Susan Gillman | University of California, Santa Cruz (original) (raw)

Papers by Susan Gillman

Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson

Caribbean Literature in Transition, 1800–1920

Hemispheric American Studies, 2020

Archipelagic American Studies, 2017

American Literary History, 2018

The Reconstruction sesquicentennial has been quietly observed rather than celebrated, in keeping ... more The Reconstruction sesquicentennial has been quietly observed rather than celebrated, in keeping with its ambivalent presence in US literature and history. Historians have been debating virtually everything about Reconstruction since federal troops were no longer called upon to support state governments in 1877, including its timeline and outcome. At the chronological and ideological center of that debate, W. E. B. Du Bois’s monumental Black Reconstruction in America (1935) offers “splendid failure” as the best judgment, if not epitaph, still standing, still open ended (708). Literary critics have been more reticent, standing back from a full-scale critical engagement with the literary historiography and criticism of Reconstruction. In fact, what inspires this special issue is the uneasy question of a “Reconstruction literature”: Does such an identifiable set of texts in context exist at all, and if so, what are its parameters, and why has it gone unrecognized for so long? The nine essays suggest different candidates for what might count as the literature of Reconstruction: from political poetry published in the late 1860s New York Herald to a newly discovered novel set under British slavery in Barbados and serialized in the Anglo-African during the summer of 1865, to Constance Fenimore Woolson’s short story “Rodman the Keeper”—newly anthologized in the latest Norton—set in the ultralocal western North

Caribbean Quarterly, 2015

IN 2015, A YEAR OF DEBATE OVER THE CONFEDERATE FLAG and intense meditation on the meaning of race... more IN 2015, A YEAR OF DEBATE OVER THE CONFEDERATE FLAG and intense meditation on the meaning of race in America, it would be a shame to miss the equally public memories of race-slavery in Britain. Britain's Forgotten Slave Owners, a twopart BBC documentary,1 publicised the Legacies of British Slave-ownership (LBS), a University College of London database of all the slave owners in Britain who were awarded compensation when slavery was abolished on 1 August 1834. A Broadway musical, Amazing Grace, dramatised the story of the British slave-ship captain, John Newton, who wrote the hymn that would become associated with African-American culture and civil rights struggles - and which President Obama sang at the eulogy for Pastor Clementa Pinckney, killed in June 2015 by a white supremacist who shot six other members of the AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. In the literary sphere, British novelist Caryl Phillips published The Lost Child, partly a prequel to Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, in which he draws on the long critical speculation that Heathcliff, brought from the slave port of Liverpool to the Yorkshire moors, is black.2 It appears that both the US and the UK are witnessing one of those moments when we confront what Toni Morrison says of Beloved (1987),3 "something that the characters don't want to remember, I don't want to remember, black people don't want to remember, white people don't want to remember. I mean, it's national amnesia."4Aside from the fact that these are actually two cases of national amnesia, what is striking is how much people keep remembering, and, more, how often it is the same icon remembered repeatedly as though with all the power of the first time. The hymn "Amazing Grace" plays as the signature music in both the BBC's Britain's Forgotten Slave Owners and an earlier documentary, the 2009 independent film A Regular Black: The Hidden History of Wuthering Heights,5 which speculates on Heathcliff's racial identity in the context of Yorkshire's historical connections with slavery, and "Amazing Grace" is the title of both the aforementioned musical about the moral awakening of Captain (later Reverend) John Newton, and a 2006 film about William Wilberforce, who led the successful fight in Parliament in 1807 to abolish the slave trade throughout the British Empire (but not slavery itself, which happened much later, in 1833). Yet, despite the circulation of these four productions across the Atlantic, it is safe to say that most Americans would not recognise the British roots of this black spiritual - and that few readers anywhere would recognise a 'black' Wuthering Heights. Looking at 2015, a year of transatlantic memories of the New World racial past and its legacy in the present, may therefore give us insight into national amnesias, plural - how two nations continue to grapple differently with their intertwined histories, the global institution of nineteenth-century slavery.The history of slavery is of course neither new nor unknown, yet its afterlives seem to be repeatedly rediscovered at particular moments in time. Some of these coincide with obvious anniversaries, such as the 2007 bicentenary of the British abolition of the transatlantic slave trade (when the only feature film to emerge from the commemoration was, symptomatically, the Wilberforce biopic Amazing Grace). And vice versa, as the voluminous work in the field of memory studies shows, the legacy of slavery is subject to periodic erasure of different kinds in public space and public memory as well as in popular literary and academic discourse.6 In the US, seeking roots can be tantamount to rejecting them: Henry Louis Gates Jr, host and executive producer of the PBS series Finding Your Roots, has been embroiled in controversy over its capitulation to actor Ben Affleck's request that the programme not reveal his ancestor's slave-holding history in a 2014 episode. (PBS put the series on hold after determining that the episode violated its editorial standards. …

American Literary History, 2017

The most striking word in translation studies these days is “untranslatability.” Or perhaps it’s ... more The most striking word in translation studies these days is “untranslatability.” Or perhaps it’s really just the prefix “un-” and its cousins in negation “in-” and “non-.” From Emily Apter’s Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability and Barbara Cassin’s Vocabulaire europén des philosophies (Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, 2014), to Anna Brickhouse’s The Unsettlement of America: Translation, Interpretation, and the Story of Don Luis de Velasco, 1560–1945 and Gayle Rogers’s Incomparable Empires: Modernism and the Translation of Spanish and American Literature, we are witnessing an insistence in very different translation zones (the title of Apter’s first book) on what is variously called mistranslation, nontranslation, incomparability, or simply (my favorite) failed translation. From a historical perspective, this is only the latest salvo in the turn away from the translational shibboleth of fidelity versus betrayal, as theorists and practitioners have long advocated. Or, as Rebecca Walkowitz puts it in Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature, “this turn away from translation is something of a return” (32). The tutelary spirit for this return is Walter Benjamin, and the touchstone is his 1923 essay “The Translator’s Task.” There he both rejects the “concept of accuracy,” long the standard metric of “the traditional theory of translation,” and actively embraces the positive possibilities of untranslatability as the fundamental condition of the translator’s task. “In truth, however, the relationships among

Casa De Las Americas, 2008

J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, 2015

5. The best edition of the original French text is Mémoires de la marquise de La Tour du Pin: Jou... more 5. The best edition of the original French text is Mémoires de la marquise de La Tour du Pin: Journal d’une femme de cinquante ans, 1778–1815: Suivis d’extraits inédits de sa correspondance, 1815–1846 (Paris: Mercure de France, 1979). It features a fawning preface by Lucie’s descendant and heir to the manuscript collection, the Belgian aristocrat Christian de Liedekerke. 6. Memoirs of Madame de la Tour du Pin, ed. and trans. Felice Harcourt (London: Harvill Press, 1969), 27. This translation is only slightly abridged, whereas an earlier one by Walter Geer is severely abridged and should be avoided. Caroline Moorehead, Dancing to the Precipice: Lucie de la Tour du Pin and the French Revolution (London: Chatto & Windus, 2009), is a useful biography. 7. Memoirs of Madame de la Tour du Pin, 16, 22. 8. Ibid., 59. 9. Ibid., 192. 10. Ibid., 197. 11. Ibid., 266, 261. 12. Liebersohn, Aristocratic Encounters: Eu ro pean Travelers and North American Indians (Cambridge, 2001). 13. The fi rst publication of the text was an En glish translation by Althéa de Puech Parham titled My Odyssey: Experiences of a Young Refugee from Two Revolutions, by A Creole of Saint Domingue (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1957). The translator’s family had held the manuscript for several generations and believed the author to be an ancestor. 14. Jeremy Popkin, ed., Facing Racial Revolution: Eyewitness Accounts of the Haitian Insurrection (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 78. I quote from the excerpt printed in Popkin’s anthology, where he has restored some passages excised by de Puech Parham. Popkin and coeditor Anya Bandau have recently identifi ed the author as JeanPaul Pillet and published a French edition, Mon Odyssée: L’epopée d’un colon de SaintDomingue. 15. Ibid., 79. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid., 29–30. 18. Ibid., 2. 19. Ibid., 31–32. 20. Key texts in the revisionist historiography of the Haitian Revolution include C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (2nd ed., New York: Vintage Books, 1963); Joan Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995); and MichelRolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995). 21. Phillips, “Toussaint L’Ouverture,” in Speeches, Lectures and Letters (Boston, 1863).

The American Historical Review, 2015

The Cambridge Companion to Mark Twain

Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson, 1990

New Essays on The Country of the Pointed Firs, 1994

Surveying the American Tropics, 2013

PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 1999

Who is, or are, Micheaux's Chesnutt(s)? Which of Charles Chesnutt's post-Reconstruction n... more Who is, or are, Micheaux's Chesnutt(s)? Which of Charles Chesnutt's post-Reconstruction novels may Oscar Micheaux be said to have adapted in his films? To such seemingly obvious questions, there are some obvious answers. It is well known that Micheaux directed two film versions of Chesnutt's tragic novel of racial passing, The House behind the Cedars (1900): the first, in 1924, is entitled House behind the Cedars and is a faithful adaption that encountered difficulties with the censors; the second is the recently rediscovered Veiled Aristocrats (1932), a remake with a happy ending. It is less well known that around the same time, Micheaux may also have arranged to purchase the rights to Chesnutt's Marrow of Tradition (1901), a novel on the 1898 Wilmington, North Carolina, race “riot,” with a parallel plot on the struggles in an interracial family over the legitimacy of the mulatto side. It is not clear whether the transaction was ever completed or whether the Marrow ...