, or Golden Dreams,” likewise illustrates the extent to which Irving considers the felicitous, noncyclical view of commerce.16 Set in eighteenth-­century New York, Irving’s tale follows a “worthy burgher” who descends from “one of the original settlers, famous for introducing the cultivation of cabbages, and who came over to the province during the protectorship of Oloffe Van Kortlandt, other­wise called the Dreamer.” Webber’s upstate village remains “quietly and comfortably” established u ­ ntil market forces accelerate: “The city gradually spread its suburbs round their domain. Houses sprang up to interrupt their prospects.” Unable to keep up with the times, “while every­one around him grew richer, Wolfert grew poorer, and he could not, for the life of him perceive how the evil was to be remedied.” When he overhears tales of Captain Kidd’s buried trea­sure at the local tavern, though, Webber’s spirits are buoyed: “He returned pensively home, full of magnificent ideas. The soil of his native island seemed to be turned into gold dust; and ­every field to teem with trea­sure.”17 Webber’s “golden visions” gradually “assumed a more definite form.” Romance (“magnificent ideas”) begins its masquerade as real­ity. Fancy actually would become fact for Webber, as new financial institutions underwrite Webber’s romance. Seemingly on his death bed, he prepares to “give and bequeath” his “small farm” ­until his ­lawyer informs him of its ­actual value: “Why, when that ­great field and that huge meadow come to be laid out in streets, and cut up into snug building-­lots—­why, whoever owns it need not pull of his hat to the patroon!”18 “His golden dream was accomplished,” we learn: “In a few days Wolfert left his room; in a few days more his ­table was covered with deeds, plans of streets, and building-­lots.” Cabbage is transmuted into “a ­little round-­bellied bag of money, a golden produce of the soil” not by legend (of which Webber is ignorant) but by the market.19 And this is precisely the point: what looks like fact (cap­i­tal­ist rents) is always already romance—­a “golden dream.” Now blithely ignorant of the economic cycle, in other words, Webber finds himself prosperous, his real­ity now indistinguishable from romance.

1819–1857: Romantic Cycles   127

The Pivot of Panic Americanists have tended to use Irving’s easeful imitations of neoclassical style to mark the beginning of a romantic cycle that w ­ ill culminate with Melville. Moving from prosperity to panic, this essay transitions from Irving to Melville, not, however, for a lack of alternative paths. One might turn to the larger literary field of antebellum New York—­back, for instance, to Jackson’s A Week in Wall Street by One Who Knows, which satirically rewrites the history of New York as the history of Wall Street; or to Sedgwick’s popu­lar tracts in domestic economy, which both presage and lament the Panic of 1837; or to frontier lit­er­a­ture in the form of Caroline Kirkland’s 1839 A New Home—­Who’ll Follow?, which explores “ ‘the madness of the ­people’ in ­those days of golden dreams.”20 Or, alternately, one might look to the southwestern states in Joseph G. Baldwin’s The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi (1853), which reflects on that “golden era” in 1835–1837 “when bank-­bills w ­ ere ‘as thick as Autumn leaves 21 in Vallambrosa.’ ” Yet swerving briefly to Melville lets me, first of all, reinforce the long-­held assumption that has given shape to the romantic cycle itself—­ the evolution from the relative economic sanguinity of Irving’s tales to the relative dourness of Melville’s The Confidence-­Man, from the idyllic Dutch village to the chaotic Mississippi riverboat. Second, however, in moving from panic to depression—­that is, back to Irving in the following section—we can ultimately discern the potholes in this periodizing logic.22 The failed publishing firm Miller and Co., which had acquired the rights to Melville’s late fiction, attempted to liquidate its holdings in the midst of the Panic of 1857. Yet “no one would risk a dollar on Melville.” No one, indeed: not even Melville would avail himself of his contractual right to “purchase the plates at 25 per cent of their first cost.” Explaining this refusal to his friend George William Curtis, Melville states, “I ­will try to do something about the plates as soon as I can. Meantime if they bother you, sell them without remorse. To pot with them, & melt them down.”23 In his willingness to consign his own novel to the ashbin of literary history, Melville refuses a ­future for The Confidence-­ Man, a fitting action given that the novel itself formalizes this very aggression ­toward mistaking a bright ­future as a necessity. An ironic parable, “The Story of China Aster” (chap. 40 of The Confidence-­ Man), more particularly challenges a mentality (“bullish” in Armstrong’s idiom) that conflates the pres­ent and a prosperous ­future. “The Story of China Aster,” a hy­po­thet­i­cal story told by the character Egbert (a caricature of Henry David Thoreau) to the confidence man in the guise of the cosmopolitan,

128   Prehistories and Transitions

seemingly adduces the old adage about not lending money to friends. Its didacticism is much darker, though, targeting the culture’s widespread willingness to “take the bright view of life.”24 A character named Orchis advocates this “bright view.” Known as “Doleful Dumps” prior to winning a “capital prize in a lottery,” Orchis equates the accident of his winning with the necessity of a bright f­ uture, concluding, “For ­every one, good luck is in store.” He soon encourages Aster to take a loan of $1,000, confident that the candlemaker Aster ­will turn it into “ten thousand, as you soon enough ­will.” Despite Orchis’s argument that the “dismal” view of life is the “ruination of a man,” though, the cheery one proves equally ruinous, leaving Aster embittered, destitute, and dead.25 Aster’s “golden dreams,” in which the angel Bright F ­ uture “pour[s] down showers of small gold dollars, thick as kernels of corn,” destroy just as quickly as they buoy. Rather than moving from a nightmare to a Webber-­like golden dream, panic nudges Aster—­and, indeed, Melville—­toward depression: the “power of motion” seems, fi­nally, to cease.

The Real­ity of Depression When taken as evidence of his “blackness,” Melville’s doleful dramatization of noncyclical thinking in The Confidence-­Man reinforces the view of his work, in Matthiessen’s term from the epigraph, as the “completion” of the romantic cycle. Melville authorizes this view in “Hawthorne and His Mosses” when he kills Irving with kindness, celebrating his pre­de­ces­sor’s “graceful style” while dismissing it for “the studied avoidance of all topics but smooth ones.”26 Critics elevate Melville, according to this logic, for exposing the golden dreams of romance as the nightmares of realism. Yet even in the relatively brighter economic vision of Irving, we find an awareness of economic cycles that I have equated with Melville’s “blackness.” To conclude this essay, in moving forward from panic to depression, then, I move backward from 1857 to 1840—­from The Confidence-­Man to Irving’s “A Time of Unexampled Prosperity: The ­Great Mississippi B ­ ubble.” Not only does the text work with dif­fer­ent scales of intelligibility, ranging from the biographical to the world-­historical, but it also ultimately questions the long-­held wisdom that Irving was “wholly ignorant of economics, [that] he never comprehended the significance of the revolutions in pro­cess all about him.” To challenge the view that Irving avoided “all topics but smooth ones,” then, is fi­nally to mind the gap that separates the beginning of the romantic cycle from the end of it. In the late 1830s, Vernon L. Parrington’s writes, “the panic had caught [Irving] with much of his capital invested in unprofitable land speculations” in

1819–1857: Romantic Cycles   129

the West.27 Needing money, and (in Irving’s words) “growing too indolent and unambitious for anything that requires ­labor or display,” he “thought, therefore, of securing to myself a snug corner in some periodical work.”28 Sounding rather like the lawyer-­narrator in Melville’s “Bartleby,” the bachelor Irving seeks the “snug” work of magazine writing to provide income. His sketch of John Law, the ill-­fated Scottish eighteenth-­century financier and architect of the Mississippi B ­ ubble in Louisiana in 1720, thus exists as one product of this ­labor regularly performed for the Knickerbocker from 1839 to 1841. The turn during the long depression of the 1840s to what Irving’s con­temporary Charles Mackay in Extraordinary Popu­lar Delusions (1841) would call France’s “Mississippi madness” might seem compensatory: the salutary escape to history to contextualize succumbing to “the avaricious frenzy.”29 Yet it seems more in­ter­est­ing to imagine Irving’s work on Law in 1840 as an attempt at periodization, one that imagines how the financial speculator’s “golden dream” gives shape to modernity. With this periodizing turn to the New World’s first financial ­bubble, Irving complicates the generic separation of romance and realism that tends to divide pre–­and post–­Civil War lit­er­a­ture. “Speculation is the romance of trade,” he opines, “and casts contempt upon all sober realities. It renders the stock-­jobber a magician, and the exchange a region of enchantment. . . . ​The subterraneous garden of Aladdin is nothing to the realms of wealth that break upon his imagination.”30 A delusive confidence thus becomes for Irving, as for Melville, a hallmark of modern finance. Demonstrating a deep knowledge of the history of public finance, indeed, Irving details the motive power of Law’s financial scheme, which transformed imperial France into a financial frenzy. More specifically, Irving details “the calamitous effects” of a system of public credit erected on the problematic of repre­sen­ta­tion, as if he can deploy a containing realism on the very romance to which he succumbed in 1837.31 And yet we might won­d er ­w hether Irving felt exhausted in 1840—­​ ­“unambitious,” he says—­precisely ­because he recognized the futility of out-­ romancing men cut from the same cloth as Law. What, ­after all, is the romance or realism of lit­er­a­ture to “the romance of trade”? “Now is the time for speculative and dreaming or designing men,” Irving opines. “They relate their dreams and proj­ects to the ignorant and credulous, dazzle them with golden visions, and set them maddening ­after shadows.”32 In a moment of resignation, which Melville repeats in refusing to permit The Confidence-­Man a f­ uture, Irving acknowledges that high financiers set the multitudes on the quest for an eternal pres­ent, looking neither back t­ oward a determining past nor forward to an

130   Prehistories and Transitions

overdetermined ­future. In d ­ oing so, moreover, such men out-­romance both American lit­er­a­ture as the Romantics practiced it and American literary studies as scholars have theorized it. Theirs is not a vision of business cycles but, instead, one devoid of cyclical motion altogether: a bright f­ uture not “soon enough” but now.

The “romance of trade” would infatuate one of American literary history’s most accomplished realists, Mark Twain. In Twain studies, this infatuation expresses itself in a “well-­known paradox” between, on one hand, Twain’s bearish repudiations of industrial capitalism in novels like The Gilded Age (published during the Panic of 1873) and, on the other hand, his turbulent investment ­career as a “cap­i­tal­ist of high character.”33 Or, to recast this paradox in the terms introduced above, not so much pauper and prince but realist and romancer. In addressing this prob­lem, this brief conclusion attempts to triangulate the Romantic and realist cycles long organ­izing nineteenth-­century American literary studies; it does so by pursuing Twain’s commitment to an inevitably bright ­future, to which he clung in the face of business fluctuations. More specifically, the short story “The £1,000,000 Bank-­Note,” published during the Panic of 1893, during which he spiraled t­ oward bankruptcy, provides an occasion to reflect on how Twain understood the real­ity of the economy as something less to be overcome than contained, perhaps even enjoyed.34 In d ­ oing so, “Bank-­Note,” from the reverse vector i­ magined above, hints at a continuity between realist and Romantic modes grounded less in literary—or military—­than economic history. The “well-­known” paradox among Twain scholars, premised on a hard ­distinction between art and economy, might obscure the fact that a tension between romance and realism in turn structured both sides of Twain’s experience. In 1886 Twain had met the inventor James W. Paige, whose newfangled typesetting machine at first won Twain, in Justin Kaplan’s phrase, as “a quiet backer” ­until “along with boundless expectations of wealth, [Twain] took on the entire financial and managerial burden of the machine.” This burden “crushed him,” as Kaplan further writes, but, in the meantime, Twain maintained “a mulish faith . . . ​despite constant delays and breakdowns.”35 Indeed, as he wrote to the financier Henry Huttleson Rogers, he “felt entirely certain that that machine would turn up trumps eventually.”36 He held on to this thought ­until 1895, when, in the face of certain failure, the machine loomed (again in Twain’s words) as “the aspect of a dissolved dream.”37 When the romance that

1819–1857: Romantic Cycles   131

his “luck would never run out” met the real­ity of bankruptcy, Twain felt as if he lived “a hellish dream.”38 Published in ­Century magazine in January 1893, “Bank-­Note” seems equally caught between romance and real­ity. In this way, the tale shares perhaps unwitting affinities with “The Story of China Aster”: like Aster, Twain’s hero Henry Adams finds himself unwillingly the recipient of a kind of loan, the titular banknote “lent . . . ​for thirty days, without interest”—­this one, however, from two anonymous En­glish ­brothers of substance.39 As the story progresses, we learn that ­Brothers A and B make a bet as to w ­ hether or not Adams can survive 30 days in London, £1,000,000 banknote in hand, without starving. By luck and pluck, Adams wins the bet, becoming notorious as the “Vest-­pocket monster,” who lodges and boards by leveraging his ironically unexchangeable note for multiple lines of credit. His success in “living like the rich and the ­great,” however, always seems tenuous, and Adams “judged that ­there was ­going to be a crash by and by.” He even describes his Janus-­faced experience, glancing at once at prosperity and depression, in generic terms: “In the night . . . ​the tragedy was always to the front, and always warning, always threatening. . . . ​ But in the cheerful daylight the tragedy ele­ment faded out and dis­appeared, and I walked on air, and was happy to giddiness.”40 If Aster’s Bright ­Future is his ruination, Adams’s sunny outlook is his salvation, allowing him to avoid the “crash” and extend his walk “on air” in­def­initely. Eventually, that is, Adams’s experiences take the form of “a long story” of a par­tic­u­lar kind: “a romance, a body may say.” Whereas the “power of motion” stops for Aster, indeed, Adams avoids the troughs of realism—he “can keep [his] capital moving”—by lending support to a friend’s failing mining scheme; with a newly bolstered business plan, his friend ­will “sell out” his option in the “Gould and Curry Extension” for “three millions cash,” netting him and Adams £2,000,000 in profits. Marital success, of course, follows financial success for Adams, prompting the rhetorical question, “Happy, we too? ­There are not words enough in the unabridged to describe it.” Happiness that exceeds language, financial success that, as Adams’s incredulous friend observes, takes the form of “Arabian Nights come again”—­Twain’s story, reinscribing the promise of an eternal pres­ent, imagines sought-­for motion as not forward but backward to prosperity.41 If cyclical reading points to how Twain’s (or Adams’s) i­ magined vector reverses Melville’s (or Aster’s), it thus fi­nally suggests how tensions between romance and realism persist across the nineteenth c­ entury, or, better yet, how the “power of motion” scandalizes the very constructs—­literary periods—­that allow us to register such movement in the first place.

132   Prehistories and Transitions

Notes 1. ​Robert Sobel, Panic on Wall Street: A History of Amer­i­ca’s Financial Disasters (New York: Macmillan, 1968), 80. 2. ​The Swiss po­liti­cal economist Simone di Sismondi first developed what Samuel Rezneck terms “period analy­sis” in Principes d’economie politique (1819), but the business cycle as a coherent concept would be anachronistic for antebellum Americans. Samuel Rezneck, Business Depressions and Financial Panics (New York: Greenwood, 1968), 5. Wesley C. Mitchell’s Business Cycles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1913) first formalized the concept in 1913. 3. ​To identify the “romance” of economics is to add to the “definitional chaos” of the term in American literary culture. See Nina Baym, Novels, Readers, and Reviewers: Responses to Fiction in Antebellum Amer­i­ca (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984). 4. ​Rezneck, Business Depressions and Financial Panics, 6. See also Charles Albert Collman, Our Mysterious Panics, 1830–1930 (1931; repr., New York: Greenwood, 1968), 40–41. 5. ​Frederick Jackson, A Week in Wall Street by One Who Knows (New York, 1841), 130. 6. ​The historiography of financial panics is robust. Recent studies include John Lauritz Larson, The Market Revolution in Amer­i­ca: Liberty, Ambition, and the Eclipse of the Common Good (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); and Jessica Lepler, The Many Panics of 1837: ­People, Politics, and the Creation of a Transatlantic Crisis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Recent literary accounts include David Anthony, Paper Money Men: Commerce, Manhood, and the Sensational Public Sphere in Antebellum Amer­i­ca (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2009); Mary Templin, Panic Fiction: W ­ omen and Antebellum Economic Crisis (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2014); and David Zimmerman, Panic! Markets, Crises, and Crowds in American Fiction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). 7. ​Alan Liu, “Local Transcendence: Cultural Criticism, Postmodernism, and the Romanticism of the Detail,” Repre­sen­ta­tions 32 (Fall 1990): 75–113. 8. ​Mary Poovey, Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth-­and Nineteenth-­ Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 230. 9. ​William Armstrong, Stocks and Stock-­Jobbing in Wall-­Street (New York, 1848), 13. 10. ​Vernon Louis Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought, vol. 3, The Beginnings of Critical Realism in Amer­i­ca (1927; repr., New York: Harcourt, 1958), xix. 11. ​Assessing the collective amnesia that sets in a­ fter financial trauma, Robert Sobel writes, “Several years ago Amer­i­ca was reminded that the last surviving solider of the Civil War had died; it is doubtful that we w ­ ill be informed when the last broker or major speculator of the G ­ reat Crash breathes his last”; Robert Sobel, Panic on Wall Street: A History of Amer­i­ca’s Financial Disasters (1968; repr., Washington, DC: Beard Books, 1999), 4. 12. ​Catharine Maria Sedgwick, “Romance in Real Life,” in Tales and Sketches by Miss Sedgwick (Philadelphia, 1835), 237–78. On the “romance of real life” genre, see Elizabeth Hewitt, “Romances of Real Life; or, The Nineteenth-­Century American Business Magazine,” American Periodicals 20, no. 1 (2010): 1–22. 13. ​Washington Irving, “Buckthorne: or, The Young Man of ­Great Expectations,” in The Works of Washington Irving, vol. 4, Tales of a Traveller (New York: Jenson Society, 1907), 195. 14. ​Irving, Tales of a Traveller, 195, 220, 237, 281. ­Here the pace of Irving’s plot mimics that of the 1819 panic itself. As Sean Wilentz explains, small farmers and wage laborers had “relied on unending credit only to be undone” by “the sudden collapse of the economy.” Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy (New York: Norton, 2005), 216, 202. 15. ​Irving, Tales of a Traveller, 308. 16. ​A recent conference pre­sen­ta­tion likewise pursues economic themes in Irving’s story: Leila Mansouri, “Lost States and Land Pirates in Washington Irving’s Tales of a Traveller” (paper

1819–1857: Romantic Cycles   133 presented at the annual meeting of the American Lit­er­a­ture Association, Boston, MA, May 21–24, 2015). 17. ​Washington Irving, “Wolfert Webber, or Golden Dreams,” in Tales of a Traveller, 471, 474, 484. 18. ​Irving, 543, 544. See also Irving’s “A Time of Unexampled Prosperity,” in which he contrasts “the slow but sure gains of snug percentage” with the speculator’s over­eagerness for “sudden fortune.” Washington Irving, “A Time of Unexampled Prosperity,” in Wolfert’s Roost, ed. Roberta Rosenberg (1840; repr., Boston: Twayne, 1979), 96. 19. ​Irving, “Wolfert Webber,” 544, 546. 20. ​Caroline Kirkland, A New Home—­Who’ll Follow? or, Glimpses of Western Life (Boston: J. H. Francis, 1855), 9. 21. ​Joseph G. Baldwin, The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi (New York: Appleton, 1853), 1. 22. ​I adapt the notion of historical periods as “leaky containers” from Caroline Levine, “Infrastructuralism, or the Tempo of Institutions,” in On Periodization: Selected Essays from the En­glish Institute, ed. ­Virginia Jackson (Ann Arbor, MI: ACLS Humanities E-­Book, 2010), para. 53. 23. ​ The Letters of Herman Melville, ed. Merrell R. Davis and William H. Gilman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1960), 188n9. 24. ​Herman Melville, The Confidence-­Man: His Masquerade (New York: Norton, 2006), 211. 25. ​Melville, 212, 209–20, 219. 26. ​Herman Melville, “Hawthorne and His Mosses” (1850), in Moby-­Dick, ed. Hershel Parker and Harrison Hayford (New York: Norton, 2002), 526. 27. ​Vernon L. Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought, vol. 2, The Romantic Revolution in Amer­i­ca, 1800–1860 (1927; repr., Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), 207. 28. ​The Life and Letters of Washington Irving, ed. Pierre M. Irving (New York: Putnam, 1863), 3:148. 29. ​Charles Mackay, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popu­lar Delusions (London: Bentley, 1841), 1:3, 15. 30. ​Irving, “Time of Unexampled Prosperity,” 96. 31. ​Irving, 113. 32. ​Irving, 95. 33. ​Henry B. Wonham, “The Art of Arbitrage: Reimagining Mark Twain, Business Man,” ELH 82 (Winter 2015): 1240. See also Justin Kaplan, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1966), 330. Mark Twain to Henry Huttleson Rogers, Feb. 19, 1899, quoted in Wonham, 1260. 34. ​For a recent reading of this understudied short story, see Nathan Leahy, “The Panic of 1893 and ‘The £1,000,000 Bank-­Note,’ ” Mark Twain Annual 8 (2010): 76–85. 35. ​Kaplan, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain, 281. 36. ​Mark Twain to Henry Huttleson Rogers, n.d., Mark Twain’s Letters (New York: Harper, 1917), 2:622. 37. ​Mark Twain to Henry Huttleson Rogers, Dec. 27, 1894, Mark Twain’s Letters, 2:620. 38. ​Mark Twain to Olivia Langdon Clemens, quoted in Kaplan, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain, 332. 39. ​Mark Twain, The £1,000,000 Bank-­Note and Other New Stories (New York: Webster, 1893), 16. 40. ​Twain, 23. 41. ​Twain, 29, 38, 43, 28.

Reimagining 1820–1865

robert s. levine

It is no secret that for the past several de­cades American literary history has been thought of in relation to five traditional periods: beginnings to 1820 (or 1800), 1820 (or 1800) to 1865, 1865 to 1914, 1914 to 1945, and 1945 to the pres­ ent. The two most popu­lar American literary anthologies (the Heath and Norton) offer five-­volume splits corresponding to ­these periods. Even such two-­volume anthologies as the Bedford and Longman, which run from beginnings to 1865 and then 1865 to the pres­ent, preserve some sense of the five periodizations. Given that ­these traditional periods or timelines have been with us for quite a while, it is not surprising that scholars in the field have regularly raised questions about their value, or just ignored them. Numerous books on nineteenth-­century American literary studies, for instance, address the long nineteenth c­ entury, precisely the historical area of the recently formed professional organ­ization called “C19: The Society of Nineteenth-­ Century Americanists.” Still, for a variety of reasons, 1865, or the Civil War more broadly, has retained considerable power in the way we read and teach nineteenth-­century American lit­er­a­ture, as has the microperiod 1820–1865. As I elaborate in this essay, I d ­ on’t think this is such a bad t­ hing. A traditional period like 1820–1865 allows for more intensive and manageable considerations of the relationship of literary production to historical context. Such considerations are especially useful for the recovery and appreciation of the work of minority writers. The study of a period over time also helps us to see more clearly one of the large (but sometimes unacknowledged) truths about periodization: that our understanding of the literary activity within traditional periods is constantly in flux. Periods may be inventions, but they are regularly re­imagined. Moreover, revised understandings of smaller periods are often the engines that help us to rethink the larger field of American literary studies.

Reimagining 1820–1865   135

All this said, I would allow that ­there is something problematic about paying such close attention to literary history within chronological frames that, in the end, are scholarly inventions. For t­ hose of us who work in the circa 1820–1865 period, one could ask why not start at 1776, 1789, 1800, or 1815, and I would respond that any of ­these starting dates would be fine, depending on the goals of a course or proj­ect. The “1865” might seem the less problematic of the two chronological markers, but for Christopher Hager and Cody Marrs, the field’s tendency to regard 1865 as an end point of sorts is where the prob­lem lies. In their provocative recent essay “Against 1865: Reperiodizing the Nineteenth ­Century,” Hager and Marrs raise questions about the number of US lit­er­a­ture monographs, courses, and anthologies that continue to use 1865 as a temporal dividing line, especially given the field’s embrace of “expanded scales of analy­ sis,” such as hemispheric and transnational studies. One might commonsensically respond, Well, the Civil War was fairly significant, as was the abolition of slavery in 1865. But how significant ­were ­those developments with re­spect to US literary history, and what should we do about the continuities that exist across 1865? Hager and Marrs address ­these questions head-on, stating persuasively, “Our argument is not that the Civil War’s po­liti­cal or historical impact has been overestimated but that as an event within literary history it is both a rupture and an occasion for extension.”1 Rupture, Hager and Marrs assert, in the form of 1865, is the current emphasis of the field (and of the major anthologies), which comes at the expense of exploring continuities across the antebellum and postbellum periods in order to take account of what Marrs in a recent book terms the “transbellum.” For example, was literary realism all that new to the post-1865 period? Hager and Marrs assert that it ­wasn’t, and they describe how Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin modeled strategies of realistic repre­sen­ta­tion that had an impact on Upton Sinclair’s 1906 The Jungle. Similarly, I would observe that Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables (1851) modeled strategies of realistic repre­sen­ta­tion that had an impact on William Dean Howells and other post-1865 realists—­with my larger point being that I d ­ on’t think t­ here are many critics who believe that realism was in­ven­ted out of w ­ hole cloth a­ fter 1865. Despite the evidence that extension as much as rupture can be read into 1865, Hager and Marrs conclude that for many Americanists the “ ‘postbellum’ period has had to be kept distinct from its chronological pre­de­ces­sor in the ser­vice of narratives of cultural and po­liti­cal history in which the postwar de­ cades figure as incipient modernity.”2 Ted Underwood observes that En­glish literary studies gained its prestige during the nineteenth c­ entury by insisting

136   Prehistories and Transitions

on (and to some extent inventing) historical contrasts between periods.3 Hager and Marrs make a similar argument about the professional motivations b ­ ehind Americanists’ predilections for telling stories about the emergence of more “modern” writing ­after 1865. Setting aside the fact that many of us regard writers like Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and even Hawthorne as more “modern” than Howells, Theodore Dreiser, and Frank Norris, and thus as crucial to the emergence of literary modernism in the United States (which developed hand in hand with the Melville Revival during the 1920s), Hager and Marrs have impor­tant ­things to say about tendencies to regard writers as belonging to this or that period, particularly when they are studied in classroom anthologies. In their article, Hager and Marrs thus raise questions about the chronological frame of the period anthologies that have as their stopping point 1865. They argue, for instance, that Melville’s posthumous Billy Budd, which typically appears in pre-1865 volumes, belongs in post-1865 volumes so that students can read the novella in the context of l­abor strikes and literary realism; they insist that Whitman’s 1881 version of his 1855 “Song of Myself ” ­doesn’t belong in a “before 1865” volume; they remind us that Dickinson’s major poetry crosses over 1865 (thus anthologists do tend to include Dickinson in pre-­and post-1865 volumes); and they drolly remark that only two of the major writers in F. O. Matthiessen’s American Re­nais­sance (1941) “­were obliging enough to die prior to the surrender at Appomattox.”4 Had they wanted to develop such arguments further, they could have pointed out that the Norton, which is the focus of their discussion, violates Appomattox by concluding its most recent 1820–1865 volume with a se­lection from Louisa May Alcott’s ­Little ­Women (1869), and they could have noted that the Norton fails to police the 1820 border as well, for it includes pre-1820 poems by William Cullen Bryant and Lydia Sigourney. In that volume, which I confess I edit, ­there are porous borders on both sides of 1820–1865 b ­ ecause I and the prior editor of the volume agree with many of the assumptions informing Hager and Marrs’s article.5 Anthology periodizations are meta­phors, not dicta, and ­these meta­phors inevitably change over time as editors (and indeed the instructors anthology editors serve) reimagine periods over time. The introduction to the 1820–1865 section in the inaugural two-­volume Norton published in 1979, for instance, which emphasizes the glorious rise of American literary nationalism, is considerably dif­fer­ent from the introduction to the 2017 edition, which addresses topics ranging from slavery to sentimentalism. T ­ hese changes of emphasis about

Reimagining 1820–1865   137

context over time, but perhaps more importantly the emphasis over time on context, point to what a number of critics argue is the most significant prob­lem with periodization: its insistence on reading lit­er­a­ture in relation to historical context. Underwood, whose critique of certain forms of periodization emerges from historical study of the practice of periodization, allows that “students still need to discover how thoroughly historical differences can reshape the experienced world.”6 For good reason, then, he argues that standard period courses, which are disappearing from curricula across the country, remain useful for introducing students (most of whom know very ­little about historical differences) to national or other sorts of literary histories. In the spirit of Underwood, I would maintain that close attention to writings of the 1820–1865 period, or any microperiod, can help to illuminate impor­tant connections between authors and their historical moment, and that ­there is a lot to learn from attending to ­these connections. But such an argument would go against the grain of much recent writing on periodization. Susan Gillman complains of “the rigidity of periodization”; Katie Trumpener terms the idea of the literary period “an inert, empty placeholder”; Gerald Graff claims that periods “erase history”; and Eric Hayot argues that “periodization in literary studies . . . ​ amounts to a collective failure of imagination.”7 Leading the charge against periodization is Rita Felski, whose b ­ attle cry in her influential article on the topic is “Context Stinks!” One of Felski’s informing assumptions (which has parallels in the Hager and Marrs article) is that ­those who work with literary periods are obsessed with policing their chosen chronological borders. Thus, Felski informs ­these presumed iron-­ cagers that “history is not a box—­that conventional models of historicizing and contextualizing prove deficient in accounting for the transtemporal movement and affective resonance of par­tic­u­lar texts.” The assumption ­here seems to be that an instructor teaching the 1820–1865 period, for example, would do what­ever he or she could to discourage students from thinking about Walden or Moby-­Dick beyond the frame of 1865. As Felski remarks, “Context is often wielded in punitive fashion to deprive the artwork of agency, to evacuate it of influence or impact, rendering it a puny, enfeebled, impoverished t­hing.” She claims as well that “our conventional models of context take . . . ​multidirectional linkages and cast them into coffinlike containers called periods”; and, worse, “we imagine an immobile textual object enclosed within an all-­determining contextual frame” in which formerly living texts are “impaled on the pin of our historical categories and coordinates.”8 ­There is an unsettling “straw man” demagoguery about such argumentation, for

138   Prehistories and Transitions

who would want to teach via “coffinlike containers” or by impaling texts on hermeneutical pins? But apparently that is precisely what ­those of us who advocate forms of historical periodization do, and the ­people (like Madeleine Usher rising from her coffin) want out! Let us for the moment grant Felski her assumptions about the bad pedagogy rife in traditional period classes. Though I suspect she has something dif­fer­ent in mind, one way out of the coffin might be through reperiodization, as Hager and Marrs suggest. In his article “Against Periodization,” Hayot proposes another pos­si­ble corrective to traditional periodizations: creating what he terms “arbitrary” periods, such as a cross-­century 1850–19509—­a periodization that actually would work quite nicely for an American literary history course moving from Melville to Ralph Ellison (who quotes Melville in the epigraph to Invisible Man). I like the idea of arbitrary periods, though as my Melville-­to-­ Ellison rubric suggests, it would always be easy for instructors to develop coherent stories within the arbitrary in the way of traditional periodizations. But what about reperiodizations that ­aren’t so arbitrary? That is what we are offered via the creatively conceived new timelines proposed in this volume. Thus, to adduce an example from each section of the book, t­ here is a broad periodization ­running from 600 BCE to 1830 CE, with a focus on The Book of Mormon; a shorter con­temporary periodization, with a focus on Andy Warhol; a relatively long periodization of 1629–1852, with a focus on democracy and the New York State patroons; and a periodization of 1622 to the pres­ent, with a focus on American lit­er­a­ture and propaganda. To say the obvious, t­ hese are not arbitrary periodizations. Each proposed timeline has a predetermined, if not overdetermined, focus, subject, and (implicit) argument and agenda, and I ­can’t help wondering ­whether such courses might not be more constraining than the standard period course. That said, ­these courses sound like wonderful special topics classes, but I imagine that the students who would perform best in such classes are ­those who, like their professors, have some understanding of the more traditional literary periods. At the very least, such an understanding would bring dialogical energy to the classroom. Whereas the “timelines” in this volume all have clearly articulated topics, the traditional American period course just has dates, such as 1820–1865. I’m not defending an immovable and rigid “­after 1820” and “before 1865,” but I do want to suggest the virtues of something like an 1820–1865 periodization in American literary studies, arguing, contra Felski and Graff, that a delimited periodization can help students to explore connections between lit­er­a­ture and history with some complexity, and that such explorations can open up (rather

Reimagining 1820–1865   139

than shut down) ways of reading and interpreting literary works, both within and across temporal frames. ­There are a host of topics, both traditional and new, that can be investigated in the context of 1820–1865. As Sandra Gustafson observes in her essay at the beginning of this volume, 1820, the year that Washington Irving published The Sketch-­book, can be regarded as an impor­tant year in the development of American literary nationalism, and thus the period 1820–1865 works well in terms of analyzing such nationalism in relation to the end of the War of 1812, the establishment of the North American Review (1815), the early publications of Bryant and Sigourney, the emergence of Catharine Sedgwick and James Fenimore Cooper, and the rethinking of American literary nationalism in Emerson’s “The American Scholar” (1837), Melville’s “Hawthorne and His Mosses” (1850), and Whitman’s writings from 1855 through the Civil War. Consideration of this topic might also include Poe, Dickinson, and Hawthorne, among ­others. And, with the help of the revisionary work of the past two de­cades, one could also explore the exceptionalist and even imperialist dimensions of such nationalism, which could then be studied across periods and not simply in relation to 1820–1865. But 1820 was also the year of the first Missouri Compromise, which firmed up the balance of ­free and slave states in an effort to sustain slavery as a national endeavor, and thus it is a year absolutely central to subsequent writings about slavery and freedom in the United States. As Frederick Douglass underscores, 1865 was also a crucial year, for it saw the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery. In his third and final autobiography, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881, 1892), Douglass titles his chapter on 1865 “Vast Changes” ­because he simply has no other way of thinking about that year apart from the “stupendous achievements” that would culminate in black citizenship three years ­later.10 From this perspective, 1865 ­really is a rupture of sorts, a moment when Douglass could take a deep breath to consider the achievements of the antislavery movement before describing the new challenges facing him and ­others committed to blacks’ full participation as US citizens. Numerous se­lections in circa 1820–1865 volumes or sections of American lit­er­a­ture anthologies speak to the slavery-­to-­freedom story in ways that ­hadn’t been true of earlier anthologies. That story can be told by starting with the 1820s and 1830s antislavery writings of Sigourney, Lydia Maria Child, and David Walker and then moving to Douglass, Stowe, Henry David Thoreau, Melville, Sojourner Truth, Frances Harper, and ­others who, even as they engage some of the key debates of the 1820–1865 period, point to issues that would remain central to post-1865 writings as well.

140   Prehistories and Transitions

Based on the se­lections in current circa 1820–1865 anthologies (or sections within beginnings-­to-1865 anthologies), ­there are numerous other topics in American literary history that one could address over the course of a semester, including the emergence of w ­ omen writers as journalists and influential contributors to the print culture of the period (Child, Margaret Fuller, and Fanny Fern), the popularity of domestic and sentimental fiction (Child, Hawthorne, Stowe, Fern, and many ­others), new ways of representing sexuality and gender (Whitman, Melville, Fuller, Hawthorne, Stowe), experiments with affect (Poe, Stowe, Fern, and many ­others), the ongoing conflict between whites and Native Americans (Cooper, Sedgwick, William Apess, Jane Johnson Schoolcraft, John Rollin Ridge), and the importance of transnationalist and trans-­Atlantic perspectives (Cooper, Emerson, Fuller, Douglass, Melville, Martin Delany). “Context” is by no means a term with a single meaning, and ­there is no reason why a period course ­can’t be an occasion for rethinking conventional notions of context through digital and other creative proj­ects that put antebellum writers into conversation with twenty-­first-­century cultural discourses and media. One of the ­great appeals of focusing on the 1820–1865 period, however, which is true of other such microperiods, is that it is pos­si­ble to study the extraordinary interconnectedness of the writers of the time. Thoreau, Fuller, and Hawthorne ­were all friends for a while, as ­were Hawthorne and Melville at a crucial moment in their ­careers. Whitman was inspired by Emerson and sent him the first edition of Leaves of Grass; Thoreau temporarily lived with the Emerson ­family; Poe, Melville, and Dickinson engaged Emerson’s philosophy and rejected aspects of his thinking. Fuller reviewed Douglass’s Narrative, and Douglass printed an excerpt from Melville’s first novel, Typee, in his newspaper. Douglass influenced Stowe’s ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), and he responded to the novel’s racialism in his 1853 novella “The Heroic Slave.” Fern knew Whitman and wrote a praising review of Leaves of Grass; Child wrote a short story that inspired William Wells Brown’s 1853 Clotel (which works with large swatches of Child’s 1842 “The Quadroons”). Poe negatively reviewed Hawthorne; Hawthorne wrote against Poe’s ahistorical aestheticism; Poe and Emerson debated the nature of poetry. Harriet Jacobs admired Stowe and then was angered when she wanted to appropriate her life history for A Key to ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1853); Child subsequently offered Jacobs a helping editorial hand. Alcott and Rebecca Harding Davis revered (and knew) Hawthorne, and Alcott studied with Thoreau. Though the concept of the transbellum usefully refocuses our attention on continuities and extensions over the long nineteenth c­ entury, it fails to attend

Reimagining 1820–1865   141

to the synergistic creative energies in the United States circa 1820–1865 (or 1865–1914). As my discussion of interconnections among vari­ous writers might suggest, ­there is no single story that can be told about 1820–1865. I have been focusing on period anthologies, which by their nature tell a limited number of stories. But, of course, anthologies can be supplemented by online materials and individual texts that complicate and extend an understanding of the period. Devoting some time to periodical culture, for example, ­whether by looking at Godey’s, Putnam’s, or the vari­ous African American newspapers available through Accessible Archives, exposes students to multifarious voices and perspectives that are not easily contained by an 1820–1865 anthology. Sustained attention to a microperiod inevitably reveals its richness and contradictions. In a power­ful defense of literary-­historical contextualization, Bruce Holsinger writes, “Rather than critiquing historical contextualism in its objectionable singularities, we might do better to embrace the plurality of interpretive stances and practices it has long enabled.”11 Such plurality is true of recent critical work on the 1820–1865 period, which has moved well beyond the older sense of the period as simply about the rise of American literary nationalism and the flowering of an “American Re­nais­sance.” In short, traditional periods are not static entities and are not as “traditional” as they seem. They are always and regularly re­imagined. Taking the 1820–1865 period as an example and the Norton as my test case, the most recent 2017 edition of this microperiod includes the following writers who ­were not included in the 1979 inaugural edition of the anthology: Sedgwick, Sigourney, Walker, Apess, Schoolcraft, Child, Fern, Jacobs, Brown, Delany, Harper, Ridge, Davis, and Alcott. (Douglass and Stowe ­were in the first edition.) It is beyond the scope of this essay to trace when and how each of ­these authors was added over a nearly forty-­year period, but the point I want to emphasize is that e­ very new addition changes how we read the writers already t­ here, which is to say that each new se­lection compels a reimagining of the period. Consider the following three examples: adding se­lections from Jacobs’s Incidents (1861), with its concluding image of a slave sale in antebellum New York City, fundamentally changes how we read New York–­based writing of the period; adding Sigourney changes our conception of the history of poetry in the United States; and adding Ridge changes how we read depictions of Native Americans in Cooper and Sedgwick and offers new perspectives as well on sensationalism and westward expansion.

142   Prehistories and Transitions

I have been discussing the 1820–1865 period as an arguably discrete period that retains its vitality as it is re­imagined over the years. I want to conclude by considering the challenges of reading minority writing of the period. If, as Felski and ­others argue, “context stinks,” try to tell that to Walker, Douglass, Jacobs, or any African American writer working in the de­cades before the Civil War. What does it mean to write as a former slave or noncitizen at a time when slavery is the law of the land? Such a question would not be addressed in the “nonperiodizing alternatives” proposed by Hayot, who calls for courses cutting across traditional periods that emphasize “forms of characterization or point of view” (narratology) and “poetic figures like rhyme, figures like apostrophe or hendiadys, or other newly described or in­ven­ted features of rhe­toric, narrative, or form.”12 In an article against periodization that fails to address interdisciplinarity, print culture, book history, ideas of authorship, or the contingencies of po­liti­cal, economic, and cultural history, Hayot gives us something like a return to the high literary world of the philologists, which, as far as I can tell, would have ­little place for Walker, Douglass, Brown, Jacobs, Harper, Harriet Wilson, Frank Webb, or Delany. Three of ­these eight writers ­were former slaves, all addressed the prob­lem of slavery and race in the United States, and all would regard their engagement with slave culture as an essential constituent of their writings. But historical context for black writers is not only about slavery and race; it’s also about print culture and readership, for mainstream publishers typically refused to publish African Americans, who therefore had to develop their own strategies for publishing and finding readers. The black nationalist David Walker has become an increasingly impor­tant figure in the period anthologies r­ unning from circa 1820 to 1865, and he emerges as an especially compelling writer when read in relation to literary and historical contexts. Walker was angered by the proslavery implications of the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and inspired by Denmark Vesey’s pos­si­ble slave conspiracy in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1822. As a ­free black in 1820s Boston, he became a traveling sales agent for the first African American newspaper, Freedom’s Journal, and in this way learned vari­ous strategies for reaching out to ­free black readers. His 1829 Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World directly engaged Thomas Jefferson, who died on July 4, 1826, and had an impact on Douglass, John Brown (who republished the text in 1848), Delany, and many other pre–­Civil War African Americans. Walker’s strategy of using sailors and other means to secretly distribute the book in the South owed a good deal to what he learned as a circulating agent for Freedom’s Journal. This is not to say that the Appeal ­doesn’t continue to resonate in our own time and c­ an’t be

Reimagining 1820–1865   143

read as a pioneering work of African American and African diasporic lit­er­a­ ture. But Walker’s engagement with vari­ous aspects of his world helped to generate his writing. Hayot and ­others may argue that Walker and other black writers are historical and not literary figures, which I would suggest is a prob­ lem with the “context stinks” crowd, who (especially in the case of Felski) are keen on works that resonate with their own affective lives. I have no prob­lem with works that are “relatable,” but ­there is much to be said for writings that pull readers out of their worlds to expose them to something that is quite other. And of course the painful surprise, at our pres­ent vexed moment, is that the world of 1820–1865 is not so other ­after all. I offer a few final words on Frederick Douglass as a figure who both supports and confutes the arguments of this essay. Like Walker, Douglass came into maturity in a nation in which slavery was the law of the land. A former slave when he published his 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Douglass, like Walker, sought to change his world by speaking and writing. His Narrative, which, to be sure, draws on a longer literary history of rhe­toric and autobiography, exposes the mendacity of the practice of slavery in antebellum Mary­land, while showing the extraordinary obstacles facing African Americans inspired by the success stories of p ­ eople like Benjamin Franklin. It makes sense to read the Narrative, published by the white abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, in relation to abolitionist culture of the 1840s. And it makes sense to read Douglass’s immediately subsequent writings, up to 1865, as responses to such developments as the Fugitive Slave Law and his embrace of radical abolitionism (he officially broke from Garrison in 1850). But, of course, Douglass lived and wrote well past 1865, and thus he (like Brown and Harper) is a good example of a writer who w ­ ill not be boxed in by 1865. He published his final autobiography, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, in 1881 (with a revised edition in 1892) and delivered one of his greatest lectures, “The Lessons of the Hour,” in 1894, just a year before his death. When Douglass’s autobiographies w ­ ere republished during the 1960s, he was suddenly one of the most widely read black writers of the time. To some extent, he became a writer of the civil rights movement.13 All of which is to say: I agree with Hager and Marrs that we need to be wary of the trap of 1865. Without a doubt, Douglass is a transbellum figure who had a vital post-1865 c­ areer and remains crucial to our current understanding of the histories of slavery and race in the United States. But if we fail to acknowledge Douglass’s own sense of the antebellum period as a period, we lose sight of how Douglass came into being circa 1820–1865, as well as how a Douglass-­inflected sense of the importance of

144   Prehistories and Transitions

slavery and race to that historical moment has helped us to reimagine traditions and concerns in the larger landscape of American literary studies. Notes 1. ​Christopher Hager and Cody Marrs, “Against 1865: Reperiodizing the Nineteenth C ­ entury,” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-­Century Americanists 1, no. 2 (2013): 261, 260. 2. ​Hager and Marrs, 265. On the “transbellum,” see Cody Marrs, Nineteenth-­Century American Lit­er­a­ture and the Long Civil War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), esp. 1–22. On the temporal turn in American literary studies, which of course works against traditional periodizations, see Cindy Weinstein, ed., A Question of Time: American Lit­er­a­ture from Colonial Encounter to Con­temporary Fiction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018). 3. ​See Ted Underwood, Why Literary Periods Mattered: Historical Contrast and the Prestige of En­glish Studies (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013). 4. ​Hager and Marrs, “Against 1865,” 261, 263. 5. ​In this regard, it is worth noting that the microperiods in the five splits of the Heath and Norton, respectively, can be used for transbellum teaching (by working with volumes B and C together) and that in both cases the editors of ­these anthologies look forward and backward in their introductions and headnotes in order to suggest the interconnection between volumes moving from circa 1820 to 1914. 6. ​Underwood, Why Literary Periods Mattered, 15. But for a compelling argument on the limits of looking at writers solely in relation to their cultural moment, which I would never advocate anyway, see Wai Chee Dimock, Through Other Continents: American Lit­er­a­ture across Deep Time (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2006). 7. ​Susan Gillman, “Oceans of Longue Durées,” PMLA 127, no. 2 (2012): 330; Katie Trumpener, “In the Grid: Period and Experience,” PMLA 127, no. 2 (2012): 350; Gerald Graff, “How Periods Erase History,” in On Periodization: Selected Essays from the En­glish Institute, ed. ­Virginia Jackson (Ann Arbor, MI: ACLS Humanities E-­Book, 2010), para. 97–123; Eric Hayot, “Against Periodization; or, On Institutional Time,” New Literary History 42, no. 4 (2011): 740. Graff ’s claim that periods erase history is based on the failure of his students in separate period classes (at Northwestern in the late 1960s) to make connections between Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (which was read in one period class) and George Eliot’s Adam Bede (which was read in another). I would suggest that the failure has much more to do with the time gap between the students’ readings, the complexities of the authors, and the peculiar quarter-­system periodizations at Northwestern. 8. ​Rita Felski, “Context Stinks!,” New Literary History 42, no. 4 (2011): 574, 582, 590. As Felski notes, her mantra “Context Stinks!” is a coinage derived from Bruno Latour citing architect Rem Koolhas. 9. ​Hayot, “Against Periodization,” 747. 10. ​Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1892; repr., New York: Collier Books, 1962), 373. 11. ​Bruce Holsinger, “ ‘Historical Context’ in Historical Context: Surface, Depth, and the Making of the Text,” New Literary History 42, no. 4 (2011): 611. For another compelling defense of periodization, see Valerie Traub, “The New Unhistoricism in Queer Studies,” PMLA 128, no. 1 (2013): 21–39. 12. ​Hayot, “Against Periodization,” 743. 13. ​On this point, see Robert S. Levine, The Lives of Frederick Douglass (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 17–25.

pa rt t wo

AG E S A N D T H E L O N G P R E S­E N T

This page intentionally left blank

prologue

The Anthropocene, 1945/1783/1610/1492–­???? (or, I Wish I Knew How to Quit You) dana luciano

Dear Anthropocene, ­We’re done. I’m over you. I mean it this time. Sure, it was exciting when it all began. It felt like I’d found a new way of seeing t­ hings: life, relation, planetarity. The earth moved; it folded humanity into itself, for better and for worse. But now, Anthropocene? Y ­ ou’re starting to wear a bit thin. You seemed to offer so much, but what have you delivered? ­After all ­these years, ­you’re still kind of obscure. I’m not sure what your point is. Y ­ ou’re taking over my life—or at least my CV—­yet you ­won’t even tell me how to pronounce your name. And ­really, Anthropocene, ­you’re a mess—­arguably sexist, pretty clearly racist, totally imperialist.1 You insist on blaming all of humanity for your prob­lems, when we all know who ­really caused them. Frankly, your ­will to totality just gets in the way, a lot of the time. Lord, what an ego ­you’ve got. So why, Anthropocene, why ­can’t I stop thinking about you? Okay, maybe it’s partly the cultural cachet. ­There’s some benefit to being seen in your com­ pany. You get noticed. You win grants. You hold out the promise of relevance to a field—my field—­anxious about its f­ uture. But it’s more than that. Honestly, ­you’re magnetizing. ­There’s a reason ­people find you so compelling, Anthropocene. You promise to be two ­things at once: an objective description—­the identification of a new geological force, the ­human species, emerging to demarcate a recognizable period in earth history—­and a performative inspiration, the unleashing of an affective-­political force, a “wake-up call for humanity.”2 Dense with information, alive with passion: who could resist you? Yet it seems, more and more, like it’s just too hard for you to be both t­ hese ­things at once. And predictably, y­ ou’ve been leaning t­ oward the first one, trying to actualize yourself, to make sure you can stick around. ­You’ve been hanging out with a committee of scientists—­stratigraphers and a few of their allies, officially recognized as the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) of the

148   Ages and the Long Pres­ent

International Council on Stratigraphy. Since 2009, t­ hey’ve been trying to make you, once and for all, a fact: a verifiable slice of geological time, objective, irrefutable, and beginning, as t­hey’ve recently proposed, in 1945.3 I d ­ on’t have a prob­lem with this. It’s what they do, defining ages and epochs and series based on observed distinctions and internal consistencies, putting forth evidence-­ based proposals, and subjecting them to several rounds of voting.4 (Compared to their courtship procedures, even the most time-­honored literary-­historical periods seem like casual hookups.) But they keep insisting you belong to them, claiming you ­were always meant to be a stratigraphic designation, and pushing the rest of us to the bottom of your social calendar.5 They ­don’t invite humanists to the parties you guys throw; they insist that you ­can’t be influenced by “choice of h ­ uman narrative”—­that your birthday needs to be “dispassionately chosen”; that this is the way to “guarantee that wider discussion is solidly founded on the best factual basis available.”6 Yeah, okay. It’s understandable that they need you to dress a certain way when you guys go out together. Stratigraphers gotta stratigraph—­and even I ­can’t imagine the AWG overtly selecting the “­human narrative” they want to locate in the geological rec­ord. Not at this point in history. It’s not the way they know scientific knowledge to be structured. Listen, though—­listen to what t­ hey’re saying, Anthropocene, about dispassionateness. They want to define not only you, but the terms on which you and I might be together. And okay, maybe you want their recognition. But remember where you came from. Your relationship with stratigraphy has only been official since 2009. As a wake-up call, though, y­ ou’ve been around at least since 2000, ­when Paul Crutzen, an atmospheric chemist, blurted you out at a conference in Mexico City, interrupting a pre­sen­ta­tion to declare, “Let’s stop it. . . . ​We are no longer in the Holocene; we are in the Anthropocene.” Every­ one got quiet then, he says—­but afterward, you ­were all anyone could talk about.7 Maybe the story’s apocryphal, Anthropocene. I w ­ ouldn’t hold that against you. ­Because it captures what’s most compelling about you—­not the part of you that’s a demarcation, but the part that’s an intensification. You d ­ on’t just mark a boundary—­you shift the mood, you impassion the discussion. You demand a change. And maybe that’s where it all went wrong. We kept thinking that the two ­things can be made to work together. We should have known better; ­speech act theory reminds us of the difference between a description and a demand. But still we conflated them. We’d waited a l­ittle too long, we humanists, to start calling you—­pushed t­ oward it, eventually, by Dipesh Chakrabarty and Elizabeth Kolbert—­and by that time you looked, even to us, like a fact, a

The Anthropocene, 1945/1783/1610/1492–????  149

demarcation.8 You ­weren’t yet—­you still ­aren’t, stratigraphically speaking, and you might never get ­there.9 Yet we keep acting as though ­you’re already set in stone, calling on geology to explain you, to authorize and or­ga­nize your effect on us. When we told our friends about you, we said ­things like this: that you forced us to alter our perception of scale, to think in deep time (even though ­you’re not that deep, especially if you w ­ ere born in 1945, as your stratigraphic driver’s license currently claims). The geological perspective was new to us, we said. And yet we kept aligning it, confusing you, with sublimity—­with whom ­we’ve been involved for a ­couple of centuries now.10 Maybe that’s why ­we’ve been describing our relationship as a romance of mutual undoing—­a kind of planetary folie à deux. Geological time, we reasoned, was largely or­ga­nized by means of extinction; so if ­you’re the ­human epoch, Anthropocene, then what­ever your birth date might be, your end date would coincide with ours. We’d go out together. That’s how we tried to bring the two parts of you into alignment, to make the act of periodization into a demand for change. We thought we’d make that demand clear if we emphasized your other boundary—if we underlined the need for humanity to switch course by completing you, imaginatively, with our own death as a species. You showed us the skeleton in the vanity mirror, we said—­taught us to see ourselves as “fossils in the making.” I’m not sure when we humanists started to obsess about your end point; the AWG ­doesn’t talk about it all that much. Maybe it’s ­because its founder, Jan Zalaciewicsz, also writes about ­human extinction, and the seductiveness of the posthuman perspective led us to conflate his work with yours.11 But maybe that’s ­because so many of us already thought that way—­ because what Srinivas Aravamudan called “the death-­orientedness of the modern individual” draws us t­ oward extinction like moths to a flame.12 And maybe we already thought that way b ­ ecause the end of the h ­ uman has been in sight as long as ­we’ve been focused on the ­human (in the guise of Western Man) as form. Michel Foucault (someone I’ve been seeing for the past few de­cades, off and on—­and no, Anthropocene, I w ­ on’t give him up for you) says we started to think this way in the eigh­teenth ­century, to understand Man, that “invention of recent [and Eu­ro­pean] origin,” as a creature “bound to a finitude which belongs only to [him], and which opens up the truth of the world to [him] by means of [his] cognition.”13 By the mid-­twentieth c­ entury (your maybe-­official birthday), he l­ ater observes, we started to be this way—an episteme gone ominously ontological. The threat of nuclear annihilation means that man is no longer what Aristotle called him, an animal with the additional capacity for po­liti­cal existence; instead, “modern man is an animal whose politics places

150   Ages and the Long Pres­ent

his existence as a living being in question.”14 True enough; ­but we knew that long before you came along, Anthropocene, and we s­ houldn’t keep making you into the t­ hing that “proves” it. We ­don’t need you to model irony for us, or to teach us about finitude. ­We’re humanists—­it’s kind of what we do. So what now, Anthropocene? Have we got any kind of a ­future? Can we get back to the way it began? I d ­ on’t want to “take you back” from the AWG. They have needs too. They need you to be geologically real. They need a chronology that grounds the epoch. And at this point, r­ eally, I’m not sure I could get you back. Their relationship with you is the one that gets the most public recognition. I mean, ­you’ve already taken their name. If I just concede that that’s your primary relationship—­that you are, or ­will be, a geological period, beginning in the mid-­twentieth ­century, whose end point we d ­ on’t yet know—­maybe I can try to work with that. Sure, literary critics ­didn’t get a say in the decision; but hey, we base literary-­historical periods, more often than not, on slices of time we d ­ idn’t choose in the first place. So coming second, in this sense, w ­ ouldn’t necessarily be a deal breaker. Actually, quite a few literary critics are already connecting with you this way, importing a post-’45 time frame for the Anthropocene into literary history. ­They’ve written about the new genres that characterize you, especially cli-­fi; t­ hey’re also exploring your impact on existing genres.15 You inspire them to ask about what happens to poetic elegy ­after the end of “nature,” as Margaret Ronda does, or, like Kate Marshall, about how you alter the time of con­temporary fiction, how your spectral presence—­posited, but not yet confirmed—­demands that we attend to “scenes in which genre and geohistory collide.”16 Still, ­there’s something I’ve noticed about ­these connections, Anthropocene. They nod to your status as a geohistorical period, deferring to stratigraphy as they name their topic—­lit­er­a­ture in or of the Anthropocene—­according to the post-’45 time frame proposed by the AWG. Yet y­ ou’re more conceptual than concretely historical in t­ hese studies. ­They’re not always worried about populating all seven of your de­cades with representative texts; in fact, many of them focus on post-1980s lit­er­a­ture, on writing that foregrounds awareness of climate change but has yet to develop a stable relation to that emergent fact. You function as a structure of feeling, a “cultural hypothesis,” as Raymond Williams puts it.17 But ­here’s the ­thing. What’s being described as “Anthropocene lit­er­ a­ture” grapples, mostly, with climate change. But if your birthday is, in fact, 1945, as the AWG proposed—if your stratigraphic birthmark is the radioactive signal that nuclear detonations left in the bedrock, as geologists suggest it ­will be—­well, then, you a­ ren’t only about climate change anymore, are you? The

349-75744_Marrs_ch01_3P.indd 150

10/11/18 8:24 AM

The Anthropocene, 1945/1783/1610/1492–????  151

stratigraphic need for precision has made you, paradoxically, more diffuse, indexing the Cold War alongside the climate, encompassing population growth, mass urbanization, and the mountains of garbage u ­ nder which w ­ e’re slowly burying ourselves. ­You’ve changed, Anthropocene. You’re about ­human self-­ cancellation now, about what Foucault saw as the paradox of the pres­ent. So maybe it’s fair if critics treat you less as a period than as a prob­lem in time. Or perhaps that’s the point—­all periods are (or should be understood as) prob­lems in time: not self-­evident facts about the past, but invitations to think about it in other ways. And that’s one of the issues p ­ eople have had with the 1945 boundary marker. A lot of us want you to tell a deeper story, a tale of ­causes—­not just an account of the strange, unsettling feeling of recognizing ourselves as a geological force, but a story of how we got that way. So maybe we could do our own t­ hing, you and I. We could go with your desire to be a period, but together, we’d be a dif­fer­ent one. We could go back to your youth, when you focused more explic­itly on fossil fuel use and climate change—­putting your birthday in 1783, the year the steam engine was in­ven­ted, as Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer suggested when they first wrote about you in 2000.18 Better still, we could go back to 1610, the year proposed by Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin. They chose that date b ­ ecause of traces found in Arctic ice cores showing that it was the low point in a decades-­long decrease in atmospheric carbon dioxide—­a decline caused, they believe, by the deaths of over 50 million indigenous residents of the Amer­i­cas in the first c­ entury ­after Eu­ro­pean contact, as well as the changes in the biosphere that ensued.19 This is the story we ­ought to be telling—­a story of an in­human era, a period where some ­humans stole the very status of the ­human from ­others and then threw up a wall between the ­human and nonhuman, refusing to acknowledge their relatedness.20 We’d be taking a hint from the members of the AWG itself: their insistence that you c­ an’t be the result of a “choice of h ­ uman narrative” was a response to this proposal. And if it bothers them so, maybe that’s all the more proof that it’s the right story for us. No, ­really, I’m not being petty. I re­spect their relationship with you. It’s a big step for them—­a real recognition that h ­ uman activity is damaging the planet, a decisive reply to the shenanigans of the climate deniers. But if I want to “think globally”—­and I do, Anthropocene—­then I need to understand the world, not just the planet. And science alone w ­ on’t help me. We could move your birthday back a bit further, then, thinking in terms of sociohistorical rather than geological indices, tracking you along the colonialist and cap­i­tal­ist pathways that so violently remade the world. That seems like a more useful frame—­though I’m not sure, yet, what it would do for me

152   Ages and the Long Pres­ent

critically. Let’s try it out with . . . ​how about Moby-­Dick? Melville’s novel tells your story, Anthropocene, almost as though it ­were written with you in mind: a power­ful and deranged American man decides to go to war with nature, despite numerous warnings and increasingly incontrovertible evidence that this is a Very Bad Idea, and in the end every­one dies. Except it i­ sn’t quite “nature” Ahab goes to war with, is it? The white ­whale is the very image of what happens to “nature” u ­ nder your domain, Anthropocene—­inscribed with the history of the whaling industry, transformed into a mere instrument of the ­human: like a “corkscrew . . . ​the harpoons lie all twisted and wrenched in him.”21 Ahab and his crew travel to the end of the earth only to be confronted by a monstrous reflection of modernity that brings about the end of the world—or at least, the end of the ship. And the ship, the Pequod—­that works too. It conveys a story of h ­ uman extinction, beginning locally—­“Pequod, you w ­ ill no doubt remember, was the name of a celebrated tribe of Mas­sa­chu­setts Indians, now extinct as the ancient Medes”—­and ending globally, as every­one goes down with the ship whose “wood could only have been American.”22 That’s the story of the inhuman “­human age” in a six-­hundred-­page nutshell: the ultimate failure of Western Man’s attempt to escape the demise he has projected, for centuries, onto racial and geographic O ­ thers. The past is the key to the ­future—­the unnatural “extinction” caused by settler colonialism circles back around to extinguish the colonizers themselves. Aaaaand . . . ​scene. No, wait. Wait. This is exactly what I said I d ­ idn’t want to do with you, Anthropocene—­turning you into a meditation on finitude, pitching your “wake-up call” in a melancholy key. And what kind of a wake-up call would that be, anyway? If Foucault is right, meditations on finitude have been Man’s favorite bedtime story for a long time now. This is how you mess with me, Anthropocene. You confuse me—­your melodrama makes me forget all sorts of ­things. For one ­thing, the Pequot a­ ren’t extinct.23 Yet it feels like you need them to be, on some level: that you need, as Matt Hooley argues, this kind of inscription, this “necropo­liti­cal construction of vulnerability” to drive your point home.24 What does it mean to tell this morbid story—to make structural vio­lence into a legible event, but then to posit that event as a kind of ominous foreshadowing, a violent past returning to issue a warning for the ­future? It situates Man as your audience, not just your origin; Man, it insists, is the one who needs to hear this story. But how much more attention does Man ­really need? Perhaps the w ­ hole periodization ­thing just ­isn’t what we should be ­doing together. To be honest, I’m ambivalent about periodization in general. It’s a

The Anthropocene, 1945/1783/1610/1492–????  153

habit we literary critics have fallen into—an old habit, Ted Underwood says, older than En­glish departments themselves, and ­we’ve stuck with it longer and more thoroughly than any other discipline.25 That could be one reason we literary critics like you so much, Anthropocene. You complete us. Stratigraphy gives periodization deep-­historical heft; it makes the princi­ple of temporal contrast into the way of the world itself, a “history written on its strata.”26 It naturalizes the appeal of literary history, which, Underwood argues, originally linked the “cultivating” effect of literary study to an awareness of historical contrast.27 Most of us are suspicious of cultivation t­ hese days, yet we keep leaning on historical periods as though their value is self-­evident. It’s a lousy habit. It makes it difficult, if not impossible, to challenge the Eurocentrism of the En­glish curriculum. It might be, as this volume contends, that proliferation—­a thousand tiny periods—is the answer: refusing the hallowed, monumental status of “traditional” literary history, generating periods more congenial to proj­ects critics want to undertake. Like your relation to Moby-­Dick, Anthropocene, t­ hese nonce periods might be read as allegories of history: contingent frames for stories that themselves shift over time as we come to understand them better, to see them differently. What if we went all the way with this? What if, knowing that period bound­ aries ­will inevitably change, we simply surrendered our grip on them? I’m not saying we should abandon history, any more than we should abandon science. Still, we could let go of the need to plot it in linear fashion. Dates m ­ atter, as Heather Davis and Zoe Todd point out in defense of Lewis and Maslin’s proposal—­but it also ­matters how we use them.28 And if, following the model of the Anthropocene boundary marker, we identify a given date with the opening of a segment of linear time, we run the risk of construing colonization as a singular narrative, or worse, as Audra Mitchell points out, of naturalizing it, making it appear, like the geological history with which it entwines, as “inevitable, determinate and less contestible than ‘po­liti­cal forces.’ ”29 Periodization itself—­not only stratigraphy—­keeps pulling us in this direction. It ­doesn’t just provide dates; it situates them as chronologies, linear-­historical maps that threaten to overshadow the very histories they are intended to illuminate. And as long as ­you’re mapped this way, Anthropocene, no ­matter when you begin, you reiterate the logic of colonization. Any version of literary history that works like stratigraphy—­cutting up homogenous, empty time into discrete slices, packaging them as linear periods, and doling them out—is likely to behave this way: ultimately, to affirm the values and needs of whoever sliced them up and handed them out. But Davis and

154   Ages and the Long Pres­ent

Todd propose a dif­fer­ent way of filling you out, Anthropocene. Pointing to Kyle Powys Whyte, who reminds us that “climate injustice is part of a cyclical history” entwined with larger pro­cesses of environmental change, colonization, capitalism, and industrialization,30 Davis and Todd invoke “a construct of time, drawing on Indigenous philosophies, as fluid, malleable and circular.”31 This ­isn’t the empty homogeneous time of stratigraphy; it reminds us of the multiple movements that characterize earth’s history—­ongoing “seismic shock[s] of dispossession and vio­lence,” but also “the renewal and resurgence of Indigenous communities in spite of world-­ending vio­lence.”32 And ­these remind us, in turn, that what Mark Rifkin calls “settler time,” the time of Man transformed into a tool of colonization, imposes itself internally as well as externally, subordinating or erasing other temporalities—­nonlinear, non-­Western, nonheteronormative.33 So why do we persist in models of literary-­historical framing that blind us to lit­er­a­ture’s ability to help us grasp time other­wise? We c­ an’t m ­ istake chronology for historiography. Literary texts are nothing like geo-­historical layers; ­they’re dense, complicated entanglements—­twisting and wrenching time, like the metal fused with the white w ­ hale’s body, or spinning, as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen describes them, like vortices, sucking in time and m ­ atter and spewing them 34 out again in strange, unexpected combinations. They beckon us to multiple vectors of analy­sis, multiple pres­ents—­the times of reference, of composition, of citation, of reading. You might name one (or some) of t­ hose, Anthropocene. You might stand in for the force of the nonhuman in t­ hese scenarios. We humanists have spent too long focusing only on the h ­ uman—­a bad habit that betrays the discipline’s Eurocentric parentage, which bequeaths to us a fantasy of Man as autonomous subject and of “nature,” the nonhuman, as secondary. You could help me not to fall into that habit—­reminding me that the h ­ uman is imbricated in earth systems, not in charge of them, that biological life and nonbiological liveliness are always actively entwined. You could help me trace the twisting times inscribed in the white ­whale’s hide; you could accompany me through the vortex that pulls in the whaling ship at the end of Moby-­Dick—­though not quite all of it. Before it subsides, remember, the vortex spits out a piece of the Pequod—­a coffin belonging to Queequeg, the tattooed Polynesian harpooner who was the bosom companion of Ishmael, the novel’s narrator, and upon which Ishmael floats to safety. This circumstance might lead us back to that earlier reading, Anthropocene, the one that made me so impatient with you: it makes the death of the indigenous man, once again, into the condition of the white Ameri-

The Anthropocene, 1945/1783/1610/1492–????  155

can’s survival. But Queequeg’s coffin holds more than one kind of time. It recalls the queer interludes he shares with Ishmael, and reminds us of his mixed spatiotemporal condition. No more the Natu­ral Man, as critics of a bygone era liked to call him, than the ­whale is Pristine Nature, Queequeg, as C. L. R. James points out, is a strikingly modern hybrid, actively “enrolled in the colonial proj­ect” but also making his own way into “the world [Melville] saw ahead.”35 And his coffin moves back and forth across life and death; though Queequeg had had it made for the expected use, during an illness he believed would prove fatal, ­after his recovery, he recycles it into a sea chest, a support for his everyday life on the ship. Then, in his spare time, he covers it with carvings mimicking the tattoos that cover his body, which, Ishmael informs us, ­were the work of a prophet from Queequeg’s island, believed to represent “a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth.”36 So many textures, so many forms of time—­intimacy, visionary futurity, prophecy, everyday life—­spilling out of one object. The vortex at the end of Moby-­Dick ­doesn’t just draw the story to a close on an image of death—it leaves us, if we pay close attention, with possibilities, unscrolling in several directions: “affective detritus, recondite m ­ atter, queer fragments, anomalous proximities.”37 Yet that’s the prob­lem, Anthropocene. ­You’re not good at paying that kind of attention. You ­don’t lend yourself as readily to fragmentation as to catastrophe. You ­don’t want to be one strand of my thinking: you loom ominously around it, sucking every­thing into your maw, reminding us over and over, in Chakrabarty’s terms, of the “negative universalism” that our collective vulnerability to species extinction might generate. It’s hard to imagine you acting as just one of the many nonce periodization proj­ects that populate this volume. You want to be the period that defines all periods, the black border around the very concept of the ­human. Even if we humanists agreed to stop referencing your potential end point, even if we agreed—as the AWG does—­that we ­don’t yet know the kind of time you’ll come to demarcate, your birth date, once it’s settled, ­will signal, almost irresistibly, a crack in time, and the complex, diffuse histories of specific, located environmental crises ­will remain at risk of falling into it. It’s that ego of yours, Anthropocene. It makes you, well, loud. And I know it’s not easy for you to quiet down—if you want to be a wake-up call, you need volume. Yet some humanists—­indigenous and decolonial scholars, ecofeminists—­have been woke for quite a while now. Not every­one needs your reminders about the intertwining of the h ­ uman and the nonhuman. Not every­one was parented Eurocentrically.

156   Ages and the Long Pres­ent

So ­here’s the deal, Anthropocene. If you can learn to stop Man-­splaining the crisis of the pres­ent, maybe we can find other ways of spending time, of seeing time, of being (in) time together. And then we might be able to keep this ­thing g­ oing—­for a l­ittle while longer, anyway. But only if we keep t­ hings fluid. See you around, maybe. xoxo, Dana Notes 1. ​For critiques of the Anthropocene concept along ­these lines, in addition to work discussed l­ ater in this essay, see Neel Ahuja, “The Anthropocene Debate: On the Limits of Colonial Geology,” Sept. 9, 2016, https://­ahuja​.­sites​.­ucsc​.­edu​/­2016​/­09​/­09​/­the​-­anthropocene​-­debate​-­on​-­the​-­limits​ -­of​-­colonial​-­geology​/­; Rob Nixon, “The Anthropocene: Promise and Pitfalls of an Epochal Idea,” Edge Effects, Nov. 6, 2014, http://­edgeeffects​.­net​/­anthropocene​-­promise​-­and​-­pitfalls​/­; Audra Mitchell, “Making a ‘Cene,’ ” Worldly, Feb. 23, 2014, https://­worldlyir​.­wordpress​.­com​/­2014​/­02​/­23​/­making​ -­a​-­cene​/­; Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trou­ble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016); Nicholas Mirzoeff, “It’s Not the Anthropocene, It’s the White Supremacy Scene,” in ­After Extinction, ed. Richard Grusin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018). 2. ​­Will Steffen, “The Anthropocene: The Ultimate Policy Challenge,” Asia and the Pacific Policy Forum, Jan.  19, 2016, www​.­policyforum​.­net​/­the​-­anthropocene​-­the​-­ultimate​-­policy​ -­challenge​/­. 3. ​Jan Zalasiewicz et al., “The Working Group on the Anthropocene: Summary of Evidence and Interim Recommendations,” Anthropocene 19 (2017): 55–60. 4. ​My thanks to John McNeill, a member of the AWG, for explaining this pro­cess in relation to the less formal periodization methods of his home discipline, history, during a pre­sen­ta­tion at a Georgetown University panel, “Anthropocene Impacts,” Nov. 28, 2017. 5. ​The 2017 AWG report observes that “[Paul] Crutzen [credited with coining “Anthropocene”] explic­itly proposed the term as a geological epoch” (56). For debates over disciplinary owner­ship, see, e.g., Clive Hamilton, “The Anthropocene Belongs to Earth System Science,” Conversation, Aug. 17, 2016, https://­theconversation​.­com​/­the​-­anthropocene​-­belongs​-­to​-­earth​-­system​ -­science​-­64105. An article protesting the disciplinary narrowness of the AWG (Erle Ellis et al., “Involve Social Scientists in Defining the Anthropocene,” Nature 540 [Dec. 8, 2016]: 192–93) argues that the “­human age” should not be determined without the input of the ­human scientists, though it, in turn, overlooks most humanities disciplines, as well as the arts, when listing desirable disciplines for inclusion on the AWG. 6. ​Jan Zalasiewicz et al., “Colonization of the Amer­i­cas, ‘­Little Ice Age’ Climate, and Bomb-­ Produced Carbon: Their Role in Defining the Anthropocene,” Anthropocene Review 2, no. 2 (Aug. 2015): 127. 7. ​Reported in Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (New York: Henry Holt, 2014), 108. 8. ​See Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four T ­ heses,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (2009): 197–222; Kolbert, Sixth Extinction.

The Anthropocene, 1945/1783/1610/1492–????  157 9. ​Re­sis­tance to the Anthropocene proposal has emerged among stratigraphers and other scientists based on the speed of the pro­cess of developing a proposal, the evidence put forth thus far, and the perception that the proposal serves goals that are more po­liti­cal than scientific. See, e.g., Whitney J. Autin and John M. Holbrook, “Is the Anthropocene an Issue of Stratigraphy or Pop Culture?,” GSA ­Today, 22, no. 7 (July 2012): 60–61. 10. ​See Noah Heringman, Romantic Rocks, Aesthetic Geology (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004). 11. ​See Jan Zalasiewicz, The Earth ­after Us: What Legacy ­Will ­Humans Leave in the Rocks? (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 12. ​Srinivas Aravamudan, “The Catachronism of Climate Change,” Diacritics 41, no. 3 (2013): 14. 13. ​Michel Foucault, The Order of ­Things: An Archaeology of the ­Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 322. 14. ​Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 143. 15. ​Adam Trexler traces the emergence of climate fiction from the m ­ iddle of the twentieth ­century; see Adam Trexler, Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change (Charlottesville: University of V ­ irginia Press, 2015). Stephanie LeMenager sees it “just now coalescing” against “the pres­ent tense, lived time of the Anthropocene.” Stephanie LeMenager, “Climate Change and the Strug­gle for Genre,” in Anthropocene Reading: Literary History in Geologic Times, ed. Tobias Menely and Jesse Oak Taylor (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017), 222, 225. 16. ​Margaret Ronda, Remainders: American Poetry at Nature’s End (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018); Kate Marshall, “What Are the Novels of the Anthropocene? American Fiction in Geological Time,” American Literary History 27, no. 3 (Fall 2015): 529. 17. ​Raymond Williams, Marxism and Lit­er­a­ture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 132. 18. ​Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer, “The ‘Anthropocene,’ ” Global Change Newsletter 41 (May 2000): 17–18. 19. ​Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin, “Defining the Anthropocene,” Nature 519 (Mar. 12, 2015): 171–80. 20. ​I make this argument at greater length, drawing on the work of Sylvia Wynter, in Dana Luciano, “The Inhuman Anthropocene,” Avidly, Mar. 22, 2015, http://­avidly​.­lareviewofbooks​.­org​ /­2015​/­03​/­22​/­the​-­inhuman​-­anthropocene​/­. 21. ​Herman Melville, Moby-­Dick; or, The Whale (New York: Penguin Books, 1988), 177. 22. ​Melville, 77, 622. 23. ​Vincent Schilling, “Seven ­Things You Should Know about the Manshatucket Pequot Tribal Nation,” Indian Country T ­ oday, Sept. 3, 2015, https://­indiancountrymedianetwork​.­com​/­news​/­native​ -­news​/­7​-­things​-­you​-­should​-­know​-­about​-­the​-­mashantucket​-­pequot​-­tribal​-­nation​/­. 24. ​Matt Hooley, “Reading Vulnerably: Indigeneity and the Scale of Harm,” in Menely and Taylor, Anthropocene Reading, 187. 25. ​Ted Underwood, Why Literary Periods Mattered: Historical Contrast and the Prestige of Literary Studies (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013). 26. ​ North American Review, 1836; quoted in Rebecca Bedell, The Anatomy of Nature: Geology and American Landscape Painting, 1825–1875 (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2002), 3. 27. ​Underwood, Why Literary Periods Mattered, 3. 28. ​Heather Davis and Zoe Todd, “On the Importance of a Date, or Decolonizing the Anthropocene,” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 16, no. 4 (2017): 761–80.

158   Ages and the Long Pres­ent 29. ​Audra Mitchell, “Decolonising the Anthropocene,” Worldly, Mar. 17, 2015, https://­worldlyir​ .­wordpress​.­com​/­2015​/­03​/­17​/­decolonising​-­the​-­anthropocene​/­. 30. ​Kyle Powys Whyte, “Is It Colonial Déjà Vu? Indigenous ­Peoples and Climate Injustice,” in Humanities for the Environment: Integrating Knowledges, Forging New Constellations of Practice, ed. Joni Adamson and Michael Davis (New York: Routledge, 2017), 88–104. 31. ​Davis and Todd, “On the Importance of a Date,” 771. 32. ​Davis and Todd, 771, 773. Davis and Todd align the notion of “seismic shock” with the reverberating time of the “wake” that, as Christina Sharpe argues, characterizes the history of the Atlantic slave trade, also bound up with New World colonization. See Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). 33. ​See Mark Rifkin, Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-­ Determination (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017). 34. ​Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Anarky,” in Menely and Taylor, Anthropocene Reading, 25–41. 35. ​C. L. R. James, Mari­ners, Renegades and Castaways: Herman Melville and the World We Live In (1953; repr., Hanover, NH: University Press of New ­England, 2001), 46. 36. ​Melville, Moby-­Dick, 524. 37. ​Cohen, “Anarky,” 26.

The Age of US Latinidad

jesse alemán

Rather than open with another call to redraw the periodization of nineteenth-­ century American literary history to better account for the diverse, multilinguistic, minority, and marginal forms of writing that populate the era, I’d like to begin by reflecting on a demographic statement: “According to the U.S. census data from April 1, 2010, one out of e­ very six p ­ eople in the United States is Latino. ­Those of Mexican origin represent the largest group: approximately 31 million [at the time]. ­Those of Puerto Rican origin: 4 million. ­Those of Central American origin: 4 million. ­Those of Cuban origin: 1.6 million. ­These numbers do not account for the undocumented Latinos living in the United States that number in the 10–12 million.”1 Such numbers fuel media hysteria that ranges from fretting about the slumbering volcano of the Latino/a vote to outright hostility directed against Latino/as, documented or not, in the United States. The numbers can be po­liti­cally and eco­nom­ically empowering, as politicians and corporations court Spanish-­speaking voters and consumers, but such demographic reports can also foster anxiety about immigration, English-­only legislation, and border walls as stopgap mea­sures to curb the rising Latino/a tide. The brown boom is also the butt of humor, most notably in the 2004 film Day without a Mexican, which imagines a domestic, agricultural, and landscaping apocalypse in the United States when all of the Mexicans go missing. The film makes vis­ i­ble, ironically by way of disappearance, the other­wise invisible lives, l­abor, and presence of the US Latino/a population. “In this way,” John-­Michael Rivera explains, the film “is a self-­reflexive meditation on the colonial logic that has historically constituted Mexicans as po­liti­cal nonentities, personae non gratae, which has led to a modern ambivalence surrounding Mexican collectivity in the United States.”2 It’s safe to say we live in an age of US Latinidad, with the growing Latino “collectivity” visibly and viscerally impacting national population spikes,

160   Ages and the Long Pres­ent

mainstream cultural consumption, two-­party po­liti­cal discourses, and prevailing racial categories. Yet, “just as demographic weight does not dissolve walls enforced by socioeconomic and racist be­hav­ior and policy, neither does the weighty presence of Latino/a lit­er­a­ture guarantee its automatic public inclusion.”3 To date, it ­hasn’t warranted a significant place in American literary history and its resilient forms of periodization and curricular organ­ization, though the demographics are, in my estimation, the first reason to think differently about the history of American lit­er­a­ture. As Latino/as increasingly enter our undergraduate and gradu­ate classrooms, they ­will be introduced to or indoctrinated into our field of study, but our current mode of literary history leads students to believe that Latino/a lit­er­a­ture did not properly arrive ­until the twentieth ­century, with the notable exceptions of María Amparo Ruiz de Burton and José Martí. ­These students—­which my institution labels with the strange “minority-­majority” moniker—­will ingest a story of American literary history that is not their own. Or, more precisely, ­they’ll be taught Anglo-­ American literary and cultural history as if it is their own, a universal narrative of national cultural production that might make some room for diverse voices but—­let’s face it—­posits the story of Anglo-­America as the history of the United States by way of period markers that make very l­ittle sense even for Anglo-­Americans. The notion of antebellum lit­er­a­ture, for example, is perhaps the most useless marker in all of American literary history. Usually spanning the 1820s to 1861, the antebellum era was one of the most bellicose periods of the nineteenth c­ entury. “The designation of the period between the 1820s to the 1860s as antebellum,” Shelley Streeby and I argue, “begs the question: before which war?”4 As many historians agree, the US Civil War was a postbellum reverberation of the 1846–1848 US-­Mexico War and the subsequent compromises over slavery and expansion the war brought with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Meanwhile, the period ­after the Revolutionary War, the era of the early republic, included the War of 1812 and the so-­called Seminole Wars, which raged throughout the era of Romanticism in three dif­fer­ent waves. The first war spanned from 1814 to 1819, the second from 1835 to 1842, and the third from 1855 to 1858, just three years before General P. G. T. Beauregard of the Confederate States of Amer­i­ca launched the US Civil War when he shelled his former West Point instructor, Major Robert Anderson, into surrender at Fort Sumter. “­People at the time, ironically, saw their era as fundamentally postbellum,” Edward Ayers says of the immediate postrevolutionary generation.5

The Age of US Latinidad   161

One of the most impor­tant reasons for rethinking the antebellum era of American literary history is that it has always been a historically erroneous and meaningless term in light of the number of wars waged for and against empire, slavery, expansion, and sovereignty before and a­ fter the war between the states. My point ­isn’t just that the bellum markers are historically inaccurate but also that the historical inaccuracy maintains American literary history firmly within an Anglo national story at the expense of other lit­er­a­tures by, say, indigenous, black, or Latino/a p ­ eoples, whose own wars of re­sis­tance, rebellion, anti-­imperialism, freedom, and in­de­pen­dence might package our literary history differently. For Mexican Amer­i­ca, the 1846–1848 war between Mexico and the United States ended with many Mexican Americans feeling like “a foreigner in my native land,” as Juan N. Seguín put it in his 1842 memoir—­a sense of colonial contusion that haunts Mexican American literary history more significantly than any trauma from the Civil War.6 For Cubans, the better part of the nineteenth ­century was one long era of internecine, anti-­colonial strug­ gle waged on the island but also fought in Spanish-­language newspapers, circulars, poems, plays, and novels penned and published in the United States between the 1830s and the 1890s. Put in period parlance, circum-­gulf US Latino/a print culture did not historically become postbellum u ­ ntil ­after 1898—­long ­after Appomattox, the rise of realism, and the appearance of naturalism. In short, while Mexican Americans ­were already living in a postbellum era before the Civil War, the postbellum era for Cubans ­didn’t begin ­until ­after their 1898 in­de­pen­dence from Spain. The politics of periodizing the nineteenth c­ entury by way of the Civil War pres­ents a pedagogical and curricular framework that at best homogenizes minority literary histories within Anglo-­America’s cultural imaginary and at worst leads minority students into thinking, reading, and understanding Anglo-­American social history as the master narrative of American lit­er­a­ture within and against which other traditions emerged. The end result is a kind of silence akin to the “unspeakable vio­lence” that characterizes the entire period: “vio­lence is an ongoing social pro­cess of differentiation for racialized, sexualized, gendered subjects in the U.S. borderlands in the nineteenth c­ entury and early twentieth.”7 If this bellicose transnational history of violent nation making and citizenship formation remains ensconced in the silence that Anglo-­centric periodizations enforce, then our very ways of apprehending the nineteenth c­ entury create a “pattern of using repetition as a way of denying vio­lence as a foundation of national history” in the first place.8 The same can be said about the major movements—­transcendentalism, Romanticism,

162   Ages and the Long Pres­ent

realism, and naturalism—­that structure American lit­er­a­ture along intellectual and artistic trends that are largely Anglocentric. T ­ hese standard period markers prioritize Anglo-­American upper-­middle-­class literacy patterns, reading practices, and print cultures as the nineteenth c­ entury’s defining literary movements. We commit the fallacy of composition by mistaking specific group practices for the w ­ hole and then perpetuate that fallacy by upholding, maintaining, and teaching the standard movements in our classroom as American literary history proper. The Age of US Latindad, however, spans the long nineteenth c­ entury and provides current Latino/a demographics with a transnational history. Canonical and noncanonical Anglo-­American texts emerged as a direct result of the significance of Cuba, the Ca­rib­bean, Mexico, or greater Latin Amer­ic­ a in US politics, print culture, and the American imagination. From Prescott’s three-­ volume History of the Conquest of Mexico to Crane’s “War Memories” of the Spanish-­Cuban-­American War, the often violent encounter between Anglo-­ America and Latinidad proved formative to movements from republicanism to reform. The traffic in books alone between Philadelphia and Mexico City in the early part of the nineteenth c­ entury proves that print culture was central to the po­liti­cal, economic, literary, and cultural formation of both the United States and Mexico, which ­were intertwined in a bibliographic network that “casts light on the role print played in both countries in this first phase of their respective developments.”9 Philip Freneau, Joel Barlow, Edward Maturin, and Robert Montgomery Bird also cultivated epic, national historical romances that squarely situate Latinidad in the center of the United States as both a nation and a new world empire. For many New E ­ ngland culture makers, including George Ticknor and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the collapse of the Spanish empire in the Amer­i­cas “proved too hard to ignore”: “border issues, commerce, and diplomatic relations all moved to center stage when Spanish Amer­i­ca won its in­de­pen­dence from Spain the 1820s.”10 Such foundational events framed the influential background of American lit­er­a­ture, established Spain and the Amer­i­cas as an “alter ego” to Anglo-­America, and even constituted an uncanny form of a “trans-­American gothic” history of conquest.11 All this is to say that the nineteenth c­ entury was the Age of US Latinidad for Anglo-­Americans, who looked t­oward their Spanish-­speaking neighbors for commerce, cultural history, romantic racialism, republican growth, economic exploitation, colonial dispossession, and other modes of empire building. ­There’s a reason, a­ fter all, that Amasa Delano, Herman Melville’s dopey Duxbury captain, speaks Spanish aboard the San Dominick slaver: he lived in the

The Age of US Latinidad   163

Age of US Latinidad, and, just as impor­tant, so did Melville when he penned the story about the United States’ emergence as the Spanish empire’s replacement in the new world. “Seguid vuestro jefe,” reads the ship’s masthead, and that might as well be the novella’s imprint for its implication that Delano’s ship of state runs the risk of following Spain’s decline in the Amer­ic­ as if it persists with the burden of slavery: “Shadows pres­ent, foreshadowing deeper shadows to come.”12 Melville knew the score. The Age of US Latinidad brought with it revolt, revolution, re­sis­tance, shaky republicanism, failed romance, mestizaje, racial ambivalence, and warnings about slavery and colonial expansion that the United States needed to heed if it ­didn’t want to go the way of Aranda and his bleached bones. “Benito Cereno” is an instructive example of the trou­ble that the Age of US Latinidad brings to the periodization of American lit­er­a­ture. Set in 1799, the tale is a thinly veiled allegory for the tense state of American affairs with slavery and empire in the mid-1850s, when Melville wrote and published the piece, and by most critical accounts, it heralds an ambivalent warning about the possibility of slave revolt and sectional conflict half a de­cade before the US Civil War. Put another way, Saint-­Domingue, Haiti, and the United States’ complicity with Spain’s New World slave empire structure the entire novella, making it impossible to decipher the narrative without an understanding of the Age of US Latinidad in which it is set and written, when the prob­lem of slavery was not exclusive to the Anglophone United States. One needs an understanding of the Hispanophone world of the Amer­i­cas to divine the novella’s full symbolic import. Simply recall that most of the conversation between Delano, Cereno, Babo, and select crew occurs in Spanish to grasp Melville’s sense of Latinidad’s importance to the fate of Anglo-­America, “with such involutions of rapidity, that past, pres­ent, and f­ uture seemed one.”13 But the Age of US Latinidad is more than just the looming geopo­liti­cal presence of Spain and Latin Amer­i­ca in the historical formation of the American literary imagination. Rather, nineteenth-­century US Latino/a print culture itself emerges as a significant body of work within and against competing colonialisms that continue to resonate with con­temporary Latino/as. Ranging from po­liti­cal pamphlets and poems to essays, novels, and travel narratives, nineteenth-­ century US Latino/a literary production, to borrow Russ Castronovo’s description of nineteenth-­century American lit­er­a­ture, “extends both backward and forward, making a mess of any presumptions about temporal demarcations that seem neatly keyed to a hundred year time span.”14 José Alvarez de Toledo y Dubois’s 1811 insurgent manifesto for Latino republicanism, for instance, might

164   Ages and the Long Pres­ent

seem as relevant now as it was when he first proclaimed, “Mexicans: signaled by Providence, the time has arrived for you to throw off the barbaric and shameful yoke with which the most insolent despotism has ignominiously oppressed you for 300 years.”15 In 1811, Toledo y Dubois is of course referring to Spain’s colonial power in the Amer­i­cas, but with Manifest Destiny, the conquest and dismemberment of Mexico’s far northern frontier, and the subsequent dispossession and displacement of Mexican Americans throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, his declaration—­like Melville’s novella—­proves prescient for the way US imperialism replaced Spain’s empire in the Amer­i­cas. Moreover, in the context of the Chicano/a movement, the 1811 manifesto sounds strikingly con­temporary in its radical sentiment of class critique, po­liti­cal disenfranchisement, and re­sis­tance to social oppression in the name of a collective identity politics: “Are you not moved, Islanders and Mexicans,” Toledo y Dubois continues, including the Ca­rib­bean in his vision of greater Mexico, “by the peaceful happiness that Venezuela, Santa Fe, Buenos Aires, Chile, and Peru enjoy, and that which Lima ­will soon enjoy? I advise you, noble ­children of the famous Montezuma, not to sheath your swords ­until order has been re-­established and your entire country been granted freedom.”16 It might sound anachronistic to read Toledo y Dubois through historical events that occurred long a­ fter his manifesto, and it’s similarly historically disingenuous to maintain that the colonial power he’s critiquing—­Spain—­could also be understood as a placeholder for the empire that the United States would become for Mexicans and Mexican Americans by the mid-­nineteenth ­century. However, the Age of US Latinidad vexes clear-­cut periodizations precisely ­because of the ways Latino/a demographics and their cultural discourses resonate across print history. I’m not arguing ­here for a clear teleology, an unchanging Latino/a voice across history, or a direct correlation between early Latino/a writings and con­temporary Latino/a lit­er­a­tures. Kirsten Silva Gruesz puts it best when she bluntly states that “the Hispanophone writers of the nineteenth ­century do not share the class and racial affiliations of most present-­day Latinos,” and Rodrigo Lazo adds that “marketplace conditions,” English-­language acquisition and fluency, and professional academic employment, among other ­things, distinguish con­temporary Latino/a writers from their nineteenth-­century counter­parts.17 I maintain, though, that the Age of US Latinidad spans periods ­because of the conflicted notions of national belonging that US Latino/a writings express with such prescience. While the lives, experiences, and historical conditions are not the same, their literary vestiges attest to the per­sis­tence of Latino/a demographics in the first place, demonstrating that the Age of US Latinidad

The Age of US Latinidad   165

began in the nineteenth c­ entury and continues to resonate in con­temporary print culture and po­liti­cal strug­gle. Perhaps that resonance is due to the recurring patterns of Latino/a immigration to the United States. Maybe it is ­because the history of conquest can be lived and felt by the dispossessed for generations, particularly when the proximity to home cultures remains close within the United States’ borders. ­Either way, the Age of US Latinidad stretches across time, not in any homogenous manner, but nonetheless in a way that asks us to rethink the cultural logic of periodization. For Nicolás Kanellos, native, immigrant, and exile constitute categories of periodization for US Latino/a lit­er­a­ture that extends from nineteenth ­century to the civil rights era, and while t­here are obvious differences between ­these labels that make them shaky for an overarching periodization structure, Kanellos’s larger proj­ect, as I read it, is to craft a literary history that foregrounds Latino/a lives and experiences as formative rather than ancillary to the history of print culture in the United States. “U.S. Latino lit­ er­a­ture,” Kanellos explains, “has been from its origins in the early nineteenth ­century, and still is t­ oday, a transnational phenomenon.”18 This prolonged transnational lit­er­a­ture cuts across national periodizations, turning the specter of anachronism into allegories of historical displacement, dispossession, anti-­ colonialism, and expressions of in­de­pen­dence and “peoplehood” that echo throughout and beyond the Age of US Latinidad.19 The anonymously published 1826 historical novel, Xicoténcatl, for instance, offers a layered historical palimpsest that scripts multiple geopo­liti­cal periods of US-­Latino relations. For ­today’s readers, and prob­ably for its own contemporaneous readership, the novel is an overwrought, clunky melodramatic republican romance, yet the narrative’s very excess—­its grotesque, baroque form, plot, and characters—is what makes it such a prescient allegory for the Age of US Latinidad. Nominally set on the eve of the conquest of Mexico, Xicoténcatl is a warning for the fate of the newly in­de­pen­dent Mexico, which might find its budding 1821 republican government already corrupted by complicity with external colonial powers—­Spain in the narrative’s imaginary past and the United States in the text’s allegorical pres­ent. As the narrative forebodes early on, “In spite of the fact that the republic [Tlaxcala] had so far maintained its united spirit, its strength, discord had begun to undermine its foundations.”20 However, if Luis Leal and Rodolfo Cortina are correct to surmise that the Cuban revolutionary priest, Félix Varela, penned Xicoténcatl, then the narrative’s allegory takes on a double reflection whereby Mexico’s postin­de­ pen­dence turmoil, symbolized in the narrative by the indigenous Tlaxcalan

166   Ages and the Long Pres­ent

republic, serves as a warning to Cuba’s early 1820s–1830s in­de­pen­dence movements in which Varela participated and found himself exiled in Philadelphia.21 If two other Cuban exiles, poet José María Heredia and diplomat Vicente Rocafuerte, coauthored the text, then it should be read as a cautionary tale for republican movements across the Amer­i­cas, especially considering that the novel’s publication date coincides with the Congress of Panama, which called on Latin American countries to put up a united fight against Spain without the United States’ backing.22 Even in its own contemporaneous moment, Xicoténcatl slides across national bound­aries and historical periods. Set during the era of conquest and written at the height of the republican period in the United States, it’s an allegory for the age of American republicanism, broadly construed. The narrative thereby challenges the United States’ historical owner­ship of republicanism as both a form of governance and a defining era of history. Mexico also emerged as an in­de­pen­dent republic, while republican revolutionary forces fomented in Cuba at the same time. But the narrative’s allegory ­doesn’t just reference the novel’s 1820s pres­ent; it also looks ahead to three other moments: the 1846– 1848 US-­Mexico War, when the model republic followed in the footsteps of Cortez, as the saying went, to dismember its Mexican ­sister republic; the 1850s, when American-­backed filibustering movements erupted in Cuba; and the 1898 Spanish-­Cuban-­American War, when Cubans fi­nally wrestled in­de­pen­dence from the two competing colonial powers that structure Xicoténcatl’s historical allegory nearly seventy-­five years prior. What Xicoténcatl presages and challenges from within the United States is its long-­standing uneven po­liti­cal and economic history of intervention, invasion, and imperial influence in Mexico, Cuba, and the rest of the Amer­i­cas. If I can put it this way, it envisions what Laura Lomas describes as “imperial modernity” in the United States and rejects it before it arrives on the scene for José Martí to critique at the end of the nineteenth ­century.23 Considered in this context, Xicoténcatl’s nineteenth-­century relevance could stretch from the Bay of Pigs to Chiapas, from the war on drugs to NAFTA, as repeated forms of colonial power and strug­gle that tell the long story of the Age of US Latinidad ­under empire. María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s 1885 novel, The Squatter and the Don, bridges periods even more pointedly. It is, as the subtitle announces, “A Novel Descriptive of Con­temporary Occurrences in California,” which “implies that the action of the novel takes place not simply concurrently with the publication date, but also in the pres­ent.”24 Though it is set in the 1870s, The Squatter and the Don addresses a range of other eras and events, including the early 1880s,

The Age of US Latinidad   167

when Ruiz de Burton wrote much of the narrative; 1885, the year the book was published; the late 1980s and early 1990s, when it was recovered, researched, and republished; and the current moment of US Latinidad, with its vexing issues of racial identity, po­liti­cal enfranchisement, and ambivalence ­toward US empire. One of the very reasons the Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage proj­ect reprinted Ruiz de Burton’s second novel first is ­because the narrative, save for a few melodramatic moments, sounds so relevant to con­ temporary times, a point not lost on Chicano/a and Latino/a scholars who continue to debate Ruiz de Burton’s significance in a way that indicates how the Age of US Latinidad stretches from her time to ours. Raúl Coronado’s study of what he calls the “history of Latino textuality” best characterizes what I’m describing as the extended Age of US Latinidad. “The future-­in-­past tense,” Coronado explains about studying the writings of the region that “would become” Mexico and the United States, “draws out, unfolds, lengthens the pro­cess of ‘becoming.’ ”25 One benefit of thinking about literary history in this way is that it opens up periodizations to “multiple temporalities” and reveals “familiar forms but with contents that have had distinct genealogies.” ­Those genealogies, Coronado says, both reveal and result from a variety of Latino/a textualities: “Rather than a history of Latino literary culture, our history of textuality . . . ​does not reduce the plurality of textuality to the fetishized, aestheticized, polished forms of lit­er­a­ture . . . ​but seeks instead to trace the discursive (trans)formations of textuality.” The challenge Coronado puts forward is not just to stretch periodizations to the point that they buckle u ­ nder the weight of their own temporality but also to compile a dif­fer­ent sense of writing altogether and account for textualities that ­were disregarded in the forming of standard literary periods.26 This is certainly true for the history of US Latino/a writing, much of which remains fugitive in literary studies ­because it’s written in Spanish, ­housed in archives, or simply not literary enough to be included within an Anglo-­American aesthetic tradition. At the same time, ­there are forms of “polished lit­er­a­ture”—­ novels, short stories, poems, and plays—­published throughout the Latino/a nineteenth ­century that should remind students and scholars that we ­didn’t aesthetically come into being in the twentieth c­ entury, when our textuality somehow fi­nally became literary. Rather, the Age of US Latinidad has always been an imaginative, expressive, and textual culture that wrote US Latino/as into the fabric of American literary history across its periods, movements, and timelines. For the Latino/a students in our classrooms, the ones now and in the ­future, it’s worth learning that their “world not to come,” to recall

168   Ages and the Long Pres­ent

Coronado’s book title, already arrived in the nineteenth c­ entury and continues to unfold in the pres­ent. Notes 1. ​Frederick Luis Aldama, “Introduction: What Are We Teaching When Teaching Latino/a Lit­er­a­ture,” in Latino/a Lit­er­a­ture in the Classroom: Twenty-­First-­Century Approaches to Teaching, ed. Frederick Luis Aldama (New York: Routledge, 2015), 5. 2. ​John-­Michael Rivera, The Emergence of Mexican Amer­i­ca (New York: NYU Press, 2006), 2. 3. ​Aldama, “Introduction,” 6. 4. ​Jesse Alemán and Shelley Streeby, introduction to Empire and the Lit­er­a­ture of Sensation: An Anthology of Nineteenth-­Century Popu­lar Fiction, ed. Jesse Alemán and Shelley Streeby (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007), xiv. 5. ​Edward L. Ayers, “Antebellum Era,” in The Oxford Companion to United States History, ed. Paul S. Boyer (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 37. 6. ​Juan N. Seguín, A Revolution Remembered: The Memoirs and Selected Correspondence of Juan N. Seguín, ed. Jesús F. de la Teja (Austin, TX: State House Press, 1991), 73. 7. ​Nicole M. Guidotti-­Hernández, Unspeakable Vio­lence: Remapping U.S. and Mexican National Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 3. 8. ​Guidotti-­Hernández, 3. 9. ​Nancy Vogeley, The Bookrunner: A History of Inter-­American Relations—­Print, Politics, and Commerce in the United States and Mexico, 1800–1830 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2001), 3–4. 10. ​Iván Jaksić, The Hispanic World and American Intellectual Life, 1820–1880 (New York: Palgrave, 2007), 1. 11. ​See Stanley T. Williams, The Spanish Background of American Lit­er­a­ture, 2 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1955); María DeGuzmán, Spain’s Long Shadow: The Black Legend, Off-­Whiteness, and Anglo-­American Empire (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), xviii; Jesse Alemán, “The Other Country: Mexico, the United States, and the Gothic History of Conquest,” American Literary History 18, no. 3 (2006): 410. 12. ​Herman Melville, “Benito Cereno,” in The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839–1860, ed. Harrison Hayford et al. (Chicago: Newberry Library; Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1987), 49, 46. 13. ​Melville, 98. 14. ​Russ Castronovo, “Introduction: Shifts, Zigzags, and Impacts,” in The Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-­Century American Lit­er­a­ture, ed. Russ Castronovo (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 2–3. 15. ​José Alvarez de Toledo y Dubois, “Mexicans,” in Herencia: The Anthology of Hispanic Lit­ er­a­ture of the United States, ed. Nicolás Kanellos (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 518. 16. ​Toledo y Dubois, 520. 17. ​Kirsten Silva Gruesz, Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2002), 208; Rodrigo Lazo, Writing to Cuba: Filibustering and Cuban Exiles in the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 195. 18. ​Nicolás Kanellos, “A Schematic Approach to Understanding Latino Transnational Literary Texts,” in ­Imagined Transnationalism: U.S. Latino/a Lit­er­a­ture, Culture, and Identity, ed. Kevin Concannon et al. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 43.

The Age of US Latinidad   169 19. ​Rivera, Emergence of Mexican Amer­i­ca, 18. 20. ​ Xicoténcatl: An Anonymous Historical Novel about the Events Leading Up to the Conquest of the Aztec Empire, trans. Guillermo I. Castillo-­Feliú (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999), 9. 21. ​Luis Leal and Rodolfo J. Cortina, “Introduccíon,” in Jicoténcal, by Félix Varela, ed. Luis Leal and Rodolfo J. Cortina (Houston: Arte Público, 1995), xvi. 22. ​Anna Brick­house, Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-­Century Public Sphere (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 53–55. 23. ​Laura Lomas, Translating Empire: José Martí, Mi­grant Latino Subjects, and American Modernities (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 5. 24. ​James Diego Frazier, “The Squatter and the Don: Title Page as Paratextual Borderland,” ANQ 22, no. 2 (2009): 33. 25. ​Raúl Coronado, A World Not to Come: A History of Latino Writing and Print Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 18. 26. ​Coronado, 9, 28, 11.

The Age of Van Buren

justine s. murison

We live in an era of divisive partisan strug­gle, but do we account for questions of partisanship in how we or­ga­nize literary history? Do po­liti­cal parties m ­ atter in our scholarship as much as they do in our own lives? Historians of the United States might delineate an “Age of Jackson” within the broader period of “antebellum,” or center their po­liti­cal history on the rise of the Republican Party, but literary scholarship by and large has ­little to say about party and electoral politics.1 Scholars of mid-­nineteenth-­century US lit­er­a­ture are, of course, well aware of the numerous intersections between partisanship and authorship. The spoils system of nineteenth-­century party politics, only reformed by the Pendleton Act of 1883 ­after Garfield’s assassination by a disappointed office seeker, offered white male writers an ave­nue for financial support not quite so forthcoming from their pens. One need not move much beyond the canon to identify writers and the parties that doled out spoils in the form of offices to them: Nathaniel Hawthorne (Demo­crat), Herman Melville (Demo­crat and then Republican), Walt Whitman (­Free Soiler and then Republican). We might add to this list writer-­journalists like William Cullen Bryant who editorialized on party politics in newspapers. This is not even to mention the more overt politicking involved in campaign biographies by Hawthorne (for Pierce) or William Dean Howells (for Lincoln). And, perhaps most canonical of all, we have Hawthorne’s preface to The Scarlet Letter, “The Custom House,” which places directly before readers Hawthorne’s experience with the spoils system. While nineteenth-­century literary scholars are fully cognizant of the influence of party politics on the shape of many authors’ ­careers, “politics” rarely means “party politics” in the scholarship. This misalignment arises out of the influence of Marxist and feminist theory, as well as Foucault’s theory of discourse, in which “politics” is not reducible to electoral politics in modern

The Age of Van Buren   171

democracies. Rather, “politics” signals a wider power strug­gle, one that encompasses both the traditional public and private spheres of the nineteenth ­century. For literary scholars, to talk politics is to unveil ideology and discourse, not to dwell on elections and party machines. To make a case for the “Age of Van Buren” therefore seems at once conservative and suspect, a throwback to exactly the type of literary history (masculinist, white, straight) that scholarship of the past thirty years has successfully dislodged. Worse yet, it bestows on the “age” the name of a president, one, incidentally, not remembered fondly. As with all of the presidents between Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln, Van Buren was a one-­term president whose policies are best described as disastrous. He is often said to have served Jackson’s “third term,” in that he oversaw the completion of Jackson’s policies more than charting his own course. As such, Van Buren was president during the forced removal of the Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, and Seminole Nations; the Panic of 1837 and the calamitous Specie Circular crisis; and capitulations to the South on slavery, most notably in the Amistad case, in which his first instinct was to return the captured enslaved Africans back to the Spanish government. By the end of his presidency, Van Buren was regularly called “Martin Van Ruin,” a reputation he certainly did not lose over time. I make a case for a literary period called the “Age of Van Buren” b ­ ecause of this ignominious rec­ord, not in spite of it. For Van Buren did achieve one victory: he was the mastermind of the modern po­liti­cal party. As historian Daniel Walker Howe puts it, Van Buren’s “­career represented not the triumph of the common man over aristocracy but the invention of machine politics.”2 In its most limited form, this period would roughly encompass 1827–1883, spanning from Andrew Jackson’s election in 1828 to the Pendleton Act, though in my conclusion I w ­ ill suggest that this period might extend to our con­temporary 3 moment. In other words, my title is a sleight of hand. This essay is not about Van Buren, but about the machinery of the party system he ushered in: national nominating conventions, national platforms, white male suffrage, and intense loyalties to party. This machinery—­strikingly distinct from the previous era of republicanism, with its implicit deference to the elite and its anti-­party ideology—­came to define electoral politics in the mid-­nineteenth ­century and remains more or less ascendant ­today. This essay considers first the rise both of machine politics in the early nineteenth ­century and of Van Buren as a telling symbol for this politics in 1830s and 1840s lit­er­a­ture. I consider then the effects of party politics on the claims of novelists as a way to diagnose what I see as one of the major outcomes of

172   Ages and the Long Pres­ent

this development: the opposition of lit­er­a­ture to politics. To put this differently, party politics, as it developed in the antebellum years, became shorthand for the opposite of what lit­er­a­ture ­ought to accomplish. What counts as the “literary,” and thus how we might carve up and inspect its history, depends on a long history of contrast between the po­liti­cal and the literary, one that persists in scholarship ­today.

Soft Hands and Wire Pulling ­ here is something shameful about machine politics and c­ areer politicians. T With the citizen-­s oldier model of George Washington as the origin of ­presidential politics, few politicians have willingly embraced the mantle of “politician.” As Glenn C. Altschuler and Stuart M. Blumin note, nineteenth-­ century po­liti­cal parties consistently presented their candidates as alienated from the party machine itself, as military heroes (whenever pos­si­ble) “with other­wise minimal po­liti­cal credentials.”4 The cult of Washington ­rose, in large part, as a way to express dissatisfaction with or separation from po­liti­cal parties, even as, or more precisely ­because, partisanship became entrenched in American culture.5 Yet since Jackson’s election, no president has been elected without a party machine underwriting the campaign. Dana D. Nelson argues that the role of the presidency in American culture since Washington has reversed the logic of democracy. The president has become the sole hope and symbol of demo­cratic power, continuity, and connection rather than the citizens who elect him or her. Paradoxically, the president has also served as the symbol of vengeance and justice. Calling this paradox “presidentialism,” Nelson explains that “by keeping our demo­cratic hopes oriented ­toward the salvific and power­ful president (if not this one, maybe the next can deliver us), t­ hese unconscious feelings keep us from recognizing, remembering, imagining and exercising the demo­cratic work we can do ourselves and the demo­cratic work that is other­wise ­going on—­and that we too often actually scorn—­all around us.”6 The prob­lem that Nelson identifies about the image and power of the presidency in American culture was created by the rise of the po­liti­cal party and, more specifically, the advent of professional politicians. Martin Van Buren would come to represent, especially for his opponents, the paradigmatic professional politician. Consider Georgia congressman Augustin Smith Clayton, who broke with Andrew Jackson and the Demo­cratic Party and founded the States’ Rights Party in Georgia in 1833. In his acerbic assessment of Van Buren during the election of 1836 (written in the voice and with the support of David Crockett,

The Age of Van Buren   173

himself a Whig congressman), Clayton insinuates, “Mr. Van Buren became a politician at an early period of his life, and has pushed it as a trade, from the beginning to the pres­ent hour; and no man has done a better business. He has met with as few losses and bad debts in his dealings, as any adventurer that ever commenced bartering; but he never believed in the doctrine ‘that honesty was the best policy,’ and now thinks the maxim entirely falsified in his success. To his notion, princi­ple had nothing to do with traffic of any kind.”7 Clayton damns Van Buren, first and foremost, for being a professional politician for his entire life. As such, he suggests, Van Buren is rarely concerned about princi­ ple as long as party interests are successfully advanced; he lacks, in other words, substance and morals. Van Buren’s centrality to the foundation of the Demo­cratic machine left him open to such characterizations as we see in Clayton’s satiric biography of him. As Daniel Walker Howe explains it, “Van Buren and the men around Jackson’s Nashville headquarters w ­ ere forging a new politics that worked from the grass roots up, based on patronage, organ­ization, and partisan loyalty.”8 The machine Van Buren created in the Demo­cratic Party held sway over the presidency from Jackson through Buchanan, with the two exceptions of the election of 1840 (in which William Henry Harrison and the Whigs dislodged Van Buren from office) and that of 1848 (when Zachary Taylor was elected and Hawthorne lost his job in the Salem Customs House). While Andrew Jackson was widely celebrated as the leader of the Demo­ cratic Party, Van Buren was known equally widely as its architect. James Parton’s 1860 Life of Andrew Jackson, published on the eve of Civil War as the Demo­cratic Party’s unity fell apart, positioned Van Buren as the major force ­behind the construction of the “Democracy” (as the party was often dubbed in the 1830s and 1840s). Naming chapter 23 “Mr. Van Buren Calls on Mrs. Eaton,” Parton elevates into a prominent moment of party consolidation Van Buren’s role in the Eaton affair, in which the wives of Jackson’s cabinet refused to socialize with Peggy Eaton, wife of Secretary of War John Eaton. Rumors swirled around the Eatons’ hurried marriage soon ­after the death of her first husband at sea. Parton waggishly declares of his chapter title, “­These may seem trivial words with which to head a chapter that treats of dynasties, successions to the presidency, and other high ­matters. Believing, however, that the po­liti­cal history of the United States, for the last thirty years, dates from the moment when the soft hand of Mr. Van Buren touched Mrs. Eaton’s knocker, I think the heading appropriate.”9 I quote Parton less as historical support for Van Buren’s centrality to the rise of party politics than as evidence of how Van Buren (and Peggy Eaton) seemed to provoke both disgust and humor. Van Buren’s

174   Ages and the Long Pres­ent

“soft” hand—­his position as the ultimate professional politician with no military or work experience—­aligns with the sexist pun about Eaton’s “knocker.” The pun demotes Van Buren’s operations even as the book opens with a defense of party politics (as Parton explains, the “wire pullers” of a party are “absolutely necessary to enable the p ­ eople to give effectual expression to their w ­ ill”).10 The sexual implication of being a “wire puller” locates party operatives, especially Van Buren, in any number of pos­si­ble sexual positions, none of which read as straight or masculine. By ascribing this “wire pulling” to Van Buren and ­others in the party machine, Parton can shield Jackson from the taint associated with party operations. Van Buren’s “soft hand” was not just an alibi for Jackson hagiographers. His messy involvement in the creation of the Demo­cratic machine allowed Jackson to represent himself as the common man and war hero, or, to use Nelson’s phrase, as the apotheosis of “presidentialism.” Van Buren would not be able to produce this effect for himself during the election of 1836, even though he was Jackson’s presumed successor. His position as professional politician got in the way. In fact, that election produced a rash of lit­er­a­ture from Whig opposition in the vein of Clayton’s sarcastic biography, all of which painted Van Buren as a degenerate “wire puller.” Van Buren came to represent not just the betrayal of demo­cratic ideals but the evacuation of ideology from politics entirely: the naked pursuit of power by a trimmer ready to cozy up to whoever would get him elected. In pursuit of this critique, satirists feminized Van Buren aggressively, a technique that Parton picked up on l­ ater. Van Buren’s stature (he was five feet, six inches tall) and sartorial style (he was known widely as a dapper dresser) thus became metonymically attached to the figure of the professional politician. Perhaps the most extensive and weird depiction of Martin Van Buren can be found in Nathaniel Beverley Tucker’s The Partisan Leader (1836). Tucker was a law professor at William and Mary and a vociferous secessionist before it was widely acceptable to be so in the South (this put him to the right of John C. Calhoun). Published in 1836 by Duff Green in Washington, DC, The Partisan Leader proj­ects a speculative ­future for the year 1856: it is a nation divided into North and South and rent by civil war. Martin Van Buren is in his third term as president and has declared himself king of Amer­i­ca. Although the plot contains a defense of slavery, secession is sparked by Van Buren’s monarchical imposition of undue tariffs on the South. Tucker is not a dab hand at satire, but ­because of this we can see how his attacks on the ideological friction between the sections depended on an emerging shorthand for what party politics

The Age of Van Buren   175

meant. Tucker offers an elaborately biting image of Van Buren in the unfinished novel: Though far advanced in life, he was tastily and even daintily dressed, his ­whole costume being exactly adapted to a diminutive and dapper person, a fair complexion, a light and brilliant blue eye, and a head which might have formed a study for the phrenologist, ­whether we consider its ample developments or its egg-­like baldness. . . . ​He seemed, too, not wholly unconscious of something worthy of admiration in a foot, the beauty of which was displayed to the best advantage by the tight fit and high finish of his delicate slipper. As he lay back on the sofa, his eye rested complacently on this member, which was stretched out before him, its position shifting, as if unconsciously, into e­ very variety of grace. Returning from thence, his glance rested on his hand, fair, delicate, small, and richly jewelled. It hung carelessly on the arm of the sofa, and the fin­gers of this too, as if rather from instinct than volition, performed sundry evolutions on which the eye of majesty dwelt with gentle complacency.11

The hint of feminization in Parton’s description of Van Buren is, in Tucker’s hands, the ruling meta­phor. Van Buren is “tastily and even daintily dressed,” with an admirable foot displayed in a “delicate slipper.” His hand is “fair, delicate, small, and richly jewelled.” Tucker strains to underscore his po­liti­cal point: machine politics slide easily into monarchy, and monarchy represents an effeminate mode of governing that ­ought to inspire open, violent, manly rebellion. Tucker’s feminization of Van Buren reinforces the dichotomy between party “wire puller” and war hero president: a professional politician easily slides into womanliness and pulls the nation’s masculinity down with it. No surprise, then, that “Martin Van Ruin” lost to the Whig war hero William Henry Harrison (“Tippecanoe and Tyler Too”) in 1840. The Whigs took a page out of the Demo­crats’ playbook to portray Harrison as a military hero ready to unseat the ineffectual and feminized Van Buren (see the figure below). In this way, as Altschuler and Blumin argue, the 1840 Whig victory over Van Buren “was a triumph, not merely of the Whigs who won the election, but of electoral democracy and its essential vehicle, the po­liti­cal party.”12 With the triumph of party politics came the entrenchment of the spoils system, in which party supporters gained lucrative public employment at the federal, state, and local levels. Reinforcing the association of feminized vice with professional politicians, the spoils system (reformed in 1883 with the Pendleton Act) was how the public came face-­to-­face with the power that parties wielded and, not incidentally, how so many writers of the era, including Hawthorne and

176   Ages and the Long Pres­ent

Edward William Clay, “Matty’s Dream” (1840), lithograph. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photo­graphs Division, LC-­USZ62-10358.

Melville, made ends meet. The spoils system served as a vis­i­ble index to what other­wise seemed to be secret, backroom dealings, beyond the control of regular citizens.

Private Vices and Decapitated Surveyors As I have been arguing, Van Buren symbolized machine politics and the subsequent effects of partisanship for antebellum Americans. That is, he represented the inverse of Nelson’s “presidentialism”: the shadowy forces b ­ ehind a masculine war hero like Jackson. As the diminutive “Matty,” Van Buren’s person indexed the anx­i­eties over this new age of partisanship. The feminized figure of Van Buren finds its corollary in what is arguably the most famous description of the spoils system in nineteenth-­century lit­er­a­ture: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Custom House.” When Hawthorne loses his job in the Salem Customs House ­after Zachary Taylor wins the presidency in 1848, he calls his state “decapitated” and likens himself to “Irving’s Headless Horseman”—­“ghastly and grim, and longing to be buried, as a po­liti­cally dead man ­ought.”13 No reader can miss t­ hese puns on decapitation: Hawthorne has been unmanned by the loss of his position.

The Age of Van Buren   177

Henry Robinson (publisher), “All Fours—­Impor­tant State of the Game—­The Knave About to Be Lost” (1836), lithograph. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photo­graphs Division, LC-­USZ62-1579.

This emasculation of politicians and citizens alike suggests that what is most wrong with party politics is that it blurs or conflates ­women and men, private and public. If the overarching repre­sen­ta­tion of Van Buren was of a diminutive, feminized man, more womanly, soft, and secret than public and masculine, the overarching meta­phor for the politics he created was a mode of private vice: gambling. “Statesmen are gamesters,” declares Clayton in The Life of Martin Van Buren (1835), “and the ­people are the cards they play with.”14 According to Clayton, machine politics reduced moral questions to maneuvers on a poker ­table. It is not surprising that this is likewise the meta­phor that Howe picks up on in What Hath God Wrought: “Van Buren played politics as a game, and he played it to win.”15 Gambling is a leitmotif in the visual repre­ sen­ta­tions of presidential elections in the era, and Van Buren solidified his position as politician-­gambler when, in order to run for president one more time, he became the ­Free Soil Candidate in the 1848 election. From the president ­eager to capitulate to southern slaveholding interests in the Amistad case to the representative of the antislavery faction of the Demo­cratic Party, Van Buren continued to symbolize the cynical politician.

178   Ages and the Long Pres­ent

While the Liberty Party and F ­ ree Soil wing of the Demo­cratic Party or­ga­ nized within the po­liti­cal system, abolitionists of all stripes (not just nonvoting Garrisonians) ­were suspicious of a system that would lead Van Buren to be the candidate for the ­Free Soil ticket. Once again the meta­phor of gaming seemed apt to express the relation of slavery to electoral politics, and abolitionists drew upon the image of the professional politician that Van Buren typified. “All voting is a sort of gaming, like chequers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong, with moral questions,” Thoreau asserts in “Re­sis­tance to Civil Government” (1849).16 And it ­matters ­little to the voter who wins an election, he reasons, as the system depends on acceding to rule by the majority. Thoreau sees voting “for the right” as “­doing nothing for it”: it is a “feeble” expression of desire rather than an energetic fulfillment of it.17 As he puts it in “Slavery in Mas­sa­chu­setts” (1854), voting implies the opposite of moral commitment: “The amount of it is, if the majority vote the devil to be God, the minority ­will live and behave accordingly, and obey the successful candidate, trusting that some time or other, by some Speaker’s casting vote, perhaps, they may reinstate God.”18 The two meta­phors I have been tracking—­feminized professional politicians and the private vice of gambling—­work seamlessly together. Both decry that politics has moved from a public sphere, where it ­ought to belong according to a theory of liberalism, to a feminized private one, or, perhaps more accurately, a secret and therefore shameful one.19 From this conflation of electoral politics with ­women and vice, we can understand better Frederick Douglass’s jokes about the electoral pro­cess in a speech in Philadelphia in 1863: I was a l­ittle curious, some years ago, to find out what sort of a ­thing this body politic was; and I was very anxious to know especially what amount of baseness, brutality, coarseness, ignorance, and bestiality could find its way into the body politic; and I was not long in finding it out. I took my stand near the ­little hole through which the body politic put its votes. (Laughter.) And first among the mob, I saw Ignorance, unable to read its vote, asking me to read it, by the way, (­great laughter), depositing its vote in the body politic. Next I saw a man stepping up to the body politic, casting in his vote, having a black eye, and another one ready to be blacked, having engaged in a street fight. I saw, again, Pat, fresh from the Emerald Isle, with the delightful brogue peculiar to him, stepping up—­ not walking, but leaning upon the arms of two of his friends, unable to stand, passing into the body politic! I came to the conclusion that this body politic

The Age of Van Buren   179

was, ­after all, not quite so pure a body as the repre­sen­ta­tion of its friends would lead us to believe.20

The laughter evoked by Douglass’s thinly veiled meta­phor (the body politic is, to put it baldly, quite a whore) demonstrates the widespread acknowl­edgment of electoral politics as occupying the intersection of feminization and vice. Douglass, in turn, characterizes the voting public through vice and failed masculinity (the illiterate voter, the drunk Irish voter); in his hands, Election Day is more like a visit to a brothel in the Five Points District than a hallowed demo­ cratic endeavor.

Po­liti­cal Lit­er­a­ture and Party Politics As we can see across a range of writers from dif­fer­ent po­liti­cal positions—­ Hawthorne, Tucker, Thoreau, and Douglass—­party politics threatened to feminize the nation by rendering its citizens passive. Partnership, rather than affording citizens access to power, came to stand in absolute contrast to Emerson’s “self-­reliance.” As Emerson himself put it in “Politics” (1844), “We might as wisely reprove the east wind, or the frost, as a po­liti­cal party, whose members, for the most part, could give no account of their position, but stand for the defence of ­those interests in which they find themselves.”21 Po­liti­cal parties, in other words, evacuate politics of any inherent meaning. Frances Trollope, in Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832), her caustic account of the United States, describes it a ­little more pointedly: “Had Amer­i­ca ­every attraction ­under heaven that nature and social enjoyment can offer, this electioneering madness would make me fly it in disgust. It engrosses ­every conversation, it irritates ­every temper, it substitutes party spirit for personal esteem; and, in fact, vitiates the w ­ hole system of society.”22 What Emerson and Trollope agreed on—­ perhaps the only ­thing they agreed on—is the pervasiveness of po­liti­cal parties and the way they substitute for other, more meaningful engagement. Yet by 1840, the year Van Buren was voted out of office, the shift ­toward the reign of po­liti­cal parties seemed inescapable. If Emerson, Thoreau, Douglass, and Trollope all see in the rise of party politics the evacuation of morality and justice, Hawthorne adds to this assessment what still remains even a­ fter all higher purposes have been discarded: high emotions. In “The Custom House,” Hawthorne calls attention to the affective quality of partisanship: “It is a strange experience, to a man of pride and sensibility,” he observes, “to know that his interests are within the control of individuals who neither love nor understand him, and by whom, since one or the other must

180   Ages and the Long Pres­ent

needs happen, he would rather be injured than obliged. Strange, too, for one who has kept his calmness throughout the contest, to observe the bloodthirstiness that is developed in the hour of triumph, and to be conscious that he is himself among its objects!”23 Partisanship is ultimately about power and strangers: both the power over strangers across a nation that is rapidly expanding into an empire and the emotional intimacy and urgency that networks of partisanship create. Hawthorne’s livelihood has been cut off by a surge of voter anger at the Demo­crats; the emotions are intensely personal, but the effects are widespread and diluted. Partisanship at once is urgent and angry but makes citizens feel powerless and ineffectual. ­These characteristics of partisanship w ­ ill seem quite familiar to readers ­today, living in an era in which Americans increasingly live, work, and marry within ideological enclaves (what journalist Bill Bishop has famously termed “The Big Sort”). For many antebellum Americans (and visitors to it like Trollope), it was a startling development, one that made attempts to tackle slavery and racism more challenging, as we saw in Thoreau’s and Douglass’s comments. As the previous section canvased, abolitionists strug­gled over the question of po­liti­cal participation, a crucial dividing line in their ranks, and this strug­gle reflected how professional politicians and po­liti­cal parties symbolized every­ thing that was the opposite of justice and morals.24 Politics, it became increasingly clear, was a poor vehicle for morality even as it was an effective way to stoke emotions—­something the lit­er­a­ture of this period aimed to show. Hawthorne’s scathing portrait of politics in The House of the Seven Gables (1851) pursues just this opposition. T ­ oward the end of the novel, Hepzibah and Clifford flee the House of the Seven Gables a­ fter seeing Judge Pyncheon dead in the front parlor. In the following chapter, ironically named “Governor Pyncheon,” the narrator taunts the judge, whispering that he is missing an impor­tant meeting of the Party, a meeting that might lead to his election as governor: “They are practised politicians, ­every man of them, and skilled to adjust t­ hose preliminary mea­sures, which steal from the p ­ eople, without its knowledge, the power of choosing its own rulers.”25 This strange chapter, in which the narrator mockingly speaks to a corpse, represents lit­er­ a­ture’s capacity to stand outside of professional politics and critique its moral vacuity. Through the imaginative encounter of disembodied but lively narrative voice with spiritless corpse, Hawthorne seeks to expose the corruption of professional politics and critique its effect on democracy. Harriet Beecher Stowe more famously made this opposition of politics and morality the lingua franca of the age. In ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851–1852), the

The Age of Van Buren   181

central chapter addressing the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act pits Mrs. Bird’s Bible against Senator Bird’s vote in support of the law. Getting the last word in, Mrs. Bird retorts, “­There’s a way you po­liti­cal folks have of coming round and round a plain right ­thing; and you ­don’t believe in it yourselves, when it comes to practice.”26 The novelization of Eliza’s flight becomes the wedge at this moment between “politics” and a “plain right t­ hing”: Senator Bird had been “as bold as a lion” in defense of the law “and ‘mightily convinced’ not only himself, but every­body that heard him;—­but then his idea of a fugitive was only an idea of the letters that spell the word,—or, at the most, the image of a ­little newspaper picture of a man with a stick and a bundle, with ‘Ran away from the subscriber’ ­under it. The magic of the real presence of distress,—­the imploring eye, the frail, trembling ­human hand, the despairing appeal of helpless agony,—­these he had never tried.”27 ­Here Stowe suggests a visual image, but it is ­really a metafictional description. The novel supplies what is missing in po­liti­cal debate: ­human frailness, tender emotion, moral certitude. Chapter 9 of ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin has long served as the most obvious set piece for the distinction between the “magic of the real presence” of distress and the abstractions of the law, but it is impor­tant to see this chapter as being as much about partisan politics as it is about ­legal abstractions. Indeed, while the ­legal system and slave law are always Stowe’s main targets in the novel as a ­whole, she pursues her critique ­here through the terms of party politics. It’s an odd choice, at first glance, that Stowe makes Senator Bird an Ohio state senator instead of a US senator. ­After all, the fictional Bird could be home from Washington, DC, as easily as he is home from Columbus. With this choice, though, Stowe highlights the ave­nues through which state parties bolster national ones, and that state-­level politicians reinforce national party wishes. All politics in 1850 is not local. Thus, when Stowe’s narrator notes that Senator Bird “was, as every­body must see, in a sad case for his patriotism” and that he had become a “po­liti­cal sinner,” we see better the double meaning to her jokes on “patriotism” and “po­ liti­cal sin”: they are si­mul­ta­neously cutting remarks about the distinction between upholding federal law and enacting God’s law and pointed references to how patriotism and party loyalty have become so conflated that Senator Bird has to sneak back into Columbus in the dead of night so that no one knows that he has “sinned” against the Demo­crats by helping Eliza make it to a stop on the Underground Railroad. The pun on “sin” may be rooted in Stowe’s evangelicalism, but it is also tied to the way professional politicians, as I canvased above, are tied to secret sins and vices by the very nature of the system. For Bird to be moral, in Stowe’s universe, he must sin against his party.

182   Ages and the Long Pres­ent

The divisive partisanship that Hawthorne and Stowe represent in their novels became an alibi for secession in 1860–1861, and this partisanship persisted into Reconstruction. In fact, the fierce partisan divide—­exacerbated by the war—­ineluctably s­ haped the electoral politics following emancipation. The terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan enforced white supremacy and buttressed the other­wise weak prospects of the Demo­cratic Party in the South, a violent power grab recounted in Albion Tourgée’s A Fool’s Errand. By One of the Fools (1879). Compared to ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin when it was first published, A Fool’s Errand builds on the opposition of lit­er­a­ture and politics that both Hawthorne and Stowe helped construct before the war, charting the ineffectual po­liti­cal response on the part of the Republican Party to the rise and terrorism of the KKK. A Fool’s Errand follows a Union col­o­nel (Col­o­nel Comfort Servosse, the “Fool” of the title) as he returns to the South ­after his time in the Union army and participates in Reconstruction, including helping to support the exercise of the franchise by the freedmen in his district. Published in 1879, a­ fter the end of Reconstruction, the final half of the novel weaves its plot together with that of the rise of the KKK. Tourgée’s ultimate goal was to condemn the inaction of the North in general, but more particularly that of the Republican Congress, which failed to address swiftly enough the terrorism occurring across the South. In a chapter titled “A Thrice-­Told Tale” (referencing Hawthorne’s Twice-­Told Tales), Tourgée tells the story of the murder by the KKK (in cahoots with Demo­cratic Party leaders) of John Walters, a Republican or­ga­nizer. Tourgée narrates the tale three times: first, as recounted by the newspapers; second, as told by a sympathetic white eyewitness; and third, from the point of view of a freedman, who overhears the murder itself. Tourgée leaves no doubt as to which of t­ hese points of view offer the fullest and truest accounts (the “eye” and “ear” witnesses), but, likewise, he makes clear which is the story that passes into history (that of the partisan papers). As each additional article joins a crowd of newspaper reports, Walters shifts from “the notorious Rockford Radical” and “infamous scalawag leader of the nigger Radicals” to a man who may have been killed by “some paramour of his wife who was anxious that she should obtain the large amount of insurance which he had upon his life.”28 In the end, the narrator sums up the fate of Walters’s murder in the popu­lar imagination: So the act passed into current history; and the ­great journals of the North recorded with much minuteness, and with appropriate head-­lines and display, the

The Age of Van Buren   183

fact that John Walters, a man of infamous character, and a prominent politician, and leader of the negroes in Rockford County, was killed by stabbing and strangling. By whom the crime was committed was by no means clear, they said, nor yet the motive; but one ­thing seemed to be well established,—­that it was not done from any po­liti­cal incentive what­ever. It was true he was a leading Radical politician in a county having a deci­ded colored majority, which was made effective almost solely by his organ­izing power; but it was certain that only personal feeling of some sort or another was at the bottom of this murder.29

A murder prompted by naked partisanship and for the purposes of electoral power is transformed into one that seems without motive and by unknown ­people, u ­ nless that motive is personal. In other words, the open secret of this murder is that it is entirely partisan, but Walters’s po­liti­cal work (organ­izing the freedmen) becomes a metonym for his personal viciousness and thus an excuse to dismiss concern over the murder. In the end, one of the ways in which Comfort Servosse is a “Fool” is in his belief that he can have a positive effect on local society in Warrington (a town in an unnamed southern state) when the federal government w ­ ill not support him and other Unionists and Republicans. The novel thus turns back to its marriage plot and ends with Servosse’s death and burial. It ends, in other words, in private life. Unlike ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin, where the goal was to spark change in the reader and the law and where the novel (rather than electoral politics) was the appropriate realm for moral work, A Fool’s Errand rec­ords the defeat of t­ hese ideals in the post-­Reconstruction moment. Perhaps ­because A Fool’s Errand recounts this defeat, it has not persisted as a symbol of the nineteenth-­century po­liti­cal novel in con­temporary scholarship as has ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Indeed, while the latter usefully wielded the division between lit­er­a­ture and party politics to make its moral case, the novel also helps us see the shifting terms of that division over time. Attacked as an unrealistic romance (or worse, in the words of Louisa McCord, the fruits of a “foul imagination” and “malignant bitterness”), ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin inspired a torrent of anti-­Tom novels and critical southern reviews like McCord’s bent on correcting Stowe’s flights of fancy.30 Even as Stowe built metafictional moments into the novel, which posed the “truer” account of feeling that politics and law could not recognize, her detractors sought to prove the novel to be a pack of lies. This accusation was not quelled when she followed the novel with the publication of A Key to ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1853), providing further evidence for her depictions. In the 1850s, she was cast as being too “literary” about her

184   Ages and the Long Pres­ent

subject; she was not offering sound politics, but sentiment and romance. Like Hawthorne, Stowe defended the literary as the space to make this account, but unlike Hawthorne, a canonical pillar in what would come to be known as an American literary re­nais­sance, Stowe’s fate in twentieth-­century criticism was to be relegated, ironically, to the questionable status of a po­liti­cal writer. ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin was not literary enough; it was too popu­lar, too bent on achieving a legislative agenda—­however laudatory that agenda might have been. Making a case for ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin even ­today—­now that it too occupies a prominent place in the canon—­still seems to shut­tle between ­these poles of “literary” and “po­liti­cal.”31 Insofar as this opposition between po­liti­cal lit­er­a­ture and party politics still obtains, it is fair to say that we never entirely left the “Age of Van Buren.” While it is true that national parties and nominating conventions continue to take the lead in organ­izing po­liti­cal life and the same two parties have controlled American politics since the Civil War, po­liti­cally speaking, ­there have also been intense changes in party politics since the civil rights movement and, more recently, following the decision in Citizens United v. FEC (2010). Yet, culturally, much of the symbolic understanding of party politics built in the antebellum years persists. On the one hand, professional politicians constantly reaffirm the cultural associations of “politician” with private vice and hy­poc­risy, not just in the tactic of exposing their opponents’ hidden indiscretions but also in the way that e­ very professional politician has to run against the system, pretend to be outside of it. Citizens, on the other hand, feel ever more intense partisan animus, but that animus is coupled with an equally intense feeling of disempowerment and disenfranchisement, both resulting from partisan “wire pulling” at the level of gerrymandered districts and the erosion of local politics in ser­vice of national party domination. ­These affective and cultural registers have only intensified, as the nation witnessed in Donald Trump’s surprise victory in the 2016 election. It may be even more accurate to say that lit­er­a­ture and mainstream entertainment have not quite escaped the Age of Van Buren. To be sure, the popularity of what is ­today referred to as “literary fiction” has waned. It is hard to imagine the novelistic equivalent of ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin occurring now, in part ­because of the way novels are positioned as “high culture” and also owing to how they circulate, mainly in book form rather than in serialized or online form. (Perhaps the only genre of novel ­today with the same market reach as ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin is young adult lit­er­a­ture.) Serialized tele­vi­sion, in many ways, has taken over this position in our current era, and like its novelistic pre­de­

The Age of Van Buren   185

ces­sor, it has a strained relationship to the partisan terrain, positioning itself as able to critique party politics without collapsing into partisanship. For instance, NBC’s Parks and Recreation would seem poised to come close to representing partisanship; however, the show, in the end, studiously avoids it, focusing instead on municipal government and the public employees whose jobs (thanks to the Pendleton Act) do not change with ­every new administration. Even when Amy Poehler’s character, Leslie Knope, runs for local office, she is never explic­itly tied to one of the two major parties (though one can infer from the plot that she runs as a Demo­crat). Even the machinations in Netflix’s House of Cards and the jokes in HBO’s Veep turn less on the main characters’ roles as leaders of their party (in both cases it is directly stated or implied that they are Demo­crats) than they do on their positions as professional politicians, regardless of party. Indeed, the shows endlessly represent (in dramatic and humorous registers, respectively) reasons to disdain the “wire pullers” of party politics in much the same way that we see in antebellum lit­ er­a­ture. Likewise, in the po­liti­cal satire of comedians such as Stephen Colbert, Samantha Bee, and Trevor Noah, ­there lingers an insistence that their comedy cannot and should not be reduced to party advocacy. Satire, as a genre, organizes its humor around a seeming separation of the rational voice from the fanatical and heated partisan. Colbert’s invitation to Sean Spicer, Donald Trump’s first press secretary, to attend the 2017 Emmys was a continued sign that late-­ night comedians still often try to avoid being too closely associated with one-­ sided partisanship. Yet we also see everywhere the erosion of any division between what we consume as entertainment and how we position ourselves in a partisan landscape, a strange paradox of our current po­liti­cal moment. With the rise of social media—­most apparent in the rampant circulation of memes and false stories within the news b ­ ubbles created by Facebook and Google algorithms—we have experienced the first federal election that decentered mainstream news and entertainment sources, but the outcome of the election only reinforced and made more heated partisan divisions. And entertainment of all kinds has been folded into the intense partisanship of the day, as Hollywood is again attacked as the “liberal elite” (an echo of the blacklist days, but no longer with an apparent “­enemy” outside of the United States as the target) and NFL football players like Colin Kaepernick are charged with mixing “politics” with the entertainment they provide. Post-2016, we might ask ­whether our literary scholarship has the tools to grapple with what may be the end of the Age of Van Buren, when it is increasingly difficult to imagine our objects of study and our

186   Ages and the Long Pres­ent

scholarship about them as distinct from partisanship. While New Criticism assumed that lit­er­a­ture could be understood in isolation from the entanglements of such messy t­ hings as the po­liti­cal system, l­ ater critical practices have often assumed that its complexities and forms can reveal and undermine politics. In both cases, partisanship largely goes unrecognized and underappreciated. Reckoning with the increasing entrenchment of partisanship across our media and cultural landscapes might well be a necessary turn in our scholarship, one that ­will allow us not only to reconsider the po­liti­cal environment we now inhabit but also to better understand its history. Notes This essay has benefited from feedback by Joshua Greenberg and John Levi Barnard. 1. ​For recent work attentive to the relation of literary and print culture to antebellum politics, see Lara Langer Cohen, The Fabrication of American Lit­er­a­ture: Fraudulence and Antebellum Print Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), in which she argues that our association of freedom and democracy with print is a particularly partisan achievement, since it arises from the Demo­cratic Party machine. See also Stacey Margolis, The Public Life of Privacy in Nineteenth-­Century American Lit­er­a­ture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), chap. 1, on The Blithedale Romance and partisan affiliation; Jordan Alexander Stein, “The Whig Interpretation of Media: Sheppard Lee and Jacksonian Paperwork,” History of the Pres­ent 3, no. 1 (2013): 29–56, which offers a counternarrative of how the Whig Party perceived the role of print in the public sphere; Trish Loughran, The Republic in Print (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), which connects a larger story about print culture and the fantasy of national identity to party politics and their divisions; and, fi­nally, Justine S. Murison, The Politics of Anxiety in Nineteenth-­Century American Lit­er­a­ture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), chap. 2, in which I argue that to understand Poe’s satires we need to delve more deeply into the partisan debates of the 1830s and 1840s. 2. ​Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of Amer­i­ca, 1815–1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 241. 3. ​This suggested periodization alters that which is often used in po­liti­cal science and po­ liti­cal history. The period ­under discussion would usually be termed the Second Party System, ranging roughly from 1828 to 1854, ending with the formation of the Republican Party. I have chosen not to adopt the numerical designations of party systems from po­liti­cal science, which track the rise and fall of reigning po­liti­cal parties—­i.e., for the Second Party System, the Demo­ crats; for the Third Party System, the Republicans. (According to many po­liti­cal scientists, we are currently in the Sixth Party System.) While it is useful to see the shifts that occur as dif­fer­ent parties take power, I’m more interested in the structure of partisanship, which organizes the party system in general. 4. ​Glenn C. Altschuler and Stuart M. Blumin, Rude Republic: Americans and Their Politics in the Nineteenth C ­ entury (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2000), 10. 5. ​Altschuler and Blumin, 10. 6. ​Dana D. Nelson, Bad for Democracy: How the Presidency Undermines the Power of the ­People (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 5. 7. ​Augustin Smith Clayton [David Crockett, pseud.], The Life of Martin Van Buren, 10th ed. (Philadelphia: Robert Wright, 1836), 30.

The Age of Van Buren   187 8. ​Howe, What Hath God Wrought, 259. 9. ​James Parton, Life of Andrew Jackson, 3 vols. (New York: Mason ­Brothers, 1860), 1:287. 10. ​Parton, 1:12. 11. ​Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, The Partisan Leader: A Tale of the F ­ uture (Washington, DC, 1836), 136, 137–38. This first edition has a hoax title page; it does not list Duff Green as the publisher and claims that the book was published in 1856. 12. ​Altschuler and Blumin, Rude Republic, 23. 13. ​Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Custom House,” in The Scarlet Letter (New York: Penguin, 1986), 41–42. 14. ​Clayton, Life of Martin Van Buren, 3. 15. ​Howe, What Hath God Wrought, 484. 16. ​Henry D. Thoreau, “Re­sis­tance to Civil Government,” in Reform Papers, ed. Wendell Glick (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1973), 69. 17. ​Thoreau, 69. 18. ​Henry D. Thoreau, “Slavery in Mas­sa­chu­setts,” in Reform Papers, 103–4. 19. ​I draw on Elizabeth Maddock Dillon’s theory of the gendered nature of the public sphere. According to Dillon, privacy and private property do not historically precede the public sphere so much as “constitute a fabulous origin” for “the narrative of liberal subjectivity.” See Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, The Gender of Freedom: Fictions of Liberalism and the Literary Public Sphere (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 20. 20. ​Frederick Douglass, “Emancipation, Racism, and the Work before Us: An Address Delivered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on 4 December 1863,” in The Frederick Douglass Papers, 1st ser., vol. 3, Speeches, Debates, and Interviews, 1855–1863, ed. John W. Blassingame et al. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), 604. 21. ​Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Politics,” in Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays and Poems (New York: Library of Amer­ic­ a, 1996), 564. 22. ​Frances Milton Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans (London: Whittaker, Treacher, 1832), 2:65. 23. ​Hawthorne, “Custom House,” 39–40. 24. ​For more on the strain of prophetic calls against the supposedly neutral and rational system of law, see Caleb Smith, The Oracle and the Curse: A Poetics of Justice from the Revolution to the Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). Smith does not concentrate on partisanship and party politics, but his articulation of this opposition is a useful corollary to the opposition between lit­er­a­ture and politics I develop ­here. 25. ​Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables (New York: Penguin, 1986), 274. 26. ​Harriet Beecher Stowe, ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 86. 27. ​Stowe, 94. 28. ​Albion Tourgée, A Fool’s Errand. By One of the Fools (New York: Fords, Howard & Hulbert, 1879), 184, 185, 187. 29. ​Tourgée, 188. 30. ​Louisa S. McCord, “­Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” Southern Quarterly Review 7, no. 13 (1853): 81–82. 31. ​My invocation of Hawthorne and Stowe recalls Jane Tompkins’s famous opposition of the two writers (man, literary, canonical; w ­ oman, popu­lar, not canonical) to argue that the “cultural work” (not its aesthetics) is what is impor­tant to appreciate about Stowe’s novel. This opposition, I hope my argument shows, had already been structured by the terms of partisanship as it emerged in the era of Hawthorne and Stowe. The debate about Stowe’s politics and sentimentality has continued in fruitful directions long past the Ann Douglas–­Tompkins debate, for instance, in Lauren Berlant’s famous reading of the novel, which focuses on its “conventional forms and ideologies of feeling.” Lauren Berlant, “Poor Eliza,” American Lit­er­a­ture 70, no. 3

188   Ages and the Long Pres­ent (1998): 637. Cindy Weinstein disputed Berlant’s transhistorical reading of sympathy in ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin by recovering the sentimental language of Stowe’s detractors, arguing instead that “Stowe’s call to ‘feel right’ ” has been “undermined so thoroughly that it has become increasingly difficult, but all the more impor­tant, to make distinctions between her version of sympathy, with its commitment to a progressive politics of abolitionism, and ­others such as Hentz’s (and Adams’s), which reveal the conjoining of sympathy and racism.” Cindy Weinstein, ­Family, Kinship, and Sympathy in Nineteenth-­Century American Lit­er­a­ture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 67.

The Ages of Appalachian Lit­er­a­ture

rachel a. wise

Appalachia refers to the mountain chain from which it takes its name, but the region has also long been a multivalent signifier in the national imaginary. Rodger Cunningham describes it as a border country between the relationally defined North and South.1 Since at least the 1870s, tales of moonshining and feuding have fueled ste­reo­types of an uncivilized Appalachia filled with outliers who cling to a frontier mentality; they are ­either quaint rustics or violent white trash. By virtue of isolation and class, the national imaginary has understood the region as deficient in values associated with urban spaces: culture, pro­gress, and heterogeneity. Anthony Harkins argues that Appalachians’ perceived lack of culture has always been po­liti­cally coded. Their backwardness highlights the pro­gress more cosmopolitan Americans have made and offloads the sins of the nation onto some other constituency elsewhere.2 If modernity refers to “an acceleration, a rupture, a revolution in time,” then, by contrast, Appalachia is a stable, unchanging past.3 Cosmopolitanism necessarily holds off the modernity of the hinterland, requiring it to function as a fixed point in time and character. If the region is perceived as culturally deficient and resistant to the flow of time, does an identifiably “Appalachian lit­er­a­ture” exist? American literary studies and anthologies have ­little to say about Appalachian lit­er­a­ture, which takes on an oxymoronic quality. On the rare occasion that American literary studies mention Appalachia at all, it is via cursory treatments of Mary Murfree’s Atlantic Monthly publications, particularly her collection In the Tennessee Mountains (1884). Murfree’s stories are the only repre­sen­ta­tions of Appalachia appearing in Norton’s American W ­ omen Regionalists (1995) and The Lit­er­a­ture of the American South (1998); they are excluded altogether from the Norton and Heath American lit­er­a­ture anthologies.

190   Ages and the Long Pres­ent

Even when scholars do center Appalachia in their studies, they similarly utilize Murfree as an origin point. Henry D. Shapiro’s influential Appalachia on Our Mind identifies 1870–1920 as the years during which the single greatest consolidation of “Appalachia” occurred in the national imaginary. Subsequent studies have utilized similar dates, including Allen Batteau’s The Invention of Appalachia, Emily Satterwhite’s Dear Appalachia: Readers, Identity, and Popu­lar Fiction since 1878, and Bill Hardwig’s Upon Provincialism: Southern Lit­er­a­ture and National Periodical Culture, 1870-­1900. In part, the consistency of t­ hese studies reflects the influence of traditional literary periodizations, which define regional writing as a postbellum phenomenon. American literary critics understand twentieth-­century regional writing by the canonical likes of William Faulkner as rooted in late nineteenth-­century “local color,” its diminutive pre­de­ces­sor. Local color is thus figured as an offshoot of literary realism that participated in the articulation of a postbellum middle-­class subjectivity that emphasized its cosmopolitanism. Consequently, local color seems replete with folk—­people and t­ hings—­that provided respite for readers disenchanted with modernity.4 As the primary representative of Appalachian lit­er­a­ture, Murfree is frequently blamed for originating a tradition that misused the mountaineer to satisfy the needs of ­these middle-­class readers, thus popularizing ste­reo­types of Appalachia still operative ­today.5 Using Murfree as a uniform starting point forecloses the construction of new literary histories that might undercut reductive characterizations of the region and its cultural output. Such critical and textual uniformity limits our understanding of local color and its relationship to regional repre­sen­ta­tion, as well as Appalachia’s importance in broader disciplinary conversations. Considering the multiple “ages” of Appalachian lit­er­a­ture complicates current understandings of the region’s literary history, and it first requires rethinking postbellum literary periodization. Literary studies that begin with 1870 obscure earlier texts like Rebecca Harding Davis’s iconic 1861 novella Life in the Iron-­Mills. Using Davis as an origin point draws attention to the formal continuities between her novella and ­later stories like “The Yares of the Black Mountains” (1875), which provides several advantages. Davis destabilizes the notion that Appalachian lit­er­a­ture—­and regionalism, more generally—is a postbellum phenomenon. She wrote well into the late nineteenth c­ entury but is usually treated as an antebellum author, to the exclusion of her ­later works.6 The canonical status of Life in the Iron-­Mills also allows Appalachia an access

The Ages of Appalachian Literature   191

point into disciplinary conversations about the relationship between American realism and regionalism, while its industrial setting disrupts Appalachia’s ste­reo­typical premodernity. An analy­sis of the ages of Appalachian lit­er­a­ture also questions World War I as a self-­evident end point. A literary timeline that extends to Harriet Arnow’s The Dollmaker (1954) enables us to identify a lit­er­a­ture and region that are culturally complex and heterogeneous, neither isolated nor out of time. Reading from 1861 to 1954 highlights that local color is more than a subset of American realism or a diminutive pre­de­ces­sor to regional writing; rather, it is a way into thinking more complexly about Appalachia’s relationship to American lit­er­a­ture and culture. This timeline closely aligns with the heyday of US industrial capitalism—­spanning from the 1850s through the World War II manufacturing boom.7 The period 1861–1954 highlights the cultural formation of “Appalachia” as something inflected and distorted by the dominant values of the economic era. This periodization highlights Appalachian lit­er­a­ture’s rebuttal to industrial capitalism, which helped purvey constructions of the backward mountain region in need of development. As this essay demonstrates, the challenge to reading Appalachian lit­er­a­ture lies in our ability to see that its texts engage multiple temporalities—­encounters between a presumed modern pres­ent and an i­ magined Appalachian past. The material culture depicted in t­ hese literary case studies ruptures the distinction between ages, revealing the interpenetration of Appalachia and the metropole, the past and the pres­ent. This Appalachia is as much a land of vistas and split-­ bottom baskets as it is the land of steel mills and mass-­produced calicos. What emerges is an Appalachian lit­er­a­ture that is more than a palliative, more than nostalgic subject ­matter. Attending to the interplay of temporality and materiality reveals an Appalachia that is dynamic, creative, and critical of the nostalgia undergirding national pro­gress narratives that lauded unchecked growth and development. Published by Atlantic Monthly in April 1861, Life in the Iron-­Mills is set in Davis’s hometown, Wheeling, ­Virginia (now West ­Virginia). It recounts the tragic death of Welsh iron puddler Hugh Wolfe, who sculpts a w ­ oman’s laboring body out of korl—­waste that remains a­ fter smelting. The first-­person narrator’s increasingly angry tone suggests that she has ­little hope readers ­will understand what they witness. She urges them to “stop a moment” so she can “make it a real ­thing,” even as she laments her own inability to tell the tale: “I can paint nothing of this, only give you the outside outlines of a night.”8 The

192   Ages and the Long Pres­ent

narrator acknowledges that she mediates Hugh’s story from a distance by referencing the incompleteness of a silhouette and a sketch, impor­tant concepts in Davis’s l­ater work. Davis’s exclusion from discussions of local color has every­thing to do with the fact that she sketches an Appalachia far dif­fer­ent from that expected in nineteenth-­century local color, which was meant for a presumably cosmopolitan middle-­class readership.9 The narrator intersperses grim industrial scenes with scenes more ste­reo­typically “local color” in quality, noting that just outside Wheeling ­there exists “odorous sunlight,—­quaint old gardens, dusky with soft, green fo­liage of apple-­trees, and flushing crimson with roses,—­air, and fields, and mountains.” The narrator then pointedly notes that this pastoral scene does not redress Hugh’s exploited existence. She laments, “The f­ uture of the Welsh puddler passing just now is not so pleasant. To be stowed away, ­after his grimy work is done, in a hole in the muddy graveyard, and a­ fter that, not air, nor green fields, nor curious roses.”10 The narrator is intent on reminding us that Hugh’s drama unfolds with Appalachian summits as its background. Critics from Cecelia Tichi to Sharon Harris have missed the point by praising the novella’s gritty realism while treating its regional specificity as incidental.11 The narrator indicts ­those who would focus solely on Appalachia’s pristine wildernesses and impressive vistas while refusing to see its local iterations of an industrial ­labor system. Life in the Iron-­Mills also features local color descriptions of Wheeling’s markets that attend to the fact that subsistence, slave, and industrial economies all propel a larger, expanding cap­i­tal­ist system. It shows on a local level the constitutive nature of ­these economies and the sacrificial bodies that power them. Jailed for allegedly stealing the wallet of a rich visitor to the mill, Hugh looks from his cell to the town below and appreciates “how like a picture it was, the dark-­green heaps of corn, and the crimson beets, and the golden melons . . . ​how the light flickered on that pheasant’s breast, with the purplish blood dripping over its brown feathers! He could see the red shine of the drops.”12 He also notices a “tall mulatto girl” following her mistress. When Hugh kills himself and the narrator describes a river of blood, she links Hugh, the pheasant, and the girl with “scarlet turban and bright eyes.”13 Given metonymic relationship to industrial, subsistence, and slave economics, each is a constitutive ele­ment of a larger cap­i­tal­ist system given bloody, local iteration. Attending to the contextual nature of Hugh’s existence reveals how capitalism’s hierarchical logic structures it.

The Ages of Appalachian Literature   193

The novella wages its most sustained critique of industrial capitalism’s inhumanity by featuring a type of material culture rarely associated with regional writing from the period: the cast-­off, repurposed, or inferior mass-­produced. By the mid-­nineteenth c­ entury, Appalachian populations w ­ ere presenting a challenge to a normative national culture increasingly characterized by the standardized invention, production, distribution, and consumption of t­hings.14 Numerous articles, such as ­Will Wallace Harney’s 1873 “A Strange Land and Peculiar ­People” and William Perry Brown’s 1888 “A Peculiar P ­ eople,” explore mountaineers’ inability to meet the cultural—­and often material—­norms sanctioned by a presumptively white, largely northeastern, middle-­class Amer­ic­ a.15 Life in the Iron-­Mills prominently features the interpenetration of the industrial pres­ent and an i­ magined Appalachian past through Hugh’s recycling of detritus. Hugh’s use of korl disrupts totalizing narratives that offset the industrial pres­ent with the Appalachian past by centering the region within controversies surrounding ­labor and pro­gress. The korl ­woman is a product of industrialization, which is why so many critics miss the fact that Life in the Iron-­Mills is also set in Appalachia. In fact, Hugh’s sculpture points to the falseness of keeping the novella’s industrial and Appalachian settings separate. Davis thus directs our attention to the material aspects of Wheeling’s iron mills, rupturing the separateness of the Appalachian past and the modern pres­ ent and elevating Hugh’s art to the level of structural critique. When Hugh sculpts korl, he disrupts the normal pro­cesses of industrial production that deem korl trash. He transforms refuse into a critique of unchecked industrial capitalism: “­There was not one line of beauty or grace in it: a nude ­woman’s form, muscular, grown coarse with ­labor, the power­ful limbs instinct with some one poignant longing.”16 The sculpture is at once primitive and protomodernist, just as the novella is both thoroughly Appalachian and industrial. Hugh’s reuse of korl turns the figure into an indictment of a system that extracts what it likes from workers it treats as disposable. He cannot dismantle the mill or larger industrial economy in which it takes part, but he uses the materials available to bear eternal witness to its ­human costs. The novella suggests that Hugh Wolfe’s critique of “pro­gress”—as well as Appalachia’s presentness in that trajectory—­cannot be entirely erased while the korl ­woman exists. The narrator reflects, “I have it in a corner of my library. I keep it hid ­behind a curtain . . . ​sometimes,—­tonight, for instance,—­the curtain is accidently drawn back, and I see a bare arm stretched out imploringly in the darkness, and an e­ ager, wolfish face watching mine.”17 The korl w ­ oman

194   Ages and the Long Pres­ent

perpetually gazes back at the middle-­class reader, demanding recognition. If we take the library as a metonym for the text, then, though marginalized, Appalachia is always and already pres­ent, a prophetic voice and outstretched arm questioning national pro­gress narratives. Its portrayal of Wheeling’s industrial economy is po­liti­cally engaged and eschews the idea that readers can nostalgically visit Appalachia whenever modernity overwhelms. Life in the Iron-­Mills anticipates work Davis undertakes in ­later, more self-­ evidently local color stories like “The Yares of the Black Mountains.” Published in 1875 and l­ater collected in Silhouettes of American Life (1892), “The Yares” depicts dynamic local cultures that trou­ble what Richard Brodhead calls the “imagination of acquisitiveness,” which seeks familiar, static types.18 Though the story leaves Wheeling’s iron mills ­behind in ­favor of one of the late nineteenth ­century’s most popu­lar tourist destinations—­the mountain towns of North Carolina—­the material signs of industrial capitalism are everywhere. Like Hugh and his korl w ­ oman, the story’s local characters cannot be fully assimilated by the middle-­class subject, but not for a lack of trying on the part of Miss Cook and the ­widow Denby. The story begins by criticizing Miss Cook, a journalist, for her insistence that Appalachia function as a pastoral escape containing aesthetic and cultural resources she can plumb. However, “The Yares” is filled with industrial products, which repeatedly disrupt Miss Cook’s plans for utilizing mountain scenes for a ste­reo­typical literary sketch. Journeying to a mountain village, “Miss Cook [takes] out her notebook and pencil, but [finds] it impossible to write.”19 This is not the quaint, preserved ruralism for which she hoped ­after reading a magazine piece that described the mountains as “almost unexplored.”20 The Appalachia before Miss Cook undercuts her nostalgic longings for respite and renewal. Ubiquitous and dirty calico wrappers are objects of par­tic­u­lar concern. B ­ ecause she anticipates homespun garments, the mountain w ­ omen fail to meet her expectations: “[The w ­ oman] would be picturesque, u ­ nder a Norman peasant’s coif and red umbrella, but in that dirty calico wrapper—­bah.”21 Calico fabric was mass-­produced in the late nineteenth ­century, and newspaper advertisements suggest that wrappers ­were widespread, cheap, and ready-­made.22 They disrupt Miss Cook’s desire to travel across both time and space to an idyllic agrarian past. Though the ­widow Denby is critical of Miss Cook’s endeavor, she also traffics in ste­reo­types ultimately undercut by the material world of the Black Mountains. Seeking purer air for her sick infant, she hitches a r­ ide to the Yares’ distant cabin. ­There the ­widow is met by a sallow-­faced, barefooted matriarch

The Ages of Appalachian Literature   195

in a dirty calico dress. She thinks, “­Human nature could reach no lower depths of squalor and ignorance than t­ hese.”23 A pig runs freely, and the one-­room cabin appears to be rudely pieced together with mud and logs, which she reads as evidence of degeneracy. Although the cabin and its inhabitants do not meet middle-­class standards of hygiene or domestic comfort, once inside, the w ­ idow sees the incorrectness of her initial impressions. The cabin is actually “a snug boarded room with half a dozen pictures from the illustrated papers on the walls.”24 The presence of t­ hese illustrations disrupts expectations of an isolated and anti-­modern Appalachia, suggesting that, in the age of mass production, print circulates even in the so-­called hinterlands. Their presence raises the possibility that the Yares might even be aware of how mountaineers circulate as types through the literary marketplace. Despite discovering a domestic scene that challenges her assumptions, the ­widow Denby never strays too far from the prescriptive force of middle-­class cosmopolitanism, and, like Life in the Iron-­Mills, the story is pessimistic about her making room for Appalachia’s complexities. In fact, the story concludes with the w ­ idow literalizing the acquisitive drive of the m ­ iddle class, a drive the Yares ultimately resist. Finding the f­ amily good com­pany but poorly clothed and lacking what she deems “Culture,” the ­widow “urge[s] them again and again to come out of their solitude.” Finding just enough to value in the Yares, she wants to relocate them to New York. Nancy Yare articulates why their acquisition ­will never come to fruition: “The Yares hev lived on the Old Black for four generations, Mistress Denby. It ­wouldn’t do to kerry us down into towns.”25 Nancy’s use of the verb “kerry” positions the Yares as objects being acted upon. Her word choice implies an awareness of the way that mountaineers circulate as objects through middle-­class consumer culture. In refusing the offer, Nancy refuses to participate in her own objectification. She refuses to concede the superiority of the metropole. By locating the origins of Appalachian lit­er­a­ture in Davis’s work, the tradition’s overlapping engagements with temporality and materiality emerge. Its lit­er­a­ture is immersed in con­temporary socioeconomic debates concerning the relationship between rural and urban spaces, ­labor, and pro­gress. The convergence of temporality and materiality creates interstices in pro­gress narratives undergirding industrialization. By the start of the twentieth ­century, Appalachian writers w ­ ere increasingly forced to grapple with the popu­lar belief that economic development was the solution to the “Appalachian Prob­lem,” a phrase Samuel Tyndale Wilson coined in his mission-­study text of 1906, The Southern Mountaineers.26 Defenders of enterprise characterized the

196   Ages and the Long Pres­ent

presumably underdeveloped, isolated mountains as the land of hookworm, trachoma, poor nutrition, illiteracy, and poverty. T ­ hose who believed that American enterprise was the answer also tended to use such logic to justify the economic exploitation of Appalachia’s h ­ uman and natu­ral resources.27 Opponents of unchecked industrialization, many Appalachian writers defended the “peculiarity” of mountain life and resilience of mountaineers. In Harriet Arnow’s The Dollmaker we witness a violent collision between the industrial pres­ent and ­imagined Appalachian past. This diasporic novel elaborates our understanding of Appalachia’s literary history through its attention to the economic connections between urban and rural, metropole and hinterland, coalfield and battlefield. Published in 1954, The Dollmaker was an instant best seller and a critical darling but is largely forgotten in con­ temporary American literary discourse. The novel is set in the waning months of World War II and depicts the Nevels leaving eastern Kentucky for Detroit so that the patriarch, Clovis, can l­abor for the military-­industrial complex. While the ­family’s matriarch, Gertie, has saved enough money to buy a homestead, she is pressured into joining her husband. The f­ amily endures numerous hardships in Detroit—­strikes, prejudice, homesickness, and the death of a child. Arnow focalizes the narrative through Gertie, who salvages wood to carve and sell dolls she hopes ­will pay for the ­family’s return home when the war ends. The novel’s conclusion suggests that this homecoming never occurs. Throughout the novel we see the interpenetration of dif­fer­ent time planes through the omnipresence of the train; it connects Appalachia’s coal production to the factories of Detroit and, more broadly, to the global war. Before heading to Detroit, Clovis hauled coal. “Kentucky Egg” feeds the red smelting fires.28 “COAL” is writ everywhere, the smell of smoke overwhelming even the schoolyard.29 Coal and the trains that carry it from eastern Kentucky to industrial centers like Detroit highlight the life cycle of material goods—­from extraction, production, and consumption to disposal. Coal’s ubiquity across geo­graph­i­cal space places Appalachia within the timeline of production as a national extraction zone where wealth and resources never belong to the ­people or land that produces them. This is a cap­i­tal­ist system that thrives on imbalance, on the uneven geography across which capital advantageously moves.30 Gertie explic­itly articulates Appalachia’s extractive economy when she hears an officer ask, “But what is their main crop?” She retorts, “Youngens fer the wars an them factories.”31 The army and domestic war efforts have cleared out mountain communities like

The Ages of Appalachian Literature   197

that from which the Nevels hail. Among the Appalachian diaspora ­there is the saying, “Blood’s the cheapest ­thing on earth, but they’s money in it.”32 This biting truism points to the reliance of the military-­industrial complex on disposable, surplus bodies. The novel is suspicious of so­cio­log­i­cal adjustment theories wielded by teachers and neighbors who constantly reiterate that Gertie and the ­children must “adjust” to the industrial city and all it represents.33 During a parent-­teacher conference, the aptly named Mrs. Whittle snidely comments, “Your psy­chol­ ogy, and your story, too, are—­well—­in­ter­est­ing. . . . ​That is the most impor­tant ­thing, to learn to live with ­others, to get along, to adapt one’s self to one’s surroundings.”34 Gertie is put off by the idea that she and her kids must be whittled away, reshaped, or fixed. Her response is definitive and critical: “You mean that when t­ hey’re through h ­ ere, they could—if they went to Germany—­start gitten along with Hitler, er if they went to—­Russia, ­they’d git along t­ here, ­they’d act like th Rus­sians?” Gertie’s point: maybe it i­ sn’t laudable for a person to be as pliable as rolled-­out biscuit dough. The conversation concludes with Gertie insisting that neither she nor her son can help the way ­they’re made.35 While Mrs. Whittle undoubtedly sees this as a failure, The Dollmaker argues that adjustment i­sn’t necessarily the epitome of pro­gress. Maybe it ­isn’t Appalachians’ unpreparedness that makes them unsuited to an industrial economy, but the unsuitability of industrial economy itself. Gertie’s whittling refuses the imperative to choose Appalachia or Detroit; it is her only weapon against assimilation, the smoothing out of her Appalachian edges. Like Hugh Wolfe, she can make almost anything from scraps—­ wood jumping jack dolls, birds, and crucifixes. While Detroit would whittle her away, Gertie finds solace in a large piece of cherrywood that she ships from the mountain. She explains, “He’s been waiten ­there in th wood you might say since before I was born. I jist brung him out a l­ittle—­but one of t­ hese days, jist you wait an see, ­we’ll find th time an a face fer him an bring him out a that block.”36 For plea­sure alone she steals what time she can to f­ ree the man in the wood. Unfortunately, the Nevels know poverty in Detroit like they never knew on the mountain, and this fi­nally forces Gertie’s “adjustment.” As Clovis’s income evaporates, she is increasingly pressured to sell her work and economize the pro­cess by using a jigsaw. Friends and ­family instruct Gertie to squelch her provincial love of whittling each unique figure with care. As Gertie feels more and more hopeless, the wood figure emerges as the “cloth-­draped shoulders of someone tired or old, more likely tired, for the shoulders, the sagging head,

198   Ages and the Long Pres­ent

bespoke a weariness unto death.”37 Plagued by refrigerators, cheap rayon dresses, and peaches in the dead of winter—­mostly bought on credit—­Gertie likens Detroit to the fleshpots of Egypt. The man in the wood has hands that hold a ­thing they cannot keep. Gertie ponders, “Jonah with a withered leaf from the gourd vine—­Esau his birthright—­Lot’s wife looking at some ­little pretty piece of ­house plunder she could not carry.” She wants to believe that a body can separate life and money. She wants Christ to emerge from the wood, but she increasingly and forebodingly sees the figure of Judas.38 Gertie’s final transformation into Judas—­preordained to take the money and regret it—­occurs when she takes the cherrywood to the scrapyard so that she can make dozens of dolls for sale. Her concession stages a violent collision between an earlier age of Appalachian artisanship (whittling) and a cap­i­tal­ist enterprise (a doll business involving a pro­cess closer to mass production). She begins the quartering pro­cess herself with the blow of an axe. In the moments before “she was so still; it was as if by steadfastly looking at the wood, she too, had changed into wood.” A doll, Gertie has given the last of herself. She has forsaken creativity, her mission to help the still-­faceless man escape the wood. Unlike Hugh Wolfe, Gertie is not Christ martyred on the cross of modernity, for the novel suggests that consent and desire are more complex. Rather, thousands of diasporic Appalachians have given up their place at the Lord’s ­table for coin. Gertie concludes in the novel’s final depressing line, “They’s millions and millions a ­faces plenty fine enough—­fer him. . . . ​Why, some of my neighbors down t­ here in th alley—­they would ha done.”39 Her salvage and whittling work highlights the liminal agency animating it, as well as the novel’s insistence that even the lowliest worker has the right to choose the kind of ­labor that ­will sustain body and soul. This is the birthright The Dollmaker mourns. The period 1861–1954 highlights a discernably Appalachian literary tradition that exceeds typical literary bound­aries. This timeline demonstrates that local color is more than a subset of American literary realism and that Appalachian lit­er­a­ture, more specifically, undercuts the nostalgia of a cosmopolitan middle-­class readership through its presentness in, and critique of, the era of industrial capitalism. While Appalachian lit­er­a­ture does not end with 1954, it does substantially transform. As war­time manufacturing waned in the 1950s, the US economy shifted ­toward knowledge and ser­vice sectors. By 1960, Appalachia no longer bore the same relationship to the national economic context. Industrialism ceased to be the cure-­all, as talk shifted to massive governmental interventions that focused on mitigating poverty. It was follow-

The Ages of Appalachian Literature   199

ing a trip to Kentucky that President Lydon B. Johnson announced in his 1964 State of the Union, “The administration, h ­ ere and now, declares war on poverty in Amer­i­ca.” Appalachia became a “domestic testing ground” for strategies promoting economic growth, be­hav­ior modification, and reeducation. In fact, it is the only region with its own federal commission, approved by Congress in 1963.40 The period 1861–1954 provides a way to view the cultural formation of “Appalachia” during a specific economic era, as well as Appalachian lit­er­a­ture’s emphatic rebuttal of that formation. In its engagement with multiple temporalities—­“ages” that are always si­mul­ta­neously in play—­Appalachian lit­ er­a­ture emerges as a tradition that challenges national pro­gress narratives predicated on assumptions about the relationship between backward p ­ eople and places and the forward-­looking metropole. Texts ranging from Life in the Iron-­Mills to The Dollmaker confront industrial capitalism’s consumption of landscapes and ­people as necessary sacrifices for pro­gress and prosperity. ­These texts refuse an Appalachia out of time and, consequently, the region’s construction as a deficient national ward—an idea that fully cohered with the War on Poverty and is still operative ­today in every­thing from 20/20’s A Hidden Amer­ i­ca: C ­ hildren of the Mountains (2008) to the horror franchise Wrong Turn (2003–2014) and J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy (2016). An alternative chronological frame that begins with Davis highlights a tradition that counteracts objectifying histories of Appalachian lit­er­a­ture and might begin to generate new insight into how Appalachian communities get built, maintained, and represented.

Notes 1. ​Rodger Cunningham, “Writing on the Cusp: Double Alterity and Minority Discourse in Appalachia,” in The ­Future of Southern Letters, ed. Jefferson Humphries and John Lowe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 145–47. 2. ​Anthony Harkins, Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 7–10. 3. ​Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 10. 4. ​Richard H. Brodhead, Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-­ Century Amer­i­ca (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 132; Amy Kaplan, “Nation, Region, and Empire,” in The Columbia History of the American Novel, ed. Emory Elliot et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 241–66; and Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse, Writing out of Place: Regionalism, W ­ omen, and American Literary Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 115–16. 5. ​Harkins, Hillbilly, 30; Allen W. Batteau, The Invention of Appalachia (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1990), 40; Henry D. Shapiro, Appalachia on Our Mind: The Southern Mountains

200   Ages and the Long Pres­ent and Mountaineers in the American Consciousness, 1870–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978), 15; Emily Satterwhite, Dear Appalachia: Readers, Identity, and Popu­lar Fiction since 1878 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2011), 27–53. 6. ​Christopher Hager and Cody Marrs, “Against 1865: Reperiodizing the Nineteenth C ­ entury,” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-­Century Americanists 1, no. 2 (Oct. 2013): 262–63. 7. ​See Stephen A. Marglin and Juliet B. Schor’s The Golden Age of Capitalism: Reinterpreting the Postwar Experience (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992); and Ben Wilson, Heyday: The 1850s and the Dawn of the Global Age (New York: Basic Books, 2016). 8. ​Rebecca Harding Davis, Life in the Iron-­Mills, ed. Cecelia Tichi (Boston: Bedford, 1998), 41, 47. 9. ​Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt’s The Tangled Roots of Feminism, Environmentalism, and Appalachian Lit­er­a­ture (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003) is a notable exception. 10. ​Davis, Life in the Iron-­Mills, 40. 11. ​Cecelia Tichi, “Introduction: Cultural and Historical Background,” in Davis, Life in the Iron-­Mills, 3–25; Sharon M. Harris, Rebecca Harding Davis and American Realism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991). 12. ​Davis, Life in the Iron-­Mills, 68. 13. ​Davis, 70–71. 14. ​Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of Amer­i­ca: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill & Wang, 2007), 160; Miles Orvell, The Real T ­ hing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 43. 15. ​­Will Wallace Harney, “A Strange Land and a Peculiar P ­ eople,” Lippincott’s Magazine 7, no. 31 (Oct. 1873): 429–38; William Perry Brown, “A Peculiar ­People,” Overland Monthly 12 (Nov. 1888): 505–8. See also Louise Coffin Jones, “In the Backwoods of Carolina,” Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine 24 (Dec. 1879): 747–56; and Ellen Churchill Semple, “The Anglo-­Saxons of the Kentucky Mountains: A Study in Anthropogeography,” Geo­graph­i­cal Journal 17 (June 1901): 588–623. 16. ​Davis, Life in the Iron-­Mills, 53. 17. ​Davis, 74. 18. ​Brodhead, Cultures of Letters, 133. 19. ​Rebecca Harding Davis, “The Yares of the Black Mountain,” in Silhouettes of American Life (New York: Scribner, 1892), 243. 20. ​Davis, 246. 21. ​Davis, 244. 22. ​Linda Welters and Patricia A. Cunningham, eds., Twentieth-­Century American Fashion (New York: Berg, 2005), 2. See also “Local Notices” in Nebraska’s The Columbus Journal, “Just to Please the Ladies” in North Dakota’s Bismarck Tribune, and “Personal Adornment” in Tennessee’s The Milan Exchange. 23. ​Davis, “Yares of the Black Mountain,” 257. 24. ​Davis, 257. 25. ​Davis, 266, 267. 26. ​See also Thomas R. Dawley’s “Our Southern Mountaineers: Removal the Remedy for Evils That Isolation and Poverty Have Brought,” which appeared in the March 1910 issue of Walter Hines Page’s reform journal, The World’s Work. 27. ​Shapiro, Appalachia on Our Mind, 158. 28. ​Harriette Arnow, The Dollmaker (New York: Scribner, 2009), 363. 29. ​Arnow, 218. 30. ​Neil Smith, Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008). 31. ​Arnow, Dollmaker, 21.

The Ages of Appalachian Literature   201 32. ​Arnow, 241. 33. ​Theodore R. Sarbin, “Adjustment in Psy­chol­ogy,” Journal of Personality 8, no. 3 (Mar. 1940): 240–49; Svend Riemer, “So­cio­log­ic­ al Theory of Home Adjustment,” American So­cio­log­i­cal Review 8, no. 3 (June 1943): 272–78. 34. ​Arnow, Dollmaker, 375. 35. ​Arnow, 375, 376. 36. ​Arnow, 48. 37. ​Arnow, 494. 38. ​Arnow, 500, 636–37. 39. ​Arnow, 676, 677. 40. ​Ronald D. Eller, Uneven Ground: Appalachia since 1945 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008), 2.

The Civil War in the Age of Civil Rights

michael lemahieu

A timeline’s appearance of geometric neutrality, its clean fusion of space and time, is reinforced by its verbal symmetry: a compound of two four-­letter words, each alternating between consonant and vowel, i’s before e’s, almost rhyming. But the slant in the rhyme also parallels the tendency of the concept. Lines extend infinitely in two directions, but timelines move forward from one discrete point to another. This directionality embeds presuppositions about what counts and how it is counted. Rather than a m ­ atter of imperfection or cause for regret, however, a timeline’s tendentiousness is the condition of possibility for its usefulness, ­whether defined in terms that are critical, hermeneutic, or pedagogical. In the Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein describes the “crystalline purity” of logic as “slippery ice where t­ here is no friction”: “in a certain sense, the conditions are ideal; but also, just b ­ ecause of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk: so we need friction. Back to the rough ground!”1 Its apparent continuity notwithstanding, a timeline’s roughness is a prerequisite for its readiness. In “Against 1865,” Hager and Marrs question the canonical status of 1865 as a watershed in the ­middle of the nineteenth ­century.2 But 1865 can also serve to unsettle the distinction between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. When bookended with 1965, 1865 inaugurates a timeline whose symmetries extend beyond the numerical. The historical coincidences between the years of the US Civil War and the height of the civil rights movement make plain the startling symmetries of our national drama and—­I’ll argue through a reading of Ralph Ellison, who thought often about timelines of American history and lit­er­a­ture—­the tragic failures t­ hose symmetries index. The promise of the Thirteenth Amendment, ratified in 1865, was still not realized one hundred years ­later, when Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Over the course of his ­career, Ellison argued that the unfinished war’s discontinuities constitute

The Civil War in the Age of Civil Rights   203

a tragic timeline of American history and demand an ironic response from American lit­er­a­ture. In September 1965, the Nation marked its one-­hundredth anniversary with a special centenary issue that appeared a month a­ fter the passage of the Voting Rights Act and reminded readers that the Nation was founded just a­ fter the nation itself had concluded four years of civil war. The propitious timing was not lost on the editors, who ran pieces commemorating the Civil War and advocating civil rights, many of them by historians: Abraham Eisenstadt contributed “1865: The ­Great Transition”; C. Vann Woodward, “Flight from History: The Heritage of the American Negro”; and Howard Zinn, “The South Revisited.” The magazine also reprinted excerpts from a series published in its inaugural year ­under the title “1865: The South As It Is.” Telling it like it is was also on the mind of another contributor. Ralph Ellison submitted a strange piece—­relatively brief but wildly complex—­titled “Tell It Like It Is, Baby.” In relating the pres­ent of 1965 to the events of 1865, Ellison reflects his conviction that “the Civil War, Reconstruction, and its tragic aftermath ­were the crux of American history and the most dramatic instances of the country’s strug­gle with the potentially fatal contradiction between its demo­ cratic theory and practice.”3 ­After some prefatory remarks, Ellison relates a dream that begins in his native Oklahoma City, where as a child he walks down a street and spots a figure he suspects is his ­father, who died when Ellison was just three years old. Ellison is then mysteriously transported to Washington, DC, in 1865, where as a young slave boy he witnesses a surreal funeral pro­ cession for Lincoln in which the dead president’s body is subjected to any number of obscene indignities: “nightmare images of a g­ reat man defiled.”4 The sequence closes with Ellison, still as a slave child, peering into the “­great hole” of a grave: “Approaching fearfully, I looked down, seeing the crowd transported t­here, a multitude, some black f­aces among them, sitting at a t­able making a ghoulish meal of some frightful ­thing that a sheet hid from view.”5 Ellison populates the text with vari­ous archetypal figures: ominous birds, mysterious w ­ omen, and multiple phallic images, most of them damaged. Framing the dream sequence are opening and concluding remarks that describe the circumstances of the text’s origins and comment on the history of US race relations in the ­century between Appomattox and Selma. It’s a whirlwind of a text. The one-­hundredth anniversary of the Nation was not, however, the initial occasion for Ellison’s part essay / part story / part autobiography. He had begun the piece almost a de­cade earlier when he was in residence at the American Acad­emy in Rome in 1956. While living abroad, he received a letter from a

204   Ages and the Long Pres­ent

childhood friend, one Virgil Branam, who asks Ellison, “Have you read about ­those cracker senators cussing out the Supreme Court and all that mess? . . . ​Tell a man how it is.”6 Branam refers to the group of senators, led by Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, who issued the “Southern Manifesto” vowing to resist the Brown decision, which the document describes as an exercise of “naked judicial power” directed against the “habits, traditions, and way of life” of the southern ­people. The document offers a rather incredible timeline of American history a­ fter the Civil War, insisting that desegregation “is destroying the amicable relations between the white and Negro races that have been created through 90 years of patient effort by the good ­people of both races. It has planted hatred and suspicion where t­ here has been heretofore friendship and understanding.”7 No won­der Ellison strug­gled to respond to his friend’s request: how does one tell it like it is when elected representatives tell it like that? Looking back at his aborted attempt to reply to his friend’s letter in 1956, Ellison could allow that “the power of the Southern Congressmen has been broken and the reconstruction of the South is once more u ­ nder way.” Nevertheless, he asserts, reflecting on the current state of affairs in 1965, that “the hooded horrors parading, murdering and shouting defiance in the South ­today suggest that the psychic forces with which I tried to deal (in both dream and essay) are still ­there to be dispersed or humanized; the individual white Southerner’s task of reconciling himself to the new po­liti­cal real­ity remains.”8 Reconciliation, as both a personal and a national task, was a recurrent theme of writing about the Civil War in the years leading up to its centennial commemoration. As David Blight remarks, “the official Civil War Centennial could never find adequate, meaningful ways to balance Civil War remembrance with civil rights rebellion. Indeed, its early efforts ­were defeated by racism, by a perception that commemoration should serve only the ends of reconciliation and patriotism.” This emphasis on heroic, triumphalist narratives of reconciliation preempted a more “tragic sensibility.”9 It thus fell to the writers, unofficial historians as well as unacknowledged legislators, to offer more complex, ambivalent, and accurate acts of remembering. ­These alternate forms of remembrance double as civil rights interventions and exist in a tense, unresolved relation in the mid-­ twentieth ­century. Over the course of multiple works spanning many years, Ellison outlined a tragic timeline of American history. On the night he had his dream, he was contemplating a timeline of a dif­fer­ent order of magnitude. He fell asleep reading Gilbert Murray’s The Classical Tradition in Poetry, “puzzling over how its

The Civil War in the Age of Civil Rights   205

insights might possibly be useful to a writer who is American, a Negro, and most ­eager to discover a more artful, and broadly significant approach to t­ hose centers of stress within our national life.”10 For Ellison, tragedy offers a pos­si­ble answer: Perhaps, therefore—­any lens being better than no lens at all—­the pres­ent optics provided by Murray’s essay on tragedy w ­ ill serve without too much distortion when we consider the possibility that the last true note of tragedy was sounded (and quickly muffled) in our land when the North buried Lincoln and the South buried Lee, and between them cast the better part, both of our tragic sense—­ except perhaps the Negroes’—­and our capacity for tragic heroism in the grave. On the national scale, at least, this seems true. The sheet-­covered figure in my dream might well have been General Robert E. Lee.11

The “last true note of tragedy,” “our tragic sense,” “our capacity for tragic heroism”—­Ellison is in good com­pany in identifying tragedy as a predominant genre of Civil War memory. In Battle-­Pieces (1866), Herman Melville refers to “the terrible historic tragedy of our time.”12 “Some pang of anguish,” Walt Whitman writes in Specimen Days (1882), “some tragedy, profounder than ever poet wrote.”13 In ways reminiscent of Ellison, Robert Penn Warren refers in The Legacy of the Civil War to “the common tragic entrapment” and to the war’s “tragic ironies—­somehow essential yet incommensurable—­which we yet live.”14 The parallels between “Tell It Like It Is, Baby” and Hamlet, one of Murray’s touchstone texts, reflect the influence of Murray’s work on Ellison’s understanding of tragedy; he describes his dream as conforming to “a pattern of classical tragedy: the hero-­father murdered.” For Ellison, the tragedy of the Civil War resides in its legacy, which is marked by a betrayal of the ideals for which the war was won and by its perpetuity, a sense that the war continues as a result of that betrayal—­thus his focus on the assassination of Lincoln, which he describes as “the tragic incident which marked the reversal of the North’s ‘victory’ ” and ensured “the failure of my promised freedom.”15 In a sense, Ellison finds in the death of Lincoln a corresponding death of tragedy, with the country’s tragic sensibility—­“except perhaps the Negroes’ ”—­and tragic heroism also cast into the grave. The caveat is key, for the aborted birth of freedom, the reversal of Lincoln’s ideals, ensured that a tragic sensibility would persist in African American culture. Ellison would return to this tragic theory of American history l­ater in his ­career. In 1974, he delivered “Address to the Harvard Alumni, Class of 1949.” Ellison relates an epiphany he experienced some twenty years earlier while

206   Ages and the Long Pres­ent

standing in Memorial Hall and looking at the names of the Harvard men who died in the Civil War. It is not simply their death that Ellison regards as tragic, but also the ways in which their death has been remembered: “Upon them a discontinuity had been imposed by the living, and their heroic gestures had been repressed along with the details of the shameful abandonment of ­those goals for which they had given up their lives. Without question, the consequences of that imposed discontinuity, that betrayal of ideal and memory, are still with us ­today.”16 It is not “reconciliation” but “discontinuity” that defines cultural narratives of Civil War memory. The living “impose” a discontinuity on the dead. One hears an echo and a reversal of the Gettysburg Address: “It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated h ­ ere to the unfinished work which they who fought ­here have thus far so nobly advanced.”17 Rather than advancing that unfinished work, Ellison insists, one hundred years of American history following the assassination of Lincoln have largely undone it. From the work that the dead nobly advanced, the living have retreated. In the Harvard address, Ellison draws loosely on multiple concepts of classical tragedy to make sense of American history. While his self-­described “epiphany” testifies to his modernist sensibilities, Ellison means it to register as a turning point, a “shock of recognition” (anagnorisis): “I knew its significance almost without knowing, and the shock of recognition filled me with a kind of anguish.”18 Ellison moves quickly from his personal moment of revelation to a generational shift. Describing a graduation address he had delivered earlier that same year, Ellison suggests to the Harvard alumni that the current generation of gradu­ates lacks “easy access to that con­ve­nient posture of ‘American innocence’ that had been the concern of American writers from Emerson to Faulkner, and which engaged much of the artistic energy of Henry James”: ­ ere “innocence” refers to our tendency to ignore the evil which can spring from H our good intentions, as well as to the consternation with which Americans react upon discovering the negative, often appalling, results that can erupt from actions conceived as totally positive. In the terminology of tragic drama such “innocence” is viewed as an aspect of h ­ uman character, and when operative in the psy­chol­ogy of the Hero it is termed a tragic flaw. The Greeks termed this flaw in character and perception hubris, and to the force which springs up from the enactment of such tragic flaws . . . ​the Greeks gave the name nemesis.

“Innocence” functions as the equivalent of hubris, the tragic hero’s fatal flaw, and such innocence in turn becomes a national nemesis, the force unleashed through displays of hubris.19 In the drama of American history fol-

The Civil War in the Age of Civil Rights   207

lowing the Civil War, racism embodies both: “I find it in­ter­est­ing that such American failures of perception w ­ ere termed ‘innocence,’ b ­ ecause hubris is usually accompanied by some form of arrogance and insolence, by some form of overbearing pride. Perhaps this is b ­ ecause in the drama of American society one of the most damaging forms of insolence and pride is racism.”20 In questioning the idea of innocence, Ellison echoes James Baldwin: “But it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.”21 Baldwin makes explicit, as he so often does, that which remains more muted in Ellison: hubris is understood not simply as a character flaw but as violent action; innocence, not as plausible denial but as the very crime itself. Ellison remains more sanguine than Baldwin about the prospects for national recognition of that complicit innocence. With the landmark legislation of the civil rights era—­from the Brown decision to the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act—­and the putative end to the ­legal basis for segregation, discrimination, and racial in­equality, Ellison begins to see coming to fruition the ideals for which hundreds of thousands died in the Civil War. The civil rights movement, he suggests, put an end to the hubris of innocence: “Hence my suggestion to ­those students that the society which they ­were about to enter as adults would be quite unlike the society of their parents. Nor could they ignore its tragic realities by adopting a posture of innocence. Since 1954, say, events both negative and positive have rendered such innocence impossible. American society and the world alike have changed more drastically than at any time during our relatively short history, and this generation of students has observed and been a part of that change.”22 What the civil rights era renders impossible, according to Ellison, is the continued crime of innocence, the ongoing hubris of racism. And with ­those developments, he implies, comes the diminution of a national nemesis. Such at least is his hope. In his narrative, Ellison omits one key term common to theories of classical tragedy. ­There is pity, and ­there is fear, but ­there is no catharsis. For Ellison, the tragedy of American history has not yet come to an end, for it is not bound to the temporal constraints of Greek drama. In place of catharsis, Ellison calls for consciousness: “All of the signs, both positive and negative, seem to indicate that the nation has been pushed ­toward an awareness of the tragic nature of the American experience; the dark underside of our history has taken on the form of a many-­headed nemesis. But if all this seems too pessimistic, remember that the antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systemize clear ideas. Or, as

208   Ages and the Long Pres­ent

Emerson insisted, the development of consciousness, consciousness, consciousness.”23 Ellison’s emphasis on ambiguity and self-­consciousness prompts his unexpected turn to irony, which he describes as a corrective. And his definition, “the capacity to discover and systemize clear ideas,” is a strange one, suggesting that the work of timelines, for example, could potentially be ironic. Modernism’s “strong association of irony with intellect and recognitive abilities,” Matthew Stratton argues, is reflected in Ellison’s work as “a conceptual po­liti­cal schema.”24 The shock of recognition, as we have seen, is crucial to Ellison’s ironic treatment of the tragedy of American history, of the failure to recognize, let alone reconcile, the disjunction between ideology and real­ity, between a nation’s demo­cratic claims and its discriminatory practices. Ellison saw the height of the civil rights era as a turning point in the ongoing tragedy of the Civil War. We can “say truly of the 1960s,” he concludes his Harvard address, “what Henry James had to say mistakenly of the late 1860s, that they mark ‘an era in the history of the American mind [in which t­ here was] introduced into the national consciousness a certain sense of proportion and relations, of the world being a more complicated place than it had hitherto seemed, the f­ uture more treacherous, success more difficult.’ ”25 Consciousness opposes innocence—­the fantasy of standing apart from or being outside of politics—­but with consciousness comes difficulty and treacherousness. Ellison’s repetition of his namesake Emerson’s keyword enacts the repetitions of American history in the ­century separating Representative Men (1850) from Invisible Man (1952). For Ellison, the end of the US Civil War marks the beginning of American social, cultural, and literary modernity. A modernist no less exemplary than Gertrude Stein suggests the same: “By the methods of the civil war and the commercial conceptions that followed it Amer­i­ca created the twentieth ­century.”26 In The Legacy of the Civil War, Warren likewise suggests that the war “catapulted Amer­i­ca from what had been in considerable part an agrarian, handicraft society into the society of Big Technology and Big Business.”27 In an early draft of “For the Union Dead,” Robert Lowell refers to the Civil War as “the first modern war.” Perhaps, then, we might hear in Ezra Pound’s dictum to “make it new” not so much a clarion call as yet another echo. “As our case is new,” Lincoln states in his 1862 Annual Message to Congress, “so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves.”28 The society out of which literary modernism would emerge, and against which it would react, finds its proximate c­ auses in the war and its aftermath, its legacy and its memory.

The Civil War in the Age of Civil Rights   209

Ellison repeatedly identified the Civil War as the catalyst for a modernity whose cultural productions, social formations, and po­liti­cal institutions would elide it, as he does in “Stephen Crane and the Mainstream of American Fiction”: “For all our efforts to forget it, the Civil War was the g­ reat shaping event not only of our po­liti­cal and economic life, but following Crane, of our twentieth-­ century fiction.” For Ellison, Crane’s work exemplifies how the effects of the Civil War led to the erasure of its ­causes: “retreating swiftly into the vast expanse of its new industrial development, ­eager to lose any memory traces of ­those values for which it had gone to war.”29 The tragedy of the war was not simply that hundreds of thousands died but also that the society the Civil War produced betrayed the values for which it was fought. This betrayal characterizes a modernity in which each new cultural or aesthetic phenomenon is attributed to the most recent historical or po­liti­cal event. In “Twentieth-­Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity,” Ellison questions the established timeline of literary modernism: “The hard-­boiled school represented by Hemingway, for instance, is usually spoken of as a product of World War I disillusionment; yet it was as much the product of a tradition which arose even before the Civil War—­that tradition of intellectual evasion for which Thoreau criticized Emerson in regard to the Fugitive Slave Law, and which had been growing swiftly since the failure of the ideals in whose name the Civil War was fought.”30 Retreat, amnesia, evasion, failure—­these are the terms in which Ellison describes a modernity that emerges out of the war, that prospers as a result of the war, but that betrays the ideals of the war and contributes to its forgetting. In the essay on Crane, Ellison sketches a timeline of American lit­er­a­ture in which the best writers and artists recognize not only the link between the Civil War and modernity but also the ongoing nature of the war: “The impor­tant point is that between Twain and the emergence of the driving honesty and social responsibility of Faulkner, no artist of Crane’s caliber looked so steadily at the ­wholeness of American life and discovered such far-­reaching symbolic equivalents for its unceasing state of civil war.”31 In his Harvard address, Ellison returns to and expands on this point: Quite frankly, it is my opinion that [the outcome of the Civil War] is still in the balance, and only our enchantment by the spell of the pos­si­ble, our endless optimism, has led us to assume that it ever ­really ended. Instead, it would seem that while the military phase of that war ended in 1865, t­ here actually occurred a reversal of Clausewitz’s famous formula through which the Civil War, upper

210   Ages and the Long Pres­ent

case, continued on as civil war, lower case, in which that war of arms was replaced by a war of politics, racial and ethnic vio­lence, ritual sacrifice based on race and color, and by economic and judicial repression.32

American optimism colors the memory of the Civil War, celebrating the preservation of the Union and the abolition of slavery but failing to recognize the per­sis­tence of slavery by other means. Baldwin agreed, writing to his nephew in the days leading up to the centennial anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, “You know, and I know, that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too soon.”33 While the nation celebrated the war’s centennial in terms of military valor and sectional reconciliation, Ellison and Baldwin roughed up a more disenthralled timeline. Such a timeline might include Baldwin’s and Ellison’s own work as part of a second American Re­nais­sance, one that emerges precisely a ­century ­after the first. It marks less a rebirth of freedom than a death of tragic innocence. In the preface to American Re­nais­sance, F. O. Matthiessen begins with the fact of “one extraordinarily concentrated moment of expression”: “The half-­decade of 1850–1855 saw the appearance of Representative Men (1850), The Scarlet Letter (1851), The House of the Seven Gables (1851), Moby-­Dick (1851), Pierre (1852), Walden (1854), and Leaves of Grass (1855).”34 The list is no doubt impressive, even startlingly so, although almost entirely homogenous (the roster would be all the more impressive had it included Stowe’s ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin [1852] and Douglass’s My Bondage, My Freedom [1855]). But one might point to another extraordinarily concentrated moment of expression a ­century ­later. The half de­cade of 1950–1955 saw the appearance of Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951), The Old Man and the Sea (1951), The Catcher in the Rye (1951), Notes of a Native Son (1955), Lolita (1955), A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955), and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955). The year 1953 alone saw the appearance of Go Tell It on the Mountain, The Adventures of Augie March, The Enormous Room and Other Stories, Fahrenheit 451, and The Crucible. One could go on, pointing to genre fiction such as Strangers on a Train (1952) or The Long Goodbye (1955), to late Steinbeck (East of Eden) or to early Vonnegut (Player Piano), both published in 1952. ­There’s of course no end, no resolution, to this type of listing. And ­there’s considerable homogeneity to this list as well. But the work that continues to stand out above all the ­others arguably is Invisible Man (1952). In his introduction to the thirtieth-­anniversary edition, Ellison describes how the voice of his famous protagonist imposed itself on an early version of the novel begun

The Civil War in the Age of Civil Rights   211

in 1945: “And while I was in the pro­cess of plotting a novel based on the war then in pro­gress, the conflict which that voice was imposing upon my attention was one that had been ongoing since the Civil War.”35 Ellison’s account of the composition of the novel, of the emergence of its signature voice, reverses his description of his epiphany at Harvard. ­There, he mourns the Civil War dead upon whom “a discontinuity had been imposed by the living.” H ­ ere, he speaks of a voice from the past haunting and imposing itself in the pres­ent. We might, then, accept Ellison’s implicit invitation to read Invisible Man as a Civil War novel, or a novel of what he describes in the essay on Crane as “the continuation of the Civil War by means other than arms.”36 Ellison’s many writings on the Civil War are discontinuous texts: begun in 1956 but published in 1965 relating a dream about 1865, delivered in 1974 about an epiphany in 1953 pertaining to the events of 1861–1865, or an introduction written in 1981 about a novel published in 1952 whose voice expresses a conflict ongoing since the Civil War. This kind of temporal discontinuity upsets a timeline’s forward march, but for Ellison, as for many other African American writers, the tragic timeline of 1865–1965 indexes not a radical break but a per­ sis­tent continuity. That continuous discontinuity diverges from the ideal that adheres to the concept of the timeline. Timelines are punctuated: a sequence of dots representing a series of decisions as to what constitutes an event and what remains on the line between the dots. Ellison suggests a timeline that invites us to conceive of t­ hose dots as ellipses: the tragedy of the ongoing civil war gives rise to the irony of a timeline that includes absences, that self-­ consciously doubles back on itself. In Ellison’s timeline, past events continue to haunt and possess the pres­ent. They remain unfinished, as yet undecided, and therefore impose a discontinuity onto the timeline. In this sense, Ellison’s divided and discontinuous, tragic and ironic, rough and ready texts of Civil War memory represent his way of telling it like it is. Notes 1. ​Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 4th ed., ed. P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte (Malden, MA: Wiley-­ Blackwell, 2009), §107. 2. ​Christopher Hager and Cody Marrs, “Against 1865: Reperiodizing the Nineteenth ­Century,” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-­Century Americanists 1, no. 2 (2013): 259–84. 3. ​John F. Callahan, introduction to The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 2003), xxiv. 4. ​Ralph Ellison, “Tell It Like It Is, Baby,” in Collected Essays, 45. 5. ​Ellison, 44.

212   Ages and the Long Pres­ent 6. ​Ellison, 29. 7. ​“Declaration of Constitutional Princi­ples,” 84 Cong. Rec. 102, pt. 4 (Mar. 12, 1956), 4459–60; reprinted in the March 26, 1956, issue of Time. 8. ​Ellison, “Tell It Like It Is, Baby,” 30. 9. ​David Blight, American Oracle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Pres, 2011), 11, 22. 10. ​Ellison, “Tell It Like It Is, Baby,” 30. 11. ​Ellison, 46. 12. ​Herman Melville, Battle-­Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866; repr., New York: Da Capo, 1995), 372. 13. ​Walt Whitman, Memoranda during the War (1875; repr., Bedford, MA: Applewood, 1993), 35. 14. ​Robert Penn Warren, The Legacy of the Civil War (1961; repr., Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 106–8. 15. ​Ralph Ellison, “Tell It Like It Is, Baby,” 30, 44, 46. In this essay, Ellison describes Lincoln as a tragic figure who accepted “the tragic duty of keeping the country unified even through an act of fratricidal war,” as well as “the most sublime and tragic awareness of the requirements of his fated role” (42–43). On Lincoln’s “tragic sensibility,” see John Burt, Lincoln’s Tragic Pragmatism: Lincoln, Douglas, and Moral Conflict (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 25. 16. ​Ralph Ellison, “Address to the Harvard College Alumni, Class of 1949,” in Collected Essays, 424. 17. ​Abraham Lincoln, “Address at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania,” in Speeches and Writings, 1859– 1865 (New York: Library of Amer­i­ca, 1989), 536. 18. ​Ellison, “Address to the Harvard College Alumni,” 424, 423. 19. ​The concept of innocence functions somewhat analogously in Reinhold Niebuhr’s The Irony of American History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1952); see particularly chap. 2, “The Innocent Nation in an Innocent World.” 20. ​Ellison, “Address to the Harvard College Alumni,” 424–25. 21. ​James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1963; repr., New York: Vintage, 1993), 5–6. 22. ​Ellison, “Address to the Harvard College Alumni,” 426. 23. ​Ellison, 429. 24. ​Matthew Stratton, The Politics of Irony in American Modernism (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 163, 152. 25. ​Ellison, “Address to the Harvard College Alumni,” 424–25. 26. ​Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, ed. Carl Van Vechten (New York: Vintage, 1990), 73. 27. ​Robert Penn Warren, Legacy of the Civil War, 8. 28. ​Abraham Lincoln, “Annual Message to Congress” (Dec. 1, 1862), in Speeches and Writings, 1859–1865 (New York: Library of Amer­i­ca, 1989), 415. Ellison remarks that “Lincoln is a kind of ­father of twentieth-­century Amer­i­ca” (“Tell It Like It Is, Baby,” 46). 29. ​Ralph Ellison, “Stephen Crane and the Mainstream of American Fiction,” in Collected Essays, 119. 30. ​Ralph Ellison, “Twentieth-­Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity,” in Collected Essays, 93. 31. ​Ellison, “Stephen Crane,” 127. 32. ​Ellison, “Address to the Harvard College Alumni,” 428–29. 33. ​Baldwin, Fire Next Time, 10. 34. ​F. O. Matthiessen, American Re­nais­sance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941), viii. 35. ​Ralph Ellison, introduction to Invisible Man (New York: Vintage, 1980), xiv. 36. ​Ellison, “Stephen Crane,” 119.

The Age of Warhol

b r y a n wa t e r m a n

Andy Warhol haunts late twentieth-­century American lit­er­a­ture in the same way Allen Ginsberg saunters through the final seconds of D. A. Pennebaker’s footage for Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” We w ­ eren’t expecting him, then—­Pop!—­there he is, an authorizing presence. It’s conventional to describe the 1960s to the pres­ent—­when Warhol outstrips all other artists at auction by a handy margin—as the Age of Warhol. Arthur Danto does so b ­ ecause Warhol, he believes, “set his stamp on what was allowable” in almost ­every medium conceivable. Prominent critics have acknowledged that postmodern lit­er­a­ture resonates with Warhol’s sensibility. Fredric Jameson, for instance, influentially reads Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes as emblematic of postmodernity, and Donald Barthelme’s biographer contextualizes his subject’s arrival in New York in relation to Warhol’s early ­career. And yet, though Warhol’s publishing efforts receive increasingly substantial attention,1 we ­haven’t asked what periodizing American lit­er­a­ture around him would reveal about the limits of language and lit­er­a­ture as Warhol and his contemporaries explored them. Warhol’s own literary efforts index key transformations not only in American art but also in commerce, technology, media, and sexuality. His literary activity opens a road map to key upheavals and detours in postwar American letters and redirects our attention from postmodern lit­er­a­ture’s preoccupations with language and meaning to broader concerns about media and mediation in general. Warhol shared ­these concerns with a range of artists and writers, from downtown Manhattan’s underground poets to other visual and per­for­mance artists whose work took the materiality of mediated words—­caught on tape, lifted from cheap newsprint—as a key concern. The cluster of writers and artists Warhol brings into view helps us to see the usefulness of the media concept as we think about lit­er­a­ture from this period, but it also forces us to broaden our definitions of lit­er­a­ture to include paintings and intermedia events such

214   Ages and the Long Pres­ent

as poetry readings, Happenings, and underground theater. Warhol expands our attention from the poststructuralist language games taken up in most literary histories of postmodernism to questions about lit­er­a­ture and authorship as commodities, about the blurry line between art and life, and about the materiality of late twentieth-­century media. No cata­log raisonné exists for Warhol’s books, but his forays into publishing predate his transformation in the early 1960s from a successful illustrator and ad man to a more controversial artist.2 Each de­cade of his ­career witnessed epoch-­defining literary proj­ects: a: A Novel and The Index (Book) in the 1960s; his underground play Pork, Interview magazine, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, and Andy Warhol’s Exposures in the 1970s; and POPism: The Warhol Sixties, Amer­i­ca, and The Andy Warhol Diaries in the 1980s. What kind of author was Warhol? As postmodernity’s poster boy—­given what Jean Baudrillard called his “sanctification of merchandise as merchandise” and his work’s “radical indifference to its own authenticity”3—he depersonalized art and authorship in ways that illustrate Roland Barthes’s famous theorization, in this period, of “the death of the author” and the “birth of the reader.”4 And yet, as Douglas Crimp has shown, Warhol’s genius “was not least his uncanny ability always to secure for himself the author-­function, and all the more so by . . . ​admitting openly that his work was r­ eally the yield of o ­ thers—­others’ ideas, o ­ thers’ designs, o ­ thers’ images, o ­ thers’ abilities, o ­ thers’ l­ abor.”5 This “curious combination of self-­effacement and celebrity” characterizes not only Warhol’s work but also his age, and it is fundamentally related to issues of media and remediation that Warhol’s work with words helps make vis­i­ble.6

On the Scene with the “New Realism” Warhol’s fascination with the mediation of common experience resonates with the rise in the 1960s of the New Journalism of Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, and Norman Mailer, or the “nonfiction novel” of his literary hero, Truman Capote. But the literary scenes Warhol directly engaged in the 1960s lay deeper underground. Guided by his young assistant, the aspiring poet Gerard Malanga, Warhol frequented “dank, musty basements where plays w ­ ere put on, movies screened, poetry read.”7 ­These overlapping scenes produced what the Fluxus artist Dick Higgins termed “intermedia.”8 From the work of John Cage and Yoko Ono to artist statements by Claes Oldenburg and Sol LeWitt to Allan Kaprow’s Happenings or Lawrence Weiner’s “statements,” 1960s avant-­garde made art from words in ways that have not been acknowledged fully by literary historians.9 Influenced by Robert Motherwell’s 1951 anthology The Dada Paint­ers

The Age of Warhol   215

and Poets and a revival of interest in Marcel Duchamp, and ­under John Cage’s extraordinary influence, underground artists created communal forms of production that blurred the bound­aries between art forms, between art and life, and between high and low cultures.10 Critics initially framed Pop art as part of a neo-­Dada “New Realism,” a term applied to Paris and New York artists whose work incorporated consumer objects and popu­lar media. The Sidney Janis Gallery’s 1962 New Realism show, which included Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, and George Segal, was American Pop’s major-­label debut. The poet John Ashbery, reviewing the show, read this work as “com[ing] to grips with the emptiness of industrialized modern life.”11 For the “New York School” poets Warhol encountered downtown, the New Realism was “a way of creating art—­and of living—­that paralleled Warhol’s practices and raised compelling questions about copying (or ‘stealing’) words and images, about authorship, and about identity.”12 Warhol contributed art to mimeographed poetry magazines, collaborated with Malanga on a series of “poem-­visuals,” and art directed an impor­tant Pop edition of the multimedia journal Aspen. He especially sought the approval of the downtown scene’s most impor­tant poet, Frank O’Hara, who also worked as a curator at the Museum of Modern Art and published art criticism. O’Hara dismissed Warhol early on—he preferred the Abstract Expressionists Warhol and other Pop artists rejected—­but their work shares features that typify New York School poetry, the New Realism, and Pop more broadly.13 Consider a few lines from “Personal Poem” (1959), in which O’Hara recounts a lunchtime conversation with his fellow poet LeRoi Jones:  . . . ​then we go eat some fish and some ale it’s cool but crowded we ­don’t like Lionel Trilling we decide, we like Don Allen we ­don’t like Henry James so much we like Herman Melville.14

The autobiographical posture and parade of proper names create an insider experience for readers who share or desire some knowledge of individuals listed or intimacies implied. This “poetics of coterie” (as Lytle Shaw terms it) extends to literary publication and canon making: their disregard for Trilling relates, we presume, to the academic critic’s snobbishness t­ oward O’Hara, Jones, and contemporaries such as Ginsberg. Donald Allen, by contrast, would include O’Hara, Jones, and Ginsberg in his 1960 anthology The New American Poetry,

216   Ages and the Long Pres­ent

1945–1960, which corrected the exclusion of the New York School and Beats from the influential recent volume The New Poets of ­England and Amer­i­ca (1957). As in much of O’Hara’s work, “Personal Poem” takes quotidian experience as the basis for a new, ready-­made art. Even the conversation about canonicity turns on consumer preference rather than aesthetic value in a way that recalls Warhol’s famous definition of Pop as “liking ­things.”15 As the younger poet and artist Joe Brainard discerned, affection is self-­evident in Pop’s repetitions: “I like Andy Warhol. I like Andy Warhol. I like Andy Warhol. I like Andy Warhol. I like Andy Warhol. I like Andy Warhol. I like Andy Warhol. And that is why I like Andy Warhol.”16 Brainard and his contemporaries among the “second-­generation” New York School poets ­were unconflicted in their simultaneous affection for Warhol and O’Hara. Both produced what Geoff Ward calls a “depthless montage” of “ ‘found’ materials” drawn from urban consumer culture.17 O’Hara’s occasional invocation of the same brand names Warhol also took as his subject (Coca-­Cola, for example) and his humorous nods to popu­lar culture tabloid headlines, as in “Poem [Lana Turner Has Collapsed!],” reveal their common Dada-­derived strategy of transforming everyday refuse into art. The ephemeral detritus of commodity culture became the very stuff of the New Realism or Pop in painting and poetry via what Ed Ruscha described in his own work as “a kind of waste-­retrieval method.”18 O’Hara’s “Having a Coke with You” (1960) illustrates the point: he compares the experience named in the title to all of art history, deciding in the final lines that his favorite paint­ers had all been “cheated of some marvellous experience which is not ­going to go wasted on me which is why I am telling you about it.” Thus rescued, throwaway words and actions, reframed as poetry, eroded cultural hierarchies. Defenders of academic poetry cringed when the New York Times asked w ­ hether Bob Dylan was Amer­i­ca’s “Public Writer No. 1,”19 but younger writers argued, in the words of Lou Reed (another Warhol protégé and aspiring poet), that the “only poetry of the last 20 years was and is in the ­music on the radio.” Like Pop art, he wrote, “Rock and Roll gobbled up all influences.”20 Reed overstates the case, as he well knew. Underground artists and writers—­ not just rock-­and-­roll singers—­incorporated found text into their work. As conceptual art began to emerge in the late 1960s, a tendency to dematerialize art by textualizing it coincided with avant-­garde poets’ attempts to materialize text.21 But Pop artists had been ­doing this all along. For artists such as Warhol, Oldenburg, and Ruscha, words entered artworks in ways that conflated verbal

The Age of Warhol   217

and visual images. Oldenburg wrote a Whitman-­and-­Ginsberg-­flavored manifesto in ­favor of “an art that embroils itself with the everyday crap and still comes out on top”: “I am for Kool art, 7UP art, Pepsi art, Sunshine art, 39 cents art, 15 cents art, Vatronol art, Dro-­bomb art, Vam art, Menthol art, L&M art, Ex-­lax art, Venida art, Heaven Hill art, Pamryl art, San-­o-­med art, Rx art, 9.99 art, Now art, New art, How art, Fire Sale art, Last Chance art, Only art, Diamond art, Tomorrow art, Franks art, Ducks art, Meat-­o-­rama art.”22 This series of names refers less to the a­ ctual products than to the way product names and prices and pitches appear as images in print advertising. Ruscha, who published a series of cheap, mass-­produced photobooks throughout the sixties and seventies in addition to painting words and consumer products and corporate log­os, was once asked by Warhol’s Interview magazine ­whether he considered the words in his work to be poetry. “Well, I d ­ on’t r­ eally know what that means,” he responded. “It’s a heavy word . . . ​sure they are.”23 The generic categorization ­here has less to do with literary convention than with cultural heft, as Ruscha takes “poetry” to mean the power of words to ­matter as ­matter. The materiality of Pop’s language becomes most palpable when we examine it in relation to prob­lems of media and mediation. Hal Foster usefully describes words (and other images) in Warhol’s work as “distressed,” revealing “a breakdown in language as well as in picture.” Take Superman (1961), in which the words in the thought ­bubble are partially erased so that the sound effect PUFF! (appropriated ­here with queer valences) becomes the center of the field, or Popeye (1961), in which the character’s name and figure are shown as blanks over a fragmented newspaper crossword puzzle, the “Pop” in Popeye seeming to provide a soundtrack for the blast associated with the cipher-­sailor’s swinging fist.24 Both paintings distress words in ways that equate remediation with the loss of original meanings—­but also the production of new ones. Similarly, Foster sorts Ruscha’s word-­images into categories based on institutional connotations: “subcultural argot like ‘boss’ or ‘ace,’ bureaucratic lingo like ‘heavy industry’ or ‘war surplus,’ and brand names like ‘Spam’ or ‘Buick.’ ” Such words betray administrative overseers: “hipsters, politicos, and admen, respectively—­with assorted goals of recognition and obfuscation.”25 Warhol does with commodities and mass-­mediated celebrity what Ruscha does with words: shifting the frame to reveal the institutional or ideological dynamics of “readymade” language’s original delivery. As Judith Goldman puts it, “the text that is so often the art is not meant to be jettisoned in the pro­cess of getting to meaning—it is put forth as materially imbricated with that meaning.”26 Regarding the artist

218   Ages and the Long Pres­ent

Andy Warhol, Superman (1961). © 2018 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Andy Warhol, Popeye (1961). © 2018 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. /  Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Mel Bochner, who splits the difference between conceptualism and Pop, Joanna Burton writes that language in his work serves as “the connective glue between other­wise seeming incongruent terms, such as conceptual/material.”27 This seems especially evident in the many works Bochner has produced since the late 1960s using the words “Language is not transparent,” or the more recent series (2008–­pres­ent) in which the text is simply a repetition of “Blah Blah Blah,” a clever commentary on ways we must produce the filler a medium demands. “The ‘content’ of any medium is always another medium,” Marshall McLuhan wrote, sealing his point that the medium is the message. Bochner carries McLuhan into a new c­ entury, reminding us that our preoccupation with “content-­driven” marketing and news cycles is only an extension of the world Warhol, who made his name by making commercial containers into art, understood so intuitively. The container is the content.

Empty Containers, Empty Words “In the sixties good trashing was a skill,” according to Warhol’s POPism. “Knowing how to use what somebody e­ lse ­didn’t, was a knack you could r­ eally be

The Age of Warhol   219

proud of.” POPism’s encomiums to thrift underwrite his most famous art: soup cans and grocery boxes, packing materials that, once the product within has been consumed, would presumably find themselves in a dumpster. The idea extends to Warhol’s writing: “Out of the garbage, into The Book,” Warhol’s employee Billy Name utters in the last line of a: A Novel.28 Among the many compelling ways to read Warhol’s novel, two stand out in the context of this discussion. The first riffs on the McLuhanite mantra to which I just alluded, pop­u­lar­ized by his 1964 book Understanding Media: the medium is the message.29 In this case, the remediation is the message: the book is a transcript of twenty-­four hours of recorded tape. As Craig Dworkin shows, one of the novel’s most consistent plotlines concerns its own production: “The conversations in a, what­ever the form they take, are what the microphone is ­there to pick up.”30 And so, remediating not only the characters’ conversations but also the rec­ords they play, phone calls they receive, and noises that drown out their voices or distract them, the book dramatizes the frustrations and fun of media without messages. Another way to understand a: A Novel is as frustrated durational per­for­mance: Warhol aimed for twenty-­four hours of taping, a length of time that recalls his films that last five or eight or twenty-­five hours, in most cases with exact times dictated by the amount of celluloid available to fill. From this vantage point, a is a series of sounds to fill a predetermined amount of magnetic tape. As a book—to borrow a phrase from the poet and artist Vito Acconci—­a: A Novel is “language to cover a page,” or, rather, more than 450 of them. Warhol underscores the importance of medium specificity to the New Realism or Pop in general. A film can only exist if it’s on film, and his films seem promiscuously to rec­ord what­ever came in front of the camera. Warhol made the early movies, he l­ater wrote, “just for the fun and beauty of getting down what was happening with the p ­ eople we knew,” another form of the coterie poetics pres­ent in New York School poetry and a form of thrift in its conservationist impulse. When he screened twenty-­five hours of his films as a single work, “****,” the experience “somehow made it seem more real to me (I mean, more unreal, which was actually more real) than it had when it was happening.”31 The journal Film Culture made the same point in 1964. In viewing Warhol’s work, Jonas Mekas wrote, the “­whole real­ity around us becomes differently in­ter­est­ing, and we feel like we have to begin filming every­thing anew.”32 Warhol’s poet contemporaries played with similar ideas about media and temporality. Ron Padgett attempted to replicate Warhol’s repetitive and durational aesthetic, riffing on Sleep (1963)—­five hours of the poet John Giorno sleeping—in his “Sonnet / Homage to Andy Warhol”:

220   Ages and the Long Pres­ent

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Does Padgett’s poem attempt to repicture Giorno’s “action” ideographically, or is it a tongue-­in-­cheek statement on the audience response to Warhol’s film? If the latter, does the title refer to Giorno’s or the audience’s sleep? Reprinted in Ted Berrigan’s C no. 7 (1964), the piece joined a handful of Padgett’s other poems, including another “sonnet” with Warholian overtones: Nothing in that drawer Nothing in that drawer Nothing in that drawer Nothing in that drawer Nothing in that drawer Nothing in that drawer Nothing in that drawer Nothing in that drawer Nothing in that drawer Nothing in that drawer Nothing in that drawer Nothing in that drawer Nothing in that drawer Nothing in that drawer

Padgett pokes fun at poetry (and language itself) as a container for ­human expression. Like Warhol’s Brillo boxes or Campbell’s cans, Padgett’s poem takes up space and evokes time without pretending to deliver depth (or content).

The Age of Warhol   221

Allan Kaprow’s Words, performed at Smolin Gallery, New York, Allan Kaprow, 1962. Photography by Robert McElroy. Courtesy of the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles.

The gesture is completely consistent with Warhol’s most famous statements on his work. “I ­don’t talk very much or say very much in interviews,” he said in 1966. “I’m ­really not saying anything now. If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface: of my paintings and films and me, and ­there I am. ­There’s nothing ­behind it.”33 Warhol’s depthless containers, like Padgett’s empty drawers, are visual counter­parts to John Cage’s influential statements on silence from the same period. As Cage put it in “Lecture on Nothing” (1959), “I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry, as I need it.”34 The movement from mere words to poetry ­here has more to do with need and mediation than with intrinsic meaning or even expression. Words w ­ ere words, oral and lexigraphic, but they w ­ ere poetry if required. Sounds, including the sound of words, ­didn’t have to convey anything. As Cage said elsewhere, “I love sounds, just as they are, and I have no need for them to be anything more. I d ­ on’t want sound to be psychological. I ­don’t want a sound to pretend that it’s a bucket, or that it’s

222   Ages and the Long Pres­ent

a president, or that it’s in love with another sound. I just want it to be a sound.”35 Reminding us, as Marjorie Perloff often has, that he should be taken seriously as a poet, Cage composed his 1974 piece Empty Words by altering text from Thoreau’s journals using chance methods, eventually reducing the appropriated text to fragments of syllables and thus to sounds. “I hope to let words exist, as I have tried to let sounds exist,” Cage explained of his desire to “make something other than language” from words: to break them into raw material.36 The conflation of word and sound in Cage’s ­music, like the conflation of word and image in Pop art, exemplifies the idea of content for medium’s sake, an idea that led less sanguine commentators to worry about a total loss of real­ity in a new electronic media environment. “We expect the papers to be full of news,” Daniel Boorstin wrote in 1961, but what we find are only “images” and “pseudo-­events”: occurrences, such as interviews with public figures or celebrities, staged simply to be reported on.37 Warhol embraces such emptiness, recognizing its productive pleasures. From childhood he reveled in popu­lar media’s cult of celebrity, and the celebrity interview, of course, became one of Warhol’s signature forms, both as a reticent interviewee and as a proponent of unedited (i.e., more realistic) interviews, retaining all the “ums” and “ers.” Image and real­ity, for Warhol, ­were inseparable; image was, perhaps, more real than real­ity ­because media delivered the material from which identities w ­ ere made. “Their lives became part of my movies,” Warhol recalled of his sixties hangers-on, “and of course the movies became part of their lives; ­they’d get so into them that pretty soon you ­couldn’t separate the two . . . ​and sometimes neither could they.”38

Media Are Not Transparent This theorization of performativity, like the rest of Warhol’s work, cannot be separated from questions of mediation. Specifically, it reconciles Warhol’s intermedia practice with his close attention to medium specificity. Warhol anticipates John Guillory’s insight that we “see what a medium does—­the possibilities inherent in the material form of an art—­when the same expressive or communicative contents are transposed from one medium into another. Remediation makes the medium as such vis­i­ble.”39 As Edmund White points out, Warhol used media precisely this way: “A painter paints: Andy made movies. . . . ​Painting can be defined in contrast to photography: Andy recycled snapshots. . . . ​Art is an expression of the artist’s personality, congruent with his discourse: Andy sent in his stead a look-­alike on the lecture tour.”40 In each

The Age of Warhol   223

case, the remediation—­transcription of tape, silkscreens derived from photo­ graphs, Screen Test films pretending to be photo­graphs, or the durational films he called “stillies” ­because so ­little happens—­asks what we expect from any given medium. As the novelist Lynne Tillman puts it, “Warhol’s art questioned what art was, what was expected to hang on a wall.” Similarly, Warhol’s novel asks, “What do we expect in novels, how should they be written, why do we expect them to conform to certain rules?”41 Perhaps ­because he was such an acute media theorist, Warhol has always been regarded a master of his media “image,” the concept that unnerved Boorstin most of all. Warhol’s life—­inseparable from his media personality—is sometimes said to be his greatest work. The m ­ usic critic Ellen Willis compared him in 1967 to Dylan, who also “exploited his image as a vehicle for artistic statement,” in contrast to James Dean or Marilyn Monroe, who “­were creatures, not masters, of their images.”42 This mastery of image making, the cele­bration of surfaces, makes some viewers uncomfortable with Warhol. Jameson famously found in Warhol “a new kind of flatness or depthlessness, a new kind of superficiality in the most literal sense,” which he ultimately tied to “the waning of affect in postmodern culture.” But this reading seems to miss something about Warholian affect, which was rooted, ­after all, in “liking ­things.”43 In another example of apparent discomfort with Warhol’s legacy, Don DeLillo’s characters in the 1991 novel Mao II are repeatedly unsettled by Warhol’s work. (DeLillo’s ­whole corpus engages Warhol obliquely, from his thoughts on film and consumer culture in Americana to his parody of lower Manhattan’s “neon creepies” in ­Great Jones Street to his meditations on supermarkets in White Noise.44) His character Brita Nilsson, a photographer, stumbles upon an exhibition by the Rus­sian painter Alexander Kosolapov that includes a Gorbachev portrait modeled on Warhol’s 1962 Gold Marilyn. Drawn to it precisely ­because it resembles a Warhol, Brita finds the painting deeply troubling, “more Warholish than it was supposed to be, beyond parody, homage, comment, and appropriation.” It is, she thinks, the theft of aura—­Monroe’s and Warhol’s alike. This leads her to think about her own photo of Warhol, which had been shown in a nearby gallery. Had she stolen Andy’s aura? (We might ask: Has DeLillo? Did Jameson? Both reproduce his paintings on the covers of their books.) This memory prompts an extended consideration of Warhol himself as icon: “Andy’s image on canvas, Masonite, velvet, paper-­and-­acetate, Andy in metallic paint, silk-­screen ink, pencil, polymer, gold-­leaf, Andy in wood, metal, vinyl, cotton-­and-­polyester, painted bronze, Andy on postcards and paper bags, in photomosaics, multiple exposures, dye transfers, Polaroid prints. Andy’s shooting

224   Ages and the Long Pres­ent

scar, Andy’s factory, Andy’s tourist posing in Beijing before the g­ iant portrait of Mao in the main square.” She remembers something he’d said to her on the occasion of their photo shoot: “The secret of being me is that I’m only half ­here.”45 The meditation on repetition and opacity in portraiture—of Andy’s ability to transmute himself, literally, into a distressed icon—­recalls a passage from earlier in the novel, in which the reclusive author Bill Gray also poses for Brita: Something about the occasion makes me think I’m at my own wake. Sitting for a picture is morbid business. A portrait ­doesn’t begin to mean anything ­until the subject is dead. This is the w ­ hole point. ­We’re ­doing this to create a kind of sentimental past for p ­ eople in the de­cades to come. It’s their past, their history ­we’re inventing ­here. And it’s not how I look now that ­matters. It’s how I’ll look in twenty-­five years as clothing and f­ aces change, as photo­graphs change. The deeper I pass into death, the more power­ful my picture becomes. I­ sn’t this why picture-­taking is so ceremonial? It’s like a wake. And I’m the actor made up for the laying-­out.46

Gray equates portraiture with the death of the author, yet he maintains a fantasy of total control over unborn audiences, c­ ounter to Barthes’s emphasis on the reader’s birth. By contrast, Warhol represents a person only “half ­here” to begin with, welcoming what his audience ­will bring to the encounter. For him, the death of the author is an act of self-­sacrifice, a willingness to transform himself into an empty vessel or a reflective surface and to distribute himself among consumers like a form of communion. DeLillo’s characters see the proliferation of Andy’s image as vulgar. Joe Brainard understood other­wise; he knew that Pop was about rescue and retrieval, about elevation rather than debasement. Pop was “liking ­things” enough to save them, to own them, to let them change your life: “Andy Warhol perhaps paints ideas, but if so, I sure do like the way his ideas look. Andy Warhol’s ideas look ­great! Andy Warhol paints Andy Warhols. And I like that.”47 The transubstantiation ­here makes Warhol’s name and image and ideas into one. Recall once more Warhol’s famous statement, with its Whitmanian echoes, “If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface: of my paintings and films and me, and t­here I am.”48 The second-­person address and the third-­person reference to himself suggest that his audience might need—­might want—­the everything-­and-­ nothing his meditations on media represent. Warhol imagines that “you” may “want to know all about” him, and so he offers up himself, a distressed and

The Age of Warhol   225

reflective surface, as a medium for your plea­sure. And that is poetry, as you need it. Notes 1. ​See esp. Victor Bockris, “Andy Warhol the Writer,” in Who Is Andy Warhol?, ed. Colin McCabe, Mark Francis, and Peter Wollen (London: British Film Institute and the Andy Warhol Museum, 1997), 17–22; Reva Wolf, Andy Warhol, Poetry, and Gossip in the 1960s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Lucy Mulroney’s several studies of Warhol’s books, including “Editing Andy Warhol,” Grey Room 46 (Winter 2012): 46–71; and the several excellent essays in Museum Brandhorst’s Reading Andy Warhol: Author, Illustrator, Publisher (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2013), along with the other works cited below. 2. ​The best overview is in Nina Schleif, “Carefully Unplanned: Books in Andy Warhol’s Oeuvre,” in Reading Andy Warhol, 11–77. 3. ​Jean Baudrillard, “Beyond the Vanishing Point of Art,” in Post-­Pop Art, ed. Paul Taylor (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 178. 4. ​Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” Aspen, nos. 5–6 (Fall–­Winter 1967): item 3a. 5. ​Quoted in Lucy Mulroney, “I’d Recognize Your Voice Anywhere: The Philosophy of Andy Warhol,” in Reading Andy Warhol, 278. 6. ​Howard Brick, Age of Contradiction: American Thought and Culture in the 1960s (New York: Twayne, 1998), 72. 7. ​Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, POPism: The Warhol Sixties (1980; repr., New York: Penguin, 2007), 34. 8. ​For Higgins’s concept of “intermedia” as “a dynamic interstitial space between media forms and between art and life structures,” see Hannah Higgins, Fluxus Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 91. 9. ​For impor­tant recent exceptions, see Daniel Kane, We Saw the Light: Conversations between the New American Cinema and Poetry (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2009); and Bill Brown, “[Concept / Object] [Text / Event],” ELH 81, no. 2 (Summer 2014): 521–52. 10. ​See, in par­tic­u­lar, Sally Banes, Greenwich Village 1963 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), chap. 2; and Daniel Kane, All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). 11. ​In Wolf, Andy Warhol, Poetry, and Gossip, 85. 12. ​Wolf, 81. 13. ​Lytle Shaw notes that O’Hara demonstrated a more positive view of Warhol by 1965. See Lytle Shaw, Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006), 217. 14. ​Frank O’Hara, “Personal Poem,” in Lunch Poems (San Francisco: City Light Books, 1964), 27–28. 15. ​The interview by Gene Swenson appeared in ARTnews in November 1963. G. R. Swenson, “What Is Pop Art? Answers from 8 Paint­ers, Part I,” in I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, 1962–1987, ed. Kenneth Goldsmith (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2004), 16. 16. ​Joe Brainard, “Andy Warhol: Andy Do It,” in The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard, ed. Ron Padgett (New York: Library of Amer­i­ca, 2012), 178; first published in C: A Journal of Poetry, no. 1 (Dec. 1963–­Jan. 1964). 17. ​Geoff Ward, “New York, War, and Frank O’Hara,” in Frank O’Hara Now: New Essays on the New York Poet, ed. Robert Hampson and W ­ ill Montgomery (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010), 22–23.

226   Ages and the Long Pres­ent 18. ​Bernard Brunon, “Interview with Edward Ruscha [1985],” in Leave Any Information at the Signal, by Edward Ruscha, ed. Alexandra Schwartz (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 251. 19. ​Thomas Meehan, “Public Writer No. 1?,” New York Times, Dec. 12, 1965. For a set of responses to the question “Is Bob Dylan the greatest poet in the United States t­ oday?” see Jerome B. Agel, “To the Editor,” New York Times, Dec. 26, 1965. 20. ​Lou Reed, “The View from the Bandstand: Life among the Poobahs,” Aspen, no. 3 (Dec. 1966): item 3. 21. ​Brown, “[Concept / Object] [Text / Event],” 524. 22. ​Claes Oldenburg, “I Am for . . . ​(Statement, 1961),” in Claes Oldenburg: Writing on the Side, 1956–1969, ed. Achim Hochdörfer, Maartje Oldenburg, and Barbara Schröder (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2013), 175. 23. ​Bob Colacello, “Art: An Interview with Ed Ruscha [1972],” in Ruscha, Leave Any Information at the Signal, 39. 24. ​See Bradford R. Collins and David Cowart, “Through the Looking-­Glass: Reading Warhol’s ‘Superman,’ ” American Imago 55, no. 2 (Summer 1996): 107–37. 25. ​Hal Foster, The First Pop Age (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2012), 124, 225. 26. ​Judith Goldman, “Re-­thinking ‘Non-­retinal Lit­er­a­ture’: Citation, ‘Radical Mimesis,’ and Phenomenologies of Reading in Conceptual Writing,” Postmodern Culture 22, no. 1 (Sept. 2011). Lisa Pasquariello argues that Ruscha’s word paintings reveal “a consistent urge to motivate the linguistic sign by way of foregrounding its materiality, despite—­and perhaps ­because of—­the arbitrary nature of most signifying.” See Lisa Pasquariello, “Ed Ruscha and the Language That He Used,” October 111 (Winter 2005): 105. 27. ​Goldman, “Re-­thinking ‘Non-­retinal Lit­er­a­ture,’  ” n27. 28. ​Warhol and Hackett, POPism, 82; Andy Warhol, a: A Novel (New York: Grove Press, 1998), 451. 29. ​A follow-up, The Medium Is the Massage, featured the Velvet Underground and Warhol’s multimedia Exploding Plastic Inevitable as examples of electronic culture enveloping audiences in sound and spectacle si­mul­ta­neously. See Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (New York: Bantam Books, 1967), 108–9. 30. ​Craig Dworkin, “Whereof One Cannot Speak,” Grey Room 21 (Fall 2005): 48. 31. ​Warhol and Hackett, POPism, 317. 32. ​Quoted in Douglas Crimp, “Our Kind of Movie”: The Films of Andy Warhol (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 144. 33. ​Gretchen Berg, “Andy Warhol: My True Story,” East Village Other, Nov. 1, 1966, in Goldsmith, I’ll Be Your Mirror, 90. 34. ​John Cage, “Lecture on Nothing” (1961), in Silence (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 109. 35. ​In the documentary Listening, directed by Miroslav Sebestik (1992). 36. ​Quoted in Marjorie Perloff, “The ­Music of Verbal Space,” in Poetry on and off the Page: Essays for Emergent Occasions (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 292. 37. ​Daniel Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-­events in Amer­i­ca, 50th anniversary ed. (New York: Vintage, 2012), 8. 38. ​Warhol, POPism, 227. 39. ​John Guillory, “Genesis of the Media Concept,” Critical Inquiry 36 (Winter 2010): 324. 40. ​In Andy Warhol: A Retrospective, ed. Kynaston McShine (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1989), 441. 41. ​Lynne Tillman, “The Last Words Are Andy Warhol,” Grey Room 21 (Fall 2005): 43. 42. ​Ellen Willis, “Before the Flood,” in Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock M ­ usic, ed. Nona Willis Arono­witz (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 3.

The Age of Warhol   227 43. ​Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University, 1991), 6. Jameson’s reading has been roundly critiqued by queer theorists. See, e.g., Nicholas De Villiers, Opacity and the Closet: Queer Tactics in Foucault, Barthes, and Warhol (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 147–49. 44. ​On Warhol’s and DeLillo’s “supermarket sociology,” see David J. Alworth, Site Reading: Fiction, Art, Social Form (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2015), chap. 1. 45. ​Don DeLillo, Mao II (New York: Penguin, 1992), 134–35. 46. ​DeLillo, 42. 47. ​Brainard, “Andy Warhol,” 179. 48. ​Berg, “Andy Warhol,” 90.

All of It Is Now Slavery and the Post-­black Moment in Con­temporary African American Lit­er­a­ture y o g i ta g o ya l

Con­temporary African American lit­er­a­ture names a curious entity, with l­ ittle agreement over when this distinct body of work begins, what it signifies, and how it coheres in relation to the extant canon. While most would agree that the end of the civil rights era generates new frames and paradigms, it has proven tricky to assign clear dates or to offer discrete thematic rubrics for the varied literary output of black writers since the 1970s. In the aftermath of the Black Arts Movement, t­ here is a sense that the concept of race lit­er­a­ture has changed, without much clarity about how one might assess the distance from the era of a W. E. B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, Zora Neale Hurston, or Richard Wright. The Norton Anthology of African American Lit­er­a­ture, for instance, tends to ­either emphasize continuity across historical eras (“The Vernacular Tradition”) or periodize largely by way of historical events (“The Lit­er­a­ture of Slavery and Freedom, 1746–1865,” “Harlem Re­nais­sance, 1919–1940,” “The Black Arts Era, 1960–1975”) and literary genres (“Realism, Naturalism, Modernism, 1940–1960”). Choosing simply the rubric “Lit­er­a­ture since 1975” and “The Con­temporary Period” for the second and third editions, respectively, the anthology does not forward e­ ither a genre or a historical event around which such lit­er­a­ture might be said to assem­ble.1 ­There are good reasons for such circumspection, since the sheer range of subjects, experiences, and literary styles of con­temporary African American lit­er­a­ture deters an urge to taxonomize. Moreover, if anything emerges as a unifying concern across this body of work, it is the insistence on splintering and diversifying existing notions of blackness, what we may call, following Stuart Hall, “the end of the innocent notion of the essential black subject.”2 And yet, at least since the 1990s, efforts to assign a new label to African American lit­er­a­ture and culture have rapidly proliferated, as discourses of “the New Black Aesthetic,” the “post-­soul aesthetic,” “postmodern blackness,” or, perhaps most

All of It Is Now: Slavery and the Post-black Moment   229

provocatively, “post-­blackness” have been submitted as appropriate idioms for black identity in the post–­civil rights era. Each of ­these, of necessity, connotes a politics beyond such aesthetic groupings as modernism or postmodernism.3 Each has also been hotly contested, not least ­because it is simply impossible to apply it to the variety of work that would encompass anyone from Toni Morrison to Samuel Delany to August Wilson to Suzan-­Lori Parks (to name just a few of the writers represented in the Norton Anthology). Trey Ellis’s much-­debated 1989 manifesto, “The New Black Aesthetic,” came in for critique precisely on ­these grounds. For Ellis, the New Black Aesthetic is the province of ­those he terms “cultural mulattoes”—­second-­generation bourgeois blacks like him who feel comfortable with and alienated from black and white culture equally, and who feel no need for “propagandistic positivism” or always having to deal with “white envy and self-­hate.” His oft-­quoted punch line—­“The New Black Aesthetic says you just have to be natu­ral, you d ­ on’t necessarily have to wear one”—­indicates the sense of play and freedom from prescription he wishes to highlight.4 But critics worry that such declarations not only offer no means of understanding continuing forms of racism but also elicit a conceptual fuzziness. Tera Hunter confessed to being “hard-­pressed to discern, for example, what esthetic values and commitments” artists such as “Eddie Murphy and Wynton Marsalis share in common.”5 In response, searching for a “common theme and artistic values,” Bertram Ashe theorizes the post-­soul aesthetic as driven by a relentless urge to experiment with received forms, what he terms “blaxporation.” But the case might be made for a diminishment of formal experimentation since the 1960s rather than an acceleration (as Aldon Nielson argues), making even such a capacious definition difficult to sustain.6 The same questions haunt the notion of post-­blackness, usually traced to Thelma Golden, curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem, who used the term in conjunction with a 2001 exhibition, Freestyle, to describe artists born a­ fter the civil rights de­cades who neither accept the designation of “black artist” nor shy away from the task of reconceiving what is understood as “black art.”7 Along similar lines, Touré, one of the most ardent promoters of the term, insists that he simply wants “the end of the reign of a narrow, single notion of Blackness” since post-­blackness works equally as an aesthetic manifesto and as a badge of a hybrid cultural identity, one that is as much “post-­Basquiat” as it is “post-­Biggie.”8 Their main goal is to “open up,” as Greg Tate puts it, “the entire text of blackness for fun and games.”9 Even though its advocates are careful to distinguish it from mainstream notions of a post-­racial United States or of

230   Ages and the Long Pres­ent

color blindness, as well as conservative efforts to dismiss the existence of racial in­equality, concerns linger about both the internal coherence of the category and its suggestion of the obsolescence of previous frames, as critics charge that it facilitates a neoliberal label of inclusion without equality.10 It is further unclear w ­ hether con­temporary African American lit­er­a­ture should be seen as the fruition of a long and august tradition, as the Norton suggests, or a radical breach from it. For some of its prac­ti­tion­ers, like novelist Charles Johnson, calls to acknowledge the heterogeneity of the black subject are not enough. So where Stuart Hall sought to expand the stories of the black experience in diasporic and gendered terms, Johnson advocates “the end of the black American narrative” altogether. Since 1965, Johnson claims, the black American narrative focused on the single story of “racial victimization and disenfranchisement” has become fully “ahistorical,” unable to account for the “complex and multifaceted” experiences of a p ­ eople who are “as polymorphous as the dance of Shiva.” “In the 21st ­century,” he argues, “we need new and better stories, new concepts and new vocabularies and grammar based not on the past but on the dangerous, exciting, and unexplored pres­ent.”11 Such a search for new vocabularies has generated no consensus thus far. Even as such writers as Colson Whitehead, Paul Beatty, Mat Johnson, and Percival Everett frequently announce their distance from the norms of African American lit­er­a­ture, it remains unclear what this impulse to “posterize,” as Paul Taylor terms it, means.12 In some cases, like Whitehead’s Sag Harbor (2009) or Everett’s I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009), it might simply mean being able to represent the experiences of a bourgeois black generation that benefited from the gains of the end of l­egal segregation without apology. But surely t­ hese debates over race and class have occurred before and are more fruitfully placed in relation to longer histories than seen as uniquely of the moment. Along t­ hese lines, the fact that all the aforementioned “post-­racial” writers are male certainly suggests that we might be seeing a variation on the race and gender debates of the mid-­twentieth ­century, where male writers w ­ ere associated with urban highbrow fiction while ­women ­were allied to southern pastoral. Questions occur as well ­whether such declarations, even if satirical, of “living post-­ racially” might not seem unresponsive to the urgency of an era where the post-­racial triumphalism that attended Barack Obama’s historic presidency seems rapidly depleted in the face of mass incarceration, police shootings, disparities in housing and education, a growing gap between rich and poor, and the continuous need to assert that “Black Lives M ­ atter” in a world that insists 13 on the opposite. In the rampant display of white supremacy in the streets of

All of It Is Now: Slavery and the Post-black Moment   231

Charlottesville and the halls of Donald Trump’s White House, such concerns further hollow out the stance of aesthetic play in precarious times. Periodizing the post-­black turn therefore necessarily involves not just a recognition of such po­liti­cal imperatives but an anatomy of its relation to historicist method. By taking up the relation between the post-­black and what might seem to be its polar opposite—­the neo-­slave imaginary that has been equally dominant in the past four de­cades of African American writing—­I show how the declaration of a post-­black rupture remains deeply rooted in and engaged with the very genealogies it seeks to disavow. ­After outlining the varied ways in which neo-­slave imaginaries challenge conventional notions of historicity and temporality, I dissolve the seeming binary between a declaration of the end of history and an insistence on the ongoing nature of the past by reading recent post-­black fiction that stages a volatile encounter with the neo-­slave narrative. ­Doing so enables a more careful sifting of the timelines of post-­ blackness and the productive instability of the category of con­temporary African American lit­er­a­ture. Such writers as Toni Morrison, Charles Johnson, Octavia Butler, David Bradley, Barbara Chase-­Riboud, Fred D’Aguiar, Caryl Phillips, Ishmael Reed, Gayl Jones, Sherley Anne Williams, J. California Cooper, and Edward Jones have turned time and again to the historical scene of slavery in the genre of the neo-­ slave narrative, probing the meaning of black identity by insisting on a link between past and pres­ent.14 While slavery was not a significant subject for much of twentieth-­century African American lit­er­a­ture (with the exception of such works as Arna Bontemps’s 1936 tale of rebellion, Black Thunder, and Margaret Walker’s 1966 Jubilee) ­until Alex Haley’s phenomenally successful Roots (1976), what Deborah McDowell called the “unstoppable rate” of literary production on the subject has only accelerated in recent years, predicating the very essence of black identity, community, and futurity on the recovery of the slave past.15 This substantial archive has yielded rich new ways of conceiving of history and temporality, most influentially captured in the notion of “rememory” in Morrison’s Beloved. Morrison refuses the separation of past, pres­ent, and f­ uture, insisting that “all of it is now, it is always now.” Her repre­sen­ta­tion of the ­Middle Passage of “sixty million and more” breaks all rules of grammar and syntax, and Beloved—­the slain child as ghost made flesh—­voices the experience of violent dismemberment and dislocation by claiming that “­there ­will never be a time when I am not crouching and watching ­others who are crouching too.”16 Linking a concept of black community to a temporality at a standstill, forever stuck in a moment of trauma that makes it impossible

232   Ages and the Long Pres­ent

e­ ither to move on or to turn back, Morrison imagines formerly enslaved characters consumed with “more yesterday than anybody,” each day weighted with the “serious work of beating back the past.”17 To accurately represent t­hese traumatized subjectivities, Morrison deranges the form of the novel itself, finding, in Paul Gilroy’s words, “a means to restage confrontations between rational, scientific, and enlightened Euro-­American thought and the supposedly primitive outlook of prehistorical, cultureless, and bestial African slaves.”18 To do so, Morrison has to reject the tenets of a rationalist historicism. Indeed, much subsequent writing on slavery has asserted the continuity among dif­fer­ent racial regimes—­slavery, peonage, Jim Crow, neoliberal racial capitalism, mass incarceration—to trace not just ­legal and institutional practices of ongoing systematic racial exploitation but also affective modes of grief, melancholy, anger, and injury. Such thinking has often coalesced around Saidiya Hartman’s resonant phrase “the afterlife of slavery” and its challenge to disciplinary thinking.19 Pondering the vio­lence of the archive, Hartman asks, “How does one tell impossible stories?”20 Explaining her method as a wish neither to succumb to her own desire to tell a romance rather than a tale of disfigurement and death nor to replicate the vio­lence by revisiting it, Hartman proposes a “double gesture”: “straining against the limits of the archive to write a cultural history of the captive, and, at the same time, enacting the impossibility of representing the lives of the captives precisely through the pro­cess of narration.” She insists that she intends not to “give voice to the slave” but to write “a history of an unrecoverable past . . . ​a narrative of what might have been or could have been . . . ​a history written with and against the archive.”21 In such neo-­slave narratives as Morrison’s Beloved, Charles Johnson’s ­Middle Passage, and Butler’s Wild Seed, repre­sen­ta­tions of the ghost of a child killed by her enslaved ­mother, a captured African god in the hold of a slave ship, and a vampiric being who can jump bodies similarly probe the relation between rationality and racial terror. Explaining her ambivalent relation to print culture in her prefatory note to Dessa Rose, Sherley Anne Williams echoes such efforts: “Afro-­Americans, having survived by word of mouth—­and made of that pro­cess a high art—­ remain at the mercy of lit­er­a­ture and writing; often, ­these have betrayed us.”22 For Gilroy, this is “vital work of enquiring into terrors that exhaust the resources of language amidst the debris of a catastrophe which prohibits the existence of their art at the same time as demanding its continuance.”23 In contrast to the attempts to find new names for con­temporary African American lit­er­a­ture, such accounts argue not only for continuity but also for a collapse of discrete categories of past, pres­ent, and ­future.

All of It Is Now: Slavery and the Post-black Moment   233

What seemingly distinguishes ­these two developments—­the declaration of post-­blackness and the insistence on neo-­slavery—is their relation to history: the former announcing a radical break in the pres­ent moment, the latter revealing continuity. For t­ hose who turn to slavery to explain current racial subordination, any declaration of post-­racialism is necessarily inimical to racial pro­gress. And for advocates of post-­blackness, slavery can only appear as something to leave b ­ ehind. Indeed, Wahneema Lubiano, interviewed by Touré, explains the very meaning of post-­blackness in relation to a rejection of historical trauma: “Post-­Black is what it looks like when ­you’re no longer caught by your trauma about racism and the history of Black ­people in the United States.”24 And yet, even though it may be immediately clear that the discourses of post-­blackness and neo-­slavery render each other incoherent, a number of self-­consciously “post-­black” writers return to the scene of slavery, mining it for their most biting critiques of ongoing regimes of race and racialism. To do so, they choose aesthetic techniques associated with postmodernism—­ irreverence, role-­playing, linguistic play, farce, and surreal juxtapositions—as often to explore the absurdity of American racism as to debunk the solemnity of a homogenizing black nationalist approach. Leaving b ­ ehind reverence for tradition, conceptions of a unitary black community, or injunctions that black art must further black pro­gress, such writers stage a collision of post-­black aesthetics with neo-­slave imperatives. But where neo-­slave narratives by such writers as Morrison, Butler, Chase-­Riboud, Williams, D’Aguiar, Phillips, and Bradley theorize trauma, resurrect ghosts as symbols of unresolved issues, debate the possibility of citizenship, imagine new forms of subjectivity and intimacy, and map a crisis in print culture, t­ hese other writers seem to be d ­ oing something more destructive, or at least less reconstructive. For Percival Everett, Alice Randall, James McBride, Bernardine Evaristo, Paul Beatty, Mat Johnson, and Suzan-­Lori Parks, the turn to slavery is no longer about righting historical wrongs, recovering a usable past, conserving memory, or commemorating loss. McBride, for instance, concocts John Brown’s abolitionist crusade as a rousing and farcical adventure in The Good Lord Bird (2013), where Brown and Frederick Douglass appear as eccentric and sometimes lecherous figures, mined for comedy, pathos, and satire rather than veneration. Akin to such literary iconoclasm are the efforts of other media figures: the comics Key and Peele debating who’s stronger on the auction block; the provocative artist Kara Walker creating a massive sugar-­coated installation of a black w ­ oman as sphinx in a former sugar factory; or Dave Chappelle, offering a series of outtakes from Roots, playing the slave and then breaking the fourth wall of theater and

234   Ages and the Long Pres­ent

becoming himself. Walker, in par­tic­u­lar, has prompted controversy as her silhouettes take up disturbing scenes of life on the slave plantation and seemingly proffer them for fetishistic and voy­eur­is­tic consumption. In her defense, Touré argues that she can refuse to “pres­ent slaves and massas and their families in typically heroic and villainous roles” ­because of our historical remove from slavery. Conceding that no artist would display a similar irreverence about Hurricane Katrina, Touré believes that the “math of tragedy plus time equals comedy.”25 Most critical accounts have situated such polemical works in relation to their rebellion against the strictures of black nationalism from the 1960s and 1970s. But I would argue that longer and more uncertain timelines may be constructed for their satirical proj­ects. We might, for instance, trace a first cycle of neo-­slave narratives (Roots, Jubilee, Beloved) that reshapes the politics of respectability and uplift, challenging black nationalist notions of re­sis­tance and community by revisiting the slave past in a New Historicist vein of redemption. A second cycle—­perhaps the heirs to a provocative and irreverent figure like Ishmael Reed or, even further back, a George Schuyler—­might then be identified that traffics primarily in modes of negation and nihilism, the grotesque and the corrosive. Their revisiting of slavery throws into doubt not only liberal notions of pro­gress or racial harmony but also the very definition of black art and its relation to racial politics and racial history. Whereas the customary origin story of the post-­black is in the black nationalist moment and the backlash to it, tracing other lines of descent exposes an artistic chafing against the expectation that African American lit­er­a­ture should always be tied to protest and uplift, strictures that have dogged the body of work from the era of slavery itself. Such a genealogy exposes the claims of a rupture in the con­ temporary era to be rooted in a disavowal of the complex ways in which past negotiations of such constraints on African American lit­er­a­ture continue to shadow and shape con­temporary efforts to imagine new relationships between aesthetics and politics. Such reckoning is especially urgent ­because most established histories of African American lit­er­a­ture root it in slavery. Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s influential notion of signifying relies on a strong sense of continuity between past and pres­ent, as genres like the folk tale morph into the urban blues, which themselves provide a template for rap and hip-­hop.26 His trope of the “talking book” derived from eighteenth-­century slave narratives further frames the entire canon of African American lit­er­a­ture in the Norton Anthology, as Gates and Valerie Smith contend that “just as the eighteenth-­century slave narrators

All of It Is Now: Slavery and the Post-black Moment   235

revised the trope of the talking book, writers in the black tradition have repeated and revised figures, tropes, and themes in prior works, leading to formal links in a chain of tradition that connects the slave narratives to autobiographical strategies employed a full c­ entury l­ ater in works such as Richard Wright’s Black Boy, Claude Brown’s Manchild in the Promised Land, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” Robert Stepto also argues, in a foundational account, that “classic texts” of twentieth-­century black lit­er­a­ture must be grounded in the slave narrative, with the quest for freedom and literacy serving as the single canonical story or pre-­generic myth of the black tradition.27 Many of the canonical accounts of early black lit­er­a­ture by such critics as William Andrews, Dickson Bruce, and Frances Smith Foster demonstrate the close connection among autobiography, the slave narrative, and early black fiction.28 Recently, however, a number of scholars have begun to argue against such connections between past and pres­ent racisms, especially by critiquing the ubiquity of slavery as a mechanism to return a sense of community and po­ liti­cal possibility in the fractured pres­ent. Many of ­these objections have turned to Beloved, seen as symptomatic of a larger New Historicist “desire to speak to the dead”—­a desire that turns continuity with the past into identification.29 Such melancholy historicism is deeply indebted to Walter Benjamin’s “­Theses on the Philosophy of History,” which outlines a vision of historical materialism that involves the historian not just recognizing “the way it ­really was” but also “seiz[ing] hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.”30 As Kenneth Warren points out, t­ hese words may be particularly appealing ­today ­because they “posit a dynamic relation between past and pres­ent that almost obliterates history, thereby casting the present-­day historian in the role of potential hero, or even freedom fighter, on behalf of a past that almost magically becomes our con­temporary in terms of what it needs or demands from us.”31 The risk of such a relation to history is that con­temporary forms of power may go unnoticed in ­favor of past violations, or the shifting nature of power may be obscured by an emphasis on slavery as the defining crucible of con­temporary black identity. But even if we consent to such injunctions against melancholic historicism, it is still difficult to understand the challenges posed by post-­black lit­er­a­ture, both to conventional genealogies of African American lit­er­a­ture rooted in slavery and to t­ hose that argue for seeing the past as a closed book. In fact, post-­black neo-­slave fictions (an awkward and oxymoronic phrase, to be sure) reveal the impossibility of drawing neat bound­aries across distinct approaches to the past.

236   Ages and the Long Pres­ent

Nowhere is this more clearly allegorized than in Percival Everett’s novel I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009), as the wealthy protagonist, named Not Sidney, on a journey across the United States from Atlanta to California keeps falling into the plots of Sidney Poitier films, including Band of Angels (1957), Lilies of the Field (1963), In the Heat of the Night (1967), and Buck and the Preacher (1972).32 Neither the protagonist’s im­mense wealth nor his philosophical attitude to his predicament can keep him safe in Georgia or Alabama or Los Angeles, as he is twice arrested for the s­ imple crime of being black. When the white f­ amily becomes black in Everett’s reworking of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), Everett’s satirical point is clear: in the post–­Jim Crow era, the presence of a black ­middle class requires negotiating the internal dynamics of class in addition to ongoing voyeurism and patronage on the part of whites. But when Not Sidney becomes a slave in a dream sequence that is rendered in troubling realist fashion, confusions persist. The novel prompts a desire for a critique based on the same assumptions about the relationship between black lit­er­a­ture and black politics that it works hard to undermine, not least through a metafictional parody of a professor “Percival Everett.” Sidney Poitier thus serves both as a yardstick against which the protagonist is mea­sured and found wanting and as a placeholder for a regime of racial repre­sen­ta­tion tied to bourgeois notions of respectability, uplift, and dignity. Moreover, the novel clearly mocks the reader for falling into the critical trap of reading for race, even as it enacts familiar racial scenarios that have become stock images of oppression in the twentieth ­century. In ­doing so, Everett allegorizes post-­black writing itself, tied to a history of race and repre­sen­ta­tion it can neither dismiss nor embrace. Although post-­black artists see themselves as firmly heralding a new era, in many ways they strug­gle with the same questions faced by writers of neo-­ slave narratives: how to relate past to pres­ent and ­whether to reveal continuities across racial regimes or to destabilize temporality itself. Both sets of texts—­the post-­black and the neo-­slave—­end up facing interrelated challenges of generating critique in the face of the constant co-­optation of difference, in an era of state-­sponsored multiculturalism still awash in antiblack vio­lence. Since slavery can become consumable as a spectacle of suffering that reaffirms the assumptions of the viewer or returns a comforting narrative of racial pro­gress, satire becomes a useful weapon that can challenge the sentimentalism of abolition or the desires of recuperation. To do so, the very object of many con­temporary black fictions becomes the commodification of the black text itself. ­Because slavery turned ­human beings into property, fashioning a self

All of It Is Now: Slavery and the Post-black Moment   237

through seizing the tools of writing clearly marked the path of re­sis­tance for the antebellum black writer. Con­temporary black writers repeat this pursuit of textuality, indicting present-­day racial regimes by centering the consumption and fetishization of the black text. Such an emphasis not only joins the post-­black to the neo-­slave but also recalls foundational debates in earlier moments of literary history—­from Douglass’s strug­gles with Garrison to the debates among Wright, Baldwin, and Ellison over the status of black fiction as protest. An origin story of a post-­black timeline would thus need to move beyond proclaiming rupture to gain greater historical texture and depth. ­Doing so would entail the recognition that t­ here is much that relates what seem to be diametrically opposed tendencies, as neo-­slave narratives also splinter unifying ideas of black identity and community; theorize new ways of challenging notions of agency, presence, and re­sis­tance; stage unresolvable ethical dilemmas to provoke debate; and showcase self-­conscious meditations on the nature of black art. Everett’s 2001 novel, Erasure, brilliantly rebuts such ongoing commandments about the true nature of black art by setting the questions of what readers want to read, what publishers deign to publish, and what prize committees choose to reward against the desires of the black writer who seeks aesthetic freedom.33 Everett bluntly stages the quandaries that attend the production and reception of con­temporary African American lit­er­a­ture by satirizing racist expectations of audiences, academics, and publishers alike. The protagonist and first-­person narrator of the novel, a writer named Thelonius Monk Ellison, declares his fatigue with the continuous demand from publishers for “true, gritty real stories of black life” instead of the “retellings of Euripides and parodies of French poststructuralists” he prefers to write (like Everett himself). Ellison also confesses that he does not “believe in race” or even think much about it, except when made to feel “guilt for not thinking about it.”34 In highlighting the pernicious ways in which black lit­er­a­ture is not allowed to be lit­er­a­ture, but must be ethnography or protest, Everett revives—in grotesque parody—­a long-­standing debate about black art, most clearly a flash point in the mid-­twentieth ­century and the locus of debates among Wright, Hurston, Ellison, and Baldwin. Such a debate also reaches further back in time—to the avowed moment of origin of African American lit­er­a­ture in the era of slavery in the compromised form of the slave narrative, as writing was asked to be proof of the narrator’s humanity. Consistently invoking the past even as it tries to sketch out the ­future, Everett’s novel highlights the many contradictions attendant on identifying a single line of continuity in the African American literary tradition, probing both origins and endings as appropriate bookends for a contested narrative.

238   Ages and the Long Pres­ent

In Erasure, no ­simple relation to the past or pres­ent is discernible. The more Everett’s prickly author, Ellison, declares himself a new kind of writer, the more he finds himself in the clutches of a very old racism. Browsing a Borders bookstore, for instance, he is disturbed to find his novels not in the Lit­er­a­ture or Con­temporary Fiction section, but in African American Studies. Repeatedly told to emulate the success of Juanita Mae Jenkins’s We’s Lives in da Ghetto, Ellison feels on reading the first few lines of the book that he has traveled through time: “It was like strolling through an antique mall, feeling good, liking the sunny day and then turning the corner to find a display of watermelon-­eating, banjo-­playing darkie carvings and a pyramid of Mammy cookie jars.”35 Deciding to respond to such demands for gritty portraits of black life in the inner city, chained to a history of racist minstrelsy, Ellison composes My Pafology, by Stagg R. Leigh, chock-­full of vicious ste­reo­types of black pathology, with typical dialogue strings that read like this: “Fuck you,” he say. “Fuck you,” I say. “Fuck you,” he say. “Fuck you,” I say. “Yo mama still fat?”36 To Ellison’s surprise, My Pafology is a smashing success, earning an advance of $600,000, movie rights for $3 million, an endorsement by the ­Kenya Dunston book club, and even a prestigious book award handed out by the National Book Association. A Random House editor calls the work “true to life,” “magnificently raw and honest,” and “the kind of book that they ­will be reading in high schools thirty years from now.” A review in the New York Times appreciates the life of “sheer animal existence” in the “down-­and-­dirty-­gritty” novel, as “the ghetto comes to life in ­these pages,” showing that “it’s a black thang.” Ellison can only conclude, “I was a sellout.”37 Moreover, given the fact that Everett includes the entire eighty-­page text of My Pafology (subsequently renamed, simply, Fuck) within Erasure, he clearly wants his readers to recognize their own investments in such voy­eur­ is­tic portraits of pathologized blackness. Indeed, some readers of Erasure have confessed that they found the novel within a novel fast, clever, and funny, and some publishers even wanted to market it as exemplary African American fiction, more than proving Everett’s satirical point about the vicious straitjacket of the au­then­tic black experience for black writers.38 It is worth noting that the rest of Erasure covers dif­fer­ent ground—­relating Ellison’s efforts to

All of It Is Now: Slavery and the Post-black Moment   239

manage the changing needs of his ­family, including a ­mother with Alzheimer’s, a dead ­father whose letters reveal an old love affair with a British nurse during the Korean War, a gay ­brother who comes out in Arizona, and an earnest ­sister who administers abortions to needy w ­ omen in Washington, DC, and is shot for it by right-­wing zealots. This more or less realist narrative thus surfaces repressed histories while the ghetto novel assumes an endless pres­ ent, as the script of black abjection fulfills its predetermined narrative arc with no relief. When Ellison sits down to write his satire, not only does he stare at the photo­ graph of his nemesis, Juanita Mae Jenkins, on Time magazine, but he also channels the entire canon of African American writing: “I remembered passages of Native Son and The Color Purple and Amos and Andy” seemingly in sync with “­people in the street shouting dint, ax, fo, screet and fahvre!”39 In a classic postmodern stance, the novel is made up of bits and pieces of earlier narratives, from minstrelsy to naturalist protest fiction to lyrical southern melodrama, all presented as a collage. But even as it departs from previously accepted protocols for writing race fiction, it has to keep returning to previous genres of black writing—­from the protest fiction of a midcentury Wright to the demand for authenticity enshrined in first-­person nineteenth-­century slave narratives and novels of passing from the early twentieth c­ entury. In Erasure, ­these seemingly superseded genres return in the enclosed “ghetto novel” to meet the demands of readers and publishers who continue to insist on a single type of black narrative. As Darryl Dickson-­Carr puts it, “ ‘Race’ and ‘Blackness’ thus become parts of tautologies; ‘ghetto’ fiction is ‘black’ b ­ ecause ‘blackness’ is a ‘ghetto’ fiction, always ready for consumption.”40 The genre of the slave narrative was likewise bounded by the presence of white editors authenticating, framing, and validating the black narrator’s prose, insisting on its veracity—­ what John Sekora termed a black message in a white envelope.41 Ellison, the metafictional postmodern author, successfully passes as a novelist of the street, even meeting a Hollywood producer in the persona of Stagg Leigh, “who is the ‘real ­thing’ ” ­because “he killed a man with the leather awl of a Swiss army knife.”42 For Ellison, ­there is no doubt that Fuck is a racist text, without any aesthetic value, but for the fact that the hyperbolic reception it receives transforms it into something like a work of art for him, requiring him to embrace the mask, become the ste­reo­type, and perform a kind of identity with his protagonist. Van Go Jenkins (Fuck’s narrator) and Ellison consequently become one, and Stagg R. Leigh and Everett become doubles as well, making it clear that ­there is no escape from past objectification in the pres­ent.

240   Ages and the Long Pres­ent

In the end, Erasure shows that ­there is no alternative to the demand for a problematic authenticity, nor any room for postmodern metafiction. All that Everett can do effectively is stage both stories together—as Ellison’s realist middle-­class narrative frames, insults, and refuses to authenticate the enclosed “ghetto” narrative. In showing his absurd fiction being read as truth, Everett clearly questions ­whether parody and satire are even pos­si­ble, let alone successful, in a climate of pervasive racism, which rapidly incorporates all critique and resells it as a commodity. Conducting an anatomy of writing from a range of perspectives—­black and white readers, publishers, literary critics at academic conferences, writers and judges of literary prizes—­Erasure offers no hope at all for the kinds of experimental metafictions Ellison wishes to write. But in its juxtaposition to its radical other—­the “ghetto” novel—­Everett embeds a dense history of the expectations and demands that have s­ haped the African American canon, as well as the inventive strategies used by writers to combat them. In d ­ oing so, he not only adumbrates the burden of the past on the con­temporary black novel but also creates a series of openings that enable a dif­fer­ent periodization of con­temporary African American lit­er­a­ture, everywhere irradiated by past forms, but not captive to them. Notes 1. ​Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Valerie Smith, eds., The Norton Anthology of African American Lit­er­a­ture (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014). 2. ​Stuart Hall, “New Ethnicities,” in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed. David Morley and Kuan-­Hsing Chen (London: Routledge, 1996), 443. 3. ​See Nelson George, Post-­soul Nation: The Explosive, Contradictory, Triumphant, and Tragic 1980s as Experienced by African Americans (Previously Known as Blacks and Before That Negroes) (New York: Penguin, 2005); and Mark Anthony Neal, Soul Babies: Black Popu­lar Culture and the Post-­soul Aesthetic (New York: Routledge, 2002). 4. ​Trey Ellis, “The New Black Aesthetic,” Callaloo 12, no. 1 (Winter 1989): 235, 238, 236. 5. ​Tera Hunter, “ ‘It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World’: Specters of the Old Renewed in Afro-­American Culture and Criticism,” Callaloo 12, no. 1 (Winter 1989): 247. 6. ​Bertram D. Ashe, “Theorizing the Post-­soul Aesthetic: An Introduction,” African American Review 41, no. 4 (Winter 2007): 609–23; Aldon Lynn Nielsen, “Foreword: Preliminary Postings from a Neo-­Soul,” African American Review 41, no. 4 (Winter 2007): 601–8. 7. ​Thelma Golden, introduction to Freestyle exhibition cata­logue (New York: Studio Museum in Harlem, 2001), 14–15. 8. ​Touré, Who’s Afraid of Post-­blackness? What It Means to Be Black Now (New York: F ­ ree Press, 2011), xvii. 9. ​Greg Tate, Flyboy in the Buttermilk: Essays on Con­temporary Amer­i­ca (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 200. 10. ​Houston A. Baker Jr. and K. Merinda Simmons, The Trou­ble with Post-­blackness (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).

All of It Is Now: Slavery and the Post-black Moment   241 11. ​Charles Johnson, “The End of the Black American Narrative,” American Scholar 77, no. 3 (Summer 2008): 37, 38, 37, 42. 12. ​Paul C. Taylor, “Post-­black Old Black,” African American Review 41, no. 4 (Winter 2007): 625–40. 13. ​Colson Whitehead, “The Year of Living Postracially,” New York Times, Nov. 3, 2009. 14. ​See Bernard Bell, The Afro-­American Novel and Its Tradition (Amherst: University of Mas­ sa­chu­setts Press, 1987); and Ashraf Rushdy, Neo-­slave Narratives: Studies in the Social Logic of a Literary Form (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). 15. ​Deborah McDowell, “Negotiating between Tenses: Witnessing Slavery a­ fter Freedom—­ Dessa Rose,” in Slavery and the Literary Imagination, ed. Deborah McDowell and Arnold Rampersad (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 144. 16. ​Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Vintage, 1988), 43, 248. 17. ​Morrison, 322, 86. 18. ​Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 220. 19. ​Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your ­Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008), 6. 20. ​Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 26 (June 2008): 10. 21. ​Hartman, Lose Your ­Mother, 26, 12. 22. ​Sherley Anne Williams, Dessa Rose (New York: Quill, 1986), 5. 23. ​Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 218. 24. ​Touré, Who’s Afraid of Post-­blackness?, 21. 25. ​Touré, 34, 38. 26. ​Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-­American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). 27. ​Gates and Smith, Norton Anthology of African American Lit­er­a­ture, xliv; Robert Stepto, From B ­ ehind the Veil: A Study of Afro-­American Narrative (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991). 28. ​William Andrews, To Tell a ­Free Story: The First ­Century of Afro-­American Autobiography, 1760–1865 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986); Dickson D. Bruce Jr., The Origins of African American Lit­er­a­ture, 1680–1865 (Charlottesville: University Press of ­Virginia, 2001); Frances Smith Foster, Witnessing Slavery: The Development of Antebellum Slave Narratives (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994). 29. ​Walter Benn Michaels, “ ‘You Who Never Was ­There’: Slavery and the New Historicism, Deconstruction and the Holocaust,” Narrative 4, no. 1 (Jan. 1996): 6. 30. ​Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 255. 31. ​Kenneth Warren, What Was African American Lit­er­a­ture? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 82. In a similar vein, Stephen Best questions such melancholic longings, tracking Morrison’s own shift from the politics of melancholy enshrined in Beloved to ­those of mourning outlined in A Mercy, ultimately urging the field to shift away from staking a sense of ethical possibility on the recuperation of the slave past. See Stephen Best, “On Failing to Make the Past Pres­ent,” Modern Language Quarterly 73, no. 3 (Sept. 2012): 453–74. 32. ​Percival Everett, I Am Not Sidney Poitier (Minneapolis: Graywolf, 2009). 33. ​Percival Everett, Erasure (Minneapolis: Graywolf, 2001). 34. ​Everett, 2. 35. ​Everett, 29. 36. ​Everett, 68. 37. ​Everett, 136, 260, 160. 38. ​Everett has said that Doubleday offered to publish a paperback edition as the inaugural imprint of a new series of African American writing called Harlem Moon, an offer Everett turned

242   Ages and the Long Pres­ent down, wondering, “Did they read it?” See Ben Ehrenreich, “Invisible Man,” LA Weekly, Nov. 27, 2002. 39. ​Everett, Erasure, 61. 40. ​Darryl Dickson-­Carr, “Afterword: From Pilloried to Post-­soul: The ­Future of African American Satire,” in Post-­soul Satire: Black Identity a­ fter Civil Rights, ed. Derek C. Maus and James J. Donahue (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014), 272. 41. ​John Sekora, “Black Message / White Envelope: Genre, Authenticity, and Authority in the Antebellum Slave Narrative,” Callaloo 32 (Summer 1987): 482–515. 42. ​Everett, Erasure, 282.

Propaganda and the Movement of American Literary History russ castronovo

American literary history would be nothing without dates. The significance of American lit­er­a­ture is often pegged to historical signposts, a tendency confirmed by the fact that “American literary history,” an endeavor that also serves as title for the flagship journal in the field, provides the umbrella for virtually all manner of approaches to the novels, poems, essays, and other works clustered around the United States. As a literary critic—­excuse me, I mean as a literary historian—­I would feel naked without my trusty parentheses that allow me to write “Moby-­Dick (1851)” and thereby assert, by implication, that t­ here is some weighty historical stuff about an impending civil war g­ oing on in a novel about whaling. So, too, this default move of “Text X (date)” anchors interpretation with social real­ity as a reference point, lest our readings of American lit­er­a­ture become too speculative, anachronistic, or presentist. But it is worth asking ­whether this anchor might also be dragging down American lit­er­a­ture, keeping it tethered to the shoals of the past by limiting its ability to speak to historical conjunctures that lie outside its moment. The interpretative significance of American literary works is often implicitly tied to chronological reminders, such as that Common Sense was written in 1776 just as in­de­pen­dence was brewing, or that ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published in book form in 1852 just as the sectional crisis over slavery reached new heights of intensity. This sense of “in-­ness” squarely locates American lit­er­a­ture in and as history, an implicit justification of its relevance and consequence. Even as it is reassuring to ground the books we read and assign to students by placing them in a moment, this pinpointing also has the effect of sticking ­those books in the past. Dates can inadvertently serve as a sign of datedness. American lit­er­a­ture continues beyond its moment of production and publication, as the writings of Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Willa Cather have for scholars of gay and lesbian lit­er­a­ture and queer studies, or as the work of

244   Ages and the Long Pres­ent

Herman Melville did for a generation of critics during the Cold War.1 The ability of American lit­er­a­ture to leave its initial temporal location, to break ­free of the parenthetical and propel itself forward in time, suggests its kinetic and generative properties. Texts move: they roll off printing presses and change hands; they are placed on shelves and retrieved; they are returned or lost; they are adapted and remediated. And when they move, books no longer stand alone but instead come to occupy a range of positions across a swath of literary history that variously has been described as a shifting communications cir­cuit, crunched with the tools of big data, and approached as comparative American studies.2 One name for books whose significance allows them to circulate across space and time is lit­er­a­ture. Another is propaganda. Thinking about the close and often vexed relationship between lit­er­a­ture and propaganda can help foster a conversation about resisting the imperatives of “in-­ness” and opening up the field of American lit­er­a­ture to the meanings of movement, dissemination, and, above all, propagation that have been hiding in plain sight. What follows is a meditation on the proximity of American lit­er­a­ture to propaganda that, appropriately enough, moves back and forth among abolitionist lit­er­a­ture, Progressive-­era writing, a papal bull of 1622, and pamphlets of the American Revolution. In other words, this essay is all over the place. My hope is that the form ­here ­will echo the content—­which is precisely a core insight in conceptualizing propaganda as a form that moves. The emphasis on propaganda and lit­er­a­ture, especially as the slippage between the two challenges some familiar timelines of American lit­er­a­ture, is not about categorizing certain works of American lit­er­a­ture as somehow too blatantly po­liti­cal or partisan but rather about tracking their propagation across time and space.

No American novelist better captured the vital importance of movement to lit­er­a­ture than the author of The Jungle, who in 1904 jumped down from a railroad car as it pulled into a downtown Chicago station and announced, “Hello! I’m Upton Sinclair. And I’ve come ­here to write the ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin of the ­Labor Movement.”3 For John Reed writing a de­cade ­later in Ten Days That Shook the World, “­here” would be a traktir, or Moscow tavern, during the Rus­sian Revolution that was fondly known as “­Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”4 “­Here” is of course a mobile concept, one that travels easily with Sinclair and Reed across time and space. Stowe’s galvanizing—as well as polarizing—­novel represents the paradigmatic instance of a deeply politicized and emotive text that has circu-

Propaganda and the Movement of Literary History   245

lated within a “spectrum of modes and genres, across print and per­for­mance, in which national histories are translated and compared as models of other nations’ histories,” as Susan Gillman has shown.5 The bluster b ­ ehind Sinclair’s comparison both relies on and produces an uncomfortable shift within the category of the literary itself, suggesting that what is often heralded as protest lit­er­a­ture bleeds into descriptions of propaganda. For the author of The Jungle, it makes just as much sense to locate Stowe’s novel in 1904 as it does for the literary historian to write “­Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852).” This awkward conjoining of dates is not without risks, however, since the conflation effaces the very real differences between black slaves and white workers, not to mention that Sinclair’s novel played upon age-­old white prejudices with its repre­sen­ta­tion of southern blacks as strikebreakers. As we ­will see, propaganda is frequently the problematic situation of American lit­er­a­ture. That assertion is neither an indictment nor a dismissal. Instead, to suggest the closeness of lit­er­a­ture to propaganda is to take account of lit­er­a­ture’s dynamic properties, its ability to circulate, to spread, to influence, to move. W ­ hether it is the social climbing of Horatio Alger’s boy heroes or the drifting of Mark Twain’s Huck and Jack Kerouac’s Sal Paradise, movement is heavi­ly thematized within the American novel. In entangling American lit­er­a­ture with propaganda, I am suggesting a dif­fer­ent emphasis on movement, one that pays attention to the structures, networks, and lines of affiliation that spark the circulation, conveyance, and propulsion—­indeed, the propagation—of books and other materials across public spheres. ­Doing so requires some heavy revision, not just to the aesthetic and po­liti­cal princi­ples associated with the field of American lit­er­a­ture but also to the understanding of propaganda itself. Propaganda in the twentieth ­century became a dirty word, denoting a type of discourse that may be bound up with an e­ nemy’s communications but never with one’s own literary traditions. The negative association between propaganda and deception is a product of recent history, growing out of the media distortions and jingoism that stirred up support for the US entry into World War I and l­ ater reached horrific proportions during the era of the Nazi Reich. Prior to being seen as a force that warps public opinion, propaganda enjoyed a more neutral meaning and, if anything, suggested a type of activism associated with Progressive reformers and their pre­de­ces­sors. Abolitionists produced propaganda, as did suffragists, medical reformers, and religious proselytizers.6 The fact that antebellum southerners successfully passed a spate of laws prohibiting the circulation of antislavery materials and that the US Congress

246   Ages and the Long Pres­ent

effectively abided a gag rule that precluded the discussion of abolition is ample evidence that the authors in American lit­er­a­ture courses, such as Frederick Douglass, Lydia Maria Child, William Wells Brown, and especially David Walker, just to name a few, saw themselves more readily as propagandists than litterateurs. Southern writers pushed back with The Planter’s Northern Bride, ­Uncle Robin in His Cabin in V ­ irginia, and Tom without One in Boston, and other counterstrokes, perhaps leading Ralph Waldo Emerson to observe that the “propagandism of slavery” also had its currency north of the Mason-­Dixon line, which was not unexpected in a country where the traffic in ­human beings was inextricable from national origins.7 The dissemination of ideas could be as true as the South’s rosy novels about slavery w ­ ere false. In Nature, Emerson sought to draw a deeper faith from the simplicity of observation: “throw a stone into the stream, and the circles that propagate themselves are the beautiful type of all influence.” If the hope was that the “natures of Justice, Truth, Love, Freedom” could thus be transmitted across ever-­widening spheres, the pragmatic approach was to see lit­er­a­ture and other media, not the least of which are Emerson’s essay itself and his activities on the lyceum cir­cuit, as mechanisms of propagation.8 A focus on propaganda reveals how meaning is bound up with movement. Just as we might want to check the default impulse of anchoring a text in a moment, it is equally impor­tant to resist lavishing attention on what is in the text—­the stuffing, the innards, the content—to the exclusion of examining how a book, pamphlet, newspaper, or broadside spreads and circulates. What impels it across the printscape? Alternatively, what ­causes it to gather dust on the shelf? The manner in which a novel is taken up (or put down) is just as meaningful as any content between its covers. The content of lit­er­a­ture does not exist apart from its modes of transmission as propaganda.9 David Walker understood perfectly how inseparable dissemination was from the content of his radical antislavery message. Handed to mari­ners visiting port cities along the Eastern Seaboard, sewn into the linings of the used clothing he sold near the wharves of Boston Harbor, and sent surreptitiously through the mails, Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World attained incendiary meaning precisely b ­ ecause within a few weeks of its publication it was found circulating as far south as Savannah, Georgia, to the obvious consternation of slaveholders. While visions about “the destruction of the oppressors” ­were unsettling enough, what was truly disturbing for southern authorities was the

Propaganda and the Movement of Literary History   247

prospect that such ideas w ­ ere being widely disseminated.10 Reprisals followed swiftly in states such as Georgia and North Carolina, where mea­sures ­were enacted to prohibit slaves from working in printshops and to keep black sailors from coming ashore lest they be carriers of this or other specimens of abolitionist lit­er­a­ture. What’s written in Walker’s Appeal, its content, is s­ haped by the urgent awareness that its impact lies in circulation: “It is expected that all coloured men, ­women and ­children . . . ​of ­every nation, language and tongue ­under heaven, w ­ ill try to procure a copy of the Appeal and read it, or get someone to read it to them, for it is designed particularly for them.” The exceptional feature of this piece of lit­er­a­ture is that it is “designed” for an environment of enforced illiteracy. It comes with its own advisory to amplify its message by adapting and remediating its content from printed to spoken word, from a small set of educated readers to a potentially larger body of listeners. Its ingenious design continues with sentences that ask ­whether the Lord ­will “publish your [white Americans’] secret crimes on the ­house top.” As opposed to ­human representatives of the divinity who often seemed more invested in throwing a veil over the horrors of American slavery, the true redeemer of Walker’s Appeal becomes the book itself. Without doubt, its message is disconcerting to both northern and southern whites, but the sheer fact of the book’s existence, which is subject to “receiving and reading,” to being “found,” and containing its own “very strict commandments” that it be communicated to o ­ thers, is the real cause for alarm. The design is for a book that—to draw on the allusive language that Walker put to power­ful effect—­moves like “a thief in the night” and “­will hurl tyrants and dev­ils into atoms.” Its inventiveness even extends to par­tic­u­lar bits of moveable type that make up the text’s composition. The use of capitalization, italics, brackets, exclamation points, and pointed index fin­gers or manicules to highlight passages and emphasize accusations, all of which constitute the “radical typography” of Walker’s Appeal, tie the ­matter of the text to its spread and propagation.11 The design of the book as propaganda is calculated to ensure its dissemination across time and space. In presenting his pamphlet as an instrument of divine revelation, Walker anticipated Stowe’s claim that her ­great antislavery epic was written not by her but by God. To be sure, the ­matter of propagation has long been undertaken as the Lord’s work. As part of its mission to spread the word of God to the New World, the Vatican in 1622 convened the Congregatio de Propaganda Fide to offset the pace of the Reformation and, in par­tic­u­lar, to encourage the

248   Ages and the Long Pres­ent

spread of Catholicism in the Amer­i­cas. This agenda was challenged by the Anglican Church, which soon had its own Society for the Propagation of the Gospel operating in the British colonies. Neither Catholics nor ­those who had left the fold viewed their activities as promoting anything less than the truth. As Siegfried Kracauer would ­later ask in a dif­fer­ent context that nonetheless still speaks of redemption, “Is not truth the best propaganda weapon?”12 It makes perfect sense, then, that ministers associated with the Anglican Church in Amer­ic­ a, such as Samuel Seabury, Charles Inglis, and Myles Cooper, led the counterattack against the American Revolution by publishing their own spirited rebuttals to the likes of Thomas Paine. Their key concern was to put out information to combat Paine’s po­liti­cal heresy by reminding ­people of the order and stability provided by monarchical wisdom. Their task, however, was made exceedingly difficult by the patriot mobs that ransacked Tory printing h ­ ouses and destroyed copies of Cooper’s A Friendly Address to All Reasonable Americans and Inglis’s The Deceiver Unmasked. Prevented from circulating, t­ hese pamphlets failed to signify. Yes, their words have meaning, but without circulation, u ­ nless such lit­er­a­ture becomes propaganda, it fails to register. As a point of contrast, consider Paine’s Common Sense, which is often treated as a preeminent example of both American lit­er­a­ture and American propaganda. It is not a case of either/or since neither propaganda nor lit­er­a­ture in this instance would exist without the other. At one level, Paine’s pamphlet said nothing new. Discussions about natu­ral rights, the artificiality of government, and the right of revolution had been around for some time, and they ­were daily being discussed in American newspapers and other venues. The ideas may have been familiar, but Paine’s innovation was the simplicity with which he presented ­those ideas. Aside from the Bible and quick references to John Milton and Giacinto Dragonetti, Common Sense presumes none of the erudite knowledge or convoluted allusions to previous authorities that characterized po­liti­cal philosophy of the day. Its fit with and ability to draw on received ideas ensured that it was well received. If this proposition seems circular, that is indeed the point since this quality, especially in conjunction with the punch of Paine’s prose style, ensured that Common Sense circulated to printing h ­ ouses, public ­houses, coffee­houses, and state­houses, where it was read and, perhaps more importantly, read aloud. Its significance as revolutionary lit­er­a­ture is inseparable from the qualities—­linguistic, intellectual, material, aesthetic, performative—­that enabled it to propagate rapidly across the American print-

Propaganda and the Movement of Literary History   249

scape. This point not only applies to Common Sense but also suggests the broader entanglement of lit­er­a­ture and propaganda.

Propaganda always stands in relation to other forms and institutions of expression such as education, religion, and, of course, lit­er­a­ture. It would be a m ­ istake to assume that t­ here are absolutely separate domains of lit­er­a­ture and propaganda, and that only lesser examples of the former fall into the degraded category of the latter, while “true” art hovers above such practical considerations. Propaganda is not something e­ lse; rather, it is h ­ ere and pres­ent, isomorphic in varying degrees with the books we read, the movies we watch, the advertising we consume, the lyr­ics we hum, and the profiles and personal statuses we update online. The short version of this position appears in W. E. B. Du Bois’s provocation, “Thus all Art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists.” By refusing to hold ­these two zones at arm’s length and defiantly intertwining them—in fact, he considered the dubious proposition that some art was not propaganda to be a prime example of propaganda itself—­Du Bois asserts propaganda as a significant mode of literary expression: “I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda.”13 Propaganda is something like the lifeblood of lit­er­a­ture: without it, art lies inert, unable to circulate. In contrast, when put to “use,” art becomes dynamic as its beauty and other facets of its aesthetic power are put into motion. While it may be that lit­er­a­ture exists without propaganda (plenty of authors do not care about publication, and likely many more are unable to get published), t­ here would be no propaganda moving across the public sphere without lit­er­a­ture or other forms to act as vehicles. A longer version of this argument about the proximity of lit­er­a­ture and propaganda appears in John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. Trilogy, particularly the first volume, entitled The 42nd Parallel. A multimedia novel, The 42nd Parallel ­jumbles together lyr­ics, newspaper headlines, tele­grams, newsreels, and advertisements as dif­fer­ent modes of dissemination. It follows the fortunes of win­dow designers at department stores, printers of socialist newspapers, Mexican revolutionaries singing corridos, and traveling booksellers hawking lurid novels, each intent on spreading their message, ­whether it is the satisfactions of commodity capitalism or the need for proletarian solidarity. “Juanito” Reed, as the famous journalist and socialist was called during his reporting on the

250   Ages and the Long Pres­ent

Mexican Revolution, confirmed the importance of the corrido as propaganda, describing the many ballads taken up by communal voices and spread across “insurgent Mexico.”14 Popu­lar traditions blend easily into propaganda. Like Reed, Dos Passos is transfixed by the movement of propaganda across borders, attuned to its transnational potential. But transnationalism is hardly a guarantee of progressive politics. ­After all, in The 42nd Parallel, the most accomplished representative of transnational interests is the American public relations counsel who enters revolutionary Mexico in order to protect the property of US oil companies ­doing business south of the Rio Grande. At the center of ­these operations stands J. Ward Moore­house, who by the end of the novel has risen to the status of a propagandist retained by corporate interests to manufacture consent for the nation’s entry into World War I. Working his way up from encyclopedia salesman to would-be lyricist of popu­lar songs to copywriter for dodgy real estate schemes to newspaperman to public relations executive, Moore­house succeeds b ­ ecause he understands that each venture depends on its capacity to spread both information and misinformation. Not so much separate endeavors as parts of a single ­career arc, his vari­ous print activities all require the awareness that transmission of a message is as impor­tant as the content of any message itself. Coming up with inflated prose to sell real estate lots is not all that dif­fer­ent from sending out press releases that advertise an impending war. And neither is writing a novel. “The importance of a writer, as of a scientist, depends upon his ability to influence subsequent thought,” remarked Dos Passos.15 While Dos Passos would want to uphold an invisible and often flimsy barrier between author and propagandist, his distinction is always at risk of being undone by the likes of Moore­house, whose real estate pamphlets constitute a type of promotional “lit­er­a­ture.”16 In fact, he promotes his own promotional lit­er­a­ture by touting it as “something a bit novel in the advertising line.”17 Lit­er­a­ture or propaganda? The “novel,” as Dos Passos insinuates, has long been adjacent to other forms of expression that, like advertising, are vested with the capacity “to influence subsequent thought.” In the end, the choice is not one between lit­er­a­ture and propaganda, since the two are grafted together; instead, it is a ­matter of appreciating how each can serve as, facilitate, and take shape as the other. Art can be used for propaganda, as Du Bois insisted, just as propaganda can be read and discussed as lit­er­a­ture, as Stowe and her adapters have proven. Propaganda, we might say, takes lit­er­a­ture out of its moment. In moving back and forth among eighteenth-­century revolutionaries and counterrevo-

Propaganda and the Movement of Literary History   251

lutionaries, nineteenth-­century abolitionists, and twentieth-­century socialists, this essay has sought to demonstrate how lit­er­a­ture, as a form adjacent to propaganda, refuses to abide neat chronological bound­aries. This devil-­may-­care sensibility may seem like a gallivanting sort of literary history, but it also suggests an openness to how the po­liti­cal relevance of a text outstrips its moment of production and publication. Much more than a thematic focus on propaganda is at stake. Propaganda challenges the familiar temporal (and, in some instances, geo­graph­ic­ al) coordinates of American literary periodization by demonstrating how texts swell beyond their initial context. The result is to bust open the secure marker of “Text X (date)” and make it more timely by extending the range of years and locations to which any work of lit­er­a­ture can speak. Letting go of chronological handholds might prove unsettling or disorienting, but it also has the capacity to make Text X more meaningful. W ­ hether written in 1776 or 1850, literary-­historical artifacts always have the potential to be updated and reactivated. To treat American lit­er­a­ture as propaganda, then, is to follow the strange travels, the shifting significances, and the continued newness of its archive. Notes 1. ​See Donald E. Pease, “Moby Dick and the Cold War,” in The American Re­nais­sance Reconsidered, ed. Walter Benn Michaels and Donald E. Pease (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985). 2. ​Robert Darnton, “What Is the History of Books?,” in The Book History Reader, ed. David Finklestein and Alistair McCleery (New York: Routledge, 2006); Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary Study (New York: Verso, 2005). 3. ​Anthony Arthur, Radical Innocent: Upton Sinclair (New York: Random House, 2006), 43. 4. ​John Reed, Ten Days That Shook the World (New York: Penguin, 1977), 255. 5. ​Susan Gillman, “Whose Protest Novel? Ramona, the ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin of the Indian,” in The Oxford Handbook to Nineteenth-­Century American Lit­er­a­ture,” ed. Russ Castronovo (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 381. For more on the international travels of Stowe’s novel, see Caroline Levander, Where Is American Lit­er­a­ture? (Malden, MA: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2013), 183–84. 6. ​See, e.g., the treatment of suffrage propaganda in Mary Chapman, Making Noise, Making News: Suffrage Print Culture and U.S. Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 7. ​Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Worship” (1860), in Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 6, The Conduct of Life, ed. Barbara L. Packer, Joseph Slater, and Douglas Emory Wilson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). 8. ​Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature (1836), in Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 1, Nature, Addresses, and Lectures, ed. Robert E. Spiller and Alfred R. Ferguson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971). 9. ​For more on this formulation, see Jonathan Auerbach and Russ Castronovo, “Thirteen Propositions about Propaganda,” in The Oxford Handbook of Propaganda Studies, ed. Jonathan Auerbach and Russ Castronovo (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 1–16.

252   Ages and the Long Pres­ent 10. ​David Walker, Walker’s Appeal, in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in Par­tic­u­lar, and Very Expressly, to T ­ hose of the United States of Amer­ i­ca, Written in Boston, State of Mas­sa­chu­setts, September 28, 1829, http://­docsouth​.­unc​.­edu​/­nc​ /­walker​/­walker​.­html. 11. ​Marcy J. Dinius, “ ‘Look!! Look!!! At This!!!!’: The Radical Typography of David Walker’s Appeal,” PMLA 126, no. 1 (Jan. 2011): 55–72. 12. ​Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Real­ity (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1997) 161. 13. ​W. E. B. Du Bois, “Criteria of Negro Art,” in The Norton Anthology of African American Lit­er­a­ture, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay (New York: Norton, 1997), 757. 14. ​For examples, see John Reed, Insurgent Mexico (New York: International, 1969) 56, 88, 158, 219. 15. ​John Dos Passos, “The Writer as Technician,” in American Writers’ Congress, ed. Henry Hart (New York: International, 1935), 79. 16. ​For more on this point, see Matthew Stratton, “Start Spreading the News: Irony, Public Opinion, and the Aesthetic Politics of U.S.A,” Twentieth-­Century Lit­er­a­ture 54, no. 4 (Winter 2008): 419–47. 17. ​John Dos Passos, The 42nd Parallel (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991), 158.

De-­ciphering American Lit­er­a­ture   1945  1840 ← → 2018 c a r o l i n e l e va n d e r

In July 1945 the Atlantic published Vannevar Bush’s landmark essay “As We May Think.” According to Atlantic editor Edward Weeks, the famous engineer and inventor’s call to all scientists to leverage new information tools and technologies that would make more openly accessible an increasingly large and bewildering store of knowledge was revolutionary. Bush’s call for a fresh relationship between “thinking man and the sum of our knowledge” heralded nothing less than a new postwar era of information systems and theory. But it also harkened back to the nation’s literary past. Weeks compared Bush to Ralph Waldo Emerson and found in “As We May Think” a twentieth-­century version of “Emerson’s famous address of 1837 on ‘The American Scholar.’ ”1 What does it mean to trace the timeline for the information age back to the nation’s literary roots—to find in Emerson and the transcendentalists literary pre­ce­dent for the information age? This question might seem overdetermined if it w ­ ere only Bush’s essay that was passingly associated with American literary ­greats. But information theory—­its genesis, creative inspiration, and evolution—­ seems to cycle ever backward as well as ever forward, looping such unlikely figures as Bush and Emerson, or cryptographers like Claude Shannon and Edgar Allan Poe, into extended collaborations across time that reveal the interlocking natures of information and language codes. This essay approaches 1945—­the year information theory was “born”—by way of 1840, the year Poe’s cryptography work began in earnest. It does so in order to ask what happens to our understanding of the information age—­what MIT information systems research scientist Andrew McAfee and economist Erik Brynjolfsson have described as our current era of “brilliant technologies”—if we take seriously its found­ers’ dependence on American lit­er­a­ture and literary cryptography as a pursuit. The “birth” of information theory—or the mathematical study of information coding and transmission via computer cir­cuits—­did

254   Ages and the Long Pres­ent

not occur in a cultural vacuum but was the logical next step of a protracted reliance of select scientific men on the literary code-­making and code-­breaking pro­cesses laid out by Poe and other men of letters well before the Civil War. And yet our literary timelines obscure this fact; designations such as antebellum and postbellum, prewar and postwar keep the secret writing exercises of the early nineteenth c­ entury safely remote from the modern era with its shiny technologies, meaning-­fracturing world conflicts, and computationally robust ecosystems. Furthermore, the origins story that we hear and tend to tell about “the second machine age” also ignores the longer history of indebtedness and influence that the following pages lay out. McAfee and Brynjolfsson, as well as John Seelye Brown and a range of notable information technology commentators, often tell a story that begins, at the earliest, in 1982, when Time magazine declared the personal computer its “Machine of the Year.” But even this history is too long in the tooth for the likes of McAfee, who identifies the second machine age as an explic­itly twenty-­first-­century phenomenon, inaugurated as recently as 2012 in Silicon Valley, where the “birth” of the Chauffeur proj­ect at Google’s headquarters heralds a new age by redefining Americans’ relationship to our most cherished machine (the motorcar), or, more remotely, 2011, when the question-­answering supercomputer named Watson succeeded in combining artificial intelligence and analytics software to beat the two best knowledge workers in the world, Jeopardy! champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter.2 Whichever event you pick as the watershed moment when the division between p ­ eople and computers is irreversibly redrawn, the era of brilliant technologies is still in its infancy, born from w ­ hole cloth out of this twenty-­first-­century moment. The following pages ask us temporarily to redraw the chronological lines that we tend to use to differentiate p ­ eople from computers, literary from computational genius, art from technology. They ask us to remember, for example, that the 1840 essay that Poe wrote for Graham’s Magazine entitled “A Few Words on Secret Writing,” offering a subscription to anyone who sent him a cipher he could not crack, produced two ciphers that have continued to mesmerize and stymie code breakers for over 150 years. ­These two ciphers ­were supposedly submitted by a Mr. Tyler, but twentieth-­century scholars have suggested that they w ­ ere written by Poe himself, a fact that generated renewed scientific interest in them in the late 1980s. Cutting their teeth on ­these ciphers was part and parcel of coders’ training ­until 2000, when the final cipher was ultimately solved by a young Canadian software engineer.

De-ciphering American Literature   255

Gil Broza was able to crack the polyalphabetic substitution system that used six symbols for e­ very letter, and his decryption made news in Scientific American, as well as the Baltimore Post Examiner and numerous other publications, when coherent poetic words began to emerge ­after his two-­month manipulation of the cipher. That lines of text such as “It was early spring, warm and sultry glowed the after­noon” w ­ ere late-­breaking news in scientific journals reminds us of what it is all too easy to forget: that literary text from long ago and a context seemingly far removed from computational innovation can and do push the bound­aries of information systems well into the pres­ent day.3 In his 1840 essay, Poe is keenly aware of the murky and uneven timelines that can emerge as a result of secret writing. Indeed, “A Few Words on Secret Writing” begins by insisting on the capacious timelines generated by cryptographic writing: “As we can scarcely imagine a time when t­ here did not exist a necessity, or at least a desire, of transmitting information from one individual to another in such a manner as to elude general comprehension, so we may well suppose the practice of writing in cipher to be of g­ reat antiquity.”4 Reaching back to antiquity and to the pres­ent day of 1840s Amer­i­ca, Poe ­imagined a literary community that crossed centuries, cultures, and languages—­a timeline that encompassed ­peoples who ranged across continents and periods, bringing them into a shared endeavor, set of practices, and desire. American literary scholars, most notably Shawn James Rosenheim, have carefully documented this longer timeline, charting a historical arc that links the writings of Poe not so much to the writings of antiquity as to the work of twentieth-­century scientists, mathematicians, and software engineers who continue to find in stories like “The Gold Bug” power­ful identifications and models for their own scientific work. Poe’s contributions to cryptography, as Rosenheim has shown, are part of the official histories of efforts to crack the Enigma code. Top secret official National Security Association histories contain long discussions of Poe’s cryptographic writing, and arguably the most famous war cryptographer, Col­o­nel William F. Friedman, whom Rosenheim treats in detail, had a career-­long involvement with Poe’s writing. In fact, Friedman mused that “it is a curious fact that popu­lar interest in this country in the subject of cryptography received its first stimulus from Edgar Allan Poe.” Friedman recalled that his own boyhood was filled with “excitement about a world he had discovered through Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Gold Bug.’ ”5 That excitement was more broadly shared, and Poe’s secret writing texts ­were part of the formal cryptographic training program for the US Army well

256   Ages and the Long Pres­ent

into the twentieth ­century. The list goes on and on: the Bulletin of the Signal Intelligence Ser­vice that Friedman ran and the go-to publication for government cryptographers published literary analyses of Poe and his works next to articles on German success on the Eastern Front. And of course, Friedman’s insistence that a cryptologist without creativity is no cryptologist at all was his own rendition of Poe’s observation that “as poet and mathematician he [Minister D—] could reason well; as mere mathematician, he could not have reasoned at all.”6 From such evidence of sustained interest in Poe and the cracking of secret codes, one commentator hypothesized that twentieth-­century scientists have derived a sense of intellectual superiority over t­ hose who cannot or do not decipher codes, mitigating their sense of isolation and aloneness, even while promising to connect the individual, lone genius with a special community existing across time: t­hose elusive few who also knew or produced what Poe called “secret writing.” And yet Poe’s writing was not simply admired by a generation of World War II scientists; more fundamentally, his work helped to create a knowledge environment that is characterized by a nonlinear, cyclic sense of time. A timeline that moves from 1840 to 1945 to the pres­ent and back again reveals an argument that is implicit if often overlooked: that integrated, circuitous, and ongoing connections between past, pres­ent, and f­uture are at the origin of information theory as a field and continue to characterize the ways in which it shapes American culture ­today. As the editors of this collection observe, the act of setting dates and creating periods can be more than an act of compartmentalization and of creating stable containers—it can be a way of constituting new arenas, environments, and ecosystems that are other­wise not readily apparent. By expanding the timeline of collaboration between Poe’s writing and information scientists’ thinking from the antebellum era to the pres­ent day, we not only create a longer time frame but also suddenly see hitherto hidden dimensions of both information theory and American literary meaning. We begin to see the ways in which information theory emerges out of and moves dialectically across what we now think of as disparate literary and computational languages and logics. If periodization is as much about transition, transformation, one ­thing turning into something ­else, as Jacques Le Goff observes, so too is the categorization of languages. Viewing it from this perspective, we can see how literary code making mutates into computational code making and back again. And we can see this most clearly by turning our attention to the work of the founding ­father of information theory, Claude E. Shannon. Widely hailed

De-ciphering American Literature   257

as the originator of information theory, Shannon has become iconic among present-­day data scientists, information technologists, and engineers, ­because he created the field that has made all modern electronic communications pos­ si­ble, and his work has led to astounding insights about the physical world. Long-­distance phone calls, the internet, satellite uplinks, the compact disc—­all modern communications are indebted to Shannon, as are digital signal pro­ cessing, seismic exploration, gambling and investing, and bioinformatics, among other fields. Shannon, rather than Friedman, is now widely understood to be the creator of the computational theory that drives our information age, and his classified 1945 memorandum for Bell Labs, entitled “A Mathematical Theory of Cryptography,” laid out the mathematical concepts under­lying his transmission of information theory. Three years ­later, the declassified memorandum—­“A Mathematical Theory of Communication” (1948)—­would become widely hailed “the Magna Carta of the communications age” and, according to many, the most impor­tant document of the twentieth ­century. And as its early, Poe-­inflected title makes clear, the relation of cryptography to information theory is anything but ­simple. In fact, Shannon rejects official science historians’ subsequent efforts to create a causal, linear story line for the relation of cryptography to the genesis of information theory. When repeatedly asked to generate an origin story for information theory and to clarify which came first, cryptography or information theory, Shannon refuses to reduce the relation to one of ­simple causality. Rather, he describes a sort of duality in which each is a slightly distorting mirror for the other, enabling him to see new aspects and developments in each field. In a late-­life interview, Shannon was asked explic­itly if he was “putting the cart before the ­horse” when he, seemingly counterintuitively, stated that cryptography was an application of information theory. Shannon refused the “question of where t­ hings would have come from,” saying instead that the 1945 Bell Labs cryptography report contained a lot of information theory, which he admitted he “worked out before, during ­those five years between 1940 and 1945.” He described t­ hose war years as a time during which he “constructed random sentences or random sequences of letters,” which “get more and more like En­glish” with time, and which are his “first getting at Information Theory.” And yet, “cryptography [i]s a way of legitimatizing it all”—of making it sound to o ­ thers like he is “working on decent t­ hings.” In words that insist on the circular timeline characterizing the field’s origin, he concludes that cryptography is the “­great working on that led back to good ­things in Information Theory.”7

258   Ages and the Long Pres­ent

Thus, for its creator, cryptography is “an application of information theory,” but it is also si­mul­ta­neously “a stimulus to it”—­the two concepts intertwined and mutually enabling, from the start. In fact, it is this refusal of sequential compartmentalization that is the par­tic­u­lar “mysterious link that made the ­whole.” The question of which came first is certainly of the chicken or the egg variety, but as Shannon insists, it is fundamentally a wrong question to ask of the field. Information theory was an answer looking for a prob­lem, and cryptography was what was needed by way of an application, but the question and answer w ­ ere not sequential. Given this tightly intertwined, nonconsecutive relation between the two concepts, it is no surprise that the term “Information Theory” first appears in Shannon’s “A Mathematical Theory of Cryptography” report, two peas in a pod, like Twain’s conjoined twins. Playing as he does at the bound­aries of literary and computational code, Poe is, unsurprisingly, integral to this field’s circuitous beginnings. If ­cryptography was embedded in the emergence of information theory as a field, it ­wasn’t just any cryptographer’s work that captivated Shannon and ­shaped his lifelong dual interests in mathe­matics (Boolean algebra) and cir­ cuit design and electronic cir­cuit relays, but, of course, the cryptographic contributions of Edgar Allan Poe. Shannon recalled his boyhood enthusiasm for Poe’s “The Gold Bug” and his delight with the buried trea­sure that the hero finds by successfully decoding a map. This all-­too-­rare literary happy ending in Poe’s story transformed Shannon into a self-­described “­great fan of Edgar Allan Poe,” and he recalled how this reading led to his solving of cryptograms as a boy. Late in his life Shannon continued to remember fondly the details of Poe’s literary c­ areer—­and not only Poe’s literary depictions of intrepid cryptographers but also his own efforts in that department, namely, his challenge to the American public that he could decode any cryptogram sent to him. Poe’s 1840 declaration that “­human ingenuity cannot concoct a cypher which ­human ingenuity cannot resolve,” or as Shannon paraphrased it, “any cryptogram a man can create a man can decipher” (and his offer to pay somebody if he ­couldn’t decipher their cryptogram), made a lasting impression on Shannon, who found in Poe’s confidence both inspiration and provocation for his own pioneering work. But Poe’s influence on Shannon and the information theory he created did not end ­there. Poe’s obsession with language as code and with linguistic coding as practice was not confined to his cryptographic challenge, but, as a number of scholars have shown, infused many writings, like Eureka and “The Raven,” where secrets need to be deciphered, where literary worlds are defined by

De-ciphering American Literature   259

hidden texts, and where deeper, double languages drive plot and characterize literary meaning. Poe’s own poetic play with his name, sensitivity to the tempo and rhythm of language, and attention to the endemic coding properties embedded in sentences and lines of poetry stimulated Shannon’s sensitivity to the literary dimensions of communication coding. If Poe’s literary genius came, at least in part, from seeing literary lines of text as code, Shannon’s computational genius came, at least in part, from being aware of the literary properties of word strings. Shannon’s alertness to the literary ele­ments of language and to the cadence, rhythm, and sound of words was sufficiently acute to at times overpower his attention to the information that words impart. In one late interview, Shannon interrupts his own story of how he happened to be familiar with both the Boolean algebra and cir­cuit design fields with a comment about the sound rather than sense of the words he used: “I’ve always loved that word, Boolean.” Colleagues picked up on Shannon’s sensitivity to the literary dimensions of language—­one engineering luminary likening his influence on information theory to that of “the inventor of the alphabet on lit­er­a­ture.” Thus, the more comprehensive literary reliance on ciphers, secret writing, the literary nuance of code, and the rhythm of language that characterizes Poe’s writing more generally quickened Shannon’s sensibility to the sound and nuances of meaning in language and to the importance of timing in effectively transmitting meaning. Shot through with double, encrypted, and secret meanings, Poe’s work helped Shannon evolve a theory that, at its core, grappled with the prob­lem of time and communication—­that sought to build a computational environment able to ensure accurate but encoded information transmission over time. As Shannon summarizes, the fundamental prob­lem that information theory seeks to solve is “that of reproducing at one point e­ ither exactly or approximately a message selected at another point.” To create and maintain continuity in the communication signal by minimizing the noise over time, Shannon began by recognizing that information is not facts, data, or evidence, but rather uncertainty, enabling him to approach information theoretically, as a prob­lem of system architecture and knowledge design. As Shannon observed, the “significant aspect is that the a­ ctual message is one selected from a set of pos­si­ble messages, and so the system must be designed to operate for each pos­si­ble se­lection, not just the one which w ­ ill actually be chosen, since this is unknown 8 at the time of design.” Shannon focused on the statistical properties of a message rather than on the content of the message in order to determine how much information can move without errors—in other words, to optimize the amount

260   Ages and the Long Pres­ent

of accurate signal that gets transmitted over time and to minimize the amount of inaccuracy, or noise. The longer period of time information can move without error, the better. Given the sensitivity to time that is embedded in information theory’s fundamental architecture, it is not surprising that its founder had a poetic as well as scientific ­career. In fact, Shannon self-­identified as a literary as well as a computational innovator. An unabashedly self-­promoting author, Shannon sent his poem “A Rubric on Rubik’s Cubics” in its entirety to the editor of Scientific American in 1981 with a cover letter in which he declared that he was a better poet than scientist and that Scientific American should have a poetry column. While the editor ­didn’t seem to agree with ­either of Shannon’s claims, the poem was fi­nally published in its entirety in the journal in 2011 in an article declaring it a “poetic masterpiece.”9 The Rubik’s Cube was a perfect subject for Shannon’s poetic experimentation, as the 3-­D puzzle has over three billion combinations but only one solution, thus lending itself to algorithmic thinking. Data scientists have turned to the Rubik’s Cube since its appearance in 1974 in order to learn more about information theory and randomization, as well as data structures, and their scientific papers on the subject continue to be published well into the twenty-­first ­century. But if the topic of Shannon’s poem is squarely in the computational realm, it exploits poetic rhythm and cadence, insisting on the seriousness of sound, with Shannon instructing readers that he prefers the poem to be sung to “ ‘Ta! Ra! Ra! Boom De Ay!’ with an eight bar chorus,” instead of being read. To get a sense of Shannon’s attention to the rhythmic qualities of language, one need only hum the following lines to the Howdy Doody theme song he had in mind as he penned ­these lines: However you persist Solutions ­don’t exist. Cubemeisters follow Rubik’s camp— ­There’s Bühler, Guy and Berlekamp; John Conway leads a Cambridge pack (And solves the cube ­behind his back!).

With its playful wording, the poem has fascinated techies and Shannon groupies, as well as poet enthusiasts more generally. Evident in both his poetic and scientific ­careers, Shannon’s sensitivity to temporal sequencing has, in turn, inspired a wide range of multimedia creative expressions that pay homage to Shannon and his life work. Video productions like Charles and Ray Eames’s A Communications Primer model a “technical

De-ciphering American Literature   261

poetics” that brings mathe­matics, poetry, and the field of design together by using film, a medium naturally riddled with gaps, to communicate the creators’ interpretation of Shannon’s idea of communication. The goal of the famous design architects’ 1953 twenty-­two-­minute documentary was to understand communication broadly construed as a temporal sequence in which signal and noise coexist in dynamic tension. “Reading is a form of communication,” Eames declares, and sound can act as e­ ither signal or noise, depending on its source.10 With the goal of inspiring greater appreciation of the broad meaning of communication across all creative endeavors and thereby breaking down “barriers between vari­ous disciplines,” their film paved the way for architects to use Shannon’s concepts as a tool in planning and design.11 More recently, dancers and choreographers Liz Santoro and Pierre Godard have created a choreographic machine that explores the links between movement and text as they unfold discretely over time. Their 2016 per­for­mance, entitled “For Claude Shannon,” is composed of twenty-­four discreet movement “atoms” for arms and legs that serve as a movement lexicon from which a fixed number of inputs are randomly chosen each time the piece is performed. The choreographic machine generates a seemingly inexhaustible set of choreographic sequence possibilities that are expressed over time, and each per­for­mance features four dancers who assem­ble and learn one par­tic­u­lar outcome among the billions pos­si­ble. The dancers rely on their knowledge of each other and their knowledge of the machine to uncover coherent movement sequences out of seemingly infinite possibilities, each per­for­mance a unique unrepeatable endeavor that embodies Shannon’s mathematical theory of communication. In ­these con­temporary and present-­day creative expressions of Shannon’s—­ and information theory’s—­indebtedness to early nineteenth-­century literary texts and to the nuance of literary language more generally, we can begin to see just how vertiginous timelines can become when they cross disciplinary divides, marrying science and lit­er­a­ture and jumping centuries in ways that refuse progressive narratives. Much as Poe saw the secret writing of his era as intimately associated with the needs of ­those writing centuries before, so too are ­those now performing “For Claude Shannon” in intimate corporeal collaboration with the code-­making exercises in which Poe and Shannon engaged and even collaborated. In other words, once we approach American lit­er­a­ture with an eye to its involvement with information theory—to how the watershed literary moment of 1840 and the watershed computational moment of 1945 are linked—we can begin to see that creative innovations to how information

262   Ages and the Long Pres­ent

is communicated, transmitted, stored, connected, and associated might occur across disciplines as well as across centuries, often through a heightened sensitivity to the importance of time in creative works. This collection asks us to unsettle the entrenched chronologies and time frames that have governed our field and the sense we make of the past and its ­futures more generally. What would it mean to chart a timeline for American lit­er­a­ture that moves back and forth across the larger literary through line I have just traced in information theory between 1840, 1945, and the pres­ent time? A timeline for American lit­er­a­ture that moves both across and circuitously between 1840, 1945, and the pres­ent shows this integrative pro­cess of textual evolution and development across disciplines (and textual forms) that we too often assume are unrelated. It suggests that we need to begin to create dotted lines between “scientific” figures like Shannon, “literary” figures like Poe, architects and designers like Ray and Charles Eames, and con­temporary choreographers. To claim the literary dimensions of scientists like Shannon for our field—to approach his “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” as in some ways a literary document, not only influenced by Poe but also infused with literary logics and meaning—is to open our field imaginary to dif­fer­ent times, practices, creative languages, and disciplinary norms. The preceding pages have followed the circuitous pathways generated by lines of text that transform from recognizable word strings to indecipherable code and back again. In so ­doing, they suggest that American lit­er­a­ture is part of a long, cryptographic timeline that encompasses the emergence of textual forms that can, through literary analy­sis and digital signal pro­cessing, create both signal and noise: crystal clear sense or confusion—­depending on the language you speak. Notes 1. ​Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,” Atlantic, July 1945, www​.­theatlantic​.­com​/­magazine​ /­archive​/­1945​/­07​/­as​-­we​-­may​-­think​/­303881​/­. 2. ​Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Pro­gress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (New York: Norton, 2014), 26. 3. ​Kristin Leutwyler, “A Cipher from Poe Solved at Last,” Scientific American, Nov. 3, 2000, www​.­scientificamerican​.­com​/­article​/­a​-­cipher​-­from​-­poe​-­solved​/­. 4. ​Edgar Allan Poe, “A Few Words on Secret Writing,” in The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. James Harrison (New York: AMS Press, 1979), 5:114. 5. ​William Friedman, “Edgar Allan Poe, Cryptographer,” Bulletin of the Signal Intelligence Ser­vice 97 (July–­Sept. 1937): 266.

De-ciphering American Literature   263 6. ​Shawn James Rosenheim, The Cryptographic Imagination: Secret Writing from Edgar Allan Poe to the Internet (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 165. 7. ​Claude E. Shannon, interview by Robert Price, July 28, 1982, no. 423 for the IEEE History Center, The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc., http://­ethw​.­org​/­Oral​ -­History:Claude​_­E​.­​_­Shannon. 8. ​Claude Shannon, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1949), 3. 9. ​John Morgan, “Poetic Masterpiece of Claude Shannon, ­Father of Information Theory, Published for the First Time,” Scientific American, March 28, 2011. 10. ​See www​.­youtube​.­com​/­watch​?­v​=b ­ yyQtGb3dvA. 11. ​See www​.­eamesoffice​.­com​/­the​-­work​/­a​-­communications​-­primer​-­2​/­.

Methodological Individualism and the Novel in the Age of Microeconomics, 1871 to the Pres­ent annie mcclanahan

The period implied by my title pres­ents some immediate prob­lems. The most obvious is ­whether one can claim any continuity among novels written between the late nineteenth c­ entury and the twenty-­first c­ entury without foun­dering on the literary periods that divide that epoch. But the more difficult challenge turns out to reside in “microeconomics,” a discipline whose self-­definition insists on its radical distance from lit­er­a­ture and literary study. From Aristotle to Adam Smith, po­liti­cal economy treated economic questions as historical prob­lems and saw economics as connected to the social and humanistic disciplines.1 However, ­after the so-­called Marginalist Revolution of the 1870s—­later seen as the advent of modern microeconomics—­and increasingly over the course of the long twentieth ­century evoked by the dates above, the discipline of economics became illegible to ­those without field-­specific training.2 By the turn of the twentieth c­ entury, the discipline known no longer as “po­liti­cal economy” but rather as “economics” aligned itself with physics and mathematical formalism and refuted its prior associations with moral philosophy, the theory of governance, and historicism.3 Yet it is precisely the incompatibility of literary studies with microeconomics, I want to hazard, that makes it both a provocation and an opportunity to bring them together. In this essay, I begin by offering a brief intellectual history of microeconomics, focusing in par­tic­u­lar on “methodological individualism” (MI). MI is not at all restricted to microeconomics, of course: as a claim about method made across the social sciences, it is simply the presumption that social phenomena (the macro) should be explained through reference to the intentional states that motivate individual actors (the micro). Yet at least one synthetic account of MI puts its intimate relationship to microeconomics quite starkly: “It has never escaped anyone’s attention,” the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes, “that the discipline that most clearly satisfies the strictures of methodological

Methodological Individualism and the Novel   265

individualism is microeconomics.”4 It is in microeconomics, I ­will suggest, that we find the most extreme version of MI, and thus it is also in microeconomics that we can most clearly see the conceptual (and ultimately po­liti­cal) entailments of MI. For my purposes ­here, two of ­these entailments are central: first, the presumption that social theory can be derived from observing the be­hav­ior of individuals, and second, the assertion (put in its baldest form) that “­there is no such ­thing as society.” The first of ­these claims derives from the idea of the “Robinson Crusoe” economy, namely, the argument that economic theory begins from a solitary individual making choices about his own consumption and production. As Frank Knight puts it, “the concept of a [Robinson] Crusoe economy is indispensable. We can[not] talk sense about economics without considering the economic be­hav­ior of an isolated individual.”5 Using this framework, microeconomics rebuts the idea that value is objective and internal to the object (as it was for the classical po­liti­cal economists, who held that value derives from the cost of the commodity’s production). Microeconomics insists instead that value is determined on the basis of the subjective expectations of individual purchasers and sellers themselves, whose individual utility (plea­sure) it mea­sures. Despite this emphasis on the individual and the subjective, however, microeconomics resists depth hermeneutics: all we can know about the individual is what he does, not why. Again, this commitment to action and decision rather than intention and motivation is common to many MI theories, but it is strongest in microeconomics. Microeconomics does more than just insist on the unknowability of ­mental states: it also reduces the scope of the meaningful individual actions to a relatively narrow orbit (consumer choices), establishes in advance a set of normative criteria to apply to t­hose actions (maximization of utility), and understands choices and wants relatively rather than absolutely (not only does it not ­matter why I love apples, but it also ­doesn’t ­really ­matter how much, only ­whether I prefer them to oranges). The second claim cited above—­the claim about society—­derives from MI’s opposition to “holism” or “collectivism.” By holism I mean the belief that society is, as Émile Durkheim argued, sui generis—­that it is not a contingent aggregation but an organic ­whole that is more than the sum of its parts and operates via internal and impersonal laws. Once again, among all the MI disciplines, microeconomics is the most radically opposed to holism. Moreover, the intensity of microeconomics’ opposition to a term associated with historical materialism and Marxism is emphatically ideological: as I explore in more detail below, microeconomics emerged in the late nineteenth ­century out of debates

266   Ages and the Long Pres­ent

about both socialism and historicism, and microeconomics’ organ­izing concept, the price system, was understood as an alternative to socialist central planning. So what does any of this have to do with literary theory or the novel? More, I want to suggest, than it may appear. Recalling that the history of microeconomics begins with a “Robinson Crusoe economy,” we might note that histories of the novel often begin with Robinson Crusoe. It is thus not surprising that from E. M. Forster, Georg Lukács, and Ian Watt to Nancy Armstrong, Gillian Brown, and Walter Benn Michaels, literary critics have tended to treat the novel itself as a kind of MI. ­After all, according to Watt, the rise of the novel marks the moment at which the individual becomes “the proper subject of . . . ​serious lit­er­a­ture,” while Armstrong observes that the eighteenth-­century En­glish novel—­like microeconomics—­“took the individual as [its] most basic unit.”6 Moreover, much as marginalist economics moved the discipline ­toward what intellectual historian Philip Mirowski describes as “the subjective world, the ‘in ­here,’ in the mind,” so too did the novel turn increasingly inward in the early twentieth c­ entury.7 Histories of the novel thus describe the attenuation of narrative omniscience in f­ avor of the intricate rendering of subjective experience, or the shift away from the social, the historical, and the material and ­toward interiority, presentism, and formalism. I want to suggest, then, that microeconomics and the modern novel worked contemporaneously and in parallel to retheorize the nature of the individual subject in a social world. So just how interrelated ­were ­these parallel theories of the individual? Somewhat more specifically, how did t­ hese two related forms of MI respond to the contradictory imperative to “add up” all t­hose individual Robinson Crusoes so that MI could also imagine, represent, and theorize groups of individuals, from markets to communities? ­These are the questions I take up in this essay by laying out the defining concerns of microeconomics and following ­those concerns into the sphere of the novel. I conclude by using a distinctly noneconomic technique, namely, close reading, to unpack some of t­hese distinctions in a “short story” by Milton Friedman, and by elaborating the formal techniques by which twentieth-­century novels themselves work to differentiate the novelistic individual from the microeconomic one and the novelistic social totality from the microeconomic refusal of social totality.

Microeconomics and Methodological Individualism The dominance of microeconomic approaches—­although not the use of the term—­begins, according to most economic historians, in the 1870s, with the

Methodological Individualism and the Novel   267

development of marginal utility theory in Carl Menger’s Princi­ples of Po­liti­cal Economy (1871), William Stanley Jevons’s Theory of Po­liti­cal Economy (1871), and Leon Walras’s Ele­ments of Pure Economics (1874). “Marginal utility”—­still central to modern microeconomics—­refers to the idea that the value of a good can be mea­sured according to the additional benefit to be gained from the consumption of one additional unit of that good (the marginal unit). Prior to what would ­later be called the “Marginalist Revolution,” economics had been interested in value, understood as an objective category, and in production, understood as a social pro­cess.8 Menger and his cohort of Eu­ro­pean marginalists, by contrast, ­were interested in price as a contingent and subjective mea­sure and in consumption as a solitary act (hence the “Crusoe economy”). The marginalists also focused on individual decision-­making, making marginalism the basis for what would only ­later (around 1945) be called microeconomics. Whereas macroeconomists tend to study the national economy, taxation, and the rate of overall capital productivity, microeconomists are concerned with what they see as the “microfoundations” of the economic system: the decision-­making and spending patterns of individuals and individual firms.9 Midcentury microeconomists such as Kenneth Arrow would thus echo Knight’s claim about the individual as the relevant unit of economic analy­sis even when the object in question was far larger than a given individual, arguing that “the behaviour of groups is explained by aggregating the behaviour of individuals.”10 Drawing on utilitarianism, the early marginalists saw their work as an expression of Jeremy Bentham’s “hedonic calculus,” a phrase that contradictorily evokes both objective formal quantification and subjective individual feeling. Although it may seem self-­evident to us t­ oday that economics is a mathematical discipline, this was not always the case. Claiming that economics “must be a mathematical science . . . ​­because it deals with quantities,” as Jevons puts it, early marginalist microeconomists used analogs from physics to develop mathematical models for utility.11 The result was a new emphasis on empirical observation and testability: Menger, for instance, explains that the economists’ job is “to reduce the complex phenomena of ­human economic activity to the simplest ele­ments that can still be subjected to accurate observation.”12 Yet alongside this empiricism, marginalism also claimed that value was a subjective quality, one derived from the individual’s tastes and resources—­this is where Bentham’s “hedonic” comes in. While acknowledging the challenge of mea­sur­ing the “quantities” of psychological experiences like plea­sure or pain, Jevons argues that it should be pos­si­ble to “estimate the equality or in­equality

268   Ages and the Long Pres­ent

of [individual] feelings” in the same way that “we mea­sure gravity by its effects in the motion of a pendulum.”13 The result was a rather contradictory account of value that managed to be both positivist and relativist, since the marginalists aimed to mea­sure subjective individual experience by way of price.14 Menger—­ sounding like a novelist—­describes the need for “a penetrating investigation of ­mental pro­cesses” to understand value, which “does not exist outside of the consciousness of men.”15 Menger’s implicit refusal of objective value also begins to suggest the po­ liti­cal implications of the marginalists’ subjective turn. Well before the very influential “socialist calculation controversy” of the 1920s and 1930s—­a debate between second-­generation marginalists such as Ludwig von Mises and Marxist economists such as Oskar Lange and Maurice Dobb—as early as the 1870s and 1880s Menger and the Austrian marginalists w ­ ere engaged in a protracted “war of method,” or Methodenstreit, against the German Historical School. The marginalists sought to refute the historicists’ social theory as well as their socialism by insisting to the contrary on individualism as both an intellectual and a po­ liti­cal imperative; in 1908, Joseph Schumpeter emphasized the intellectual aim over the ideological one and termed the marginalists’ position “methodological individualism.”16 As I have suggested already, MI became central to debates in philosophy and sociology throughout the twentieth c­ entury, theorized by Max Weber, Gabriel Tarde, Karl Popper, and Bruno Latour. For the marginalists, as for some of the social theorists named above, MI refuted both the intellectual claims of historical materialism and the politics or ideology of collectivism—­indeed, it sought to debunk the idea that t­here was any such ­thing as a “social totality.” As von Mises puts it, the “social collective has no existence and real­ity outside of the individual members’ actions.” This collective, MI asserts, can have no agency and can never be more than the contingent and shifting parts that compose it: “The hangman, not the state, executes the criminal,” aphorizes von Mises.17 Despite the microeconomists’ insistence on the priority of the individual over the collective, however, the psychological individual deep at the heart of microeconomics ultimately was neither deep nor psychological. Second-­ generation marginalists became increasingly wary of the field’s association with the unrigorous discipline of psy­chol­ogy. In order to retain individualism while eschewing psy­chol­ogy, microeconomics made two abrupt turns. First, microeconomists stopped claiming that their accounts of homo economicus as a rational pursuer of enlightened self-­interest described ­actual ­human be­ hav­ior (which might look like d ­ oing psy­chol­ogy—or, worse, history) and began

Methodological Individualism and the Novel   269

instead to claim that they ­were formalizing ideal be­hav­ior (which allowed for a unified field theory that was both general and empirical). The economists’ job, as Hayek put it, was to “classify types of individual be­hav­ior” rather than to understand the motives ­behind be­hav­ior or to judge the reasonableness of another’s preferences.18 Microeconomics thus began to emphasize not the origin or cause of plea­sure and pain but rather the way plea­sure and pain ­were revealed and made mea­sur­able through decisions and actions. Second, microeconomics turned from models of cardinal utility, which sought to mea­sure utility absolutely, to models of ordinal utility, which mea­sured utility relatively. The result of both of ­these shifts was an increasingly emphatic insistence on what Paul Samuelson influentially termed “revealed preference,” which dispensed with the treatment of utility as a “psychological concept” and moved instead ­toward “­human be­hav­ior.”19 Following Samuelson, microeconomic MI asserted, first, that all one can ever know about another person is what they manifestly do (a significantly more modest claim than Jevons’s almost utopian fantasy that one might “mea­sure the feelings of the ­human heart”) and, second, that what one does is always an expression of one’s preferences (even if ­under conditions of scarcity) rather than an unfree action determined by exterior circumstances. The result, however, was that microeconomics’ methodological individual began to look like a rather flat figure indeed: so par­tic­u­lar that he could not possibly be known by anyone ­else, and yet also, in his subjection to abstract formal logic, generically universal. Homo economicus would become neither more robust nor less isolated over the course of the twentieth ­century. This was despite a number of amendments to the microeconomic theory of preference and decision. Among the most influential of t­ hese amendments w ­ ere the introduction of game theory (which brought social institutions and po­liti­cal constraints onto the scene of decision-­ making), the development of Gary Becker’s “social economics” (which asserted that “be­hav­ior is driven by a much richer set of values and preferences” than rationalist models allowed), and the reappearance of psy­chol­ogy by way of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman’s influential work in the new field of behavioral economics (which drew on emerging work in cognitive psy­chol­ogy to produce an account of decision-­making that d ­ idn’t assume rationality).20 Yet t­ hese did not, in the end, mean that microeconomic theories of individual motivation became more richly psychological, and still less that they became more social. Game theory imagines no more than a contingent group of asocial individuals whose preferences express a state of nature rather than social or historical

270   Ages and the Long Pres­ent

circumstance.21 For Becker, the individual—or “decision unit”—is still a utility-­ maximizing monad; it is simply that the utility function now also describes “irrational” decisions.22 Behaviorism, although it promised a return to the early marginalist’s “hedonic calculus,” draws its psychological theories largely from cognitive psy­chol­ogy and thus shares cog-­psych’s computational theory of mind. Indeed, over the second half of the twentieth ­century microeconomics increasingly became what Mirowski terms a “cyborg science” and began to theorize the subject as a kind of machine.23 As the economist Donald Patinkin sanguinely put it, modern microeconomics “consider[s] the individual—­with his given indifference map and initial endowment—to be a utility computer into which we ‘feed’ a sequence of market prices and from whom we obtain a corresponding sequence of ‘solutions’ in the form of specified optimum positions.”24 Microeconomic MI’s reduction of subjectivity from (unknowable) psychological motivation to (vis­i­ble) be­hav­ior was also the source of its philosophical antisociality. Hayek, for instance, claims, “It is not only impossible to recognize, but meaningless to speak of, a mind dif­fer­ent from our own.”25 One can almost hear Adam Smith rolling in his grave. For Smith, the very possibility of ­human social life came from the experience not only of recognizing but also of feeling on behalf of minds dif­fer­ent from our own. Trying to suture a theory of economic reason to a theory of po­liti­cal governance, Smith i­ magined the sympathetic vision of an “impartial spectator” who could see the social w ­ hole and who was thus a model for the potential beneficence of civil government.26 Hayek, by contrast, refers to and then immediately scoffs at the possibility of an “omniscient dictator” capable of seeing and knowing the w ­ hole. For Hayek, since “all man’s mind can effectively comprehend are the facts of the narrow circle of which he is the center,” no social planner—­indeed, no po­liti­cal individual or even institution—­could ever or­ga­nize the world more rationally and justly than the market, which aggregates all that dispersed individual knowledge.27 MI’s foreclosure of omniscience persists ­today: a con­temporary microeconomics textbook is likely to ironically invoke the “benevolent social planner” only to assure us that he ­doesn’t r­ eally exist—­real benevolence, ­after all, would mean “letting the market decide.” Taken together, I suggest, ­these two claims—­opposition to (individual) depth and opposition to (holist) breadth—­produce a vision of the individual that looks rather dif­fer­ent from the one we tend to associate with humanist or liberal “individualism.” ­Free in his preferences but pres­ent only through his actions, given infinite choice but deprived of meaningful consciousness of his own in-

Methodological Individualism and the Novel   271

tentions, the formidable pivot around which the economic universe turns but also no more than a ­human calculator capable of performing a single function, the microeconomic individual is an uncanny subject. He is not a complex, unique psychological subject but rather a highly abstracted point around which a formula can be constructed, a set of observable but mindless be­hav­iors, a machine. Drifting through contingent and shifting social aggregates themselves deprived of meaning—­unable to know much of anything even about ­those with whom he interacts, let alone the larger social world of which he is a part; incapable even of forming, let alone realizing, a collective interest—he seems to be understood through what he cannot do or be or have or know more than via a robust or optimistic “possessive” individualism. In short, for microeconomic MI, “true individualism” is not ­really about the complex motivations, deep desires, or even the yearning for freedom of individual ­human subjects. Put simply, its individualism is not a positive theory. Instead, it is the basis for a negative claim, namely, opposition to the empowerment of larger social institutions. And that opposition, in turn, both arises from and intensifies the position that t­ here is no such t­ hing as society in the first place—­often not even in the modestly liberal sense, as what John Dewey called “associated life,” and never in the more radically Durkheimian sense, as “that ­whole which includes all ­things, that class ­under which all other classes must be subsumed.”28 Thus, when Karl Popper argues for a “sane opposition to collectivism and holism” that refuses “to be impressed by . . . ​a general ­will or a national spirit, or, perhaps, by a group mind,” he pres­ents the solipsism of MI as a liberated, rational, humanist antidote to the paranoid belief that ­there is such a ­thing as a social totality.29 Refusing to grant agency or coherence to social ­wholes, microeconomic MI tries to suture over the gap between the anti-­humanism of MI (cyborg economics) and the faux humanism of ideological individualism (anti-­collectivism) by offering an ostensibly virtuous rejection of the very idea of society.

The Novel and Methodological Individualism And what of the novel? ­Here a parallel story seems to emerge. As I suggested above, critics have long tended to treat the novel itself as a form of MI. By the end of the nineteenth ­century, just as the marginalists ­were refuting macro-­omniscience in f­ avor of what Mirowski describes as the “extreme solipsism” of a consumer-­oriented theory, novelists ­were also turning away from conventional omniscience. As the second-­generation marginalists homed in on the price system as a means for collecting what Ludwig von Mises terms

272   Ages and the Long Pres­ent

“subjective valuations,” the early twentieth-­century modernists w ­ ere “relocat30 ing the outside on the inside,” in Armstrong’s phrasing. Likewise, one of the most familiar accounts of the postmodern novel holds that it too has acknowledged the impossibility of accessing a totality and has fallen instead into a kind of nihilistic individualism, eschewing psychological realism and “rich” interiority in f­ avor of flat affect and an emphasis on be­hav­ior and consequence. Fi­nally, we are often told that twenty-­first-­century—or so-­called neoliberal—­fiction is more individualist than ever. As Walter Benn Michaels puts it—­quoting not only Margaret Thatcher but also, albeit without noting it, Hayek and Latour—in the con­temporary novel “­every sentence . . . ​tells us that t­ here are only individuals and their families.”31 Correlating the rise of MI and the (putative) transformation of the novel from a genre of the social world to a genre of the individual, this story—­one familiar within novel theory, from Lukács and Watt to Armstrong and Fredric Jameson—­illuminates the ways that microeconomics and the novel w ­ ere wrestling with many of the same questions in this period. Some of ­these questions are philosophical and long-­standing. What is the relationship between consciousness and activity? What can we know about other p ­ eople’s intentions, motivations, and desires? Is the social an organic unity with its own laws (a class), or is it a contingent, fleeting, and spontaneous aggregation of individuals (a market)? Moreover, as I have suggested already, the shared concerns of microeconomics and the novel in this period are themselves the product of concrete historical changes (although saying so would certainly consternate the anti-­historicist microeconomists). Skepticism about omniscience—­the doubt about how much we can know about our world or ­those around us—­arises out of a historically conditioned feeling of alienation and bafflement increasingly common in advanced, urban, global capitalism. The question of why and how we desire—­the emphasis, shared by microeconomics and the twentieth-­ century novel, on acts of consumption—­reverberated with par­tic­u­lar force in an economy in which individual consumption was more impor­tant than ever before (and in which ­there ­were thus more and more choices to make). The increasing incompatibility between theories of the individual and theories of the social, the agon between libertarianism and collectivism, the fear of totalitarianism, the collapse of the welfare state, and, perhaps most emphatically, the eclipsing of economic class as the mediator between self-­interest and the collective good—­all of ­these are consequences of the po­liti­cal and economic changes that define the twentieth ­century, and all show up in some way in both microeconomics and the novel.

Methodological Individualism and the Novel   273

I describe ­these as shared questions not to suggest that microeconomics and the novel offer the same answers to them. For reasons I elaborate below, they do not. But I do want to suggest that we need a more sophisticated historical and conceptual account of both microeconomic and novelistic MI than we currently have in order to convincingly disentangle them. For one ­thing, it turns out that the question raised by both microeconomics and the novel is not so much individual or society: even the most individualist microeconomic theory or the most individualist novel is also still partly about collective forms of social life. Rather, the question is what kind of social group is imaginable. For microeconomics, quite clearly, the answer is simply “markets,” and I describe below what the resulting social imaginary looks like. For the novel, however, t­ hings are, not surprisingly, more complicated. Certainly the novel in the age of microeconomics expresses an anxiety about collective interest (class identity) and a fear of collective activity (crowds), as well as a preference for private selective affiliation (the ­family) over more involuntary forms of social life (the state). Yet if, as Lukács argues, in the novel the “dissonance” between the individual and the collective is both “problematic” and “form-­ giving”—­that is, if the novel is indeed “the epic of an age in which the extensive totality of life is no longer directly given . . . ​yet which still thinks in totality”—we might nonetheless find in it some perduring commitment to a more holist account of the social as a determining force that acts upon us, and on which we might, collectively, act in turn.32 In the remainder of this essay, then, I want first to apply some of the habits of literary reading to a microeconomic anecdote in order to begin to understand what social aggregation looks like in microeconomic theory: what, I want to ask, are the limits of market sociability in the microeconomic imaginary? Then I want to think very briefly about how the novel in the age of microeconomics—­precisely by exploring some of the same economic, po­liti­cal, and philosophical questions as microeconomics—­ develops a range of techniques for turning the prob­lem of the individual into an image of both social totality and historicity.

Social Mind, Social Voice, and the Price System Milton Friedman had a story he liked to tell about a pencil. It shows up in his price theory textbook, as well as his 1980 PBS documentary ­Free to Choose. The PBS version goes like this: Look at this lead pencil. ­There’s not a single person in the world who could make this pencil. Remarkable statement? Not at all. The wood from which it is made,

274   Ages and the Long Pres­ent

for all I know, comes from a tree that was cut down in the state of Washington. . . . ​ This black center . . . ​I’m not sure where it comes from, but I think it comes from some mines in South Amer­i­ca. This red top up ­here, this eraser, a bit of rubber, prob­ably comes from Malaya, where the rubber tree ­isn’t even native! It was imported from South Amer­i­ca by some businessmen with the help of the British government. This brass ferrule? I h ­ aven’t the slightest idea where it came from. Or the yellow paint! Or the paint that made the black lines. Or the glue that holds it together. Literally thousands of p ­ eople co-­operated to make this pencil. ­People who d ­ on’t speak the same language, who practice dif­fer­ent religions, who might hate one another if they ever met! When you go down to the store and buy this pencil, you are in effect trading a few minutes of your time for a few seconds of the time of all t­ hose thousands of p ­ eople. What brought them together and induced them to cooperate to make this pencil? ­There was no commissar sending . . . ​out ­orders from some central office. It . . . ​[was] the operation of the ­free market . . . ​that brought them together and got them to cooperate, to make this pencil, so you could have it for a trifling sum.33

­ here is so much to say about this ­little parable. If we wanted to begin with T its politics, we would note the euphemistic description of the rubber “imported from South Amer­i­ca by some businessmen with the help of the British government.” Friedman refers, with stunning disingenuousness, to the colonization of Malaysia by the East India Com­pany: rubber was introduced to the economy and ecol­ogy of Malaysia by British colonists, who made it hugely profitable by bringing in massive numbers of mi­grant workers from India and China. Narratively, t­ here is something in the way Friedman turns world history into minor anecdote that suggests his relationship to the “macro” as such. For my purposes, however, I want to observe instead that Friedman’s parable rather startlingly recalls two other scenes of commodity encounter. First, it resembles Marx’s account of the commodity fetish, wherein the social relations ­behind the commodity object are obscured while the object itself comes to life. It also suggests what Bruce Robbins describes as the “sweatshop sublime,” wherein the globally produced commodity object reminds us that we are morally and po­liti­cally implicated in an economic system of nearly inconceivable magnitude.34 For Marx, fetishism is a moment of mystified reification, whereas Robbins’s sublime opens onto a critical view of global production—­ and yet for both Marx and Robbins, the experience of the sublimely fetishized commodity is shot through not only with won­der and plea­sure but also with anxiety, dread, and even terror.

Methodological Individualism and the Novel   275

This ele­ment of fear is, not surprisingly, repressed by Friedman, who instead plays rhetorically with a kind of mansplainery bonhomie. Yet the result of this disavowal is that Friedman’s account of the commodity object as the realization of social “cooperation” is strangely utopian. In laughing off the possibility of intentional design—of the bureaucratic “central office”—­Friedman is forced instead to resort to something far more magical, producing an “invisible hand” fantasy whereby, as he elsewhere puts it, “an extremely subtle and complex device,” namely, the market itself, “coordinate[s] the activities of hundreds of millions of p ­ eople all over the globe [­under] ever-­changing conditions.”35 Through the image of the pencil, in other words, Friedman is not just describing a scene of robust and satisfied consumer desire, the sort Nikolai Bukharin has in mind when he scorns marginalist microeconomics as the “economic theory of the leisure class.”36 Nor is this anything like that other story beloved by the microeconomists since the beginning, namely, the “Robinson Crusoe economy,” in which both desire and its fulfillment are strictly solitary pro­cesses. Instead, Friedman imagines a kind of crystallized social totality, producing a dizzying image of a system of social intelligence in which we are, in Robbins’s phrase, “strangely powerless.”37 Through his parable, Friedman is restoring to the microeconomic imaginary the very macro vision that the theory explic­itly disavows. Besides offering us ample opportunities for close reading, Friedman’s story also begins to clarify the point I made above, namely, that it’s not ­really as s­ imple as “individual” versus “social.” Setting aside the fantasy of a “Robinson Crusoe economy,” you ­can’t have an economy—­let alone a “market”—­without having more than one person (nor, Defoe seems to realize halfway through Robinson Crusoe, can you have much of a novel). Despite its concern with microlevel explanations, microeconomics does in the end have to explain how a market works—­how a bunch of p ­ eople get together first to produce pencils and then to exchange them. In other words, even if microeconomics is never talking about totalities, it is often talking about aggregations and groups. The prob­lem of describing how t­ hose groups come together organically and without external direction—­how they emerge and disperse simply through the activities of atomized individuals—is one of the first obstacles the theory confronts (Friedman’s recourse to the sublime might be read as a sign of this difficulty). As I have already explained, microeconomics begins by foreclosing the bird’s-­eye view of the omniscient dictator in order to insist on the impossibility of knowing the social world except through individual actions and understanding. It also forecloses what we might call the eye-­to-­eye view of individuals seeing

276   Ages and the Long Pres­ent

and knowing one another: recall Hayek’s insistence that “it is impossible to recognize, let alone to speak of, a mind other than our own.” Yet both the claim that we ­can’t know every­thing and the claim that we c­ an’t know anyone clearly pose prob­lems for a theory of social activity. How, microeconomics has to ask, do we move from the incomplete, fragmented, blinkered knowledge of individuals to what Hayek describes as an intelligent “social mind”? The answer is the system that Hayek calls a “marvel”: the price system. And this answer, in turn, gives us a better sense of what the MI aggregate looks like and how it might be dif­fer­ent from the holist totality. “Evolv[ing] without design,” the price system produces groups that are momentary, arbitrary, fugitive, spontaneous—­not much more, in the end, than the adding of one individual to another.38 If the paradigmatic meta­phor for social holism is the crowd—­defined by obligations and compulsions external to its constituents and far more than the sum of its parts—­the “social mind” of the price system resembles what MI sociologist Erving Goffman terms an “occasion”: “a shifting entity, necessarily evanescent, created by arrivals and killed by departures.”39 Indeed, in Goffman’s image of the social entity “killed by departures” we might recall that once the price system finds the perfect equilibrium of supply and demand, the result is known as the “market clearing” price: the social aggregation of the market aims at nothing less than the abolition of the t­hing that brought every­one together in the first place. Thinking through microeconomic MI thus requires us to distinguish more carefully between dif­f er­ent kinds of social aggregates. When Thatcher tells us (echoing Friedman) that t­ here is no such t­ hing as society but t­ here are “individual men and ­women and families,” or when Hayek extols “the common efforts of the small community and group,” they are describing the kinds of aggregates MI not only allows but indeed cherishes: small-­scale communities of elective affinity produced by what Hayek terms “the noncompulsory conventions of social intercourse,” communities that (ostensibly) look and work exactly like the ­free market. The same complexity is pres­ent in the novel: even the most apparently “individualist” novel is about more than one person. The question that remains, then, is this: what are the imaginable forms of social aggregation for the novel in the age of microeconomics? Are they limited to elective, evanescent “encounters,” or might they embrace the “collective consciousness” of the crowd (without banishing the latter to the realm of irrational mob vio­lence)? The most obvious way that the novel formally stages the prob­lem of social encounter—­precisely by thinking through the question ­whether it is pos­si­ble

Methodological Individualism and the Novel   277

to know “a mind dif­fer­ent than our own”—is f­ree indirect discourse (FID). FID rebuts Hayek’s nihilistic solipsism by providing what J. Hillis Miller calls a “structure of interpenetrating minds.”40 When we understand that the novel and microeconomic price theory engage similar prob­lems of “social mind,” it hardly seems coincidental that perhaps the two most often cited instances of FID in the Anglophone novel—­“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a ­great fortune must be in want of a wife”; and “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. For Lucy had her work cut out for her”—­are both about economic activity. FID is a way of temporarily achieving the eye-­to-­eye view that microeconomic individualism forecloses by giving us temporary access to the other’s ­silent thoughts. Yet if FID is, as critic Gage McWeeny argues, a novelistic technology for “combining social intimacy and distance,” then despite its capacity to render other individuals transparent to us, it nonetheless does not imagine much more than the kinds of ephemeral, transient exchanges that are the outer limit of microeconomics’ free-­market sociability (or sociability as a f­ree market).41 To understand this in terms more familiar to novel theory, we might say that FID is a feature of the kind of “mere description” Lukács famously disparages: rather than showing the “laws of historical development” and the “action of social forces,” FID (like the price system) can only imagine the trivial, “transient” exchanges that occur between mere strangers.42 As with Goffman’s occasion, ­these moments of temporary, elective sociality “appear suddenly and just as suddenly dis­appear,” in Lukács phrasing.43 In this sense, the sociality of FID comes to seem as attenuated as the aggregated sociality of the price system: a temporary and tentative form of relation from which we can always opt out and whose final and definitive act is its own self-­destruction or “market clearing.” What I am terming “social voice,” by contrast, is a kind of cacophonous sound that we cannot avoid, the sort of social ­whole or social determination that includes and interpolates us w ­ hether we like it or not. In the American context, perhaps the most famous instance of this kind of social voice is to be found in John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. Trilogy, with its account of social collision and its deployment of narrative cacophony. Lukács disparaged Dos Passos for his modernist fragmentation—­and Dos Passos himself l­ ater made an ideological about-­ face, embracing libertarian conservativism and renouncing both socialism and the historical materialism of early works like the U.S.A. Trilogy—­yet ­there can be no doubt of the trilogy’s commitment to precisely that historically determined, impersonally motivated, social force Lukács seeks out in the properly

278   Ages and the Long Pres­ent

“repre­sen­ta­tional” novel. As Elvira Godek-­Kiryluk writes, “with ­every utterance [the U.S.A. Trilogy] claims us as participants in social discourse.”44 This is not the sort of social discourse through which we might, like a “price taker” on the market, receive some ephemeral minimum of social information capable of constituting a temporary, orderly, and self-­abolishing social system. Rather, in Dos Passos ­there is always far too much information, a kind of social excess that precludes identification precisely ­because it is both the ambient atmosphere of our world and something beyond us. That is, theories of the market want to deny the existence of a social totality by imagining a “marvel” of social addition, a system whose scale is im­mense but that is reducible to the activities of a given individual, a system whose crowning achievement is to immediately void itself and f­ ree us to return to our atomic individuality. For Dos Passos, by contrast, it is impossible that any given exchange between individuals could substitute for the w ­ hole, which means that the social totality persists precisely insofar as it remains difficult to see and represent it. Price theory sees the order, rationality, and equilibrium of the market and insists that under­neath that order is fragmentation, subjectivity, and epistemological opacity. Dos Passos produces chaos and fragmentation but insists on an overarching unity, social holism, and the possibility of objective knowledge. At the other end of the age of microeconomics, and outside the “U.S.A.” of Dos Passos’s trilogy, we find Luiz Ruffato’s novel ­There ­Were Many Horses, first published in Portuguese in 2001 and translated into En­glish in 2014.45 Like the U.S.A. Trilogy, Ruffato’s novel is experimental and heterogeneous; also like Dos Passos’s work, ­There ­Were Many Horses is set in a city exemplary of the historical moment in which the novel is written: no longer New York, but São Paulo, Brazil. And like the U.S.A. Trilogy, Ruffato’s novel speaks in a chaotic mix of voices, their narration and dialogue producing not only the cacophony but also the bodily collisions and spatial contradictions of a crowded late cap­ i­tal­ist city: in one passage, a young man imagines what he wants to get his ­mother for M ­ other’s Day and says, “To work, then! . . . ​Now: where to find the cash? Brabeza loiters. The best place to pick pockets is Barão de Itapetininga, where ­there are ATMs.”46 The U.S.A. Trilogy produced the sociality of the multitude of workingmen by imagining one man d ­ oing many jobs, the anonymous voice of its prologue an example of that strange phenomenon Kate Marshall describes as “grammars of the multitude [that become] singular plural.” By contrast, ­There W ­ ere Many Horses imagines the even more vexed multitude that happens when many ­people are ­doing no jobs at all.47 That is, it takes

Methodological Individualism and the Novel   279

up the specifically con­temporary condition of fundamental superfluity that defines life in a moment and a place where t­ here is no formal work, and where “to work” thus means to pick pockets. Like Dos Passos, Ruffato deploys a heterogeneous array of textual documents, from horoscopes to phone book listings to financial reports. A list of job openings, for instance, seems at first a moment of mimetic bricolage: “MAN­AG­ER—­administrative/MANAGER—­ administrative industrial/MANAGER—­data-­processing center/MANAGER—­ deli.” And yet at the end of this list, suddenly ­there is a shift, so that we no longer read the list neutrally but rather from a par­tic­u ­lar perspective: “WELDER—(Ah!); / WELDER—­primary to ju­nior high, 2 years’ experience, aged 28 to 50 / WELDER—no educational requirements.”48 ­Here, a banally impersonal administrative document cedes to a rec­ord of the individual, subjective experience of precarity, which in turn becomes the means to limn an objective set of social and historical circumstances. In this sense, Ruffato’s work illuminates a Durkheimian totality in which the combination of ele­ments—­here, the production of a mass population—­makes pos­si­ble something whose newness resides not in its ele­ments but in their combination itself. Moreover, it illuminates this totality not just in a conceptual sense but also in an aesthetic one, rendering that experience of organicity as strangely, darkly sublime as Marx’s “hidden abode of production,” the secret b ­ ehind the commodity’s uncanny animation. ­These two instances, taken from the two ends of a long microeconomic ­century, show that despite and indeed through an abiding concern with the fates of individuals, novels attempt to preserve the idea of social totality despite its po­liti­cal and intellectual attenuation. Microeconomic individualism gets us neither individual depth nor social breadth, neither rich interiority nor collective expansiveness. Precisely in its engagement with the very same impasses and questions that animate microeconomics and the ­century that it came to define, the novel—­sometimes with frustrated and frustrating incompleteness, sometimes with powerfully dialectical verve—­tries to get us both at once. ­There is one last ­thing to say, and it returns me to my title. I hope I have adequately explained why the microeconomic ­century begins in 1871, with the publication of Menger and Jevons’s works of marginal utility theory and the Methodenstreit against socialism and historical materialism. Yet it remains unclear when, or if, it might be said to have ended. Certainly in any of the most obvious senses, it has not: microeconomic assumptions still dominate the discipline of economics, and for the past few de­cades they have also become

280   Ages and the Long Pres­ent

central to both statecraft and public policy, from military strategy to health care. MI broadly speaking, meanwhile, has become more influential, moving—­ under the auspices of disciplinary formations such as actor network theory—­ even into realms of critical theory once more firmly committed to thinking in terms of totalities. Yet ­there may still be fissures in this dominance. One of t­ hose fissures comes with the crisis of 2008, and it fractures the individual herself. In 2008, it became clear that we could count on neither individuals nor states nor the marvelous price system to master the economy, which had instead become a force of its own unmaking. While many microeconomic ideas survived that crisis (if, perhaps, from a more defensive crouch), a certain kind of individualist ideology arguably did not. As I discuss at length elsewhere, far from enabling a restoration of possessive individualism, the post-2008 era marks the realization that possession itself is radically uncertain, subject to the volatility of debt.49 Given conditions of increasingly absolute scarcity, the microeconomic individual’s capacity to reproduce is in profound and intractable crisis. Endowed with infinite consumer choice while burdened with full responsibility for his own reproduction, the microeconomic individual ­under conditions of crisis wavers between assumptions of rationality and descriptions of irrational folly, between naked self-­interest and the libertarian humanism of freedom and “personal responsibility.” The second fissure is along the fault line of the social w ­ hole or the collective subject. What is emerging from the grave of possessive individualism is something like the mode of protagonicity we find in Ruffato’s novel, with its use of anonymity, brevity, and proliferation: not the lyrical “one” (nor even the “we” of the ­family and liberal community) but rather the impersonal and yet still intimate “many” of the population. That population is not the sort produced by the temporary contingencies of the market, but a surplus population of the growing excluded, a mass understood as both undifferentiated and absolutely redundant, who not only persist but multiply as capitalism throws more and more subjects out of certain forms of market participation altogether. Ruffato’s novel probes the question of such a population’s capacity for collective activity—­ its capacity not only to be produced sui generis by an impersonal history but also to become an agent of history, an agent with its own kind of social mind, an agent far more than the sum of its parts—­and in so ­doing suggests the possibility that microeconomic individualism’s Robinson Crusoe economy might run aground not only on the shores of method but also on the rocks of history.

Methodological Individualism and the Novel   281

Notes Research ­toward this essay was funded by a Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellowship, for which I’m im­mensely grateful. Written and rewritten over a rather long period, this essay has been read and engaged by many ­people, and I have benefited ­every time. I am especially indebted to my comrades at the Stanford Novel Theory conference and at Post45, as well as to the tremendous intelligence of my UCI colleagues Chris Fan, Richard Godden, Joe Jeon, Ted Martin, and Michael Szalay. I also had an im­mensely rich email exchange with Heather Love early in my thinking. Most of all, I’m grateful to Jason Puskar, who spent a summer reading marginalist theory with me, thus providing evidence that not all decisions are rational. 1. ​See Regina Gagnier, The Insatiability of ­Human Wants: Economics and Aesthetics in Market Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). 2. ​See Philip Mirowski, More Heat Than Light: Economics as Social Physics, Physics as Nature’s Economics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 3. ​See Ben Fine and Dimitris Milonakis, From Po­liti­cal Economy to Economics: Method, the Social, and the Historical in the Evolution of Economic Theory (London: Routledge, 2008). 4. ​Joseph Heath, “Methodological Individualism,” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Stanford University, 1997–), published Feb. 3, 2005, last modified Jan. 21, 2015, http://­plato​.­stanford​ .­edu​/­entries​/­methodological​-­individualism​/­. 5. ​Frank Knight, Intelligence and Demo­cratic Action (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), 76. 6. ​Ian Watt, Rise of the Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 60; Nancy Armstrong, How Novels Think: The Limits of Individualism from 1719–1900 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 3. 7. ​Mirowski, More Heat Than Light, 235–36. 8. ​See Simon Clarke, Marx, Marginalism, and Modern Sociology: From Adam Smith to Max Weber (London: Macmillan, 1991). 9. ​See Thomas Schelling, Micromotives and Macrobehavior (1976; repr., New York: W. W. Norton, 2006). 10. ​Kenneth Arrow, Social Choice and Individual Values (1951; repr., New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 4. 11. ​William Stanley Jevons, Theory of Po­liti­cal Economy (New York: Macmillan, 1871), 3–4. See also Mirowski, More Heat Than Light. 12. ​Carl Menger, Princi­ples of Economics (1871; repr., Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2007), 46. 13. ​Jevons, Theory of Po­liti­cal Economy, 14. 14. ​See Mirowski, More Heat Than Light, 280–86. See also Clarke, Marx, Marginalism, and Modern Sociology, 141–79. 15. ​Menger, Princi­ples of Economics, 116, 121. 16. ​Lars Udehn, Methodological Individualism: Its Background, History, and Meaning (London: Routledge, 2002), 104–9. 17. ​Ludwig von Mises, ­Human Action: A Treatise on Economics (1949; repr., Auburn, AL: Liberty Fund), 42. 18. ​Freidrich Hayek, Individualism and Economic Order (1948; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 67. 19. ​Paul Samuelson, “A Note on the Pure Theory of Consumer’s Be­hav­ior,” Economics 5, no. 17 (Feb. 1938): 61. 20. ​Gary Becker, The Economic Approach to H ­ uman Be­hav­ior (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976); Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, and Paul Slovic, Judgment ­under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

282   Ages and the Long Pres­ent 21. ​See Shaun Heap and Yanis Varoufakis, Game Theory: A Critical Introduction (London: Routledge, 2004). 22. ​Gary Becker, Accounting for Tastes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). 23. ​See Don Ross, Philosophy of Economics (London: Palgrave, 2014). 24. ​Patinkin quoted in Mirowski, Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 25. ​Hayek, Individualism and Economic Order, 66. 26. ​On the impartial spectator, see Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759; repr., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 27. ​Hayek, Individualism and Economic Order, 14. 28. ​Dewey quoted in Sean McCann, Gumshoe Amer­i­ca: Hard-­Boiled Crime Fiction and the Rise and Fall of New Deal Liberalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 151; Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen Fields (New York: ­Free Press, 1995), 443. 29. ​Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, vol. 2, Hegel and Marx (1945; repr., London: Routledge Classics, 2003), 101. 30. ​Armstrong, How Novels Think, 9. 31. ​Walter Benn Michaels, “­Going Boom,” Bookforum, Feb./Mar. 2009, www​.­bookforum​.­com​ /­inprint​/­015​_­05​/­3274. 32. ​Georg Lukács, Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1974), 56. 33. ​Transcript taken from Ann Elizabeth Moore, “Milton Friedman’s Pencil,” New Inquiry, Dec. 17, 2012, https://­thenewinquiry​.­com​/­milton​-­friedmans​-­pencil​/­. 34. ​Bruce Robbins, “The Sweatshop Sublime,” PMLA 117, no. 1 (Jan. 2002): 84–97. 35. ​Milton Friedman, Price Theory: A Provisional Text (1962; repr., London: Routledge, 2007), 10. 36. ​Nikolai Bukharin, Economic Theory of the Leisure Class (1927; repr., New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974). 37. ​Robbins, “Sweatshop Sublime,” 85. 38. ​Hayek, Individualism and Economic Order, 87. 39. ​Goffman quoted in Gage McWeeny, The Comfort of Strangers: Social Life and Literary Form (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 16. 40. ​Miller quoted in Adela Pinch, Thinking about Other P ­ eople in Nineteenth-­Century British Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 145. 41. ​McWeeny, Comfort of Strangers, 29. 42. ​Georg Lukács, Writer and Critic and Other Essays, ed. and trans. Arthur Kahn (London: Merlin, 1970), 122. 43. ​Lukács, 135. 44. ​Elvira Godek-­Kiryluk, “Modernism in the Balance: Dos Passos with Lukács,” Mediations 29, no. 2 (Spring 2016), www​.­mediationsjournal​.­org​/­articles​/­modernism​-­in​-­the​-­balance. 45. ​Luiz Ruffato, ­There W ­ ere Many Horses, trans. Anthony Doyle (Seattle: AmazonCrossing, 2014). Originally published as Eles Eram Muitos Cavalos (São Paulo, Brazil: Boitempo, 2001). 46. ​Ruffato, 36–37. 47. ​Kate Marshall, “Dreiser’s Stamping Room: Becoming Media in An American Tragedy,” NOVEL 46, no. 2 (Summer 2013): 247. 48. ​Ruffato, ­There ­Were Many Horses, 35–36. 49. ​See Annie McClanahan, Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and Twenty-­First-­Century Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016), esp. chap. 1.

1980 to the Pres­ent Formalism and the New Authoritarianism

r a c h e l g r e e n wa l d s m i t h

The West is a civilization that has survived all the prophecies of its collapse with a single stratagem. . . . ​The operation can be summarized like this: an entity in its death throes sacrifices itself as a content in order to survive as a form. The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection (2009)

This essay probes a tendency that has existed in formalisms throughout the twentieth and twenty-­first centuries: the inclination to see the question of aesthetic form as entwined with the question of po­liti­cal authority. As Carolyn Levine explains, “It is the work of form to make order . . . ​and if the po­liti­cal is a ­matter of imposing and enforcing bound­aries, temporal patterns, and hierarchies on experience, then t­ here is no politics without form.”1 Levine goes on to contest the critical tendency to identify formalism with domination, arguing that formalism—­and even the pursuit of unity through a form she calls “wholeness”—­can also seek out points of intersection, conflict, and multivalence. And yet she acknowledges that, for many anti-­formalists, “the valuing of aesthetic unity implies a broader desire to regulate and control—to dominate the plurality and heterogeneity of experience.”2 If our moment has seen a renewed interest in critical formalisms, what does this rise tell us about the po­liti­cal assumptions that govern our moment?3 Further, what might we learn about postwar American literary culture if we frame the period with an eye t­ oward shifting attitudes t­ oward form and formalism, authority and authoritarianism? One answer to this question, I argue, is that our sense of the transition between postmodernism and what has come to be called “post-­postmodernism” might be refined such that the 1980s can be understood less as the high point of postmodernism and more as a pivotal moment in the emergence of attitudes t­ oward authority and form that are still dominant ­today. In order to sketch this periodization, this essay begins with

284   Ages and the Long Pres­ent

a brief foray into the 1960s and 1970s, a period during which progressive ­po­liti­cal change was widely envisioned as a practice of the destruction of structures rather than the imposition or management of them. This po­liti­cal moment overlapped with a period in critical method that valued deconstruction and the disruption of sense making. Literary works, particularly ­those that tend to be defined as formally postmodernist, also reflected this value. But both of t­ hese trends—­one po­liti­cal, the other literary—­began to find challenges in the 1980s as literary scholars and writers questioned the po­liti­cal consequences of aesthetic and theoretical anti-­authoritarianism. Turning to novels by Don DeLillo, Rachel Kushner, and Heidi Julavits that take up the relationship between aesthetic form and vio­lence directly, this essay argues that renewed interest in authority and form in literary discourse should be understood in the context of changes in the expression of po­liti­cal power in the United States, beginning in the 1980s and extending into the pres­ent.

The Aesthetics of Anti-­authoritarianism In his contribution to the 1967 Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation, a gathering characterized by “a curious pastiche of eminent scholars and activists,”4 including Gregory Bateson, Stokely Carmichal, and Herbert Marcuse, radical psychiatrist R. D. Laing diagnosed the root cause of domination by invoking the “­simple morality tale” of the infamous shock experiments conducted by Stanley Milgram at Yale University.5 The fact that a majority of Milgram’s test subjects w ­ ere willing to deliver what they believed to be a potentially lethal shock to an innocent victim simply ­because they ­were told to do so by an authority figure suggested, according to Laing, that most p ­ eople “are prepared to do practically anything if told to do it by a sufficient authority.” For this reason, if one is concerned with liberation, “it is particularly impor­tant to study the nature of obedience,” in order to identify and combat the source of the prob­lem: “we all have a ‘reflex’ t­ owards believing and d ­ oing 6 what we are told.” This belief—­that the source of po­liti­cal ills stemmed from the dynamics of authority and obedience—­permeated the po­liti­cal climate of the 1960s and 1970s, leading to a general ethos of anti-­authoritarianism on the left that was directly reflected in aesthetic form.7 The result at its most extreme was the dissolution of the work of art into the “Happening,” an activity in which, according to Allan Kaprow, “audiences should be eliminated entirely” in f­avor of a participatory event that integrates the specificity of “the par­tic­u­lar materials and character of the environment” ­toward a one-­time action.8 As John Barth points out in

1980 to the Present: Formalism and New Authoritarianism   285

his 1967 essay “The Lit­er­a­ture of Exhaustion,” Happenings and other “intermedia” arts share a “tendency to eliminate not only the traditional audience . . . ​ but also the most traditional notion of the artist: the Aristotelian conscious agent who achieves with technique and cunning the artistic effect.”9 This is, as Barth explains, a po­liti­cally motivated critique: “the very idea of the controlling artist,” he writes, “has been condemned as po­liti­cally reactionary, authoritarian, even fascist.”10 Barth himself is not ready to be done with the figure of the author entirely, but he is still sympathetic to this critique. His solution, as it is for a cluster of writers he admires, is to write “novels which imitate the form of the Novel, by an author who imitates the role of Author”—in other words, what we have come to define as postmodern fiction.11 While Barth sees his own position as more invested in traditionalism than that of the advocates of Happenings and other “intermedia” art, his interest in how fiction might acknowledge its own finitude is undoubtedly informed by their critiques. This is made explicit in his 1984 reflections on the essay, in which Barth writes with uncharacteristic earnestness, “Rereading [‘The Lit­er­a­ture of Exhaustion’] now, I sniff tear gas in its margins; I hear an echo of disruption between its lines.”12 This interest in dismantling structures of authority was at the heart of 1960s and 1970s critical theory as well. In his 1977 preface to the first volume of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizo­phre­nia, Michel Foucault praises the work for being anti-­fascist in the most capacious definition of the term. He writes, “The major e­ nemy [of the book] is fascism. And not only historical fascism, the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini . . . ​but also the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday be­hav­ior, that fascism that ­causes us to love power, to desire the very ­thing that dominates and exploits us.” For Foucault, fascism is not merely a po­liti­cal threat but a subjective one too. To be anti-­fascist, then, requires rooting out fascism everywhere, including in language itself. He explains, “Deleuze and Guattari . . . ​have tried to neutralize the effects of power linked to their own discourse. Hence the games and snares scattered through the book . . . ​the book often leads one to believe it is all fun and games, when something essential is taking place, something of extreme seriousness: the tracking down of all va­ri­e­ties of fascism, from the enormous ones that surround and crush us to the petty ones that constitute the tyrannical bitterness of our everyday lives.”13 ­Here Foucault describes a style that sounds very much like that of postmodern lit­er­a­ture, with its focus on play, suspicion ­toward easy forms of closure, and affirmation of the po­liti­cal and social value of difficulty. Read this way, the peculiar stylistic qualities typical of both postmodernism and certain kinds of late twentieth-­century theory should be

286   Ages and the Long Pres­ent

understood, first and foremost, as a method of “tracking down” authoritarian impulses in language.

No More Nonsense We are now in a moment of skepticism ­toward precisely the kind of theoretical and aesthetic style that Foucault once saw as a necessary antidote to the lurking threat of fascism. Just as we have seen a turn to literary works that are stylistically “post-­postmodern,” that are less formally opaque and more comfortable with narrative closure, so has deconstructive and post-­structuralist theory lost purchase. And the decline of ­these movements has occurred, in part, ­because of a growing perception that the skepticism t­oward authority they performed ultimately led to a damaging reluctance to say anything of substance at all. In this view, the very rejection of authoritarianism embodied in the dismantling of certain kinds of linguistic and social authority ultimately leads to a cele­bration of a kind of free-­floating nonsensical anything-­goes attitude that looks very much like the experience of late capitalism. This argument is epitomized in Fredric Jameson’s “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” (1984). In his prefatory remarks on what would become arguably the most impor­tant periodizing gesture of late twentieth-­century cultural studies, Jameson notes that scholars trained in the sixties and seventies ethos of anti-­authoritarianism tend to object to the imposition of critical forms of authority—­including periodization itself—­ because of their potential “obliteration of heterogeneity.”14 “What happens,” he writes, “is that the more power­ful the vision of some increasingly total system or logic . . . ​the more powerless the reader comes to feel.” And yet, he continues, “if we do not achieve some general sense of a cultural dominant, then we fall back into a view of pres­ent history as sheer heterogeneity, random difference, a coexistence of a host of distinct forces whose effectivity is undecidable.”15 For Jameson, this “sheer heterogeneity,” an aspiration of postmodern art and theory, is symptomatic of the rise of late capitalism, with its disorienting flows of technology, its delirious focus on consumption, and its glossy and undecipherable surfaces. In the face of this situation, Jameson ultimately sees critical authority as preferable to nonsense. Something similar took shape in mid-1980s lit­er­a­ture. While most definitions of postmodernism see it as extending through the eighties and into the early nineties, looking at this shift through the lens of attitudes ­toward form and authority allows us to see significant political-­aesthetic changes already

1980 to the Present: Formalism and New Authoritarianism   287

occurring in the 1980s.16 Think, for instance, of Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel, White Noise. The novel’s main character (the founder, not coincidentally, of Hitler studies), Jack Gladney, spends the first part of the novel plaintively musing, “May the days be aimless. Let the seasons drift. Do not advance the action according to a plan.” In an echo of the anti-­authoritarianism of postmodern aesthetics and theory, Gladney begs for formlessness in the face of the threat of literary cohesion, ­because, as he argues, “All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots. Po­liti­cal plots . . . ​[as well as] narrative plots.”17 This clearly articulated skepticism ­toward narrative closure leads the novel to be held up as an easily identifiable—­and teachable—­example of postmodern fiction.18 Yet throughout the novel, the alternatives to the murderous, Hitlerian totality of structured narratives are the diffuse “waves and radiation” of consumerism, information culture, and popu­lar culture, which are, in turn, envisioned as the cultural equivalents of toxic contaminants. The pursuit of narrative closure might be fascist, the book tells us, but the alternative is far from ideal: an existentially damaging capitulation to capitalism. The novel’s structure itself—­particularly its self-­conscious capitulation to the structure of plot in its final section—­seems to perform the tension between ­these two options.19 As Gladney moves t­ oward the Chekovian resolution to the novel in which he ­will shoot the man who has been sleeping with his wife, he is animated, it seems, by the sheer force of plot. He even seems aware of this structure as it literally shapes his world.20 As he stalks his victim, gun in hand, he reflects: “I sensed I was part of a network of structures and channels. I knew the precise nature of events. I was moving closer to ­things in their a­ ctual state as I approached a vio­lence, a smashing intensity.” In this state of seamless plot, Gladney knows that the world is structured for him in advance: “It occurred to me that I did not have to knock. The door would be open. I gripped the knob, eased the door open, slipped into the room. Stealth. It was easy. Every­ thing would be easy.”21 This moment of perfect plottedness, however, is ultimately undermined by the end of the novel, which returns the reader to the incoherent murmur of the supermarket, the disorientation of the environment complete as a result of the reor­ga­ni­za­tion of the market’s shelves. ­There, shoppers “walk in a fragmented trance . . . ​trying to figure out the pattern, discern the under­lying logic.” This attempt is ultimately in vain. Though the shoppers “try to work their way through confusion” through vari­ous strategies of shopping, decoding, and organ­izing, “in the end it d ­ oesn’t ­matter what they see or think they see. The terminals are equipped with holographic scanners, which

288   Ages and the Long Pres­ent

decode the binary secret of ­every item, infallibly. This is the language of waves and radiation.”22 The “secret” of ­every item, however, is merely its price: this is the limit of what holographic scanners can see. Even if “waves and radiation” have a structure, in this view, their structure is superficial, pointing only to the momentary and variable position of an item in the market, literally and figuratively.23 Both pos­si­ble endings—­the supermarket and the shooting—­seem impossibly dark. The novel therefore posits what looks like an impasse: postmodernist play or authorial control? The slow death of toxicity or the immediacy of the gun? The incoherence of perfect freedom or the vio­lence of total authority? Relativity or ideology? The supermarket or the camp? Insofar as the shooting scene ultimately devolves into farce while the supermarket scene seems to indicate the general condition of the f­ uture, the novel seems to suggest that t­ here may be reason to prefer the vio­lence of structure over the disorientation of nonsense. In other words, the novel suggests the possibility that we may have deci­ded, sometime in the 1980s, that the primary ­enemy had shifted: from fascism to capitalism, from authoritarianism to flexibility, from certainty to relativism.

The New Authoritarianism One way to read this turn is to imagine that con­temporary authors know that ­they’ve inherited a dead-­end choice from postmodernism: e­ ither succumbing to the meaninglessness of linguistic play or instituting the strong authority of sense making. By extension, literary works that figure the imposition of form as being analogous to vio­lence might be read as reluctantly capitulating to meaning making, even if that meaning making is likely to have authoritarian implications. The strongest critical articulation of this point has come from Walter Benn Michaels, who praises Maggie Nelson’s decision to call her book of poems about her aunt’s murder Jane: A Murder instead of Jane: An Elegy. Both titles, Michaels explains, “require a death, but only the murder understands the poem itself as a weapon.”24 For Michaels, this is the better choice, despite the fact that “in the wake of the deconstructive critique” any desire for an artwork to be perfect, beautiful, ­whole, or autonomous ­will be “understood as the desire also for a kind of vio­lence.” This vio­lence is necessary, he explains, ­because, in the context of the rise of neoliberal capitalism, “the critique of form is the mark of a neoliberal politics.”25 The possibility that art might entail a violent imposition of perfection is preferable to the more common tendency in con­temporary art, which he sees as the reduction

1980 to the Present: Formalism and New Authoritarianism   289

of art to taste, individual sensibility, and the vicissitudes of attitude, a reduction that depoliticizes art at the very moment when structural in­equality is growing. Better the vio­lence of perfection, Michaels argues, than the anemia of individual experience. In this model, the authority of intentional form is seen as a power­ful antidote to the cap­i­tal­ist ethos of individual consumer choice that permeates much of con­temporary American culture.26 And the authority and structure invoked by formalism are preferable for two reasons: first, ­because it gives shape to experience that seems shapeless; and second, b ­ ecause seeing form in works of art alerts us to the fact that capitalism is not unstructured, even though it may appear to be so in daily life—­indeed, capitalism itself is a power­ful structuring force. As we have seen, 1980s works tend to be concerned with the former prob­ lem: the need to impose order on the apparent shapelessness of life ­under late capitalism. But many recent works address the latter prob­lem: what to do about a form of po­liti­cal control that both is and ­isn’t authoritarian? The anti-­ authoritarianism of the sixties and seventies was, in some large mea­sure, a response to the dynamics of authority and obedience that characterized the authoritarian regimes of the twentieth ­century. That anti-­authoritarianism was ultimately appropriated by the rhe­toric of the f­ ree market that emerged with neoliberal policies in the 1980s.27 As Michaels argues, the anti-­authoritarianism characteristic of the sixties and seventies therefore reaffirms the primacy of individual choice at a moment when the primacy of individual choice is central to neoliberal ideology. Continuing to invoke authority as an antidote to the ideology of individual choice, however, seems as if it misses a dif­fer­ent point: the under­lying structure of authority that makes the ideology of individual choice look like po­liti­cal freedom in the first place. Rachel Kushner’s 2013 novel, The Flamethrowers, reflects this paradox by characterizing the vio­lence of art not as the intentional imposition of form—as in the clear aesthetic choices invoked in DeLillo—­but as something so fundamentally structural that it is expressed by figures with ­little or no agency. As she takes in the art scene of New York and the po­liti­cal upheavals of Italy in the 1970s, Reno, the novel’s artist-­narrator, is markedly passive, observing the gun-­wielding, power-­hungry male artists and radicals who surround her while rarely taking any definitive action on her own behalf. Yet, in the final scene of the book, she half-­knowingly smuggles across the Alps an Italian radical who ­will eventually kill her ex-­lover’s ­brother. While the men around her are constantly trying to make ­things happen with threats of vio­lence, the most violent moment of the novel occurs not as a result of their efforts at “pure

290   Ages and the Long Pres­ent

offense” but as a result of a kind of thoughtless passivity that reflects not radicalism but complacency. In her notes on the novel, Kushner writes that when she began looking at photo­graphs of the 1970s art scene in researching the novel she found “lots of guns” and “lots of nude ­women.”28 She explains, “I was faced with the plea­sure and headache of somehow stitching together the pistols and the nude ­women as defining features of a fictional realm, and the one in which the female narrator, who has the last word, and technically all words, is nevertheless continually overrun, effaced, and silenced by the very masculine world of the novel she inhabits.”29 Rather than reproducing the obvious opposition between active and violent men with guns and passive and peaceful nude ­women, Kushner creates a passive female narrator who is nevertheless violent precisely as a result of her passivity. The figure of Reno is therefore markedly dif­fer­ent from Jack Gladney. Reno’s formal position does not pit the structuring vio­lence of art against the bewilderment of capitalism; rather, it suggests that vio­lence expresses itself through individuals as a result of a structure beyond their comprehension. In the case of The Flamethrowers, the structure of the novel itself pushes Reno ­toward her violent act, even if Reno herself seems to have no hand in it. Kushner therefore sketches out a peculiar kind of relationship to literary form and vio­lence, one where one can have “technically all words” and be “nevertheless continually overrun” in such a way that makes the very location of textual authority so encompassing that it is invisible. Or, put another way, if Jack Gladney knows he must propel the plot forward even if it means picking up a gun to do so, Reno knows nothing, has no agenda, is obedient to no par­tic­u­lar authority figure and holds no ideological position in par­tic­u­lar, but picks up a gun anyway. This formal position is analogous to a par­tic­u­lar kind of vio­lence of our con­temporary moment: vio­lence that seems to inhabit passive bystanders, not as a function of their obedience to a single authority figure, but as a function of their passive participation in a system that inescapably produces vio­lence. Wendy Brown offers an account of this phenomenon in her analy­sis of the rhe­toric of “shared sacrifice” employed in neoliberal defenses of austerity mea­ sures ranging from statewide cuts in the social safety net to individual furloughs, cut pensions, and reduced benefits. As Brown points out, the par­tic­u­lar form of sacrifice invoked to defend such practices “relocates this classic gesture of patriotism from a political-­military register to an economic one . . . ​individuals . . . ​ may now be legitimately sacrificed to macroeconomic imperatives.”30 As opposed to the much more widely acknowledged discourse of freedom, which neolib-

1980 to the Present: Formalism and New Authoritarianism   291

eralism is generally understood to rest upon, the per­sis­tence of the rhe­toric of sacrifice in the neoliberal age points to the po­liti­cal underside of neoliberalism’s i­ magined space of individual liberation. Brown explains: “Thus . . . ​does a po­liti­cal rationality originally born in opposition to fascism come to mirror certain aspects of it, albeit through powers that are faceless and invisible-­ handed and absent an authoritarian state.”31 For Brown, neoliberalism is not fascism, but its effects—­the mobilization of mass sacrificial action, for instance—­are hauntingly similar. But b ­ ecause ­these effects, while having fascist undertones, are “absent an authoritarian state,” the literary and critical response to them cannot be achieved by approaching them as if they w ­ ere the results of fascism. Heidi Julavits’s 2013 novel, The Vanishers, interrogates this point, beginning with its epigraph: “A talent is not a weapon in e­ very culture.”32 In leading with this quotation, The Vanishers seems to ask the question The Flamethrowers leaves us with: is it pos­si­ble to make art without being inadvertently weaponized? The novel engages this question metafictionally through a plot concerning psychics who seem to be thinly veiled creative writers, ­housed at a higher education program referred to only as “The Workshop,” which has clear resonances of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. In the novel, a young psychic, Julia, is employed as an assistant to a Workshop faculty member, Madame Ackermann, who has been asked to use her psychic powers to find a missing film reel belonging to a filmmaker known as “The Leni Riefenstahl of France.” But ­because Madame Ackermann has a psychic version of writer’s block, Julia finds the reel herself and then tries, unconvincingly, to attribute the success to Madame Ackermann. Julia then goes into dramatic physical decline and believes that this is the result of a curse brought upon her by her jealous mentor. It is not u ­ ntil the end of the book that Julia discovers that her illness was a side effect of a psychic assault she has been unconsciously making on Madame Ackermann, who is near death by the novel’s close. Like The Flamethrowers, The Vanishers flirts with fascist imagery. And also like The Flamethrowers, The Vanishers features an artist-­protagonist who sees herself as a passive follower, when, in fact, she is a perpetrator of vio­lence. As Julia’s powers grow, so does her destruction—­the better the writer, in this formulation, the more murderous. Her observation that as her talents increased she was becoming “the bad person I apparently . . . ​could not help but become” exemplifies this paradox whereby becoming “a bad person” is something that happens to someone rather than a pro­cess in which someone actively participates.33

292   Ages and the Long Pres­ent

The novel thus suggests that one cannot avoid becoming a bad person simply by trying to stop being bad. “The Leni Riefenstahl of France” and her protégée exemplify the danger of such an attempt when they embrace a practice of producing and starring in violent pornographic films, effectively taking the vio­lence of art making and turning it against themselves. “We are the feminists who know,” the protégée tells the press, “that self-­exploitation is the only safe expression of empowerment and love.” But this position is figured as suicidal in the novel; it is ultimately destructive both to the artists and to t­ hose exposed to their films. The other option, the one Julia takes, is to keep pursuing her psychic visions ­because they are the mechanisms by which she can stay tied to her history and her social surroundings, even though ­those ties are unsafe, unstable, and always potentially generative of sickness and vio­lence. She concludes, “As with so many diagnoses it is, in the end, the symptoms that ­matter, not the cause, ­because this is what being alive means, this is what being a person means, to be sickened by an illness known as you.”34 The illness both is and ­isn’t something that stems from the self in this formulation. It might be “you,” but it is also a condition of being a person. But the answer the novel gives is not mere capitulation. Julia resolves to offer care and support to the victims of her assaults, understanding that ­those assaults both do and do not come from her. In both of ­these novels, the answer to the prob­lem of the relationship between aesthetic form and vio­lence is not the withdrawal of intention and authority—­both books see such a withdrawal of intention as ­doing nothing to stop individuals from perpetrating vio­lence. Instead, both novels advocate an awareness of the “symptoms” that participants in a system of exploitation and in­equality produce. And both works value narrative form as a mechanism for their recording, offering, as they do, chronicles of characters who become bad ­people despite their passivity. Given the situation that Brown describes, this approach makes sense. If the pres­ent is characterized by effects—­like the expectation of shared sacrifice—­that look increasingly like the effects of authoritarianism, but “absent an authoritarian state,” ­these novels trace the dangers of navigating a world in which structural vio­lence happens absent a clear controlling agent, and they do so in a literary genre that traditionally relies on a relationship between narrator and form that has strong hierarchical valences. Unlike the postmodern novels that precede them—­those that aim to disrupt the very foundation of this hierarchy—­these novels demonstrate that you can have the vio­lence of narrative form absent a strong narrator, a formal real­ity that might help us understand the po­liti­cal real­ity we currently inhabit.

1980 to the Present: Formalism and New Authoritarianism   293

Notes Material drawn from this essay also appears in “The Contemporary Novel and Postdemocratic Form,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 51:2 (2018): 292–307. Epigraph. The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009), 91. 1. ​Carolyn Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2015), 3. 2. ​Levine, 24–25. 3. ​For an account of the rise of formalism in recent years, see Marjorie Levinson, “What Is New Formalism?,” PMLA 122, no. 2 (2007): 558–69. 4. ​David Cooper, introduction to The Dialectics of Liberation, ed. David Cooper (New York: Verso, 2015), 7. 5. ​R. D. Laing, “The Obvious,” in Cooper, Dialectics of Liberation, 30. 6. ​Laing, 29, 32. 7. ​For an expanded account of the relationship between 1960s literary form and the anti-­ authoritarian social movements, see Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the Emergence of the Postmodern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). 8. ​Allan Kaprow, excerpt from Assemblages, Environment, and Happenings 1959–65, in Art in Theory 1900–2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), 722. 9. ​John Barth, “The Lit­er­a­ture of Exhaustion,” in The Friday Book: Essays and Other Non-­ fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 65. 10. ​Barth, 65. Note also Steven Belletto’s contention that writers of the period waged “a critique of both totalitarian po­liti­cal systems [abroad] and also of Cold War norms back in the States” by embracing chance over design. See Steven Belletto, No Accident, Comrade: Chance and Design in Cold War American Narratives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 32. 11. ​Barth, “Lit­er­a­ture of Exhaustion,” 72. 12. ​Barth, 63. 13. ​Michel Foucault, preface to Anti-­Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizo­phre­nia, by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), xiii, xiv. 14. ​Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review 146 (July–­Aug. 1984): 57. 15. ​Jameson, 57. 16. ​So-­called post-­postmodernist lit­er­a­ture is often described ­either as a twenty-­first-­century phenomenon or as beginning with the literary backlash ­toward postmodernism in the 1990s, and particularly with the manifestos of writers such as David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen, who sought to reinvest fiction with the psychological texture of Jamesian realism. See, e.g., Robert L. McLaughlin, “Post-­postmodern Discontent,” symploke 12, nos. 1–2 (2004): 53–68; Stephen J. Burn, Jonathan Franzen at the End of Postmodernism (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011); Jeremy Green, Late Postmodernism: American Fiction at the Millennium (New York: Palgrave, 2005); Samuel Cohen, ­After the End of History: American Fiction in the 1990s (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2009). 17. ​Don DeLillo, White Noise (New York: Penguin, 1985), 98, 26. 18. ​See Cornel Bonca, “Don DeLillo’s White Noise: The Natu­ral Language of the Species,” College Lit­er­a­ture 23, no. 2 (June 1996): 25–44. 19. ​As Frank Lentricchia points out, “plotlessness is a controlled effect of [White Noise] ­because . . . ​the novel is narrated by a man who fears plots in both conspiratorial and literary senses.” Frank Lentricchia, “Tales of the Electronic Tribe,” in New Essays on “White Noise,” ed. Frank Lentricchia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 97.

294   Ages and the Long Pres­ent 20. ​See Mitchum Huehls, “Knowing What We Are ­Doing: Time, Form, and the Reading of Postmodernity,” Cultural Critique 61 (2005): 55–86. Huehls argues that DeLillo’s work exemplifies postmodern prob­lems with ideology critique by offering up characters “fully aware of the mediated nature of their experience” and who “even recognize the impotence of their awareness” (65). 21. ​DeLillo, White Noise, 305. 22. ​DeLillo, 325, 326. 23. ​For David Alworth, the site of the supermarket holds the potential for the recognition of the interpenetration of ­human and nonhuman agencies. See David Alworth, “Supermarket Sociology,” New Literary History 41, no. 2 (Spring 2010): 301–27. Allison Shonkwiler has a darker account of the repre­sen­ta­tion of technology in the novel, seeing it as representing the “mystifications of capital . . . ​that make it difficult or impossible to distinguish the actuality of money from the increasing unreality of global capitalism.” Allison Shonkwiler, “Don DeLillo’s Financial Sublime,” Con­temporary Lit­er­a­ture 51, no. 2 (Summer 2010): 249. 24. ​Walter Benn Michaels, The Beauty of a Social Prob­lem (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 6. 25. ​Michaels, 7, 67. 26. ​See also Nicolas Brown, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Real Subsumption ­under Capital,” nonsite, March 13, 2012, http://­nonsite​.­org​/­editorial​/­the​-­work​-­of​-­art​-­in​-­the​-­age​-­of​-­its​ -­real​-­subsumption​-­under​-­capital, particularly his interest in genre as something that is “governed by rules” (n.p.). 27. ​David Harvey contends that it is precisely this appropriation of the language of freedom from the social movements of the 1960s to the neoliberal language of the f­ ree market in the late 1970s and 1980s that makes the concept hold such ideological power. See David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 28. ​Rachel Kushner, “A Portfolio Curated,” The Flamethrowers (New York: Scribner, 2013), n.p. 29. ​Kushner. 30. ​Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2015), 212–13. 31. ​Brown, 219. 32. ​Heidi Julavits, The Vanishers (New York: Anchor Books, 2013), n.p. Epigraph from Adam Phillips, Terrors and Experts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), xiii. 33. ​Julavits, Vanishers, 272. 34. ​Julavits, 274, 279.

American Captivity Narratives from the Colonial Era to the Pres­ent A New Timeline birgit brander rasmussen

The first American best seller was a captivity narrative. Mary Rowlandson’s The Sovereignty and Goodness of God from 1682 inaugurated a genre that has remained central to early American scholarship. Recent studies have expanded the field of captivity narrative studies geo­graph­i­cally and temporally beyond the colonial period—­but rarely past the nineteenth ­century. Yet t­ here are a plethora of American captivity narratives from the twentieth and twenty-­first centuries, including memoirs, documentaries, and fiction about Japa­nese internment; prison lit­er­a­ture; hostage and detention narratives from Iran, Af­ ghan­i­stan, Iraq, and Guantanamo; memoirs and exposés of ­labor confinement and sexual slavery; and stories from mi­grant raids and detention camps. As the field is currently conceptualized, such con­temporary texts do not come ­under the heading “captivity narratives” b ­ ecause it has been considered predominantly a colonial-­era genre. But surely internees and hostages and prisoners and detained immigrants are captives, and their con­temporary narratives invite us to examine the genre anew. This essay proposes to recast the field in a number of ways. I offer a new timeline for American captivity narratives that extends from the colonial era to the pres­ent in order to comprehend and account for more recent texts about captivity. This reperiodization builds on and extends recent developments in the scholarship on American captivity narratives; monographs and teaching anthologies have continued to push the temporal bound­aries of analytic inquiry. While gender has long been central to scholarship in the field, race takes on acute significance when we consider more recent captivity narratives. Early settler narratives about captivity cast authors like Rowlandson as the innocent victims and indigenous ­peoples as “ravenous Beasts” and “hellhounds,” thus justifying the vio­lence of the settler state.1 Con­ temporary captivity narratives perform very dif­fer­ent cultural work, often centering a critique of racial and state vio­lence. Seemingly neutral analytic

296   Ages and the Long Pres­ent

categories such as genre and periodization thus have surprising ethical consequences, b ­ ecause they can obscure or reveal con­temporary practices of dehumanization. Scholarship in the past few de­cades has understood the genre in light of settler efforts to construct a unified national self in opposition to an (often racialized) ­enemy other. A longue durée approach to the study of American captivity narratives reveals the diversity and complexity of the genre, its relevance for con­temporary American literary and cultural studies, and the need to reckon with the coloniality of the pres­ent. Inspired by Rowlandson’s foundational narrative, this essay w ­ ill proceed through a series of removes that aim to transform our understanding of the field just as Rowlandson’s understanding of herself and her world shifted through her involuntary journey with Narragansett refugees fleeing colonial devastation.

First Remove ­ here is broad consensus among scholars specializing in American captivity T narratives that The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, Together with the Faithfulness of His Promises Displayed: Being a Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson is foundational.2 Rowlandson’s book was the first American captivity narrative to be published as a stand-­alone book. It was also the first written by a w ­ oman, and it was im­mensely successful. Set in what is now Mas­sa­chu­setts during King Philip’s War in 1675–1676, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God opens with a raid on a colonial settlement. It then chronicles the subsequent captivity of Rowlandson and her c­ hildren, one of whom dies in her arms. The ­daughter and wife of Puritan religious leaders, Rowlandson was ransomed eleven weeks l­ater and subsequently penned a deeply personal memoir of her ordeal. It circulated privately before being published in 1682 with a postscript sermon by her husband, Joseph, and a preface usually attributed to Increase Mather. This beautifully literary narrative is structured in twenty “Removes” that provide a glimpse of life in a New ­England war zone in 1675, ethnographic detail about the lives of her Narragansett captors, an account of trauma and its aftermath, and a spiritual exploration of loss and redemption. Published in London and in Cambridge, Mas­sa­chu­setts, the book went through no fewer than twenty-­three editions by 1828. It remains a canonical text in early American studies to this day and has been the subject of several monographs and numerous articles. Most recent studies of American captivity narratives devote an entire chapter to Rowlandson’s book.

American Captivity Narratives: A New Timeline   297

Second Remove The Sovereignty and Goodness of God was soon followed by a growing number of similar accounts, including a major collection by Cotton Mather containing both typical narratives about captivity and ransom, like Quentin Stockwell’s from 1677, and sensational stories like Hannah Dustan’s 1697 account of escaping ­after killing her captors.3 Cast by Mather as exemplary of God’s relationship to the captive and the larger community, the genre reflected anx­i­eties about salvation, authority, and declension but also functioned as a propaganda tool justifying colonial war. As the genre evolved, the list of adversaries expanded to include not just indigenous p ­ eoples but also competing colonial forces, like the French or En­glish, and other religions, like Catholicism, exemplified in John Williams’s The Redeemed Captive Returning to Zion from 1774.4 The genre of captivity narratives predates the arrival of Pilgrims and Puritans in the American Northeast, however. Stories of Christians held captive by Muslims, Moors, Turks, and pirates ­were already popu­lar with the Eu­ro­pean reading public, and the genre grew with imperial expansion in Africa and the Amer­ i­cas, where “Barbary captivity narratives” also circulated. Early stories of American captivity ­were embedded in longer narratives like Cabeza de Vaca’s La Relación (1542) or John Smith’s Generall Historie of ­Virginia, New E ­ ngland, and the Summer Isles (1624). For the Puritans of New E ­ ngland, the genre ­became popu­lar reading, whereas most literary forms, like poetry and plays, ­were banned.5

Third Remove The earliest captives in colonial Amer­i­ca ­were not Puritan, but Arawak prisoners captured by Christopher Columbus. Many other Native p ­ eople w ­ ere captured, enslaved, and sometimes brought to Eu­rope or sent to Bermuda and the Ca­rib­bean. While some names are familiar, like Squanto and Pocahontas, their own stories remain untold. In 1576–1577, Martin Frobisher kidnapped four Inuits from Baffin Island, whose portraits and descriptions survive in the archives. Despite extensive documentation of their captivity, their own perspectives are entirely absent, and they died shortly ­after their arrival.6 Perhaps ­because the genre was so significant to Puritan society, American scholars of the captivity narrative have focused tremendous attention on Puritans’ versions of the genre, generally called “Indian captivity narratives.” It has been called the first indigenous literary form in American lit­er­a­ture and has been studied as “an impor­tant expression of puritan theological and

298   Ages and the Long Pres­ent

social thought” and a “reflection of tensions in puritan society.”7 The term “Indian captivity narratives” has been ­adopted in scholarship to such a degree that it almost entirely obscures the captivity experiences and narratives of indigenous Americans. Even ­today, a library search using the term ­will yield only settler narratives.

Fourth Remove Analytic terms generated by a focus on settler narratives have or­ga­nized scholarly inquiry, most notably the par­ameters of the genre itself, as well as the ways in which the genre has been periodized. However, the term “captivity narratives” is quite elastic and includes both Barbary captivity narratives and African and African American narratives about captivity among e­ ither Native or white ­people. Native American and First Nations ­peoples in the colonial era also took captives for a number of reasons. Some ­were ransomed or exchanged for other hostages, some became slaves, some ­were killed, and some ­were ­adopted to replace dead f­ amily members. Such was the case of Eunice Williams, the young ­daughter of John Williams whose f­ amily was captured in a raid on Deerfield, Mas­sa­chu­setts, in 1704. Williams, a Puritan minister, was released in 1706 and shortly thereafter gave a sermon reflecting on the experience. In 1774, he published The Redeemed Captive Returning to Zion, which became a best seller like Rowlandson’s book a ­century before. Young Eunice was ­adopted into a Mohawk f­ amily, adapted to Mohawk life, married, and refused to return. Such integration and refusal ­were not uncommon.

Fifth Remove While Puritans published captivity narratives with ­great zeal, other colonial powers and languages figure in the genre as well. Stories of captivity and martyrdom written by Jesuit missionaries such as Isaac Jogues are included in the most recent anthology in the field.8 During the eigh­teenth ­century, former slaves began publishing memoirs in order to rally antislavery forces.9 The slave narrative became an impor­tant form of American captivity narratives, though it obviously had other concerns and aims than the Puritan variety. While the latter assumed an audience that shared the narrator’s whiteness and colonial commitments, African and African American authors addressed readers that might not even consider them fully ­human. ­After the United States gained in­de­pen­dence from ­England, the captivity narrative genre developed in numerous directions. Some of the best-­known slave narratives, like Frederick Douglass’s autobiography and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a

American Captivity Narratives: A New Timeline   299

Slave Girl (1861), ­were written as the strug­gle moved from the Atlantic slave trade to slavery in the American South.10 For Douglass and Jacobs, the veracity of their accounts was impor­tant to its moral authority and cultural work, in part b ­ ecause a­ fter in­de­pen­dence the American captivity narrative began to merge with the novel. Some of ­these novels have remained classics of American lit­er­a­ture read around the world, like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s blockbuster ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, published in 1826 and made into a Hollywood movie as recently as 1992.

Sixth Remove In the nineteenth ­century, the genre multiplied into a vast and diverse body of lit­er­a­ture ranging from the autobiographical to the fictional, from the personal to the ethnographic, from the po­liti­cal to the sensational and even lurid. Herman Melville’s literary debut, Typee, included a captivity narrative, and the genre looms large over the entire nineteenth ­century in American letters, often as a potent tool of anti-­Indian propaganda. ­After the end of the Civil War in 1865, Native ­peoples in the West found the full force of the US military turned on them, and many faced imprisonment or confinement on reservations. Out of such experiences emerged narratives of strug­gle by warriors like Geronimo, who died in captivity in Fort Sill, Oklahoma, in 1909.

Seventh Remove ­ ntil relatively recently, scholarship and teaching editions focused exclusively U on Anglo narratives from colonial New ­England as exemplified by Vaughan and Clarks’s 1981 anthology Puritans among the Indians. The 1990s brought renewed interest in the genre. Rowlandson’s narrative was reissued in 1997 as part of the Bedford Series in History and Culture, along with related historical documents and historical context for the classroom.11 The de­cade also brought a burst of scholarship leading Gordon Sayre in 1998 to pronounce the captivity narrative “alive and well in the American acad­emy” in an impor­tant review article surveying the field for American Quarterly.12 Two years l­ater, Sayre published a groundbreaking teaching anthology that recast the field significantly, starting not with familiar Puritan narratives but with a German captivity narrative from 1557 by Hans Staden. Sayre’s edition, published by a major press, Houghton Mifflin, signals the continued relevance of the genre, which ­here spans from 1557 to 1906; includes German, Spanish, En­glish, and French narratives in translation; and concludes with Geronimo’s story of strug­gle and captivity.13 Such temporal expansiveness was initiated by Kathryn Zabelle

300   Ages and the Long Pres­ent

Derounian-­Stodola and James Arthur Levernier in The Indian Captivity Narrative, 1550–1900, published in 1993 as part of Twayne’s United States Authors Series, which Sayre calls “a bellwether of canonization.”14 This impor­tant study vastly expands the field’s archival imaginary and gestures ­toward twentieth-­ century captivity narratives in film, from John Wayne classics like The Searchers (1956) to more recent blockbusters like Dances with Wolves (1990). However, it concludes, as the title notes, in the year 1900 and, like most other studies, confines itself largely to experiences of captivity among Native ­peoples. Sayre’s inclusion of Geronimo’s captivity in the New Riverside Editions is a unique effort to anthologize a Native American story of captivity among settlers, and only Christopher Castiglia’s Bound and Determined: Captivity, Culture-­ Crossing, and White Womanhood from Mary Rowlandson to Patty Hearst (1996) makes a sustained attempt to take the field into the twentieth ­century.15

Eighth Remove ­ here are many narratives about American captivity since 1900 that challenge T our current timeline and our analytic terms. While gender remains salient in all captivity narratives, stories published throughout the twentieth and twenty-­ first centuries bring to the forefront the latent issue of race. Japa­nese internment provides a useful case study. During World War II, more than 110,000 ­people ­were held captive on US territory in selected remote sites called internment camps. This experience gave rise to a significant number of captivity narratives that constitute a distinctive tradition in its own right: the Japa­nese internment narrative. Internment narratives tell of individual and collective trauma, of lives derailed, families devastated, possessions and land stolen. Race, national identity, culture, shame, and intergenerational silence are central tropes, and the narratives often foreground the demand by subsequent generations to know what happened. Such stories are not usually called “captivity narratives,” but they certainly are narratives about captivity that reveal the continued importance of the genre in US culture and demonstrate the way it changes to confront racial abjection in the con­temporary era.

Ninth Remove Following the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December of 1941, President Roo­ se­velt issued Executive Order 9066 in February 1942 directing the army to initiate an unpre­ce­dented racial profiling and removal campaign. Of the 127,000 Japa­nese and Japa­nese Americans living in the continental United States at the time, only 17,000 escaped detention. The rest ­were forced to sell their pos-

American Captivity Narratives: A New Timeline   301

sessions and abandon homes and farms before being transported to prison camps in Utah, Arizona, Colorado, Arkansas, Idaho, Wyoming, and California. ­People of German and Italian descent ­were not targeted, so this was an explic­ itly racialized captivity experience, and many narratives strug­gle with racial stigmatization, shame, and ambivalence ­toward the narrator’s country and identity. War­time patriotism and outrage at the injustice of internment are central tensions in ­these stories. The first published narrative about internment came out in 1946, just one year ­after the war ended. Miné Okuba’s Citizen 13660 is a graphic narrative detailing the experience of internment in sober language and ink drawings.16 ­Later publications like Farewell to Manzanar (1973) w ­ ere more openly critical of the US government, reflecting a dramatically dif­fer­ent po­liti­cal environment in the aftermath of civil rights victories, the Vietnam War, the Black Power movement, and the strug­gle for ethnic studies on college campuses. Younger generations at that time began to feel a sense of racial pride and demanded to know their histories. As a country, the United States began to explore the history of internment through congressional hearings, and in 1988 Congress passed a bill issuing a formal apology and payment of $20,000 in reparations to each remaining survivor of the camps. Even more invisible, Aleuts in Alaska w ­ ere also interned and have recently begun to recover and tell their stories in print and documentaries.17 In addition to memoirs and testimony, internment narratives have been told in fiction, documentaries, images, and anthologies of documents such as Only What We Could Carry: The Japa­nese American Internment Experience (2000).18

Tenth Remove Roy Harvey Pearce’s “The Significances of the Captivity Narrative” (1947) is widely recognized as a landmark initiating scholarship in the field.19 Although Pearce must have been completing the article at the same time that internees ­were leaving the camps, his focus remains solidly on New ­England and the colonial era. Perhaps this reflects the general silence surrounding internment for de­cades a­ fter the camps closed and into the Cold War era, when the field of American studies first emerged. Cold War nationalism and the intimidating intellectual climate created by the McCarthy hearings may explain the absence of critical engagement with governmental wrongdoing and the narrow focus of early scholarship on white captives in colonial New ­England. As Lisa Voigt has demonstrated, American captivity narratives drew on an earlier tradition from southern Eu­rope, where stories about captivity among

302   Ages and the Long Pres­ent

Turks circulated widely.20 ­There is general agreement among con­temporary scholars of Puritan captivity narratives that “tropes of racial and cultural prejudice” are “fundamental to the captivity drama.”21 While the first wave of scholarship focused primarily on Puritan theology, current scholarship includes colonial and feminist critiques. Pauline Turner Strong notes that “the captivity of colonists such as John Smith is utilized to justify violent conquest,” and Kathryn Zabelle Derounian-­Stodola and James Arthur Levernier explore at length the way the genre has functioned as a vehicle for anti-­Indian propaganda.22 Catherine Stimson argues that early captivity narratives worked “to maintain the established interlocking hierarchies of race and gender in the New World,” and Gordon Sayre notes that historically “captivity dramas have served to rally ‘us’ around the figure of the innocent captive held in bondage by ‘them.’ ”23 Japa­nese internment thus raises crucial questions about how to theorize the captivity narrative in the twentieth and twenty-­first centuries. H ­ ere, too, “tropes of racial and cultural prejudice” figure prominently, but in ways that are quite dif­fer­ent from slave and Puritan captivity narratives. Japa­nese and Japa­nese American internees ­were associated imaginatively with a war­time ­enemy, but they ­were innocent captives, and the United States was the captor. Rather than rallying “us” against “them,” the narratives confront a complicated nexus of war­time nationalism and racial stigmatization in order to recuperate an “American” identity for the internees as seen in Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston’s classic Farewell to Manzanar.24 While shame and patriotism may explain the silence surrounding internment in foundational scholarship like Pearce’s, it still d ­ oesn’t explain his exclusive focus on colonial New ­England during the crucial period following World War II. Perhaps this temporal displacement helped secure a sense of moral integrity for the United States while reserving for whiteness an uncontested cultural space at a historical moment when colonial and racialized subjects began to rise up abroad and at home. But if the genre has historically constructed “a white self in relation to a racialized other,” how then do we understand internment narratives that must reckon instead with the experience of racial stigmatization? Or, for that ­matter, how do we understand the critique of racism in slave narratives? Such questions become crucial in the late twentieth and early twenty-­first centuries. While some narratives, such as Jill Carroll’s 2006 account from Baghdad, reintroduce the white female captive among enemies, the majority of con­temporary captivity narratives describe captivity and atrocities by the United States.25

American Captivity Narratives: A New Timeline   303

Eleventh Remove Such con­temporary captivity narratives make it intellectually and ethically impor­tant to interrogate how we conceptualize and periodize a genre thus far nearly synonymous with the colonial and early national period. In fact, scholars have long seen the genre as dynamic in relation to social context, periodizing the captivity narrative as predominantly religious and typological in the early colonial period and then becoming increasingly propagandistic and sensationalist during the Revolutionary War era, before merging with fiction in the late eigh­teenth and nineteenth centuries. The scholarship has also changed significantly in response to changing times and theoretical paradigms. Feminist analy­sis is central to many recent scholarly publications, and Castiglia broke new ground by linking canonical Puritan narratives like Rowlandson’s with Patricia Hearst’s 1981 narrative about her capture by the Symbionese Liberation Army in 1974. Although Castiglia engages just one narrative from the late twentieth ­century, his analy­sis demonstrates the relevance of a longer timeline. The 1960s and 1970s witnessed the publication of numerous narratives that, like Hearst’s, link imprisonment and the tumultuous era of social protest movements. One of the most influential memoirs of the period is The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965). A narrative of spiritual and po­liti­cal awakening that begins in prison, the autobiography embeds the narrative of captivity in the larger story of Malcolm X’s life.26 Equally gripping and relevant to captivity narrative scholarship is Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1966 “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”27 Like King, George Jackson also used the epistolary form in Soledad ­Brother (1970), another widely read narrative that emerges entirely from within the state of captivity that is incarceration.28 Angela Davis, an out­spoken supporter of the Soledad B ­ rothers, published a narrative about her own experiences facing arrest, imprisonment, and trial that came out the same year as Jackson’s.29 A major figure in con­temporary prison studies and anti-­incarceration activism, Davis wrote the foreword for Assata Shakur’s autobiography, which dwells in ­great detail on Shakur’s 1973 arrest, her trial, and her imprisonment before fleeing into Cuban exile.

Twelfth Remove Jackson, Davis, and Shakur cast their narratives as the stories of po­liti­cal prisoners unfairly incarcerated by a racially oppressive state. Such narratives

304   Ages and the Long Pres­ent

constitute another impor­tant variation of the genre, one that is engaged by writers from a variety of backgrounds, including Lakota writer and American Indian Movement member Leonard Peltier. My Life Is My Sundance (1999) is set entirely in jail and addressed to an audience that might be conceived as the heirs of Rowlandson.30 Fellow Native writers Louise Erdrich and Sherman Alexie have both written poems entitled “Captivity” that explic­itly engage Rowlandson’s foundational narrative along with the historical and literary legacies of coloniality.31 ­These poems can be read as lit­er­a­ture, of course, but also as theoretical and conceptual contributions to scholarship on captivity narratives, and perhaps as models of decolonization. Jimmy Santiago Baca’s lyrical autobiography A Place to Stand (2001) dwells at length on his experiences in prison and offers a searing indictment of the poverty, abuse, and colonial legacy that s­ haped his life leading to incarceration; at the same time, the book celebrates the liberatory power of literacy in the tradition of Frederick Douglass.32 ­Here, as in internment narratives, the captor is the state, the writing self is racialized, and the captivity experience is understood in relation to a racist and oppressive state apparatus. Bringing such work into dialogue with early American scholarship yields new understandings of the nature and purpose of captivity narratives. In prison studies, the 1973 Rocke­fel­ler Drug Laws are often considered the beginning of the current era of mass incarceration, which is explained partly as a backlash against the civil rights era and Black Power movement. ­These de­cades also witnessed the publication of influential teaching anthologies of Puritan captivity and the reissue of impor­tant slave narratives. Such temporal convergences register in work like Shakur’s 1987 autobiography, where she refers to her birth name as a “slave name.”33 She has recently brought her story to the internet as well, with a website on which she calls herself “a twentieth c­ entury escaped slave.”34 Similar transtemporal connections or­ga­nize Toni Morrison’s groundbreaking neo-­slave narrative Beloved, published one year ­after Ronald Reagan officially announced his “War on Drugs” in 1982. Morrison’s Nobel Prize–­winning novel explores Margaret Garner’s story of escape from slavery, her pursuit by slave catchers, and her trial for murder of the young ­daughter she killed to prevent her return to slavery. Morrison probes the continuity between slavery and incarceration in chapters narrated by Paul D as he shares his experiences in Alfred, Georgia, as a chain-­gang prisoner following the end of the Civil War.35 In scholarship, historians such as Douglas A. Blackmon have likewise explored the transition from slavery to incarceration (and their relationship) in historical

American Captivity Narratives: A New Timeline   305

studies such as Slavery by Another Name: The Re-­enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II.36

Thirteenth Remove Some of the most nightmarish examples of American captivity narratives in the twenty-­first c­ entury hail from extraterritorial sites like Bagram, Abu Ghraib, and Guantanamo. When brought into dialogue with early American scholarship, ­these stories reveal the urgency of revisiting the genre, its periodization, and its relationship to race and national identity, while si­mul­ta­neously foregrounding the stakes of terms like “captive” versus “internee” and, for that m ­ atter, “detainee,” “­enemy combatant,” “illegal immigrant,” “po­liti­cal prisoner,” and “criminal.” Such words denote not just disparate forms of captivity but also dif­fer­ent moral claims, as they express variegated relationships to the state and to coloniality. In the most recent edition of Farewell to Manzanar, Houston includes a new, agonizing postscript expressing her shock that racialized incarceration could return so shortly ­after the nation apologized for internment. If narratives about “the captivity of colonists such as John Smith [are] utilized to justify violent conquest,” how then do we theorize the emergence of twenty-­first-­century stories about white hostages and captives in Iran, Iraq, and Af­ghan­i­stan alongside the stunning images and narratives of torture and captivity in sites like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo? How does the rise of mass incarceration and ­human trafficking in the late twentieth ­century affect our understanding of the captivity narrative genre? When placed in dialogue with other con­temporary stories from l­ abor camps and mi­grant detention centers, for example, such accounts challenge us to read along a new timeline and ask urgent new questions about American captivity from the colonial era to the pres­ent. Notes 1. ​Mary Rowlandson, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, ed. Neal Salisbury (Boston: Bedford / St. Martin’s, 1997), 70. 2. ​See, e.g., Alden T. Vaughan and Edward W. Clark, eds., Puritans among the Indians: Accounts of Captivity and Redemption 1676–1724 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1981), 3. 3. ​Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana (Hartford, CT: Silas Andrus & Son, 1853). 4. ​John Williams, Redeemed Captive Returning to Zion (Boston: Samuel Hall, 1795). 5. ​Vaughan and Clark, Puritans among the Indians, 3. 6. ​Pauline Turner Strong, Captive Selves, Captivating O ­ thers: The Politics and American Captivity Narratives (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1999), 23.

306   Ages and the Long Pres­ent 7. ​Annette Kolodny, The Land before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630–1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984); Vaughan and Clark, Puritans among the Indians. 8. ​Gordon M. Sayre, ed., American Captivity Narratives (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000). 9. ​Olaudah Equianoh, The In­ter­est­ing Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equianoh or Gustavus Vassa the African (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000). 10. ​See Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself (Boston: Bedford / St. Martin’s, 2002); and Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000). 11. ​Rowlandson, Sovereignty and Goodness of God. 12. ​Gordon M. Sayre, “Captivity Canons,” American Quarterly 50, no. 4 (Dec. 1998): 860. 13. ​Sayre, American Captivity Narratives. 14. ​Kathryn Z. Derounian-­Stodola and James A. Levernier, The Indian Captivity Narrative, 1550–1900 (New York: Twayne, 1993); Sayre, “Captivity Canons,” 860. 15. ​See Christopher Castiglia, Bound and Determined: Captivity, Culture-­Crossing, and White Womanhood from Mary Rowlandson to Patty Hearst (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 16. ​Miné Okuba, Citizen 13660 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001). 17. ​Aleut Story, directed by Marla Williams (2005). 18. ​See Lawson F. Inada, ed., Only What We Could Carry: The Japa­nese American Internment Experience (Berkeley: Heyday Books, 2000). 19. ​Roy Harvey Pearce, “The Significance of the Captivity Narrative,” American Lit­er­a­ture 29 (Mar. 1947): 1–20. 20. ​Lisa Voigt, Writing Captivity in the Early Modern Atlantic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). 21. ​Sayre, “Captivity Canons,” 860. 22. ​Strong, Captive Selves, 20; Derounian-­Stodola and Levernier, Indian Captivity Narrative, 23–35. 23. ​Catherine R. Stimpson, foreword to Castiglia, Bound and Determined, ix; Sayre, introduction to American Captivity Narratives, 1. 24. ​Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, Farewell to Manzanar (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2002). 25. ​Jill Carroll, “Hostage: The Jill Carroll Story” (2006), Christian Science Monitor, www​ .­csmonitor​.­com​/­Specials​/­Hostage​-­The​-­Jill​-­Carroll​-­Story. 26. ​Malcolm X and Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York: First Ballantine Books, 1965). 27. ​See Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (1963), www​.­africa​.­upenn​.­edu​ /­Articles​_­Gen​/­Letter​_­Birmingham​.­html. 28. ​George Jackson, Soledad B ­ rother: The Prison Writings of George Jackson (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1994). 29. ​See Angela Davis, Angela Davis: An Autobiography (New York: International, 1996). 30. ​Leonard Peltier, My Life Is My Sundance: Prison Writings (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999). 31. ​See Sherman Alexie, “Captivity,” in First Indian on the Moon (Brooklyn: Hanging Loose, 1993); and Louise Erdrich, “Captivity,” in Jacklight (New York: Henry Holt, 1984). 32. ​Jimmy Santiago Baca, A Place to Stand (New York: Grove, 2001). 33. ​Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2001), 49. 34. ​See www​.­assatashakur​.­org. 35. ​Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Vintage Books, 1983). 36. ​Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-­enslavement of Black Americans from Civil War to World War II (New York: Anchor Books, 2008).

afterword

The Newer Newest ­Thing Reperiodizing, Redux

susan gillman

Why is time so timely t­ hese days? That’s an unavoidable question for anyone attempting an afterword to a collection entitled Timelines of American Lit­er­ a­ture. Part of the question is to locate the date of “­these days.” ­There’s academic talk about both time and space in fields ranging from the pillars of humanities, history and lit­er­a­ture, to the interdisciplines of ocean studies, environmental humanities, feminist studies, and critical race studies. It is especially prominent in geography, where the spatiotemporal dimensions of the field have long been a focus of study (more on that ­later). Best-­selling books such as Charles C. Mann’s 1491 (2005) and 1493 (2012) start from the premise of the unexceptional year, while literary scholars are ­doing much the same.1 Time-­travel and alternate histories abound in popu­lar culture ­today: Ben H. Winters’s Underground Airlines and Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad are just two recent experiments with speculative historical fiction. Questions of periodization, historical divides, and durées are at the forefront of many journals and conferences, along with institutional efforts such as t­ hose of the Modern Language Association (MLA) to revise its divisions, structured since the 1940s by period, language, and nation. (More on that ­later too.) Perhaps nothing is more symptomatic of this trend than all the scholarly book titles with the sound bite of the “long” X ­century. As the above examples indicate, thinking through space-­time is not new; historically, it has been with us in the humanities and social sciences at dif­ fer­ent paces and stages. So why is time timely this time? One crudely obvious answer is that, spatiotemporally speaking, the pendulum continuously swings, producing “turn” ­after “turn.”2 At first blush, the shift to time might seem to be a predictable reaction formation, almost a chemical reaction to the dominance of space in literary, historical, and cultural studies. Efforts to break out of the prison ­house of the nation have tended, as so many have recognized,

308   Timelines of American Literature

t­ oward the spatial: diaspora, borderlands, oceanic areas such as the Black Atlantic (and other non-­national, subnational, or supranational units), and, most recently, archipelagoes are among the most familiar examples of ­these imaginatively extended units. In the discipline of history, some scholars are engaging big history and big data, most notably with an explicit return to longues durées. Pioneered by the “géohistorien” of the Mediterranean world, Fernand Braudel, the concept of the longue durée fuses time and space. We ­don’t necessarily immediately associate the two methodological units for which Braudel is known (one chronological, the other geo­graph­i­cal), but they have shared origins. Braudel first developed an application of the concept of the longue durée during the 1940s, when, as a German prisoner of war, he wrote the initial draft of his book La Méditerranée et le Monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II (Paris, 1949); ­later, in 1958, he published his famous conceptual piece on the longue durée in Annales. The product of this postwar conjuncture, Braudel’s Mediterranean models the possibility of an experimental oceanic longue durée history. Si­mul­ ta­neously with the interdisciplinary attention to ocean studies writ large and debates among historians (and, to a lesser extent, literary critics too) about the ubiquitous concept of the turn, Braudel appears to be ready for a comeback, judging from the contentious calls by historians David Armitage and Jo Guldi for a return to the big picture of the longue durée. They lament the demise of the activist Braudelian historian writing for a wide reading public to influence policy and governance, and they urge a move away from the short durée microhistory that has dominated the postwar profession, back to an engaged academia with a public, future-­oriented mission. While some historians have embraced this call, o ­ thers react more skeptically, but the disciplinary controversy at this moment of perceived crisis over the relevance of the humanities is itself telling.3 For me, as a literary scholar, Braudel is back, this time as a scholar responsible for the twin invention of Mediterranean and longue durée studies.4 His work in the long postwar de­cade of the 1950s, coinciding with Rachel Carson’s prizewinning best seller The Sea around Us (1951), lays the ground for a return to the Mediterranean as a model for ocean studies. This goes beyond the fact that our Mediterraneanizers are typically public intellectuals like Armitage’s Braudel and Carson herself, whose 1952 National Book Award ac­cep­tance speech opened with a Humboldtian challenge to the compartmentalization of knowledge. “Many ­people have commented with surprise on the fact that a work of science should have a large popu­lar sale,” she said, taking aim at the separate

Afterword  309

spheres that divide the lit­er­a­ture of science from biography or history or fiction. It may be that we are in a charmed moment, comparable to the 1950s of Braudel and Carson, another historical conjuncture when oceans, longue durées, and turns are all coming, improbably, skeptically, speculatively together ­under the rubric of space-­time. While both literary and historical studies have thus been preoccupied for a while now with challenging the space of the nation-­state, time has gotten shorter shrift. Recent institutional attention to periodizing by the MLA produced a set of PMLA essays and, more importantly, an initiative in 2013 to create a ­whole new orga­nizational structure—­the revised MLA “Forums,” “the first revision to the intellectual structure since 1974,” whose stated intent was to protect small fields, especially less commonly taught languages; to minimize hierarchies and exclusions both large and small; and to recognize emergent fields.5 Most of the proposed reor­ga­ni­za­tion centered on amalgamating “Divisions” structured around periods of national lit­er­a­tures, for example, merging the Division on Late Eighteenth-­Century En­glish Lit­er­a­ture with the Division on Restoration and Early Eighteenth-­Century En­glish Lit­er­a­ture. The pushback was intense, judging both from the outcome and from responses still available on the web. The late eighteenth-­century Executive Committee, in a letter of protest posted by a group called “The Long Eigh­teenth,” challenged the act of periodization itself. “Periodization is an imperfect instrument of historical knowledge,” the letter begins (parenthetically commenting that historical periods are “necessary fictions”), but the MLA “proposal for amalgamation not only reaffirms periodization rather than overturns it . . . ​[but] also arguably reaffirms it in cruder form” and thereby “might be said to compound rather than correct” the imperfections. Scholars are simply being asked “to get by with fewer periods.”6 The outcome was perhaps inevitable: the new MLA Forums, instituted in 2016, subordinate but retain most of the national-­language period divisions within nine new umbrella categories (Languages, Lit­er­a­tures, and Cultures; Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies; ­etc.). Balancing continuity with change, the MLA move away from periodization was perhaps more honored in the breach, much as “The Long Eigh­teenth” belied its own self-­naming and rejected the merger of early and late. So much for the ubiquitous longue durée borrowed from historians for so many literary critical titles. ­Others seeking to explain the current attention to time would focus on efforts to bring together the two dimensions, the marriage of space-­time advocated by some cultural critics and theorists. In a 2005 essay on the afterlives of area studies, Japa­nese historian Harry Harootunian called for “a restoration

310   Timelines of American Literature

of considerations of the crucial spatiotemporal relationship that must attend any explanatory program.” At the time, Harootunian saw the romance with newly enlarged entities (globe, empire) as one cause of the withdrawal of time (“the spatiotemporal relationship seems to have dis­appeared u ­ nder the weight of ­these virtual continents”) from comparative studies.7 Current indicators suggest that we may be ready to re­unite space-­time. The ongoing romance in literary, historical, and cultural studies with geo­graph­i­cally extended units (borders and diasporas, archipelagoes and islands) now imagines them to have multiple spatialities and temporalities, not simply a unified space-­time dimension. To take only the most recent of ­these inventions, archipelagic American studies traces its indebtedness to the Martinican theorist Édouard Glissant, known for his “poetics of Relation,” an “Antillean imaginary” in which “each island is an opening,” creating the conditions of possibility for an open-­ended comparativism, attuned to the changing interrelations of space and time within physical and ­human geographies.8 ­There seems to be some amnesia about analogous work in the recent past, often sparked by commemorative events and then apparently forgotten. Two centennials, the 1992 Columbian quincentenary of the renamed “Conquest” (aka Discovery) and the 1998 anniversary of the Spanish-­American War (variously renamed to include Cuba), reflected and produced de­cades of borderlands scholarship by literary critics and historians working not only to dislodge 1865 from its centrality in US national history but also to insert the alternate years of 1848 and 1898 as heuristics for fundamentally redefining what counts as “American” in the first place. Jesse Alemán’s essay in this volume, “The Age of US Latinidad,” on the prob­lem with the bellum periods (ante and post), reminds us that the waves of amnesia that have accompanied Latinx studies for so long are even longer and deeper than we thought—­and connect in unnoticed ways to black studies too. T ­ here are multiple alternative candidates for the Civil War dividing line, including the 1848/1898 reperiodization, as well as related scholarship by historians of race and slavery, who have long advocated rethinking the divide of the Civil War in terms of emancipation (pre/post and degrees thereof) rather than ­either bellum (pre/post) or slavery. This revisionist work extends back to Reconstruction historian Eric Foner on Amer­i­ca’s unfinished revolution and forward to Cuban historian Rebecca Scott, who takes an Atlantic World approach to the hemispheric history of “degrees of freedom,” and most recently to Gregory Down’s ­After Appomatox: Military Occupation and the Ends of War (2015) on how ­there was ­really neither a dividing line “­after” the Civil War nor an “end” to slavery u ­ ntil federal troops

Afterword  311

occupied the South, 1865–1877. And that, too, was a beginning, one point in the history of Amer­i­ca’s unfinished revolution.9 Alemán brings all of this, including his own take on the plural “ends of war,” together in a striking meditation on which war we are talking about when say “antebellum” and “postbellum.” A backward glance to the early republic, the War of 1812, and the three waves of the (so-­called) Seminole Wars reminds us of all the wars, rebellions, and revolutions fought on vari­ous scales for and against empire and slavery. Alemán pres­ents ­these alternative histories of nineteenth-­century vio­lence in ser­vice of thinking expansively ­toward an age of Latinidad that extends the arena of conflict to a print culture that looks, in Spanish and En­glish, both backward (to the Spanish colonial era across the greater South) and forward (to the radically dif­fer­ent twentieth-­century US Latino/a worlds) in space-­time. The result is, from my vantage point, a suggestively adapted Braudelian longue durée take on the timeline of “circum-­gulf U.S. Latino/a” history and culture, which “did not historically become postbellum ­until ­after 1898.” We could extend Alemán’s timeline to ­those other, ultravisible wars of the 1980s, the canon wars, all the canon busting/expansion debates of the 1980s and early 1990s. As Marrs and Hager point out, the current ­will to reperiodize is surely a response, however belated, to the surplus of American texts and archives discovered and recovered earlier—­without a commensurate de-­and reperiodizing of the literary history to which they w ­ ere simply added. Some time ago, in a 1989 issue of Michigan Quarterly Review on the canon wars (in which the lead essay is Toni Morrison’s “Unspeakable T ­ hings, Unspoken”), Hazel Carby commented critically on this additive logic, saying that the “democracy of the supermarket” in education adds texts to the shelves without changing the questions we ask or challenging the forms of knowledge production, the structural inequalities shaping how departments of En­glish and American studies look at and think about culture. Among t­ hose structures are the divisions of national literary histories into periods defined by centuries and punctuated by monumental events. Carby called then for canon expansion to be “part of the pro­cess of re-­defining the En­glishness that is implied in the structural organ­ ization of En­glish departments,” and the same could be said again, now, for the formation of American lit­er­a­ture, “likewise a racialized strug­gle over the definition of Americanness.” Carby continues, “That [American] lit­er­a­ture means in practice the lit­er­a­ture of [the United States] should be challenged as a racist definition, which is part of an [American] imperialist discourse and which excludes most of the English-­speaking ­peoples of the world . . . ​[and

312   Timelines of American Literature

the Spanish-­speaking ­people of the United States] and most of the lit­er­a­ture written in En­glish [and in languages other than En­glish].”10 This adaptation of Carby indicates how canon expansion reaches its limits pretty quickly if we ­don’t ground, and test, the latest ­thing in/against a sense of disciplinary history, our own historical consciousness of the discipline. This collection aims through assembling a set of imaginative timelines to rethink both the spatiotemporal questions we ask and the assumptions we d ­ on’t question about studying American lit­er­a­ture. The concept of the timeline—as the introduction suggests, a temporal graph, or map, that charts multiple events—­ not only encompasses multiple times (expanded, contracted, curved) but also puts time on and in space, has both space and time. “We literally cannot ‘tell time,’ without the mediation of space,” according to the visual-­culture theorist W. J. T. Mitchell.11 Mitchell’s voice ­here gestures t­ oward the long (inter)disciplinary debate in literary and related studies, thinking spatiotemporally about the very prob­lem that this collection takes on: the benefits of reperiodizing instead of deperiodizing. Geographers especially have been d ­ oing something like that, putting space-­ time together through repeated inquiry informed by a deep sense of the history of the discipline. Yet geography has had less of an impact or presence in literary studies than other allied disciplines. (David Harvey is perhaps the best known for his work as a Marxist geographer on capitalism.) Literary critics tend to assume a divide between the disciplines of geography and history, yet geographers—­whether affiliated with physical or ­human geography, or with field offshoots such as historical geography and time geography—­provide a suggestive model for scholarship that thinks historically about time and space together. Geographers study relationships between p ­ eople and their environments, analyze diverse cultural landscapes, and solve prob­lems related to local and global change over time. Scholars of both physical and h ­ uman geography stress the spatiotemporal challenge of understanding and managing the earth’s diverse cultural and physical environments, ranging from local to global scales across the full range of h ­ uman history. The study of mobility and territoriality highlights contact, exchange, and interaction among disparate ­peoples, cultures, and languages, where ongoing pro­cesses of reterritorialization take place in tandem with historically contested reorderings of networks of movement and flow, to connect with emerging po­liti­cal discourses that have a firmly geo­ graph­i­cal base. Several key imperatives are in play ­here: to recognize both space and time in seeking explanation in physical and h ­ uman geography, to

Afterword  313

accentuate the space-­time constitution of social life, and to reflect on the history of geography as a discipline attentive to spatiotemporal dimensions. ­There is a striking body of retrospective lit­er­a­ture in geography that looks critically and historically at the state of the field: from about the 1970s to the pres­ent, a series of pieces on the changing ways that space and time have been handled—­together, separately, in tandem, at odds—in both physical and ­human geography. Feminist geographer Doreen Massey provided the flash point in her oft-­cited 1999 essay “Space-­Time,”12 where she takes off from a speculative proposition: “the possibility that t­here may be commonalities between physical geography and ­human geography in emerging ways of conceptualizing space, time and space-­time.” While the dif­fer­ent parts of geography have been held apart for so long, she says, by their relationship to physics as an assumed model of “science” (“ ‘science’ and physics envy”), “the urge to think ‘historically’ is now evident in both physical and h ­ uman geography.”13 Massey’s essay is an overture, rather than a manifesto or call to arms, to geographers working in fields very dif­fer­ent (“I had thought,” she says) from her own, an overture specifically made through the work of Jonathan Raper and David Livingstone, geomorphologists focused on the digital repre­sen­ta­tion of complex coastal phenomena such as sea-­level rise (where physicality and the sociopo­ liti­cal intercept), who had argued against the traditional spatial modeling of environmental prob­lems, dominated by more or less unthinking “timeless,” geometrically indexed (absolute) space, and for a more self-­conscious, object-­ oriented relative space in which “time is a property of the objects.” Massey embraces Raper and Livingstone as physical geographers and fellow travelers alike, ­doing the kind of work with connections to “my neck of the geo­graph­i­cal woods”: “trying to rethink space as integrally space-­time and to conceptualize space-­time as relative . . . ​, relational . . . ​, and integral. . . . ​Sometimes it can make your head hurt to think in this way.”14 Typically self-­mocking and at times strategically comic, Massey’s essay was followed by a slew of other pieces that take it as a touchstone in the developing disciplinary argument for a reconceptualization of geography around a reconceptualization of space-­time. Raper and Livingstone themselves took on the Massey mantle two years ­later in an “Exchange” in the same journal, written from their perspective as prac­ti­tion­ers of Geo­graph­i­cal Information Systems (GIS) and designed to join the disciplinary debate through the history of the GIS community, looking back to other key figures (Henri Lefevbre, for example), just as geographers writing ­later (a 2008 Robert Dodgshon essay,

314   Timelines of American Literature

“Geography’s Place in Time,” reprinted in 2015, for instance) also trace their pres­ent to this specific Massey moment in the past.15 This geo­graph­i­cal lit­er­ a­ture shares a self-­reflective view, systematically brought to bear through a series of open-­ended concentric circles, from the 1990s back to the 1960s or earlier and forward to the pres­ent, tracing an unfinished history “from timeless space to spacetime” in ­human and physical geography. Geography thus provides us in literary and cultural studies with a model sense of deep, disciplinary historical consciousness, “disciplinary” defined through the contours of the field itself and extending, capaciously, never defensively, to cognate disciplines, a group of literary and critical theorists, from Fredric Jameson to Edward Soja, whose work is consistently engaged. We find no mention of a trade gap, but rather a transdisciplinary take on the mea­sure over time of the state of the field. What is the takeaway for readers of Timelines of American Lit­er­a­ture? The implication is that time is truly open-­ended, in contrast to the logic of periodization, in which the f­ uture is already foretold (“Colonial American,” “American Re­nais­sance”). This Timelines proj­ect resonates with the transdisciplinary history that Massey describes as “an attempt to recapture that notion of the genuine openness of temporality, . . . ​an open historicity once again on the agenda in both physical and social sciences.”16 By practicing reperiodization, we literary scholars offer dif­fer­ent ways of imagining history and of imagining time as truly historical. A properly literary history lives by dates that have to be superimposed on larger histories, creating the imperative, “Always historicize!” As the essays in this volume demonstrate so eloquently, ­there are dif­ fer­ent pathways by which to follow through on the imperative. Historicizing ­here runs the gamut from tracing chronologies that are resolutely non-­or anti-­ linear, constructed from dates, individual and serial, almost all intentionally arbitrary, to major-­minor figures and events, to socio-­economic-­political prob­lems, to regions, macro and micro, and fi­nally to genres, “lit­er­a­tures” themselves. The essays tackle an expansive and willfully uneven range of references: Van Buren and Warhol, Appalachia and the other (global, Confederate) South, captivity narratives, propaganda, the lit­er­a­tures of sovereignty, and (more than once) “American lit­er­a­ture” in toto. Most strikingly in terms of specific historical contexts are the essays that deal with economics, homeownership, the multiple panics of the nineteenth ­century, and microeconomics. Less sustained but compelling attention goes to race, historicized through vari­ous “ages” (Latinidad, civil rights) and genres (from “Confederate lit­er­a­ture” to “con­ temporary African American lit­er­a­ture,” from the lit­er­a­tures of sovereignty

Afterword  315

to The Book of Mormon). A dif­fer­ent, as-­yet-­undefined, temporal unit may be needed to materialize both the phenomenon of the post-­race, neo-­slave narrative and the multiple burials of an undead Confederate lit­er­a­ture. The signature of the volume is all ­those content-­driven timelines, which variously make good on the promise to reperiodize. Even more importantly, the concept of the timeline itself is key to the experimentation of the collection, very much of an i­magined space-­timeline. The introduction briefly references the “speculative gestures”—­“playing with dates”—­that characterize the timelines, alluding to that radically open sense of futurity that Doreen Massey would say comes from imagining time as truly historical: speculative dimensions, worlds not yet come. Our volume, with its series of imaginative timelines, offers a sustained speculative dimension—­outlining possibilities that respond to the sense in many disciplines ­today of a current po­liti­cal impasse, even exhaustion. Many scholars are seeking an alternative to the re­sis­ tance model, vis­i­ble in work on disenchantment and the new formalism in lit­er­a­ture, as well as, perhaps more po­liti­cally astute, on the afterlives of the postcolonial. Gary Wilder’s Freedom Time (2014) reconsiders post-1945 decolonization from the perspectives of Aimé Césaire (Martinique) and Léopold Sédar Senghor (Senegal), poet-­politicians and public intellectuals seeking a ­future for former French colonies that would not equate self-­determination with sovereignty and colonial emancipation with national in­de­pen­dence.17 The key is the speculative dimension: to reanimate past but unrealized po­liti­cal proj­ects and anticipate pos­si­ble f­ utures by acting as if they had already arrived. The “as if ” of the alternate timelines in the collection marks the aspiration ­toward such creative, ultimately speculative thinking. The many timelines finding new projections and creating new assemblages lend themselves to imperfect, incommensurate, uneven, asymmetrical units of analy­sis. In short, they provide the license to discover pasts we ­don’t yet know in order to predict ­futures not yet pos­si­ble.

Notes 1. ​Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, In 1926: Living on the Edge of Time (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). 2. ​Over the past four de­cades, both historians and literary critics have contextualized t­ hese turns, the former with greater sustained attention. See Victoria E. Bonnell, Lynn Hunt, and Hayden White, eds., Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); James W. Cook, Lawrence B. Glickman, and Michael O’Malley, eds., The Cultural Turn in U.S. History: Past, Pres­ent, and F ­ uture (Chicago: University of Chicago

316   Timelines of American Literature Press, 2008); AHR Forum on “Historiographical ‘Turns’ in Critical Perspective,” American Historical Review 117 (2012): 698–813, esp. James W. Cook, “The Kids Are All Right: On the ‘Turning’ of Cultural History,” 746–71; Doris Bachmann-­Medick, Cultural Turns: New Orientations in the Study of Culture, trans. Adam Blauhut (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016); and Hester Blum, ed., Turns of Event: Nineteenth-­Century American Literary Studies in Motion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). 3. ​Jo Guldi and David Armitage, The History Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); for responses, see “Exchange: On The History Manifesto,” American Historical Review 120, no. 2 (Apr. 2015): 527–54. See also Armitage’s further work in this vein: “What’s the Big Idea? Intellectual History and the Longue Durée,” History of Eu­ro­pean Ideas 38, no. 4 (Dec. 2012): 493–507; “The International Turn in Intellectual History,” in Rethinking Modern Eu­ro­pean Intellectual History, ed. Darrin M. McMahon and Samuel Moyn (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); “The Return of the Longue Durée: An Anglo-­American Perspective,” (in French) in Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales 69 (2014); and “Horizons of History: Space, Time, and the ­Future of the Past,” History Australia 12, no. 1 (2015): 207–25. 4. ​See Susan Gillman, “Oceans of Longue Durées,” PMLA 127, no. 2 (Mar. 2012): 328–34. 5. ​See PMLA 127, no. 2 (Mar. 2012); https://­news​.­mla​.­hcommons​.­org​/­2014​/­05​/­14​/­new​-­mla​ -­forum​-­structure​/­. 6. ​See https://­long18th​.­wordpress​.­com​/­2013​/­09​/­17​/­last​-­years​-­letter​-­from​-­the​-­exec​-­committee​ -­for​-­late​-­18c​-­english​-­literature​-­anderson​-­goodman​-­lynch​-­macpherson​-­warner​-­about​-­the​ -­proposed​-­reorganization​/­. 7. ​Harry Harootunian, “Some Thoughts on Comparability and the Space-­Time Prob­lem,” boundary 2 32, no. 20 (Summer 2005): 24. 8. ​On the “archipelago princi­ple” (traced to the era of postwar decolonization with the 1955 Bandung Conference and the West Indian Federation) and Glissant, see Brian Roberts and Michelle Stephens, “Archipelagic American Studies and the Ca­rib­bean,” Journal of Transnational American Studies 5, no. 1 (2013): 13–14. 9. ​See Eric Foner, Nothing but Freedom (1983; repr., Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007), 7; Rebecca Scott, Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba a­ fter Slavery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); Gregory Downs, ­After Appomatox: Military Occupation and the Ends of War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). 10. ​Hazel Carby, “The Canon: Civil War and Reconstruction,” Michigan Quarterly Review 28, no. 1 (Winter 1989): 37–38, 40. 11. ​See W. J. T. Mitchell, “Spatial Form in Lit­er­a­ture: ­Toward a General Theory,” in The Language of Images, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 274. 12. ​Doreen Massey, “Space-­Time, ‘Science’ and the Relationship between Physical Geography and ­Human Geography,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 24, no. 3 (1999): 261–76. 13. ​Massey, 261, 263, 261. 14. ​Massey, 262. 15. ​Jonathan Raper and David Livingstone, “Let’s Get Real: Spatio-­temporal Identity and Geographic Entities,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 26, no. 2 (2001): 237–42. Raper and Livingstone echo Massey’s dry wit with their qualified acknowl­edgment in the double negative that “GIS protagonists may appear to be unrepentant” about the current limits of digital repre­sen­ta­tion, but “our ‘weak’ or ‘moderate realism’ appears to be not dissimilar to the ‘qualified naturalism’ of which Massey speaks” (241). See also Robert Dodgshon, “Geography’s Place in Time,” Geografiska Annaler Series B ­Human Geography 90, no. 1 (Mar. 2008): 1–15. 16. ​Massey, “Space-­Time,” 272. 17. ​Gary Wilder, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the F ­ uture of the World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).

Appendix

Sample Syllabi 1. Rachel Greenwald Smith, “Authority, Democracy, and Form: American Lit­er­a­ture, 1960 to the Pres­ent” 2. Erica Fretwell, “American Lit­er­a­ture’s Other Scripts” 3. Annie McClanahan, “Modern Economic Theory and the Economic Novel” 4. Michael LeMahieu, “Civil War Memory in Civil Rights Lit­er­a­ture” 5. Justine S. Murison, “The Age of Van Buren” syllabus 1

Authority, Democracy, and Form: American Lit­er­a­ture, 1960 to the Pres­ent Rachel Greenwald Smith This class examines key movements in American lit­er­a­ture and art from the 1960s to the pres­ent in the context of shifting attitudes t­ oward authority. While the traditional account of this period sees it as characterized primarily by the rise and fall of postmodernism, this course resituates postmodernism as one of several responses to a key question that arose in the postwar period. That question is this: Knowing that a modern Western democracy can succumb to totalitarianism, how should art respond to the threat of authoritarianism? The course begins with a set of responses to Stanley Milgram’s famous obedience experiments. Artists, psychologists, and activists alike addressed the revelation that a majority of individuals would do harm to ­others simply b ­ ecause they ­were told to do so by a person in a position of authority. ­These responses included the countercultural aesthetic experiments of John Cage and Allan Kaprow, who sought to limit the artist’s control over the work of art through the use of chance and participatory forms. But they also included works by Amiri Baraka, Valerie Solanas, Yoko Ono, and Marina Abramovic, who saw per­for­mance as a way of highlighting the existence of vio­lence in what appeared to be everyday American life. We then move on to a short unit on postmodernism, which focuses on the movement’s ambivalence t­ oward structure, even as its key critical works professed to be interested in the total removal of closure and determinacy. Fi­nally, the class turns to the con­temporary moment, where, in light of a perceived shift in which individual freedom has become overvalued in the wake of the neoliberal emphasis on individual responsibility, critics and artists have begun to reimagine the possibilities for the authority of formal closure, rigidity, and authorial control. We read works by authors such as Rachel Kushner, Heidi Julavits, and Salvador Plascencia, who explore the relationship between authorship and authority as thematic material. And we w ­ ill end with recent experiments in reasserting strict form as a generative force in works by writers such as C. A. Conrad, Peter Dimock, and Paul Beatty.

318  Appendix

Unit 1. Beginnings Week 1. Introduction: Authority and Obedience From David Cooper, ed., The Dialectics of Liberation: David Cooper, “Introduction,” R. D. Laing, “The Obvious,” and Stokely Carmichael, “Black Power” Stanley Milgram, Obedience (1965) Week 2. Counterculture and Happenings: In Pursuit of Indeterminacy Allan Kaprow, Assemblages, Environments, and Happenings John Cage, “4:33” Joan Didion, “Slouching ­toward Bethlehem” Michel Foucault, introduction to Anti-­Oedipus Se­lections from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus Week 3. Vio­lence, Race, and Gender Huey P. Newton, “In Defense of Self-­Defense” Amiri Baraka, “The Revolutionary Theater” Valerie Solanas, The SCUM Manifesto Yoko Ono, “Cut Piece” Marina Abramovic, “Rhythm 0” Unit 2. Postmodernism Week 4. What Was Postmodernism? Ihab Hassan, “­Toward a Theory of Postmodernism” John Barth, “A Visit to the Fun­house” John Barth, “The Lit­er­a­ture of Exhaustion” Week 5. Postmodernism and Late Capitalism Don DeLillo, White Noise Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” Unit 3. Form and Authority Weeks 6–7. Art, Form, Politics Carolyn Levine, from Forms Nicolas Brown, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Real Subsumption ­ under Capital” Walter Benn Michaels, from The Beauty of a Social Prob­lem Wendy Brown, from Undoing the Demos Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers Weeks 8–9. The Author as Authority Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” Salvador Plascencia, The ­People of Paper

Sample Syllabi   319

Weeks 10–11. The Author as Murderer: Feminism and Vio­lence Jessica Benjamin, from The Bonds of Love Sheryl Sandberg, “Lean In” (TED Talk) Heidi Julavits, The Vanishers Unit 4. New Experiments in Formation Weeks 12–13. Asceticism, Somatics, and Formation C. A. Conrad, from A Beautiful Marsupial After­noon Peter Dimock, George Anderson: Notes for a Love Song in Imperial Time Weeks 14–15. Race and Erasure: Exposing the Form Christopher Chen and Tim Kreiner, “­Free Speech, Minstrelsy, and the Avant-­Garde” Ta-­Nahesi Coates, “The Case for Reparations” Paul Beatty, The Sellout syllabus 2

American Lit­er­a­ture’s Other Scripts Erica Fretwell This course invites students to consider the relationship between form and format, between literary genre and material affordance, by focusing on nonvisual textualities. As the nineteenth-­ century explosion of embossed print systems and other tactile writing technologies forcefully shows, ink print is not the only format in which to read and write. While engaging questions about how textual materials both enable and constrain certain possibilities for action and meaning over ­others, this course also asks the following: How might blind disability alter our understanding of the changing nature of textuality in the nineteenth ­century? What sorts of intimacies and subjectivities do textual materials imagine and solicit? How might tactile media challenge commonly held assumptions about what counts as reading, writing, and lit­er­a­ture? This course aims to recover overlooked textual media and, in the vein of Mara Mills’s influential scholarship, trace the disabilities that have long underwritten histories of print, media, and technology. At stake in this approach to nineteenth-­century lit­er­a­ture is making tactile media and materials integral to—­rather than merely integrated into—­the contested realm of “the literary.” Unit 1: Reading Tactics frames the question of what constitutes reading through early nineteenth-­century debates in ­England and Amer­i­ca about blindness and literacy—­that is, how blind p ­ eople should read and what they should read. We begin with Words­worth’s repre­sen­ta­tion of a blind beggar in his autobiographical poem The Prelude and then move to Charles Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop, focusing on why Dickens would have gifted that specific novel (in raised print) to the students at the Perkins Institute for the Blind. We then turn to the journal and memoir of Laura Bridgman and Helen Keller, respectively, who ­were students at the Perkins Institute for the Blind. Their texts describe tactile reading as both an institutionally regulated practice and a world-­making experience. Keller’s work in par­tic­u­lar dwells on fin­ger spelling as a radically intimate act, which renders the flesh as

320  Appendix

text. The hand, a metonym for touch, both expands the reading public and dissolves the distinctions between reading and writing. Turning from one act of manual dexterity to another, Unit 2: Writing Techniques considers the technologies and affordances of tactile writing modes. We begin with a textual material that is frequently disregarded: textiles, specifically sewing samplers. Students ­will consider the affinity between Mary­land freewoman Mary D’Silver’s sampler (which cites Barbauld’s “The Mouse’s Petition”) and Bridgman’s own samplers and the “prick-­writing” machines that blind p ­ eople used to handwrite in Braille. This juxtaposition not only highlights the commonality between female domestic handi­work and the manual l­ abor of tactile writing but also reframes textiles as a mode of authorship. Indeed, if D’Silver’s sample turns citation into a mode of self-­authorization, textiles trou­ble notions of authorial originality perhaps nowhere more so than in Emily Dickinson’s hand-­sewn fascicles, which con­temporary artist Jen Bervin reappropriates in her large-­scale embroideries. Unit 3: Texturing Technology concludes the course by considering the disability history of the typewriter and the audiobook (originally called the Talking Book). It focuses on the gender politics of the typewriter and theories of automatic writing by way of Henry James’s dictated novel The Ambassadors, and it encourages students to think about how technology (handwriting vs. typing, typing vs. dictating) affects literary style. We then turn to Edison’s phonograph and writer Edward Bellamy’s fantasy of the phonographic book at the end of the nineteenth ­century. Concluding with a brief history of the Talking Book, we ­will compare a sample from the print and audiobook editions of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass to consider how visual and nonvisual reading technologies enable and shape dif­fer­ent experiences and interpretations. Introduction: Material Textuality Bonnie Mak, introduction to How the Page M ­ atters (2011) Ruth Finnegan, “Tactile Communication,” in The Book of Touch, ed. Constance Classen (2005) Unit 1. Reading Tactics New Communities William Words­worth, The Prelude (1798) Mara Mills, “What Should We Call Reading?” (2012) Catherine Kudlick, “Our Ancestors Sighted” (2015) The Sentimental Touch Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–41) and excerpts from American Notes (1842) Vanessa Warne, “Blind Reading and Nineteenth-­Century British Print Culture” (2016) Hands: Author and Audience Laura Bridgman, Journal (1859) Helen Keller, The World I Live In (1908) Marta Werner, “Helen Keller and Anne ­Sullivan: Writing Other­wise” (2010)

Sample Syllabi   321

Unit 2. Writing Techniques Anna Laetitia Barbauld, “The Mouse’s Petition” (1773) Mary D’Silver Sampler (1793) Prick-­writing machines, Perkins Institution for the Blind digital collection (1840s–1870s) Laura Bridgman’s textiles, Perkins Institution for the Blind digital collection (1840s–1850s) Lillian Nayder, “Blindness, Prick Writing, and Canonical Waste Paper” (2014) Emily Dickinson, Fascicle 32 (including “­Don’t Put Up My Thread and Needle”) Jen Bervin, The Dickinson Composites (2010) and “The Event of a Thread” video (2017) Unit 3. Texturing Technology Touch-­Type Henry James, The Ambassadors (1903) Theodora Bosanquet, excerpts from Henry James at Work (1920) Lisa Gitelman, “Automatic Writing,” in Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines (1999) Christopher Keep, “Blinded by Type” and/or “The Cultural Work of the Type-­Writer Girl” The Grain of the Recorded Voice Thomas Edison, “The Phonograph and Its ­Future” (1878) Edward Bellamy, “With the Eyes Shut” (1898) Matthew Rubery, “Canned Lit­er­a­ture: The Book ­after Edison” (2013) Walt Whitman, se­lection from Leaves of Grass, print and audiobook editions (Caedmon audio) Georgina Kleege, “Audio Description Described” (2016) syllabus 3

Modern Economic Theory and the Economic Novel Annie McClanahan Beginning in the late nineteenth c­ entury and continuing over the course of the twentieth ­century, economic theory underwent a radical change. The discipline once known as “po­ liti­cal economy” became “economics” and aligned itself with mathe­matics and physics and against history, po­liti­cal theory, and moral philosophy. It also shifted attention from the “macro” to the “micro,” developing what came to be called methodological individualism. For the first generation of modern economic theory, this individualism drove economists to study individual desire (or “utility”); in ­later generations, it meant what came to be called “rational choice theory”; more recently, economic theory has returned to psy­chol­ogy via evolutionary and cognitive models for individual decision making. Thus, despite economics’ turn ­toward quantificatory models and complex mathematical formulas, it also takes up questions common to novels. Why and how do ­people desire, and how do their actions reflect or reveal ­those desires? How rationally do individuals act, and how do their circumstances determine what is rational or irrational? What is the relationship between smaller units like the ­family or the ­house­hold and the broader economy?

322  Appendix

How do economic conditions affect individuals differently according to race or gender? And what happens when markets fail? This class ­will use both modern economic theory and the novel to explore ­these questions. At times we ­will be thinking about novels that offer answers similar to ­those we find in modern economic theory: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The ­Great Gatsby, for instance, focuses on a desire similar to the “hedonic calculus” impor­tant to early microeconomics, while Patricia Highsmith’s antisocial novel Strangers on a Train seems inspired by the economic libertarianism of midcentury thinkers such as Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. At other points, however, novels offer very dif­fer­ent answers to economic questions, as in Frank Norris’s The Pit, which insists on the unnaturalness of markets; or Joseph Heller’s Catch 22, which retheorizes Cold War rationality as insanity; or Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, which takes the neoliberal “new home economics” as the site to retheorize issues of f­amily wealth and race. Week 1. Political-­Economy Precursors Aristotle, excerpts on oikonomia from Politics Adam Smith, excerpts on invisible hand from Wealth of Nations (1776) David Ricardo, excerpts on value from On the Princi­ples of Po­liti­cal Economy (1817) Karl Marx, excerpts on primitive accumulation from Capital, volume 1 (1867) Week 2. “Robinson Crusoe Economies” Daniel Defoe, excerpts on trade and money from Robinson Crusoe (1719) William Stanley Jevons, excerpts on first princi­ples from The Theory of Po­liti­cal Economy (1871) Frank Knight, excerpts on “Crusoe economies” from Intelligence and Demo­cratic Action (1960) Weeks 3–4. Theories of Desire Karl Menger, excerpts on value and price from Princi­ples of Economics (1871) F. Scott Fitzgerald, ­Great Gatsby (1925) Ludwig von Mises, excerpts on be­hav­ior from ­Human Action: A Treatise on Economics (1949) Weeks 5–6. Crowds and Entrepreneurs Gustav Le Bon, excerpts on “mind of crowds” from The Crowd (1895) Frank Norris, The Pit (1903) Joseph Schumpeter, “The Creative Response in Economic History” (1947) Weeks 7–8. Rational Economies, Irrational Wars John von Neumann, excerpts on game theory from Theory of Games and Economic Be­hav­ior (1944); transcripts from US Atomic Energy Commission stewardship (1950s) Joseph Heller, Catch 22 (1961) Kenneth Arrow, “Economists and Glory” (2009)

Sample Syllabi   323

Weeks 9–10. Individualism and the ­Free Market Friedrich Hayek, excerpts on individualism from Individualism and Economic Order (1941) Patricia Highsmith, Strangers on a Train (1950) Milton Friedman, excerpt on ­free market from Capitalism and Freedom (1962) Weeks 11–12. Race, Class, and the New Home Economics Gary Becker, excerpts on wealth, race, and the ­house­hold from The Economics of Discrimination (1957) and A Treatise on the ­Family (1981) Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon (1977) Weeks 13–14. The Behavioral Turn Daniel Kahenmann and Amos Tversky, excerpt on biases from introduction to Judgment ­under Uncertainty (1982) Robert Shiller, excerpts on the irrationality princi­ple from Irrational Exuberance (2000) Sam Lipsyte, The Ask (2010) Adam McKay (dir.), The Big Short (2015) syllabus 4

Civil War Memory in Civil Rights Lit­er­a­ture Michael LeMahieu Charleston and Charlottesville are but two of the more recent reminders that Civil War memory, as with collective memory more generally, reflects as much about the culture d ­ oing the remembering as about the one being remembered. As historians such as David Blight have demonstrated, the memory of the US Civil War transformed considerably during the half ­century following the war’s conclusion, converting from a narrative of emancipation to one of reconciliation that frequently buttressed ideologies of white supremacy. Lost Cause my­thol­ogy emerged as the symbolic aide-­de-­camp to Jim Crow segregation and lynch mob terrorism. Civil War memory was again reconstructed during the civil rights era, when southern “massive re­sis­tance” to Brown v. Board often took the form of Lost Cause nostalgia and neo-­Confederate sentiment. The centennial commemoration of the war coincided with some of the most pivotal events in the civil rights movement, thus calling attention to the troubling symmetries of the country’s history. The first state to opt out of the Union was South Carolina in 1860; in 1960, a group of black students staged a sit-in in Greensboro, North Carolina. In April 1861, shots fired on Fort Sumter signaled the continuation of politics by other means; in summer 1961, Freedom Riders in Alabama and Mississippi ­were received as outside agitators or e­ nemy combatants. A few months a­ fter Stonewall Jackson defeated Union forces in 1862, Abraham Lincoln issued the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation; ­after nearly a de­cade of deliberate stonewalling, James Meredith integrated the University of Mississippi in 1962. In 1863, Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address, which inaugurated “a new birth of freedom”; in 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered the “I Have a Dream” speech, which dreamed of a f­ uture in which that new birth would fi­nally

324  Appendix

arrive. A ­century ­after Sherman’s march to the sea, a nonviolent march was met with vio­ lence in Selma. The promise of the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution outlawing slavery, passed in 1865, was still not realized one hundred years l­ater, when Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The official Civil War Centennial Commemoration unartfully avoided this intersection of Civil War commemoration and civil rights revolution, retreating into the kitsch of commemorative stamps and battlefield reenactments. It thus fell to writers, t­ hose unofficial historians, to represent and ultimately to reconstruct Civil War memory. “The Civil War is our only ‘felt’ history, history lived in the national imagination,” Robert Penn Warren wrote in The Legacy of the Civil War, published in 1961, as the centennial commenced. Two years ­later, on the one hundredth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, James Baldwin wrote to his nephew, “You know and I know that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too soon.” Civil War memory during the civil rights era is as much about ­imagined pasts as it is about projected ­futures. This course examines the role of Civil War memory in literary works written primarily during the height of the civil rights era (1954–1968). Our focus ­will be on dif­fer­ent “genres of memory.” We ­will ask how cultural narratives of the Civil War exhibit the features of literary genres, how t­ hose genres perform ideological functions, and how writers strategically reconstructed Civil War memory in order to intervene in civil rights strug­gles. Each unit of the course features texts from the civil rights movement and from the con­temporary moment. Suggested Reading David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2001) Alice Fahs and Joan Waugh, eds., The Memory of the Civil War in American Culture (2004) Robert J. Cook, Troubled Commemoration: The American Civil War Centennial, 1961–1965 (2007) Reading Schedule Unit 1. Civil War, Civil Rights Robert Penn Warren, The Legacy of the Civil War (1961) Edmund Wilson, preface to Patriotic Gore (1962) James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1963) Ta-­Nehisi Coates, “Why Do So Few Blacks Study the Civil War?” (2011) Unit 2. Brown v. Board Lit­er­a­ture Langston Hughes, “Theme for En­glish B” (1951) Flannery O’Connor, “A Late Encounter with the ­Enemy” (1953) Gwendolyn Brooks, “A Bronzeville ­Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi ­Mother Burns Bacon” (1960) Carson McCullers, Clock without Hands (1961) Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman (2015) Kevin Young, Brown (2018)

Sample Syllabi   325

Unit 3. Civil War Memory in Pastoral Elegy Allen Tate, “Ode to the Confederate Dead” (1928) Robert Lowell, “For the Union Dead” (1960) George Saunders, “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline” (1996) Natasha Trethewey, Native Guard (2006) Kevin Young, “For the Confederate Dead” (2007) George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo (2017) Unit 4. Alternate History / Historical Fiction MacKinlay Kantor, If the South Had Won the Civil War (1961) Richard Brautigan, A Confederate General from Big Sur (1964) Margaret Walker, Jubilee (1965) Ishmael Reed, Flight to Canada (1976) Kevin Willmott, C.S.A.: Confederate States of Amer­i­ca (2004) Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad (2016) Unit 5. Tragedy, Irony, Tragic Irony Ralph Ellison, “Tell It Like It Is, Baby” (1965) Suzan-­Lori Parks, Topdog/Underdog (2001) Ta-­Nehisi Coates, “The Civil War ­Isn’t Tragic” (2011) Suzan-­Lori Parks, ­Father Comes Home from the Wars, parts 1, 2, and 3 (2015) syllabus 5

The Age of Van Buren Justine S. Murison We live in an era of divisive partisan strug­gle, but do we account for questions of partisanship in how we or­ga­nize literary history? Historians of the United States might delineate an “Age of Jackson” within the broader antebellum period, or center their po­liti­cal history on the rise of the Republican Party, but literary scholarship by and large has ­little to say about party and electoral politics. This syllabus seeks to open up that very conversation, asking what the relationship is between partisanship and American lit­er­a­ture. The syllabus focuses on the nineteenth ­century, with a final unit on the con­temporary moment. The reason to return to the nineteenth ­century is ­because this is the era that sees the rise of the two parties, Demo­crats and Republicans, that still dominate electoral politics to this day. The course opens with the Demo­cratic Party, Andrew Jackson, and the emergence of po­liti­cal machines as they unfolded across a variety of cultural productions, including fiction, nonfiction, po­liti­cal cartoons, and genre painting. It follows ­these questions of partisanship through the rise of the second po­liti­cal party still operative t­oday—­the Republican Party—­and we consider the impact of this interparty strug­gle on nineteenth-­ century American lit­er­a­ture. The final unit skips ahead to the tumultuous election of 2016 and our current moment, in which it is difficult to predict the f­ uture of partisanship. According to any number of commentators, 2016 represented equally the disruption of the long-­stable two-­party system or a further entrenchment of the two parties’ power. This

326  Appendix

final unit can be conceived of as a fluid reflection on the pres­ent era that is now unfolding. I encourage ­those who might adapt this syllabus to turn the reins over to student research proj­ects (­here i­magined as one concentrating on what circulated in social media), thus always keeping the question of the “ends” of partisanship fresh and responsive to the moment the course is taught. Unit 1. The Demo­cratic Party and the Rise of Party Politics Week 1 Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Custom House” Po­liti­cal Cartoons of Martin Van Buren and Andrew Jackson George Caleb Bingham, Stump Speaking and The County Election (genre paintings) David Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought, chapters 9, 11, 13 Week 2 Edgar Allan Poe, “Mellonta Tauta” and “Some Words with a ­Mummy” Robert Montgomery Bird, Sheppard Lee Stacey Margolis, The Public Life of Privacy in Nineteenth-­Century American Lit­er­a­ture, chapter 1 Week 3 Robert Montgomery Bird, Sheppard Lee, continued Jordan Alexander Stein, “The Whig Interpretation of Media: Sheppard Lee and Jacksonian Paperwork” Unit 2. Citizenship, Race, and Gender in the Antebellum United States Week 4 Lydia Maria Child, se­lections from Letters from New York Lucy Stone, “Disappointment Is the Lot of ­Women” Seneca Falls Convention, “Declaration of Sentiments” Week 5 Henry Highland Garnet, “An Address to the Slaves of the United States of Amer­i­ca” The Colored Conventions Proj­ect: http://­coloredconventions​.­org Harriet Beecher Stowe, ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin, chapter 9, “In Which It Appears That a Senator Is But a Man” Derrick Spires, “ ‘Flights of Fancy’: Rereading Henry Highland Garnet’s ‘Address to the Slaves’ through Reception History and Print Culture” Week 6 Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” and “Emancipation, Racism, and the Work before Us: An Address Delivered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on 4 December 1863” Henry D. Thoreau, “Re­sis­tance to Civil Government” and “A Plea for Captain John Brown”

Sample Syllabi   327

Week 7 Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Unit 3. The Republican Party, the Civil War, and Radical Reconstruction Week 8 Abraham Lincoln, “A House Divided” and “First Inaugural” Walt Whitman, Drum-­Taps (se­lections) and Memoranda during the War (se­lections) Week 9 Elizabeth Keckley, ­Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House Abraham Lincoln, “Second Inaugural” Dana Luciano, Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-­Century Amer­i­ca, chapter 5 Week 10 Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, “National Salvation” (with introduction by Eric Gardner) David Blight, Race and Reunion, chapters 4, 8, and 9 Mary B. Hale, “The Po­liti­cal Procedural: The Novel’s Contribution to the Rise of Nonpartisanship and the Abandonment of Reconstruction” Week 11 Charles Chesnutt, Marrow of Tradition Week 12 Charles Chesnutt, Marrow of Tradition, continued Andrew Hebard, “Romance and Riot: Charles Chesnutt, the Romantic South, and the Conventions of Extralegal Vio­lence” Unit 4. Party Politics ­after 2016 Week 13 Veep (selected episodes) Rebecca Traister, “Inside Hillary Clinton’s Surreal Post-­election Life” Hillary Clinton, se­lections from What Happened Week 14 Laurie Penny, “I’m with the Banned” Ta-­Nehisi Coates, “The First White President” Proj­ect: Memes, gifs, and hoaxes from the election of 2016 Week 15 Jared Yates Sexton, The ­People Are ­Going to Rise Like the ­Waters upon Your Shore

This page intentionally left blank

Contributors

Jesse Alemán is a professor of En­glish at the University of New Mexico. With Rodrigo Lazo, he is the coeditor of The Latino Nineteenth C ­ entury: Archival Encounters in American Literary History (NYU Press, 2016). He has published over a dozen articles in journals and edited collections, including American Literary History, The Oxford Handbook to Nineteenth-­Century American Lit­er­ a­ture, and Hemispheric American Studies. In 2003 he edited and reprinted Loreta Janeta Velazquez’s 1876 memoir, The W ­ oman in ­Battle (University of Wisconsin Press), and in 2007 he coedited Empire and the Lit­er­a­ture of Sensation (Rutgers University Press). He is currently writing “Wars of Rebellion,” a book about nineteenth-­century Hispanic writings about the US Civil War. Adrienne Brown is an associate professor of En­glish at the University of Chicago. She is the author of The Black Skyscraper (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017) and the coeditor, with Valerie Smith and Kim Lane Scheppelle, of Race and Real Estate (Oxford University Press, 2015). Her work has also appeared in journals such as American Lit­er­a­ture, PMLA, Criticism, and the Journal of Modern Lit­er­a­ture. Gerry Canavan is an associate professor of twentieth-­century and twenty-­first-­ century lit­er­a­ture in the Department of En­glish at Marquette University. He is the author of Octavia E. Butler (University of Illinois Press, 2016) and the coeditor of two books: the Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and Green Planets: Ecol­ogy and Science Fiction (Wesleyan University Press, 2014). He has also coedited special issues of American Lit­er­a­ture and Polygraph on “speculative fiction” and “ecol­ogy and ideology,” and he has published numerous essays in venues such as Journal of American Studies, Science Fiction Film and Tele­vi­sion, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Russ Castronovo is the Tom Paine Professor of En­glish at the University of Wisconsin–­Madison. His most recent books are Propaganda 1776: Secrets, Leaks, and Revolutionary Communications in Early Amer­i­ca (Oxford University Press, 2014) and Beautiful Democracy: Aesthetics and Anarchy in a Global Era (University of Chicago Press, 2007). He is also the editor or coeditor of several books, such as The Oxford Handbook to Nineteenth-­Century American Lit­er­a­ture (Oxford University Press, 2012), States of Emergency: ­Toward a ­Future History of American Studies (University of North Carolina Press, 2009), and Materializing Democracy: ­Toward a Revitalized Cultural Politics (Duke University Press, 2002). His work has also appeared in journals such as Critical Inquiry, PMLA, and American Literary History and in collections such as The Cambridge

330  Contributors

Companion to Transnational American Lit­er­a­ture (Cambridge University Press, 2017) and Keywords for American Cultural Studies (NYU Press, 2007). Erica Fretwell is an assistant professor of En­glish at the University at Albany, SUNY. Her work has appeared in American Literary History and J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-­Century Americanists and is forthcoming in the edited volumes The New Whitman Studies (Cambridge University Press) and The Cambridge Companion to Food and Lit­er­a­ture (Cambridge University Press). She guest-­ edited a special issue of Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities on “Common Senses and Critical Sensibilities” (May 2018). Her book manuscript, “Sensitive Subjects,” traces the emergence of sensitivity in the long nineteenth ­century as a physiologically “specialized feeling” linking aesthetic cultivation to biopo­liti­cal arrangements. Susan Gillman is a professor of lit­er­a­ture and American studies at the University of California–­Santa Cruz. She is the author of Blood Talk: American Race Melodrama and the Culture of the Occult (University of Chicago Press, 2003), which received an honorable mention for the MLA William Sanders Scarborough Award for an Outstanding Study of Black Lit­er­a­ture and Culture, and Dark Twins: Imposture and Identity in Mark Twain’s Amer­i­ca (University of Chicago Press, 1989), as well as essays and articles that have appeared in journals such as PMLA and Comparative American Studies and in edited volumes such as Early African American Print Culture (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012) and Hemispheric American Studies (Rutgers University Press, 2008). She is also a coeditor of States of Emergency: The Object of American Studies (University of North Carolina Press, 2009), W. E. B. Du Bois and the Gender of the Color Line (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), and Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson (Duke University Press, 1990). A member of the Advisory Committees for both PMLA and J19, she is currently writing “Our Mediterranean: American Adaptations, 1820–1975,” a comparative critical study of the Amer­i­cas that reaches into hemispheric and ocean studies. Yogita Goyal is an associate professor of African American studies and En­glish at UCLA. She is the author of Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Lit­er­a­ture (Cambridge University Press, 2010), guest editor of a special issue of Research in African Lit­er­a­tures (Fall 2014), and editor of the Cambridge Companion to Transnational American Lit­er­a­ture (2017). She is currently writing a book on the revival of the slave narrative as a new world literary genre, titled Runaway Genres: Global Afterlives of Slavery. She edits the journal Con­temporary Lit­er­ a­ture and is the vice president of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Pres­ent.

Contributors  331

Jennifer Greiman is an associate professor of En­glish at Wake Forest University. She is the author of Democracy’s Spectacle: Sovereignty and Public Life in Antebellum American Writing (Fordham University Press, 2010). Her work has also appeared in journals such as J19 and Arizona Quarterly and in collections such as The New Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and Melville and Aesthetics (Palgrave, 2011). She is the coeditor of The Last Western: “Deadwood” and the End of American Empire (Bloomsbury, 2013). Her article on Melville and Tocqueville, which appeared in J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-­Century Americanists, was awarded the Hennig Cohen Prize for the best essay or chapter on Melville. She is currently writing a book on aesthetics and democracy in Melville. Sandra Gustafson is a professor of En­glish and American studies at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of Imagining Deliberative Democracy in the Early American Republic (University of Chicago Press, 2011); Eloquence Is Power: Oratory and Per­for­mance in Early Amer­i­ca (University of North Carolina Press, 2000); and essays on William Apess, James Fenimore Cooper, Jonathan Edwards, Margaret Fuller, and Henry Adams. She is the editor of The Norton Anthology of American Lit­er­a­ture, volume A (9th edition), and the MLA-­affiliated journal Early American Lit­er­a­ture, as well as the coeditor of Cultural Narratives: Textuality and Per­for­mance in American Culture before 1900 (University of Notre Dame Press, 2010) and guest editor of a special issue of the Journal of the Early Republic on po­liti­cal writing and lit­er­a­ture. Her work has recently appeared in journals such as New Literary History, PMLA, and J19 and in volumes such as Religious Transformations in the Early Modern Amer­i­cas (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014). She is currently writing a book about politics and the American novel from Cooper to Silko that draws on peace studies methodologies. Christopher Hager is the Charles A. Dana Research Associate Professor of En­glish at Trinity College, Hartford. He is the author of Word by Word: Emancipation and the Act of Writing (Harvard University Press, 2013), which won the 2014 Frederick Douglass Prize, and of I Remain Yours: Common Lives in Civil War Letters (Harvard University Press, 2018). His essays have appeared in journals such as American Lit­er­a­ture and J19 and in edited collections such as A History of American Civil War Lit­er­a­ture (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and A History of American Working-­Class Lit­er­a­ture (Cambridge University Press, 2017). His work has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for Humanities, including the Public Scholar program, as well as the American Council of Learned Socie­ties and the American Philosophical Society.

332  Contributors

Jared Hickman is an associate professor of En­glish at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Black Prometheus: Race and Radicalism in the Age of Atlantic Slavery (Oxford University Press, 2016) and the coeditor of two essay collections: Abolitionist Places (Routledge, 2013) and Americanist Approaches to “The Book of Mormon” (Oxford University Press, 2016). His work has also appeared in PMLA, American Lit­er­a­ture, American Literary History, Early American Lit­ er­a­ture, Atlantic Studies, and Nineteenth-­Century Lit­er­a­ture, as well as The Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-­Century American Lit­er­a­ture (2012). He currently serves on the editorial board for ELH. Coleman Hutchison is an associate professor of En­glish at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Apples and Ashes: Lit­er­a­ture, Nationalism, and the Confederate States of Amer­i­ca (University of Georgia Press, 2012), the first literary history of the Civil War South; the coauthor of Writing about American Lit­er­a­ture: A Guide for Students (Norton, 2014); and the editor of A History of American Civil War Lit­er­a­ture (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Hutchison is currently at work on two books in pro­gress: “­Dixie Mythologies: Region, Race, Refrain” and “The Ditch Is Nearer: Race, Place, and American Poetry, 1863–2009.” Andrew Kopec is an assistant professor of En­glish at Indiana University–­Purdue University, Fort Wayne. His work on the relation between lit­er­a­ture and economics in early Amer­i­ca has appeared in journals such as ELH, Early American Lit­er­a­ture, and ESQ. Another essay, “The Digital Humanities, Inc.,” appeared in PMLA in 2016. He is currently writing his first book, “Pacing Panic: American Romanticism and the Business Cycle.” Michael LeMahieu is an associate professor of En­glish at Clemson University. He is the author of Fictions of Fact and Value: The Erasure of Logical Positivism in American Lit­er­a­ture, 1945–1975 (Oxford University Press, 2013), coeditor of the volume Wittgenstein and Modernism (University of Chicago Press, 2017), and coeditor of the journal Contemporary Literature. He received a 2018–2019 ACLS fellowship to work on his current project, a study of Civil War memory in literature from the civil rights movement to the contemporary moment. Caroline Levander is the vice president for Strategic Initiatives and Digital Education, Carlson Professor in the Humanities, and professor of En­glish at Rice University. She is currently writing Rogues: The Men Who Threatened to Make Amer­i­ca ­Great (Oxford University Press, forthcoming). Most recently, she has cowritten (with Matthew Pratt Guterl) ­Hotel Life: The Story of a Place

Contributors  333

Where Anything Can Happen (University of North Carolina Press, 2015) and Where Is American Lit­er­a­ture? (Wiley-­Blackwell’s Manifesto Series, 2013). In addition to coediting a book series, Imagining the Amer­i­cas, with Oxford University Press, she is the author of Cradle of Liberty: Race, the Child, and National Belonging from Thomas Jefferson to W. E. B. Du Bois (Duke University Press, 2006) and Voices of the Nation: W ­ omen and Public Speech in Nineteenth-­Century American Culture and Lit­er­a­ture (Cambridge University Press, 1998; paperback reprint, 2009). She has coedited A Companion to American Literary Studies (Wiley-­Blackwell, 2011), Teaching and Studying the Amer­i­cas (Palgrave, 2010), Hemispheric American Studies (Rutgers University Press, 2008), and The American Child: A Cultural Studies Reader (Rutgers University Press, 2003). Robert S. Levine is a professor of En­glish and Distinguished University Professor at the University of Mary­land, College Park. His most recent books are The Lives of Frederick Douglass (Harvard University Press, 2016) and Race, Transnationalism, and Nineteenth-­Century American Literary Studies (Cambridge University Press, 2018). He is the editor or coeditor of a number of volumes, including The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville (Cambridge University Press, 1998), Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville: Essays in Relation (University of North Carolina Press, 2008), and a Norton Critical Edition of Melville’s Pierre (Norton, 2017). He is the general editor of The Norton Anthology of American Lit­er­a­ture. In 2014 the American Lit­er­a­ture Section of the MLA awarded him the Hubbell Medal for Lifetime Achievement in American Literary Studies. Dana Luciano is an associate professor of En­glish at Rutgers University. She is the author of Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-­Century Amer­i­ca (NYU Press, 2007), which won the MLA’s First Book Prize in 2008. Her edited volumes include “Queer Inhumanisms,” a special issue of GLQ: The Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies coedited with Mel Y. Chen (vol. 22, nos. 2–3, Spring/Summer 2015); and Unsettled States: Nineteenth-­Century American Literary Studies (NYU Press, 2014), coedited with Ivy G. Wilson. She is a member of the editorial collective for Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities and is currently at work on two book proj­ects: “How the Earth Feels: Geological Fantasy in the Nineteenth-­Century US” and “Time and Again: The Affective Cir­cuits of Spirit Photography.” Cody Marrs is an associate professor of En­glish at the University of Georgia. He is the author of Nineteenth-­Century American Lit­er­a­ture and the Long Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and the editor of The New Melville

334  Contributors

Studies (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). His work has appeared in journals such as American Lit­er­a­ture and American Literary History and in edited volumes such as A History of American Civil War Lit­er­a­ture (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and The New Dickinson Studies (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). Annie McClanahan is an assistant professor at the University of California at Irvine. She is the author of Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and Twenty-­First-­ Century Culture (Stanford University Press, 2016), winner of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Pres­ent Best Book of 2017 Prize. Her work has also appeared in journals such as Repre­sen­ta­tions, Journal of American Studies, South Atlantic Quarterly, theory & event, and boundary 2. She currently holds a Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellowship, through which she is studying microeconomics ­toward a book proj­ect tentatively titled “A Cultural History of the Microeconomic ­Century.” Justine  S. Murison is an associate professor of En­glish at the University of Illinois at Urbana-­Champaign. She is the author of The Politics of Anxiety in Nineteenth-­Century American Lit­er­a­ture (Cambridge University Press, 2011), a study of the impact of neurological science and medicine on nineteenth-­ century writing and culture. She has coedited special issues of American Literary History (on “American Lit­er­a­tures  /  American Religions”) and Early American Lit­er­a­ture (on “Methods for the Study of Religion in Early American Lit­er­a­ture”). Her essays have also been published in American Lit­er­a­ture, Arizona Quarterly, ESQ, Lit­er­a­ture and Medicine, Atlantic Studies, and The Neuroscientific Turn: Transdisciplinarity in the Age of the Brain (University of Michigan Press, 2012). She is currently writing a book on privacy, po­liti­cal hy­poc­risy, and the secularization of the body and editing a volume titled American Lit­er­a­ture in Transition, 1820–1860 (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). Birgit Brander Rasmussen is an associate professor of En­glish at SUNY-­ Binghamton. She is the author of the prizewinning book Queequeg’s Coffin: Indigenous Literacies and the Making of Early American Lit­er­a­ture (Duke University Press, 2012). Her work has appeared in American Lit­er­a­ture, PMLA, Early American Lit­er­a­ture, Journal of Transnational American Studies, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Mississippi Quarterly, and Modern Language Quarterly. Her article “Negotiating Treaties, Negotiating Literacies: A French-­Iroquois Encounter and the Making of Early American Lit­er­a­ture” won the 2007 Norman Foerster Prize for best essay published in American Lit­er­a­ture. She is coeditor of The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness

Contributors  335

(Duke University Press, 2001). Her next book is tentatively titled “Signs of Re­ sis­tance, Signs of Resurgence: Pictography and American Lit­er­a­ture, 901 to the Digital Age.” Phillip Round is a professor of En­glish and American Indian and Native studies at the University of Iowa, where he coordinated the American Indian and Native Studies program for six years. His latest book, Removable Type: Histories of the Book in Indian Country, 1663–1880 (University of North Carolina Press, 2010), was awarded the MLA’s James Russell Lowell Prize in 2011. In 2013, he received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship to support research for his new book on collaborative practices in early Native lit­er­a­ture. His work has appeared in PMLA, American Literary History, and numerous collections and anthologies. Rachel Greenwald Smith is an associate professor at Saint Louis University. She is the author of Affect and American Lit­er­a­ture in the Age of Neoliberalism (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and editor of American Lit­er­a­ture in Transition, 2000–2010 (Cambridge University Press, 2017). She is also coeditor, with Mitchum Huehls, of Neoliberalism and Con­temporary Literary Culture (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017). Her essays have appeared in American Lit­er­ a­ture, Twentieth-­Century Lit­er­a­ture, Mediations, Modern Fiction Studies, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a second monograph tentatively titled “Compromise Aesthetics: Lit­er­a­ture ­after Democracy.” Bryan Waterman is the Global Network Associate Professor of Lit­er­a­ture and an associate provost for undergraduate academic development at NYU-­Abu Dhabi. He is the author of Republic of the Intellect: The Friendly Club of New York City and the Making of American Lit­er­a­ture (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007) and the coeditor, with Cyrus Patell, of The Cambridge Companion to the Lit­er­a­ture of New York (Cambridge University Press, 2010). He edited the Norton Critical Editions of two early American novels and wrote the volume on Tele­vi­sion’s Marquee Moon for Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 series (2011). He has also published in journals such as the William and Mary Quarterly, American Literary History, and Early American Lit­er­a­ture. He is currently working on two books: one on New York City in the Age of Warhol, and another on seduction stories and sex scandals in the revolutionary Atlantic World. Rachel  A. Wise received her PhD in En­glish from the University of Texas at Austin in 2014. She subsequently spent time as a visiting scholar at the American Acad­emy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge, Mas­sa­chu­setts. While in residency, she worked on a book-­length proj­ect, “Losing Appalachia,” which

336  Contributors

examines Appalachian lit­er­a­ture’s use of material culture to critique industrial capitalism. Her scholarly work has appeared in Arizona Quarterly and Resources for American Literary Study, and you can find her poetry in Cave Region Review and Chariton Review. She currently resides in Austin as an in­de­pen­dent scholar and full-­time grant writer.

Index

abolition/abolitionism, 13, 135, 139, 143, 177, 178, 180, 233, 236, 244, 245–46 Abu Ghraib, 305 Acconci, Vito, 219 Adams, John, 12 Addams, Jane, 40 African American lit­er­a­ture, 141, 142, 211, 228–40, 298, 314 African Americans, 38, 44–46, 50, 142, 205, 230, 235, 236, 245, 298 Agnew, Spiro, 101 Alcott, Louisa May, 140, 141; ­Little ­Women, 31, 136 Aleuts, 301 Alexie, Sherman, “Captivity,” 304 Alger, Horatio, 245 Allen, Donald, The New American Poetry, 215–16 Allen, Edward, 24 Allen, Woody, 104 American Bible Society, 25 American Graffiti (1973), 104 American Indian Movement, 104, 304 American Indians, 67, 69, 75, 76; removal of, 12, 13, 68; and sovereignty, 56–57, 59–60, 64. See also Indian Removal Act (1830); indigenous ­peoples; Native Americans American Printing House for the Blind (APH), 24, 26, 32 American Re­nais­sance, 14, 67, 68, 141 American Revolution, 4, 58, 88, 90, 91, 110, 244, 248 American Romanticism, 5, 58, 123–31, 160, 161 American ­Women Regionalists (W. W. Norton), 189 Amos, Israel, 62 Amos and Andy, 239 Anagnos, Michael, 25, 26 Anderson, Benedict, 35n3 Anderson, Robert, 160 Andrews, William, 235 Anglican Church, 248 Anglo-­American culture, 42, 161, 167 Anglocentricism, 18, 162 antebellum period, 33–34, 57, 58, 67, 87, 89, 170, 190, 237, 245–46, 254, 256, 310, 311; economy of, 124, 125, 127; party politics in, 172, 176, 180, 184, 185; postbellum continuities with, 4, 135; synergistic creative energies in, 6, 134–44; vio­lence of, 160–61

Anthropocene era, 3–4, 74, 147–56 Anthropocene Working Group (AWG), 147–48, 149, 150, 151, 155 Apess, William, 63, 75–76, 78, 140, 141; Eulogy for King Philip, 57; The Increase of the Kingdom of Christ, 78; The Indians, 78–79; Indian’s Looking-­Glass for the White Man, 79; A Son of the Forest, 13, 78 Appalachian lit­er­a­ture, 189–99, 314 Appomattox, 111, 136, 161, 203 Arawak prisoners, 297 Aristotle, 149, 264, 285 Armstrong, Nancy, 266, 272 Armstrong, William, Stocks and Stock-­Jobbing in Wall-­Street, 125 Arnow, Harriet, The Dollmaker, 191, 196–99 Arrow, Kenneth, 267 Artman, William, Beauties and Achievements of the Blind, 32 Ashbery, John, 215 Ashby, Hal, 49 Ashe, Bertram, 229 Asimov, Isaac, The Gods Themselves, 103 Aspen, 215 Attaquin, Ezra, 62 Austen, Jane, Pride and Prejudice, 277 Austin, Mary, 59 authoritarianism, 283–92 Baca, Jimmy Santiago, A Place to Stand, 304 Bagram Airfield, 305 Baldwin, James, 207, 237; Go Tell It on the Mountain, 210; Notes of a Native Son, 210 Baldwin, Joseph G., The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi, 127 Balzac, Honoré de, 15 Bancroft, George, 54 Band of Angels (1957), 236 Banner of the South, The, 113 Barbary captivity narratives, 297, 298 Barlow, Joel, 162 Barth, John, “The Lit­er­a­ture of Exhaustion,” 284–85 Barthelme, Donald, 213 Barthes, Roland, 214, 224

338  Index Bateson, Gregory, 284 ­Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973), 104 Baudrillard, Jean, 214 Baum, Frank, Wizard of Oz, 37–38 Beatty, Paul, 230, 233 Beauregard, P. G. T., 160 Becker, Gary, 269, 270 Bedford Anthology of American Lit­er­a­ture, 134 Bee, Samantha, 185 Belches, Margaret, 32 Bellamy, Edward, Looking Backward, 58 Bellow, Saul, The Adventures of Augie March, 210 Benjamin, Walter, 68, 69, 73; “­Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 235 Bentham, Jeremy, 267 Berrigan, Ted, C no. 7, 220 Bird, Robert Montgomery, 162 Black Arts Movement, 228 Black Lives ­Matter, 120, 230 black nationalism, 142, 234 black ­people, 54, 161, 230. See also African Americans Black Power movement, 301, 304 blind ­people, 21–22, 24–26, 27–31, 32. See also embossed print Bochner, Mel, 218 Bonnin, Gertrude, “The Widespread Enigma of Blue Star ­Woman,” 63 Bontemps, Arna, Black Thunder, 231 Book of Mormon, The, 5, 67–80, 138, 315 Boorstin, Daniel, 222, 223 Boudinot, Elias, Star in the West, 78 Bourdieu, Pierre, 61–62 Brackenridge, Hugh Henry, Modern Chivalry, 12 Bradbury, Ray, Fahrenheit 451, 210 Bradford, William, 75 Bradley, David, 231, 233 Bradstreet, Anne, “Contemplations,” 16–17 Braille, 21, 22, 23, 26, 27, 29, 31 Braille, Louis, 21 Brainard, Joe, 216, 224 Branam, Virgil, 204 Braudel, Fernand, 308, 309, 311 Bretton Woods, 99 Brezhnev, Leonid, 104 Bridgman, Laura, “Holy Home,” 26 Brooks, Cleanth, 116

Brown, Charles Brockden, 71; Arthur Mervyn, 12; Edgar Huntly, 12; Ormond, 12; Wieland, 12, 17 Brown, Claude, Manchild in the Promised Land, 235 Brown, Gillian, 266 Brown, John, 142, 233 Brown, John Seelye, 254 Brown, William Hill, The Power of Sympathy, 11–12 Brown, William Perry, “A Peculiar ­People,” 193 Brown, William Wells, 141, 142, 143, 246; Clotel, 140 Brown v. Board of Education, 204, 207 Broza, Gil, 255 Bruce, Dickson, 235 Brunner, John, The Sheep Look Up, 103 Bryant, William Cullen, 13, 136, 139, 170 Brynjolfsson, Erik, 253, 254 Buchanan, James, 173 Buck and the Preacher (1972), 236 Bunyan, John, Pilgrim’s Pro­gress, 16 Burke, Edmund, 90, 91 Burney, Frances, 17 Burton, Tim, 17 Bush, George H. W., 104 Bush, Vannevar, “As We May Think,” 253 Butler, Octavia, 231, 233; Wild Seed, 232 Cabeza de Vaca, Álvar Núñez, La Relacion, 297 Cage, John, 214, 215, 221–22; Empty Words, 222; “Lecture on Nothing,” 221 Calhoun, John C., 174 capitalism, 71, 72, 89, 100, 102, 104, 124, 151, 154, 249, 272, 278, 280, 286; and Appalachia, 191; and Arnow, 196, 198, 199; and Davis, 192, 193, 194; and DeLillo, 287, 288; and Irving, 126; and Kushner, 290; and Michaels, 289; and Twain, 130 Capote, Truman, 214 captivity narratives, 6, 295–305, 314 Carlyle, Thomas, 17 Carmichal, Stokely, 284 Carroll, Jill, “Hostage,” 302 Carson, Rachel, 308–9; The Sea around Us, 308 Castillo, Susan and Ivy Schweitzer, The Lit­er­a­tures of Colonial Amer­i­ca, 18 Cather, Willa, 243 Césaire, Aimé, 315 Chandler, Raymond, The Long Goodbye, 210 Channing, Walter, “Essay on American Language and Lit­er­a­ture,” 70

Index  339 Chapin, William, 27 Chappelle, Dave, 233–34 Charlottesville, VA, 110, 230–31 Charter of Freedoms and Exemptions (1629), 88 Chase-­Riboud, Barbara, 231, 233 Cheever, John: The House­breaker of Shady Hill, 46, 47–48; Shady Hill stories of, 47–48 Cherokee Nation, 55, 61, 171 Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, 55 Chicano/as, 164, 167 Chickasaw Nation, 171 Child, Lydia Maria, 139, 141, 246; Hobomok: A Tale of Early Times, 13; “The Quadroons,” 140 Choctaw Nation, 171 Chuck D, 118 civil rights, 48, 115, 120, 204, 207, 314 Civil Rights Act (1964), 50, 207 civil rights movement, 109, 143, 184, 202–11, 228, 229, 301, 304 Civil War, 4, 14, 54, 58, 59, 68, 109, 134, 173, 182, 204, 299; centennial of, 110, 115, 118, 204, 210; as dividing line, 310–11; and Ellison, 203–11; expansion before, 161; as rupture and occasion for extension, 135; sesquicentennial of, 110, 120; as spectral presence, 121n6; and Tucker, 174; and US-­Mexico War, 160 Clark, Kenneth, 16 Clayton, Augustin Smith, The Life of Martin Van Buren, 172–73, 174, 177 Clinton, Bill, 106 Club of Rome, 102 Cody, William Frederick “Buffalo Bill,” 58 Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, 154 Colbert, Stephen, 185 Cold War, 106, 151, 244, 301 colonial era, 1, 295, 299, 301, 302, 303 colonialism, 151, 152, 153, 154, 159, 161, 163, 164, 166, 297, 298; and The Book of Mormon, 68, 69–71, 72, 73, 74–75, 76, 78; and captivity narratives, 295, 296, 302; and Dutch West India Com­pany, 88, 89; and Melville, 155; and sovereignty, 57, 58, 61, 62 coloniality, 14, 296, 304, 305 Columbus, Christopher, 297 Commonwealth v. Hunt, 55–56 Compromise of 1850, 15 Confederate States of Amer­i­ca, 160, 314, 315; flag of, 111–15, 118, 120; idealized, 117; memorials to, 112,

120; memory of, 110; and nationalism, 109–21; sacralization of, 114; symbols of, 113 Congregatio de Propaganda Fide (1622), 247–48 Congress of Panama, 166 Conrad, Joseph, 15 Coombs, Isaac, 62 Cooper, James Fenimore, 14, 15, 17, 18, 60, 87, 88, 94, 139, 140; The Chainbearer, 90–91, 92; The Last of the Mohicans, 299; Littlepage trilogy, 87, 90–92; Precaution, 13; The Redskins, 90, 91–92; Satanstoe, 90, 92 Cooper, J. California, 231 Cooper, Myles, A Friendly Address to All Reasonable Americans, 248 Coronado, Raúl, 167, 168 Cortez, Hernan, 166 Crane, Stephen, 57, 209, 211; “War Memories,” 162 Creek Nation, 171 Crockett, David, 172–73 Crosby, Frances Jane, 32 Crutzen, Paul, 148, 151 cryptography, 6, 253–59, 261 Cuba, 162, 166 Cuban in­de­pen­dence, 159, 161 Cummings, E. E., The Enormous Room and Other Stories, 210 Curtis, George William, 127 Cusick, David, Sketches of Ancient History of the Six Nations, 71 D’Aguiar, Fred, 231, 233 Dakota ­people, 60–61, 63 Dances with Wolves (1990), 300 Davis, Angela, 303–4 Davis, Rebecca Harding, 57, 140, 141; Life in the Iron-­Mills, 190–94, 195, 197, 199; Silhouettes of American Life, 194; “The Yares of the Black Mountains,” 190, 194–95 Dawes Severalty Act (1887), 63, 66n28 Day, Mary: Incidents in the Life of a Blind Girl, 32; The World as I Have Found It, 32, 33 Day without a Mexican (2004), 159 Dean, James, 223 deconstruction, 284, 286 Defoe, Daniel, 17; Robinson Crusoe, 266, 275 De La Beckwith, Byron, 118 Delany, Martin, 140, 141, 142

340  Index Delany, Samuel, 229 Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari, Capitalism and Schizo­phre­nia, 285 DeLillo, Don, 284, 293–94n20; Americana, 223; ­Great Jones Street, 223; Mao II, 223–24; White Noise, 223, 287–88, 289, 290 democracy, 12, 19, 53, 56, 88, 89–90, 95n18, 101, 138, 172, 175; and Cooper, 91; and Ellison, 203, 208; and Hawthorne, 180; and Matthiessen, 17; and Melville, 87, 93–94; and Van Buren, 174 Demo­cratic Party, 54, 57, 63, 172, 173, 174, 175, 177, 178, 180, 181, 182 Derrida, Jacques, 73, 95n18 Dewey, John, 271 Dick, Philip K., A Scanner Darkly, 103 Dickens, Charles, 125 Dickinson, Emily, 15–16, 136, 139, 140, 243 Didion, Joan, 214 “­Dixie” (song), 118, 119, 120 Dobb, Maurice, 268 Dos Passos, John: The 42nd Parallel, 249–50; U.S.A. Trilogy, 249, 277–78, 279 Douglass, Frederick, 141, 142, 143–44, 179, 180, 233, 237, 246, 304; “Emancipation, Racism, and the Work before Us,” 178–79; “The Heroic Slave,” 140; “The Lessons of the Hour,” 143; Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, 139, 143; My Bondage, My Freedom, 210; Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 140, 143, 298–99 Dragonetti, Giacinto, 248 Dreiser, Theodore, 136 Du Bois, W. E. B., 228, 249, 250 Duchamp, Marcel, 215 Durkheim, Émile, 265, 271, 279 Dustan, Hannah, 297 Dutch patroons, 6, 86–94 Dutch West India Com­pany, 86, 88, 89 Dylan, Bob, 216, 223; “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” 213 Early American Lit­er­a­ture, 14 Early American Studies, 14 early national period, 14, 87, 160, 303 Eastman, Charles, From the Deep Woods to Civilization, 61 Eaton, John, 173 Eaton, Peggy, 173, 174

economics, 5, 6, 53, 124, 130, 264, 265, 267, 269–70, 290–91, 314 economy, 98–100, 104, 118, 127, 265, 266, 275, 280; and American Romanticism, 123–31; and Appalachian lit­er­a­ture, 192, 194, 195, 196, 198, 199. See also panics, financial Edwards, Jonathan, 15, 17 1865, 134, 135, 136, 139, 202, 310. See also Civil War Eisenstadt, Abraham, “1865,” 203 Ellis, Trey, “The New Black Aesthetic,” 229 Ellison, Ralph, 202, 237; “Address to the Harvard Alumni, Class of 1949,” 205–7, 209–10, 211; Invisible Man, 138, 208, 210–11, 235; “Stephen Crane and the Mainstream of American Fiction,” 209, 211; “Tell It Like It Is, Baby,” 203–5; “Twentieth-­Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity,” 209 Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, Charleston, SC, 110, 120 embossed print, 2, 21–34 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 14, 17, 22, 54, 56, 136, 140, 206, 208, 209, 246; “The American Scholar,” 13, 139, 253; “The Divinity School Address,” 13; En­glish Traits, 53, 54; Nature, 13, 246; “Politics,” 179; Representative Men, 208, 210 empire/imperialism, 18, 19, 59, 147, 180, 297, 309, 311; and Melville, 163; and nationalism, 139; and United States, 59, 161, 162, 163, 164, 166, 167 environment, 2, 3–4, 102–4, 106, 150–51, 154, 155 Equiano, Olaudah, In­ter­est­ing Narrative, 12 Erben, Patrick, A Harmony of the Spirits, 18 Erdrich, Louise, “Captivity,” 304 ethnicity, 47, 49, 61, 210, 301 Eurocentrism, 70, 153, 154, 155 Euro-­Christians, 74–75, 76, 78 Eu­ro­pean Economic Community, 99 Evaristo, Bernardine, 233 Everett, Percival, 233; Erasure, 237–40; I Am Not Sidney Poitier, 230, 236 Evers, Charles, 118 Evers, Medgar, 118 Evers, Myrlie, 118 Executive Order 9066, 300–301 Exorcist, The (1973), 104 extinction(s), 74, 149, 152, 155

Index  341 Fair Housing Act (1968), 49, 50 Faulkner, William, 114, 190, 206, 209 federal government, 39, 40, 42, 44, 45, 53–54, 55, 56, 59, 63, 198–99 Federal Housing Administration (FHA), 42, 44, 45 Federal Writer’s Proj­ect, 46 Felski, Rita, 142; “Context Stinks!,” 137–38, 143 feminism, 170, 292, 302, 303, 307 Fern, Fanny, 140, 141 Film Culture, 219 First Nations ­peoples, 298 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, The ­Great Gatsby, 41–42, 47 Flint, Michigan, 50 Flournoy, Angela, 49 Ford, Gerald, 101, 106 Ford, Richard, 49 foreclosures, 37, 42, 43, 50 formalism, 266, 283–92 Forster, E. M., 266 Foster, Frances Smith, 235 Foster, Hannah Webster, The Coquette, 12 Foucault, Michel, 61, 149–50, 151, 152, 170, 285, 286 Foucault, Pierre, 29 Franklin, Benjamin, 17, 143; Autobiography, 11, 14 Franzen, Jonathan, 49, 293n16 ­free blacks, 142 freedmen, 183 freedom, 53, 54, 139, 161, 164, 205, 210, 235, 237, 271, 280, 287, 289, 290–91 Freedom’s Journal, 142 Freedom Summer, 118 ­Free to Choose (PBS documentary), 273–74 Freneau, Philip, 11, 162 Friedlander, Julius, 24 Friedman, Milton, 100, 266, 273–76 Friedman, William F., 255, 256, 257 Frobisher, Martin, 297 Fuchs, Barbara, “Golden Ages and Golden Hinds,” 18–19 Fugitive Slave Act (1850), 143, 181, 209 Fuller, Margaret, 140 Furman v. Georgia, 105 game theory, 269–70 Garfield, James A., 170 Garrison, William Lloyd, 143, 237 Garrisonians, 178 Garvey, Ellen Gruber, 33

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 234–35 gay and lesbian lit­er­a­ture, 243 gender, 140, 161, 230, 295, 300, 302. See also masculinity; ­women Geo­graph­i­cal Information Systems, 313 geography, 152, 154, 312–14 geology, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 153 Geronimo, 299, 300 ghetto narrative, 238, 239, 240 Ghost Dance, 69, 72, 75 GI Bill (1944), 44, 45 Gibson, George, 27 Giles, Paul, 19 Gillman, Susan, 137, 245 Gilroy, Paul, 232 Ginsberg, Allen, 213, 215, 217 Giorno, John, 219, 220 Glissant, Édouard, 310 Godey’s, 141 Godfather, The (1973), 104 Godwin, William, 17 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, The Sorrows of Young Werther, 12 Goffman, Erving, 276, 277 Golden, Thelma, 229 Gone with the Wind (1939), 38 ­Great Britain, 17–18, 99 ­Great Depression, 37, 38, 42–44, 59 Guadalupe Hidalgo, Treaty of, 160 Guantanamo, 305 Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), 236 Guillory, John, 222 Habermas, Jürgen, 22, 35n3 Haley, Alex, Roots, 231, 234 Hall, Donald, Robert Pack and Louis Simpson, The New Poets of ­England and Amer­i­ca, 216 Hall, Frank, 28, 29 Hall, Lansing: Beauties and Achievements of the Blind, 32; Voices of Nature, 32 Hall, Stuart, 228, 230 Hallett, Benjamin, 62–63 Hansberry, Carl, 44–45 Hansberry, Lorraine, 47–48; A Raisin in the Sun, 48 Happy Days (1974), 104 Harney, ­Will Wallace, “A Strange Land and Peculiar ­People,” 193

342  Index Harper, Frances, 139, 141, 142, 143 Harrison, William Henry, 173, 175 Hartman, Saidiya, 232 Haüy, Valentin, 21 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 13, 14, 25, 57, 139, 140, 170, 175–76, 179, 184, 187–88n31; campaign biography of Pierce by, 170; “The Custom House,” 170, 176, 179–80; “Feathertop,” 25; The House of the Seven Gables, 135, 180, 182, 210; and Matthiessen, 17; as modern writer, 136; “My Kinsman Major Molineux,” 56; and Salem Customs House, 170, 173, 176; The Scarlet Letter, 25, 210; Twice-­Told Tales, 182 Hayek, Fredrich, 100, 269, 270, 272, 276 Hearst, Patricia, 303 Heath Anthology of American Lit­er­a­ture, The, 13–14, 34, 134, 144n5, 189 Hemingway, Ernest, 209; The Old Man and the Sea, 210 Heredia, José María, 166 Heron, Gil-­Scott, 107 Higgins, Dick, 214 Highsmith, Patricia, Strangers on a Train, 210 Hispanophone writers, 163, 164 historicism, 235, 264, 266, 268 history, 73, 109–10, 153, 165, 236, 243, 264, 274, 307, 308, 312, 315; context of, 134, 136, 137–38, 139, 141, 142; and geography, 312–14; and Morrison, 232; periods in, 97; and Ruffato, 280; transdisciplinary, 314. See also periodization Holiday, Billie, 118 Holocene era, 3 homeownership, 2, 37–51, 314; and mortgage melodramas, 37–39, 42–44, 47, 48; and public housing, 46, 49, 50 Home Own­er’s Loan Corporation (HOLC), 42, 43, 44 Homer, 16, 32 homo­sexuality, 101–2 Hoover, Herbert, 40 Houghton, Sir Henry, “A Reply to the Conquered Banner,” 114 House of Cards (tele­vi­sion series), 185 Houston, Jeanne Wakatsuki, Farewell to Manzanar, 301, 302, 305 Howe, Daniel Walker, 54 Howe, Samuel Gridley, 21, 24, 25; The Reader of Extracts, 25

Howells, William Dean, 58, 135, 136, 170 Hudson, Henry, 85 Hughes, Langston, Montage of a Dream Deferred, 210 humanists, 148, 150, 154, 155 Hunter, Kristin, The Landlord, 49 Hurricane Katrina, 50, 234 Hurricane Sandy, 50 Hurston, Zora Neale, 228, 237 Hyde, Orson, 78 immigrants, 44, 47, 159, 165, 295, 305 Inada, Lawson Fusao, Only What We Could Carry, 301 incarceration, 60, 102, 230, 232, 303–5 Indian Nullification (1835), 62–63, 64 Indian Removal Act (1830), 6, 13, 56–57, 76 Indian Territory, 56, 57, 58, 69 indigenous ­peoples, 13, 18, 54, 69–71, 74, 151, 154–55, 161; and The Book of Mormon, 68, 77; and captivity narratives, 295; and Channing, 70. See also American Indians; Native Americans information theory, 253–62 Inglis, Charles, The Deceiver Unmasked, 248 In the Heat of the Night (1967), 236 Inuits, 297 Invisible Committee, The, The Coming Insurrection, 283 Irving, Washington, 14, 17, 87, 88, 94, 124, 127, 128, 129, 132n14, 176; “Buckthorne,” 125–26; A History of New York, 85, 87, 92–93; “The Legend of Sleepy-­Hollow,” 12; “Philip of Pokanoket,” 12–13; “Rip Van Winkle,” 12; The Sketch-­book, 12, 139; Tales of a Traveller, 125, 126; “A Time of Unexampled Prosperity,” 128–29; “Traits of Indian Character,” 12–13; “Wolfert Webber, or Golden Dreams,” 126 Irwin, Robert, 21 Irwin P. Beadle & Co., Dime Novels, 58 It’s A Wonderful Life (1946), 38 J19, 14–15 Jackson, Andrew, 56, 124, 171, 172, 173, 174 Jackson, Frederick, A Week in Wall Street by One Who Knows, 124, 127 Jackson, George, Soledad ­Brother, 303–4 Jackson, Jesse, 106 Jacobs, Harriet, 140, 142; Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 141, 298–99

Index  343 Jacobs, Jaap, 88; The Colony of New Netherland, 85 James, C. L. R., 155 James, Henry, 57, 206, 208 Jameson, Fredric, 95n7, 213, 223, 272, 314; Postmodernism, 98; “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” 286 Japa­nese internment narratives, 300–301, 302 Jefferson, Thomas, 12, 90, 142; Declaration of In­de­­pen­dence, 55; Notes on the State of ­Virginia, 11, 14 Jehlen, Myra and Michael Warner, The En­glish Lit­er­a­tures of Amer­i­ca, 1500–1800, 15 Jennings, Ken, 254 Jeopardy! (tele­vi­sion program), 254 Jevons, William Stanley, Theory of Po­liti­cal Economy, 267–68, 279 Jim Crow, 57, 121n6, 232 Jogues, Isaac, 298 Johnson, Andrew, 111 Johnson, Charles, 230, 231; ­Middle Passage, 232 Johnson, Lydon B., 199 Johnson, Mat, 49, 230, 233 Jones, Edward, 231 Jones, Gayl, 231 Jones, LeRoi, 215 Julavits, Heidi, 284; The Vanishers, 291–92 Jurca, Catherine, 49 Kaepernick, Colin, 185 Kaprow, Allan, 214, 284; Words, 221 Kenyon Review, 115 Kerouac, Jack, On the Road, 245 Kerry, John, 106 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 109; “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” 303 King Philip’s War, 296 Kirkland, Caroline, A New Home—­Who’ll Follow?, 127 Kissinger, Henry, 101 Kneass, Napoleon, Philadelphia Magazine for the Blind, 26 Knickerbocker, The, 129 Know-­Nothings, 53 Kosolapov, Alexander, 223 Kracauer, Siegfried, 248 Ku Klux Klan, 182 Kushner, Rachel, 284; The Flamethrowers, 289–90, 291, 292

labor/workers, 54, 55–56, 58, 87, 89, 98, 99, 119–20, 136, 193, 198 La Hache, Theodore, 111 Laing, R. D., 284 Lakotas, 72–73 Lange, Oskar, 268 Latin Amer­i­ca, 162, 163 Latinidad, Age of US, 6, 159–67, 310, 311, 314 Latour, Bruno, 268, 272 Law, John, 129 Lawrence, Josephine, If I Have Four Apples, 43–44, 48 Lee, Chang Rae, 49 Lee, Robert E., 109, 111, 205 Le Goff, Jacques, 256 Le Guin, Ursula K., The Dispossessed, 103 Lentricchia, Frank, 293n19 Lewis, Sinclair, Babbitt, 40–41, 42, 43, 46 LeWitt, Sol, 214 Lexis-­Nexis, 104 liberalism, 39, 100, 115, 178, 185, 234, 270, 271, 280 Liberty Party, 178 Lichtenstein, Roy, 215 Lilies of the Field (1963), 236 Lincoln, Abraham, 60, 109, 170, 171, 203, 205, 206, 212n15; Annual Message to Congress (1862), 208; Gettysburg Address, 206 Lit­er­a­ture in the Early American Republic, 15 Lit­er­a­ture of the American South, The (W.W. Norton), 189 local color, 190, 191, 192, 198 Locke, Alain, 228 Locofoco Demo­crats, 53 Logan, Chief, 11 London, Frank Brown, Trumbull Park, 46 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 162 Longman Anthology, 134 longue duree, 71, 296, 307, 308, 309, 311 Loughran, Trish, 18 Lowell, Robert, “For the Union Dead,” 208 Lubiano, Wahneema, 233 Lukács, Georg, 266, 272, 273, 277 Luther v. Borden, 54 Mackay, Charles, Extraordinary Popu­lar Delusions, 129 Macpherson, James, 111 Magnum Force (1973), 104 Mailer, Norman, 214

344  Index Malanga, Gerard, 214, 215 Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, 303 Malling-­Hansen, Rasmus, 29–30 Manifest Destiny, 58, 74, 164 Marcuse, Herbert, 284 marginal utility theory, 264, 266, 267, 268, 270, 271, 275, 279 marriage plot, 37 Marsalis, Wynton, 229 Martí, José, 160, 166 Marx, Karl, 274, 279 Marxism, 170, 265, 268 masculinity, 174, 175, 176–77, 179. See also gender Mashpee Pequot, 62–63 Mas­sa­chu­setts Supreme Court, 55–56 Mather, Cotton, 19, 297 Mather, Increase, 296 Matilda Ziegler Magazine for the Blind, 26 Matthiessen, F. O., 17, 128; The American Re­nais­sance, 13, 123, 136, 210 Maturin, Edward, 162 McAfee, Andrew, 253, 254 McBride, James, The Good Lord Bird, 233 McCarthy hearings, 301 McCord, Louisa, 183 McGill, Meredith, 18 McLuhan, Marshall, 218; Understanding Media, 219 McWeeny, Gage, 277 media, 2, 22–23, 27, 30, 213, 214, 215, 217, 222 mediation, 213, 214, 217, 221, 222 Mediterranean studies, 308 Melville, Herman, 14, 17, 83n43, 91, 124, 138, 170, 176, 244; “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” 56, 129; Battle-­Pieces, 205; “Benito Cereno,” 162–63, 164; Billy Budd, 136; The Confidence-­Man, 127–28, 129; “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” 128, 139; Moby-­Dick, 76, 94, 137, 152, 153, 154–55, 210, 243; Pierre, 86, 87, 88, 93–94, 210; “The Story of China Aster,” 127–28, 131; Typee, 140, 299 Menger, Carl, Princi­ples of Po­liti­cal Economy, 267, 268, 279 Merchant, Ismail, 17 Mexican Americans, 161, 164 Mexicans, 159 Mexico, 162, 164, 165–66, 167 Michaels, Walter Benn, 266, 272, 288–89 microeconomics, 264–80, 314; and market sociability, 273–76, 277; and methodological

individualism (MI), 264–65, 266–71, 272, 273, 276, 280; and price theory, 271–72, 276, 277, 278, 280 microperiods, 134, 137, 140, 141, 144n5 Milgram, Stanley, 284 Miller, Arthur, The Crucible, 210 Miller, J. Hillis, 277 Miller and Co., 127 Milton, John, 32, 248; Paradise Lost, 15, 16–17 Mises, Ludwig von, 268, 271–72 Mississippi ­Bubble, 129 Missouri Compromise (1820), 12, 13, 139, 142 Missouri School for the Blind, 31 Mitchell, Helen Slack, 31 Mitchell, Margaret, Gone with the Wind, 112 Mitchell, W. J. T., 312 modernism, 1, 2, 59, 105, 206, 208, 209, 229, 277 Modern Language Association (MLA), 14, 307, 309 Monroe, Marilyn, 223 Monroe Doctrine, 59 Mormons, 67–80 Morrison, Toni, 229, 233; Beloved, 231–32, 234, 235, 241n31, 304; A Mercy, 241n31; “Unspeakable ­Things, Unspoken,” 311 mortgage melodrama. See homeownership Motherwell, Robert, The Dada Paint­ers and Poets, 214–15 Motorola, 98, 104 Mulford, Carla, Early American Writings, 18 Murfree, Mary, In the Tennessee Mountains, 189, 190 Murphy, Eddie, 229 Murray, Gilbert, The Classical Tradition in Poetry, 204–5 Museum of Modern Art, 215 Nabokov, Vladimir, Lolita, 210 NAFTA, 166 Narragansetts, 296 NASA, 103 Nation, “1865,” 203 National ­Women’s Rights Conventions, 56 Native Americans, 6, 11, 13, 56, 59, 61, 140, 141, 171, 297–98, 299; and captivity narratives, 298, 300; and Nullification Crisis, 54; sovereignty of, 59, 62–64. See also American Indians; indigenous ­peoples nativism, 53, 75

Index  345 naturalism, 161, 162, 239 Naylor, Gloria, 49 Nelson, Maggie, Jane: A Murder, 288 neoliberalism, 6, 97, 100, 106, 230, 232, 289, 290–91 neo-­slave narratives, 231–33, 234, 235, 236, 237, 304, 315 Newark Sunday Call, 43 New Criticism, 186 New ­England, 162, 299, 302 New Historicism, 234, 235 New Journalism, 214 New Mexico, 18 New Netherland, 85, 86 New Realism, 215, 216, 219 New York, 85, 102 New York City, 141 New York Historical Society, 85, 86 New York Point, 21, 26, 29 New York School, 215, 216, 219 New York’s Freeman’s Journal, 111 Nielson, Aldon, 229 Nixon, Richard, 100–101, 104 Noah, Trevor, 185 Norris, Frank, 37, 136 North, 44, 57, 174, 182 North American Review, 139 Norton Anthology of African American Lit­er­a­ture, The (W.W. Norton), 228, 229, 230, 234 Norton Anthology of American Lit­er­a­ture, The (W.W. Norton), 14, 34, 57, 58, 70, 134, 136, 141, 144n5, 189 novels, 14, 17, 19, 266, 271–73, 276–79 nullification, 53–54 Nullification Crisis of 1832–1833, 54 Oates, Joyce Carol, 48–49 Obama, Barack, 109, 230 Obama administration, 100, 106 O’Connor, Flannery, 210 O’Gorman, Edmundo, 71 O’Hara, Frank: “Having a Coke with You,” 216; “Personal Poem,” 215, 216; “Poem [Lana Turner Has Collapsed!],” 216 Okuba, Miné, Citizen 13660, 301 Oldenburg, Claes, 214, 215, 216–17 Oñate, Juan de, 18 Ono, Yoko, 214

OPEC (Organ­ization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries), 102 Padgett, Ron: “Nothing in that drawer,” 220–21; “Sonnet / Homage to Andy Warhol,” 219–20 Page, Thomas Nelson, 37 Paige, James W., 130 Paine, Thomas, 90; Common Sense, 243, 248–49 panics, financial, 5, 89, 124, 125, 127, 130, 132n14, 171, 314. See also economy Papillon (1973), 104 Parks, Suzan-­Lori, 229, 233 Parks and Recreation (tele­vi­sion series), 185 Parrington, Vernon L., 64, 128–29; Main Currents in American Thought, 58 Parton, James, Life of Andrew Jackson, 173–74, 175 Partridge, Jennie, 31, 33 Pastorius, Francis Daniel, “Bee-­Hive,” 18 Patinkin, Donald, 270 patroons/patroonship system, 85–94, 95n7, 138 Paul, Ron, 106 Payton, Philip A., 44–45 Peltier, Leonard, My Life Is My Sundance, 304 Pendleton Act (1883), 170, 171, 175, 185 Pennebaker, D. A., 213 Pequot Indians, 75, 83n43, 152 periodization, 1, 2, 3, 4–7. See also history; reperiodization; timelines, concept of Perkins School for the Blind, 24, 25, 26, 32 Philadelphia Institution for the Instruction of the Blind, 24, 26 Phillips, Caryl, 231, 233 Picasso, Pablo, 105 Pierce, Franklin, 57, 170 Pinochet, Augusto, 100 ­Piper, Andrew, 35n8 Planter’s Northern Bride, The, 246 Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), 57 Poe, Edgar Allan, 136, 139, 140; and cryptography, 253, 254–56, 257, 258–59, 261, 262; Eureka, 258–59; “A Few Words on Secret Writing,” 254, 255, 258; “The Gold Bug,” 255, 258; The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, 13; “The Raven,” 56, 111, 258–59; Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, 13 Poetry of Amer­i­ca, The, 25 Poitier, Sidney, 236 Pop art, 215, 216, 218, 219, 222, 224 Popper, Karl, 268, 271

346  Index popu­lar culture, 33, 216, 287 postbellum period, 6, 57, 160, 161, 190, 254, 310, 311; antebellum continuities with, 4, 135; synergistic creative energies in, 141 post-­blackness, 229, 231, 233, 234, 235, 236, 237 post-­Fordism, 98 post-­Jim Crow era, 236 postmodernism, 97, 98, 105, 229, 233, 239, 240, 272; and authority, 283, 284, 285–86, 287, 288; and Warhol, 213, 214, 223 post-­postmodernism, 283, 286, 293n16 post-­racialism, 230, 233, 315 post-­structuralism, 214, 286 Pound, Ezra, 59, 208 Prescott, William H., History of the Conquest of Mexico, 162 Progressive Era, 244, 245 propaganda, 6, 40, 138, 244–51, 299, 302, 303, 314 Puerto Ricans, 159 Puritans, 14, 19, 85, 297–98, 302, 304 Putnam’s, 141 Pynchon, Thomas: The Crying of Lot 49, 48; Gravity’s Rainbow, 104–5; “A Journey into the Mind of Watts,” 48–49 queer studies, 155, 227n43, 243 race, 6, 13, 53, 55, 64, 109, 152, 161, 232, 233, 310, 314; and Baca, 304; and black writers, 142; and captivity narratives, 295, 300–301, 302, 303, 305; and discrimination, 49, 50, 207, 208; and Everett, 236, 237, 238, 239, 240; and homeownership, 42, 47, 48; and segregation, 45–46, 47, 115, 207, 230; in South vs. North, 57; and US Latinidad, 163, 167 racism, 79, 106, 118, 147, 180, 204, 229, 311 Randall, Alice, 233 Randall, James Ryder, “The Unconquered Banner,” 114 Reagan, Ronald, 106, 304 realism, 2, 47, 57, 124, 128, 161, 162, 190, 198; and Davis, 191, 192; and Everett, 239, 240; and Hawthorne, 135; and Howells, 135; and Irving, 129; and Melville, 128, 136; and Stowe, 135; and Twain, 130, 131 Reconstruction, 57, 115, 182, 203, 204, 310–11 Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage proj­ect, 167 Reed, Ishmael, 231, 234

Reed, John, 249–50; Ten Days That Shook the World, 244 Reed, Lou, 216 regionalism, 190, 191, 192 remediation, 214, 217, 219, 222–23, 247 Rensselaer, Kiliaen van, 87 Rensselaer, Steven van, III, 87, 89 reperiodization, 3, 7, 138, 295, 311, 312, 314, 315. See also periodization Republican Party, 170, 182 Revolutionary War era, 13, 15, 160, 303 Rezneck, Samuel, Business Depressions and Financial Panics, 132n2 Rich, Adrienne, 16–17 Richardson, Samuel, 17 Ridge, John Rollin, 140, 141; The Adventures of Joaquin Murieta, 61 Riis, Jacob, 40 Robbins, Bruce, 274, 275 Rocafuerte, Vicente, 166 Rocke­fel­ler Drug Laws (1973), 304 Rockfeller, Nelson, 102 Roe v. Wade, 101–2 Roman alphabet, 21 romance, 57, 58, 124, 125–26, 128, 129, 130–31 Roof, Dylann, 110 Roo­se­velt, Franklin Delano, 300 Roots (tele­vi­sion miniseries), 233–34 Rosenquist, James, 215 Roth, Philip, “Goodbye Columbus,” 48–49 Rowlandson, Joseph, 296 Rowlandson, Mary, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, 295, 296–97, 298, 299, 304 Rowson, Susanna, Charlotte ­Temple, 12, 17 Ruffato, Luiz, ­There ­Were Many Horses, 278–79, 280 Ruggles, Samuel, 24 Ruiz de Burton, María Amparo, The Squatter and the Don, 62, 160, 166–67 Ruscha, Ed, 216–17 Russ, Joanna, “When It Changed,” 105 Rus­sian Revolution, 40 Rutter, Brad, 254 Ryan, Abram Joseph, 118, 120; “Cleburne,” 113; “The Conquered Banner,” 111–15, 117; “The Sword of Robert Lee,” 113 Saint-­Domingue, 163 Salinger, J. D., The Catcher in the Rye, 210

Index  347 Santoro, Liz and Pierre Godard, “For Claude Shannon,” 261 satire, 40, 46, 57, 58, 174, 185, 233, 236, 237, 238, 239, 240 Schoolcraft, Jane Johnson, 140, 141 Schumpeter, Joseph, 268 Schuyler, George, 234 science fiction, 103–4, 105 Seabury, Samuel, 248 Searchers, The (1956), 300 Sears Tower, 102 Sedgwick, Catharine Maria, 125, 127, 139, 140, 141; Hope Leslie, 13, 75 Segal, George, 215 Seguín, Juan N., 161 Selma, Alabama, 203 Seminole Nation, 171 Seminole Wars, 160, 311 Seneca Falls Convention, 56 Senghor, Léopold Sédar, 315 sentimental fiction, 140 sentimentalism, 136, 236 Serpico (1973), 104 Seward, William, 89 sexuality, 140, 161, 174. See also gender; masculinity; ­women Shakespeare, William, 19; Hamlet, 205; A Winter’s Tale, 26 Shakur, Assata, Assata, 303–4 Shannon, Claude E., 253, 256–62; “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” 257, 262; “A Mathematical Theory of Cryptography,” 257, 258; “A Rubric on Rubik’s Cubics,” 260 Shaw, Lemuel, 55–56 “She Wronged Him Right” (cartoon short), 37, 38–39 Sidney Janis Gallery, 215 Sigourney, Lydia, 136, 139, 141 Silicon Valley, 254 Sinclair, Upton, The Jungle, 135, 244, 245 Sismondi, Simone di, Principes d’economie politique, 132n2 Skylab, 103, 108n11 slave narratives, 234–35, 237, 239, 298–99, 302, 304 slavery, 12, 57, 60, 121n6, 136, 139, 160, 231–40; context of, 142; and Cooper, 91, 92; and Davis, 192; and Douglass, 143; and Ellison, 203, 210; and Jacobs, 141; and Melville, 163; and Spain, 163; and

Stowe, 181, 243, 245; and Tucker, 174; and Van Buren, 171, 177; and D. Walker, 246; and F. Walker, 119–20; and K. Walker, 234. See also abolition/abolitionism Sleep (1963), 219 Sleeper (1973), 104 Smith, Adam, 264, 270 Smith, Henry Nash, 58 Smith, Joel, 21 Smith, John, 302, 305; Generall Historie, 297 Smith, Joseph, 67, 75, 78 Smith, Samuel H., 78 Smith, Valerie, 234–35 Snider, Jacob, 21, 24 Sobel, Robert, 132n11 socialism, 100, 266, 268, 277, 279 social media, 185 Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, 248 Society of Early Americanists, 14 South, 44, 57, 174, 177, 182, 204, 245, 246–47, 314 sovereignty, 39, 40, 50, 69, 161; lit­er­a­tures of, 53–64, 314–15 Soviet Union, 104 Soylent Green (1973), 104 Space Race, 103 space-­time, 71, 76, 307, 309–10, 311, 312–14, 315 Spain, 19, 162, 163, 164, 165 Spanish, 18, 167 Spanish-­American War, 310 Spanish empire, 162, 163. See also Cuban in­de­pen­dence Spanish lit­er­a­ture, 18–19 Spanish-­speaking ­people, 312 Spengemann, William, A New World of Words, 15, 16, 17 Spicer, Sean, 185 Squanto, 297 Staden, Hans, 299 Star Trek (tele­vi­sion series), 103, 104 Star Trek: The Animated Series (tele­vi­sion series), 104 Stein, Gertrude, 208 Steinbeck, John: East of Eden, 210; The Grapes of Wrath, 42–44, 46 Stepto, Robert, 235 Sting, The (1973), 104 St. John de Crèvecœur, J. Hector, Letters from an American Farmer, 11, 14 Stockton, Annis Boudinot, 11

348  Index Stockwell, Quentin, 297 Stoermer, Eugene, 151 Stone, John Augustus, Metamora; or, The Last of the Wampanoags, 13 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 139, 141, 181, 247, 250; A Key to ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 140, 183; ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 135, 140, 180–82, 183–84, 187–88n31, 210, 243, 244–45, 299 Studio Museum in Harlem, Freestyle (exhibition), 229 Stuyvesant, Peter, 85 Supreme Court, 54, 55, 105 Tamarkin, Elisa, Anglophilia, 18 Tarantino, Quentin, 17 Tarde, Gabriel, 268 Taylor, Edward, 15 Taylor, Paul, 230 Taylor, Zachary, 173, 176 Tennen­house, Leonard, The Importance of Feeling En­glish, 17–18 Thatcher, Margaret, 272, 276 Thirteenth Amendment, 139, 202 Thoreau, Henry David, 17, 56, 60, 127, 139, 140, 179, 180, 209, 222; “Re­sis­tance to Civil Government,” 178; “Slavery in Mas­sa­chu­setts,” 178; Walden, 137, 210 Thurmond, Strom, 204 Ticknor, George, 162 Tillman, Lynne, 223 timelines, concept of, 1, 312 Titcomb, Mary, 24 Toledo y Dubois, José Alvarez de, 163–64 Touré, 229, 233, 234 Tourgée, Albion, A Fool’s Errand, 182–83 Townsend, Elizabeth, 29 transbellum, 135, 140–41, 143, 144n5 transnationalism, 2, 19, 135, 140, 161, 162, 165, 250 Treaty of Paris, 14 Trilling, Lionel, 215 Trollope, Frances, Domestic Manners of the Americans, 179, 180 Trump, Donald, 106, 184, 231 Trumpener, Katie, 137 Truth, Sojourner, 139; “­Ain’t I a ­Woman?,” 56 Tucker, Nathaniel Beverley, The Partisan Leader, 174–75, 179 Turri, Pellegrino, 28

Twain, Mark, 57, 58, 209; A Connecticut Yankee, 58; The Gilded Age, 130; Huck Finn, 245; “The £1,000,000 Bank-­Note,” 130, 131; Pudd’nhead Wilson, 57, 64 20/20 (tele­vi­sion program), A Hidden Amer­i­ca, 199 Tyler, Royall: The Algerine Captive, 12; The Contrast, 11 ­Uncle Robin in His Cabin in ­Virginia, and Tom without One in Boston, 246 United States, 17–18, 68, 69, 85, 98, 99, 100, 104, 161, 164, 166, 167; Department of Energy, 102; Department of ­Labor, 40; Drug Enforcement Agency, 102; Housing Authority (USHA), 42 United States Congress, 21, 202, 245–46 United States Constitution, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 54, 55 United States Latinidad, 159–68 United States-­Mexico War, 160, 161, 166 United States Senate, 67 Updike, John, Rabbit Run, 46 Vale, Lawrence, 40 Van Buren, Martin, 171, 172–75, 176, 177, 179, 314 Vance, J. D., Hillbilly Elegy, 199 Varela, Felix, 165–66 Veep (tele­vi­sion series), 185 Vergil, 16 Vesey, Denmark, 142 Victoria, Queen, 58 Vietnam War, 101, 106, 301 Villagrá, Gaspar Pérez de, Historia de la Nueva Mexico, 18 Voigt, Lisa, 301–2 Voltaire (François-­Marie Arouet), 74 Vonnegut, Kurt: Breakfast of Champions, 105–6; Player Piano, 210; Slaughterhouse-­Five, 105 Voting Rights Act (1965), 202, 203, 207 Wait, William Bell, 21, 29 Waitie, Stand, 61 Walker, Alice, The Color Purple, 239 Walker, David, 13, 139, 141, 142, 246; Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, 55, 142–43; Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, 246, 247 Walker, Frank X: “­Dixie Suite,” 118; “I’d Wish I Was in ­Dixie Too,” 119–20; Turn Me Loose, 118–20 Walker, Kara, 233, 234

Index  349 Walker, Margaret, Jubilee, 231, 234 Walker, Martin, 142, 143 Wallace, David Foster, 293n16 Walras, Leon, Ele­ments of Pure Economics, 267 Warhol, Andy, 138, 213–25, 314; a: A Novel, 214, 219; Amer­i­ca, 214; The Andy Warhol Diaries, 214; Andy Warhol’s Exposures, 214; Diamond Dust Shoes, 213; Gold Marilyn, 223; The Index (Book), 214; Interview, 214, 217; The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, 214; Popeye, 217; POPism: The Warhol Sixties, 214, 218–19; Pork, 214; Superman, 217 War of 1812, 12, 68, 69, 139, 160, 311 Warren, Robert Penn: The Legacy of the Civil War, 109, 115, 205, 208; “Two Studies in Idealism,” 115–18; Wilderness, 115 Washington, George, 172 Watergate break-in, 100–101 Watson (supercomputer), 254 Watt, Ian, 266, 272 Wayne, John, 300 Way We ­Were, The (1973), 104 Webb, Frank, 142 Weber, Max, 268 Webster, Daniel, 54, 63 Webster-­Hayne debate, 13 Weeks, Edward, 253 Weiner, Lawrence, 214 Wheatley, Phillis, 11, 14, 15 Whitehead, Colson, 230; Sag Harbor, 230; The Underground Railroad, 307 Whitman, Walt, 17, 139, 170, 217, 224, 243; Leaves of Grass, 123–24, 140, 210; “Song of Myself,” 136; Specimen Days, 205 Whittier, John Greenleaf, 13 Wideman, John Edgar, 49 Wigglesworth, Michael, The Day of Doom, 15–16 Wilder, Gary, Freedom Time, 315 Wiley, Bell Irvin, Johnny Reb, 122n24

William and Mary Quarterly, 14 Williams, Eunice, 298 Williams, John, The Redeemed Captive Returning to Zion, 297, 298 Williams, Raymond, 97, 150 Williams, Sherley Anne, 231, 233; Dessa Rose, 232 Williams, Tennessee, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, 210 Wilson, August, 229 Wilson, Harriet, 142 Wilson, Samuel Tyndale, 195 Wilson, Sloan, 46 Winter in Amer­i­ca (1974), 107 Winters, Ben H., Underground Airlines, 307 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations, 202 Wizard of Oz, The (1939), 38 Wolfe, Tom, 214 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 17 ­women, 33, 54, 56, 59, 105, 140, 177, 178. See also gender; sexuality Woodman’s Nannette and Other Tales, The, 33 Woodward, C. Vann, “Flight from History,” 203 Woolf, ­Virginia, Mrs. Dalloway, 277 Worcester v. Georgia, 55 World War I, 14, 110, 191, 209 World War II, 110, 191, 196, 300–301; end of, 150, 151; period ­after, 42, 106, 283, 302 Wright, Richard, 228, 237; 12 Million Black Voices, 45–46; Black Boy, 235; Native Son, 45–46, 239 Wrong Turn (2003–2014), 199 Xicotencatl, 165–66 Yates, Richard, Revolutionary Road, 46 Zalaciewicsz, Jan, 149 Zinn, Howard, “The South Revisited,” 203

This page intentionally left blank