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Conference Papers by Sören Fröhlich

C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists Fourth Biennial Conference Penn State Univers... more C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists
Fourth Biennial Conference
Penn State University, March 17-20, 2016

79. Racial Diagnosis: Disease, Regulation, Remedy
Chair: Julia Rosenbloom, The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia
Don James McLaughlin, University of Pennsylvania, “Diagnosing
Dread: Rabies, Phobia, and Blackness in Frederick Douglass
and Harriet Beecher Stowe”
Robert Gunn, University of Texas at El Paso, “American Horologics:
Josiah Gregg’s Clockwork Minstrelsy and the Commerce of
Empire”
Geoffrey Sanborn, Amherst College, “Masculinity, AntiColonizationism, and William Wells Brown”
Sören Fröhlich, Independent Scholar, “Doctor Who? Unsettling
William Wells Brown, M.D.”

In this paper I ask how William Wells Brown's medical practice and his life relate, and how they further our understanding of both his therapeutic choices and literature. Brown is often lauded as the first black novelist for his brilliant 1853 novel Clotel; or The President’s Daughter, and less frequently for his narratives explaining his escape from enslavement, his struggles to free his family members, his travels through Europe, his help to other escaping slaves, his activism in the temperance movement, and his contributions to black historiography. He wrote about medicine in several texts, but most salient here is the contrast between what I want to shorthand as “old medicine” in Clotel and My Southern Home, and “new medicine” in a biographical note to The Rising Son and Brown’s more detailed biography recently made available to us by Ezra Greenspan. Brown’s emphasis on the political potential of medical therapies helps us both distinguish and bridge his early and late writings and the ways he implemented his thought in his practice. Among all of Brown’s many accomplishments, his medical profession is frequently neglected, but to me it is exactly this aspect of his later life and work that we should start with. Stressing the doctor in Dr. Brown as a doctor shows me that his abolitionist and anti-racist thought also influenced the material dimension of medicine and in turn helps us distinguish the subtle strands of his textual fabrics.

Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association The (Re)production of Misery and the Ways of R... more Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association
The (Re)production of Misery and the Ways of Resistance
October 8-11, 2015
Toronto, Canada

4:00 pm – 5:45 pm
094. States of Injury
Sheraton Centre, Forest Hill
CHAIR: Amy Farrell, Dickinson College
PAPERS:
J.C. Sibara, Colby College (ME)
Bare Life? Slow Death? Premature Disability? Theorizing Imperial Injury in Muriel Rukeyser's The Book of the Dead
Maria O'Malley, University of Nebraska, Kearney (NE)
The Aesthetic Response to Torture in Emily Dickinson's Poetry
Robert Mousseau, Carleton University (Canada)
Reading in Reaction to Misery: Observing Therapeutic Responses to Social Tragedy in Dave Eggers's Literature
Sören Fröhlich, University of California, San Diego (CA)
Blood Writ: Tissue Economies and the Misery of Parasitic in Sherman Alexie's The Sin Eaters

Abstract:
Despite acclaim for Sherman Alexie’s oeuvre, “The Sin Eaters” remains under-studied. Bridging genres, this short story draws on contemporary science fiction like Derek Bell’s “The Space Traders,” on testaments of Native American genocide, as well as on texts about the Holocaust. It tells a fictional witness account of the horrors during the removal and internment of all full-blood Native Americans by the U.S. government. Their isolation prisons turn out to be medical factories for the extraction of bodily fluids from the bodies of Native Americans for the benefit of Anglo Americans. Recently, French scholar Diane Sabatier argued that this story combined an allegorical engagement with Otherness. Critic Juda Bennett reads it as an exploration of the moral and social implications of the prison-industrial complex. This tension between formal-aesthetic and socio-political engagement results from Alexie’s use of narrative framing that fuses Native American and dystopian narrative in blood.
Alexie establishes a parasitic symbiosis of pain between Native and Anglo bodies through blood. He evokes contradictory and laden cultural associations of blood. Allusions to genocidal campaigns, blood quantum laws, state-sponsored eugenic programs, and the internment and torture of ethnic minorities trace the awful richness of the Native American experience. Imprisonment, dehumanization, and medical torture of Native bodies at the hands of the U.S. government destroy this wealth of associations. Alexie also stresses contemporary medico-capitalist exploitation of blood, however. As Catherine Waldby and Robert Mitchell explain, cultural and ethical considerations of blood become insignificant in the face of contemporary symbiotic, global flows of blood-as-capital. The blood of Alexie’s protagonist collapses from culture to biology when the medical substance threatens to erase his cultural identity—the extraction of blood robs “certain words” from him.
I therefore focus on Alexie’s critique of global blood markets. As the government reduces full-blooded bodies to bodies full of blood, therapeutic process overrides lived experience. Read against the boom of global blood markets and blood product companies, Alexie’s story rises beyond a parable about Otherness and a story about capitalist incarceration. In his view, vampiric capitalism tortures indigenous cultures to satisfy an unquenchable thirst for blood. The extraction of precious raw materials fuses psychological and physical pain in an echo of contemporary biopolitical global blood markets. The parasitic flow of liquid capital, our need for blood today, mobilizes immense economic and social activity—and pain. This misery is decidedly non-fictional. Black blood markets pose an existential threat to many indigenous cultures today. Government policies that govern blood donations continue to discipline donors and police the national body while industrial processes of blood component production by medico-capitalist conglomerates rob all cultures.
Without meaningful discussions of who benefits from global blood markets, of whom they threaten, and of what happens with that blood, the Red Cross and the American Association of Blood Banks will continue to rob words from us. Alexie’s story urges us to intervene in the negotiation of biopolitical blood economies and to reclaim relationships and communities stolen under the auspices of therapeutic progress.

" Research of African American literature frequently addresses modes of agency and resistance ... more "

Research of African American literature frequently addresses modes of agency and resistance by describing performativity (Gilroy, Roach, Rottenberg). Other research has examined the relation between race and medicine in the U.S. an stressed histories of exploitation, scientific prejudice, and professional discrimination, but also brilliant improvisation and resistance of patients and practitioners (W. Michael Byrd and Linda A. Clayton, Molly Rogers, Thomas J. Ward).

Yet too often these two fields of research remain too far apart. This leads to an unwitting naturalization of the roles that patient and doctor play, which in turn renders the problem of race and performance invisible in the examination of medicine. My paper ties these two fields together through close examination of a text by a master of minstrelsy and medical practitioner: William Wells Brown.

While Brown is best known for his novel Clotel (1853), I focus on his much later and much more complicated text, that has largely escaped critical attention: The Rising Son (1874). This history stands between Martin R. Delany’s Pan-Africanist arguments and African-American histories like George Washington Williams’ History (1882) and Pauline E. Hopkins “Primer” (1905). More specifically, though, I look at the preface, “Memoir of the Author,” yet another biographical sketch about Brown, penned by one Alonzo D. Moore. It relates a fascinating episode in which Brown escapes from a KKK lynching. He uses his medical experience to drug the mob leader but cloaks it in the guise of a conjuring man to access the man’s body. This hitherto unexamined episode brings together Brown’s well-established mastery of the minstrel performance, his renowned presence of mind, and his years of medical practice in a complex layering of performance. In connection to the character of Sam the sham doctor in Clotel, Brown’s nuanced veiling of medical expertise through the performance of a black stock character reveals his mastery over performance of race and class beyond abstract bodies in market places.

His performance is adjusted to audience and situation, all the while performing for his life. I argue that recognizing the sophistication of African American performance must lead to a critical examination of holistic concepts like “medicine” in the context of race. African-American practitioners were keenly aware of their dangerous social position but by no means helpless. We must recognize the full awareness of African American authors to judge the complexity of their statements, but also their actions—after all, Brown once again wins back his freedom by conjuring ‘blackness.’"

Because of its prestige as the first American novel, The Power of Sympathy not only stifles the d... more Because of its prestige as the first American novel, The Power of Sympathy not only stifles the discussion of other authors, but this sentimental piece even suffocates William Hill Brown’s own texts. Therefore, it is urgently necessary to recontextualize Sympathy through Brown’s other texts—texts that remain understudied, largely unpublished, and undertheorized. I discuss Brown’s Ira and Isabella: or the Natural Children, a Novel, Founded in Fiction (1807) in order to shed light on another project he pursued: experimental writing aimed to create a new form of writing and thinking appropriate in the new political body, a republican novel. As Ira was post-humously published, I examine the time and place of Brown’s death to historicize his novel and to present him as a politically engaged author concerned about the young United States. This novel transgresses neat classification of early texts, which brings the abnormal right back to the supposed creator of the norms in our discipline. Yet Ira functions not only as a general writing experiment, it is actually a satire of Sympathy that takes the sentimental novel to task over the roles of realism and form, over social questions, especially the nature of origins, legitimacy, and nature, as well as over the role of fiction in the new republic. The novel’s foreword is a unique commentary on the literary market place, on the role of the novel, the merits of European lit-erature, the desirability of realism vis-à-vis novelty—a worthy introduction to an hitherto mis-understood experimental text. The novel further discusses the situation of illegitimate orphans in the new republic—a theme that entails sometimes unanswered questions about legitimacy, heredity, domesticity, legality, and truthfulness in this new nation. Brown discusses arguments of Scottish common sense philosophy, natural rights, ideals of education, concepts of cultivation, training, and discipline to explore the realistic counterpart to the artificial, seemingly isolated setting of Sympathy. Ira, in short, does not fit the framework often conveniently applied to Brown, who did not simply proscribe a moral attitude, but critically examined his genre and their social environment, the role of the author and his text, and the role literature could play in shaping a new society. The early American author emerges as not nearly as stable and consistent, and hence as not nearly as dogmatic as some would have him be. Rather, Ira forces us to recog-nize a Brown novel that presents strong female characters, ambivalent natural moral states, the failure of man-made social constructs, the psychological sublimation in commercial affairs, and pointed inquiries into the a-morality of fiction.

The climax of A Faithful Narrative of the Wicked Life and Remarkable Conversion of Patience Bosto... more The climax of A Faithful Narrative of the Wicked Life and Remarkable Conversion of Patience Boston (1738) is a tableau of early American society organized around blood. In court, Patience confronts the corpse of her white master's grandson, whom she drowned in a symbolic act of vengeance. If it spontaneously bleeds at the touch of her hand, Puritan belief in supernatural manifestations in blood will condemn her—blood figures the divine truth. But in the Narrative, blood also assigns individuals other social roles than that of witch or murderess: it calls our attention to liminal social positions within the colonies, helping us understand silenced voices. Closely examining the metaphorical use of blood in the text, I will trace this multi-directional, polysemantic metaphor that assigns race, privilege and status, denotes violence, and figures the divine. Patience’s story is not exceptional; it is evidence for proto-racial and sexual discourses present in everyday colonial life, a document of shifting epistemes. She is half Native American, half white, an indentured servant married to a black indentured sailor and thus socially powerless because of a mixed blood on which eighteenth-century discourses begin to focus. Patience's role in court is centered around the victim’s blood, but it is her own mixed blood and marriage to a black man that makes her vulnerable. Patience probably bound out by a family that fought to survive genocide and was caught in the periodicity of maritime family life, but her husband, family, and tribe are deleted as the emergence of a new dominant social identity—the white, Puritan, patriarchal bloodline—aims to censure her hybrid social identity in the Narrative. Her story is overwritten with heavy-handed, uneven, religious rhetoric, interrupted by her few resisting lines, markers of absences and silences of the larger context. While it presents itself as a verbatim et literatim, linear narrative, the last sections, excerpts from the Rev. John "Handkerchief" Moody's diary, present the episodic behavior of a traumatized woman acting out against the cultural and legal coercion that tries to define her history and self. As she grapples with the power trajectories that dominate her though blood discourses, Patience simultaneously adopts a socially assigned role and resists society, playing her role tactically and thus embodying the multi-ethnic, multi-class, multi-gendered reality of America in the 1700s. This aspect is missed in Williams’ anthology of early American criminal narratives, which sees the Narrative as a crime story, and in Hogeland and Klages’ 2004 anthology of women writings, which stresses history and gender. The complication of the text's narrative layers together with contemporary insights into society and culture around seafaring, families, and sexuality in New England present a more intricate text, a multi-layered network of discourses in the shape of a confessional conversion, all of which derive their power from blood discourses.

Teaching Documents by Sören Fröhlich

LTEN 149 (B00) - THEMES IN ENGLISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE Fall 2012 Instructor: Sören Frö... more LTEN 149 (B00) - THEMES IN ENGLISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE

Fall 2012

Instructor: Sören Fröhlich
Meetings: Tu, Th 09:30-10:50 in WLH 2114
Contact: sfrohlic@ucsd.edu, Office: LIT 240, Office hours: Tu 12-2, Th 2-3 and by appointment.

If You Want Blood: Thematic Readings of U.S. Blood Discourses

Course Description: This is an upper-division undergraduate course designed to teach and train scholarly approaches to literature. It focuses on what I call “blood discourses,” meaning linguistic usages or interactive utterances attached to a social practice, to sketch out ways that blood was and is evaluated and how it structures and is structured in culture, especially literature, in medicine, and in history. We will read texts from a wide range of genres, periods, and media to follow the question: what is blood?

Humans may have always thought about blood, but this course will focus on how the understanding of blood changed over time, and how cultural representations of blood reflect and reinforce these changes. Blood is ever-present, from the latest splatter film to genetic engineering, from debates on blood quantum policies to the Eucharist. The Oxford English Dictionary has entire pages on entries related to blood. Blood donation is a major business, and so are hygiene products. Why are we so fascinated by blood? This course will examine the fluid that moves between fiction and fact, between body and psyche. We will learn to read fiction in connection to other fields, like medicine, anthropology, and religion.

We will focus on U.S. writing in several genres, as well as visual and performance art, and film, since the mid-nineteenth century that consider blood as a problem or a solution. We will locate some historical strands that still influence texts about blood, and supplement a focus text with readings from theology, sensational and gothic fiction, political and legal contexts, history of science, and media studies.

Course Requirements: Students must complete all of the required readings and see any required films before the class meeting for which they are assigned. Attendance is mandatory. Your active responses to the readings and screenings will provide the foundation for our class discussions. I expect each member of the class to take seriously our collective project of respectfully engaging and responding to the ideas of the participants.

Evaluation:
25% Attendance and participation
25% Weekly assignments and quizzes
50% Final Writing Assignment
100%

Attendance and participation: I expect you to attend class regularly. Please contact me immediately for any special accommodation, medical problems, or the like. Two (2) unexcused absences are the maximum number to receive a passing grade in attendance.

Piazza page: I provided and will monitor a supplementary piazza.com course website under UCSD, LTEN 149 (https://piazza.com/ucsd/fall2012/lten149/home). Piazza.com is a third-party service in no way affiliated with UCSD. This is supposed to be your space outside the classroom. It is an optional venue for you to exchange ideas, contact each other, plan and discuss presentations, ask questions, discuss readings, look through the additional links I post, and to contact me. While I will closely monitor the content, I do not grade your questions or censor discussions, provided they do not violate UCSD’s Principles of Community (http://www.ucsd.edu/explore/about/principles.html).

Weekly assignments: The weekly sessions include written assignments designed to give you the basic tools needed for a successful literature course and to deepen these skills. You have one oral assignment at the end of class. Please contact me immediately if you think you need help giving an oral presentation in front of the class. The assignments are training in basic skills, but you should also use them to assess your strengths and weaknesses, find areas of interest to you, and also work strategically with the final assignment in mind. They should help you prepare texts, find sources, and rehearse techniques you can then apply quickly and easily in your final assignment. Contact me immediately if you need any special accommodations. (Formatting for all assignments: Letter-size paper, name, title, Times New Roman 12p, 1in. margins, double-spaced, no extra blank lines. I reserve the right to request an electronic copy.) Unless stated otherwise, all assignments are to be completed alone and due at the beginning of the first meeting each week. Quality gains higher grades than quantity and quantity more than blank sheets of paper. Attempts to cheat and trick receive very, very low grades. Any missing assignment receives a zero. There is zero tolerance of plagiarism. (For information on UCSD’s policy, see: http://students.ucsd.edu/academics/academic-integrity/policy.html) I reserve the right to pop quiz you at any time.

Final assignment: Write a five-page research paper (excluding notes and bibliography) or a four-page essay (double-spaced on one side of 8 1/2 by 11" paper, 1" margins, Times New Roman 12 point). The topic has to be related to one or more primary or secondary text assigned in class, a theoretical or conceptual problem, or a historical problem in relation to the texts. I expect you to use the tools acquired during the quarter to conceive, plan, and execute the paper. Contact me with alternative assignment ideas, ideas for collaboration, or if you wish to be examined in a different format no later than week 7. Contact me immediately if you need any special accommodations.
The final assignment has to be completed by Thursday, 12/13/2012, 11AM.

Required books (at UCSD Bookstore = B):
- Bill Hayes. Five Quarts: A Personal and Natural History of Blood.
- Cormac McCarthy. Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West.

Required short readings: I tried to reduce cost to the student and opted not to make a course reader. For the short readings, go to the UCSD Library course reserve (= O). Go to http://reserves.ucsd.edu and select our department or me or search by course name. Beginning this quarter, the Library will be password protecting Electronic Reserves. You need to enter this password to view the materials on Electronic Reserves: sf149 (not case sensitive). You can also contact library staff in person at Geisel Library, they will be happy to help you. Also, you may have to consult the audio-visual media, full-length texts, and additional texts I placed on the reserve shelf at the library (= R).

German Blockseminar at the Catholic University of Eichstatt-Ingolstadt in 2008. Goals: This ... more German Blockseminar at the Catholic University of Eichstatt-Ingolstadt in 2008.

Goals:
This course aims to give students a firm understanding of works and authors of a certain period in the history of American Literature. In addition to introducing basic literary concepts, it furthermore stresses these basic skills: reading and analyzing English prose and poetry, researching, rewriting and presenting materials in a scientific manner, speaking freely before the class, and writing a paper with a clear thesis, according to scientific standards. As much as possible, and time permitting, we will attempt to achieve these goals through communicative activities in the group. This course will be reading-centered, so the chief requirement is that you make a commitment to keeping up with the reading, and that you come to class prepared to discuss what you have read. It is recommended that you read all literature at your own pace and leisure during the semester as you will most likely not be able to read the literature along with the course progression.

Presentations by Sören Fröhlich

Dissertation Chapters by Sören Fröhlich

Blood exists in the overlap of social systems-above all religious, political, aesthetic, and scie... more Blood exists in the overlap of social systems-above all religious, political, aesthetic, and scientific, especially medical ones-and thus adds breadth and depth to readings of canonical as well as neglected texts. I trace "blood" because it places all humans in a global, meaningful relation to novels, poems, serial texts, essays, medical literature, and histories.

I begin with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1851 The House of the Seven Gables to anchor my study in a can... more I begin with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1851 The House of the Seven Gables to anchor my study in a canonical text and a central example for a liberal-progressive national imaginary that is largely in alignment with the nation state. Hawthorne’s novel best illustrates the struggle to extricate the nation state from its bloody history, to expel the blood, and through this process of abjection create a new, civilized, and hygienic domestic order. In terms of genre, a masterfully-structured Romance novel can control blood in a coherent, symmetrical image of the nation as a well-built house.
Instead of recognizing the legacy of violence, Hawthorne disavows existing imperial history and continuing bloodshed within the nation. In other writings, he relegates the nation’s bloody violence to marginal spaces like the frontier and the border with Mexico. The U.S. republic presented a formidable challenge to aristocratic sovereignty, raising the question of whose blood would count in the new nation, if not the aristocracy’s. Hawthorne never answers this question but disappears blood, with grave consequences for the relation of history, politics, and blood in the novel.
To achieve his coherent image of the house, Hawthorne uses the liberties of the Romance genre to prioritize its own imaginary over existing history, the Romance over the fact. As Thomas W. Herbert has demonstrated, House attempts to legitimate the nation state as the natural order of middle-class dominance that triumphs over aristocratic ideals derived from European sovereignty (33-5). To Hawthorne, associations between blood and European sovereignty remained important for U.S. national imaginaries well past political declaration of independence from the British sovereign. Blood in this sense, however, selectively represents the political legacy of both European sovereignty and the U.S. in bad faith because it muddles the legacy of the nation as both colony and colonizer, as the victim of violence and the violator.
Hawthorne defines the U.S. against sovereignty by way of what I think Jean Fagan Yellin alludes to in her term of his “strategy of avoidance and denial” (“National Sin” 97). Even though the novel narrates historical periods of massive bloodshed, especially the genocidal campaigns against Native American and chattel slavery, what little blood appears in the novel disappears entirely by its end, leaving a blood-free, hygienic order of the domestic nation. Hawthorne both denies historical blood and renders physical blood invisible by abstracting it. This national imaginary avoids and denies blood as part of the nation by piling layers of representations on blood.
I observe several layers in which the novel removes and abstracts blood. House first projects sovereign violence into a factually incorrect history and erases other historical acts of violence, especially King Philip’s War, by laying bloodshed at the feet of the aristocratic sovereign’s representatives. This history then turns into a map and a deed behind a portrait. Finally, the last drop of blood of the sovereign’s last representative, Judge Pyncheon, disappears into a daguerreotype of his death.
Paul Gilmore stresses that especially Hawthorne’s use of daguerreotypy helps him find the technological means to “establish a new, bourgeois Edenic family,” which leads the nation to progress (Genuine 139). In the final picture of death, Hawthorne manages to reintroduce a signifier into the novel’s central confrontation with blood, i.e. the moment when only a daguerreotype remains of Judge Pyncheon’s corpse, the last embodiment of sovereign power, which the last descendant of the Pyncheons never sees.
Shawn Michelle Smith adds that this family is also a stabilization of whiteness in the increasingly heated political debates over slavery in the 1850s. This is true, but I argue that we cannot find a connection between Hawthorne’s views on familial character and eugenic ideas about blood (Smith Archives 41-3). House does progress, from bloody history to bloodless present, and thus inscribes liberal domesticity with progress and civilization. It also does stress that the most important role of blood is biological reproduction of middle-class citizens with possessions, not the vertical bloodlines of aristocrats who are of noble descent can only lay claim to ownership, without any actual possession. Blood is thus the nation’s invisible driving force. Hawthorne also insists, however, that individuals can change, which puts him well outside both the scientific racism we see in chapter five and later eugenics.
I juxtapose Hawthorne’s glossed history of the nation with the raw, disorderly reality of Ludwig von Reizenstein’s 1850 Die Geheimnisse von New Orleans (The Mysteries of New Orleans). As mentioned above, Reizenstein left his native Bavaria over the 1848 uprisings and made his way across much of Louisiana and Missouri as a surveyor and journalist. Instead of New England, the son of petty aristocracy focuses on the Gulf of Mexico, St. Louis, and Texas as settings for his sensational serial novel.
Kirsten Silva-Gruesz and German Studies scholar Patricia Herminghouse stress that Reizenstein’s sprawling novel opens our reading of the antebellum moment by introducing international relations especially in the Gulf of Mexico, the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), and that it calls us to reconsider stereotypical histories of antebellum German immigrant communities.
I argue that Reizenstein demonstrates that even though the history of blood and the timeline of the nation state may coincide, material and metaphorical blood points to blind spots and telling silences in glossed, narratives of the nation state’s history as a linear ascend. I expand these readings by arguing that Reizenstein emphasizes that the U.S. and its authors, like Hawthorne, fail to acknowledge and work through the nation state’s history of violence.
Reizenstein advocates working through painful complexities and uncertainties about the nation itself and the democratic negotiation of values. He insists that by making the blood that drips from the pages of history disappear, the nation becomes a spectral, gothic space bound to sovereignty, incapable of fulfilling its democratic promise of freedom. Unlike Hawthorne, he stresses the affective dimension of blood, its ephemerality, precariousness, and its changing role in the many different communities within the nation state.
Translating Reizenstein’s German, I trace the ways in which he offers a national imaginary in which blood seeps from a porous, grotesque nation in which the ghosts of the past are still present because the history of the nation state is silent on its past. The Geheimnis (secret) of bloodshed past and present gives rise to a nation of secret societies, haunted urban spaces, and prophetic visions of doom. Instead of hoping that biological reproduction and possession will resolve the nation’s internal tensions, Reizenstein sees the perpetual reproduction of violence in a society based on slavery where queer non-biological inheritance seems more coherent than the precarious blood ties of families.
Reizenstein’s insistence on telling the Geheimnis, i.e. witnessing and narrating the nation’s bloody history to to liberate the nation from its curse also rejects simplified notions of transplanted democratic revolutions. His sensational writings about the nation’s bloody history, murders, and secrets depended on new proliferations of print technology and mass-distribution of printed matter that carried his German, radical national imaginary to New Orleans readers.

Chapter two sketches out the failure of Romantic blood metaphors in the description of blood duri... more Chapter two sketches out the failure of Romantic blood metaphors in the description of blood during the Civil War and the rise of medical language as a means to diffuse the epistemic problem of blood. I focus on Emily Dickinson’s Civil War poem manuscript of “The name – of it – is ‘Autumn’” (1862), which directly addresses the blood on the battlefield as both real and incompatible with the national imaginary. This alone makes it stand out among Dickinson’s poems. However, its source and final posthumous publication show that a later text about blood and the nation can integrate even a counter-imaginary to realign blood with the nation state.
As Tyler Hoffman, Ben Friedlander, and Faith Barrett have pointed out, “‘Autumn’” stands as a powerful evocation of the dripping blood on the battlefields and ponders the possibilities of representing the Civil War in writing. “‘Autumn’” overtly engages other Romantic war poems that offer solace in red fall foliage and by insisting on the jarring affective force of liquid, dripping blood. As mentioned above, Civil War poems wrote about battles, but usually stopped short of writing about red, wet blood. I argue that this reflects a representational crisis in the episteme. How to find the words to write about what must not be?
Chapter two expands this emphasis on affect with reference to Nina Baym’s and David Cody’s findings about Dickinson’s science education at Mt. Holyoke Academy, a still under-studied influence on her work. Dickinson graduated from middle class at Mt. Holyoke Female Seminary in 1848, where she had studied from a wide range of textbooks, the new staple of progressive school pedagogy. “‘Autumn’” simultaneously rejects Romanticist clichés, and discounts the taxonomic vocabulary it draws from Calvin Cutter’s Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (1858), Dickinsons’ anatomy textbook. Dickinson’s poem critiques efforts to side-step the epistemological challenge of blood by way of medicalizing it in taxonomical vocabulary as political. She illustrates that the nineteenth-century obsession with anatomical and hygienic taxonomy offered a new way to keep at bay blood by seeing the blood while avoiding its affective force.
Blood taxonomy is a mobile vocabulary; it moves through genres and translates its political conception of blood from one kind of text to another, making possible a highly indirect discussion of what place blood has in the nation. Rising from medical handbooks and textbooks for anatomy and physiology, blood taxonomy is present in creative literature as well as later efforts to rewrite the history of the Civil War in the national imaginary. In print, “‘Autumn’” therefore ironically becomes a nature poem.
The first, posthumous publication of the poem in The Youth’s Companion in 1892 frames it with rote questions asking for exactly the taxonomical, quantitative knowledge the poem rejects. “‘Autumn’” becomes part of the celebration of the Civil War as a national myth in the same Companion issue that lobbied for the adoption of Columbus Day and the “Pledge of Allegiance.” Such revisionist national imaginaries about the Civil War, which function similarly to Hawthorne’s “avoidance and denial,” consciously reframe blood to replace its confusing threat, incoherence, disjunction, and potentiality with glossy memorialization and an emphasis on rote-learned quantification of the nation’s blood.

Chapter three illustrates that this medicalization of blood was not just a matter of language, bu... more Chapter three illustrates that this medicalization of blood was not just a matter of language, but also of practice, as we see in the Civil War poems of Walt Whitman. Medicine offered a way to solve the epistemological crisis through newly-emerged practices of clinical medicine and medical hygiene that promised to absorb both the literal and metaphorical blood. Walt Whitman ended his struggle to make sense of the Civil War bloodshed by embracing the powers of medicine, even though he gave priority to the nurse over the surgeon.
Scholars like Joann P. Krieg , Philip W. Leon, and Robert Leigh Davis have taken up the important inquiry into Walt Whitman’s relation to medicine. Surprisingly, there is still little consideration paid to his specific relation to Civil War medicine, despite the enduring popularity of his poem “The Wound-Dresser” from the “Drum-Taps” sequence of Leaves of Grass. This chapter focuses on Whitman’s 1865 first edition of the poem collection Drum-Taps and the way Whitman wrestled with the limits of language and the expressible inherent in the affective force of the blood he witnessed and with the implications of the blood for his national imaginary.
Whitman’s poems present blood as a crisis and come to the same conclusion as Dickinson. Existing discourses of blood in Romanticism, religion, or political rhetoric could not express the red, trickle of blood. During his stay in Civil War hospitals, Whitman found his solution in the ways nurses and surgeons stopped the bleeding. Read in conjunction with Civil War medical manuals, I explain that Whitman’s images of Civil War surgery are not as realistic as some may assume. Instead of aiming at realism, Whitman consciously distorted and highlighted certain facts and medical procedures in hospital medicine, especially methods of absorbing blood.
By focusing on absorption, he found a way to write about the nation’s shed blood and thus to rescue his national imaginary into subsequent editions of Leaves of Grass. In what turns out to be an root of his later reliance on the Hegelian dialectical progress, his naturalized medical lens simultaneously absorbs blood and makes it legible, removes it without abjecting it, and thus allows the nation to overcome the challenge. Despite this personal-aesthetic success, he later decried the political failure to absorb the blood and stressed that the bloodless history of the renegotiated Civil War history created exactly the same sense of uncanny, spectral doubling that Reizenstein foresaw.

Chapter four turns from students and observers of medicine to medical practitioners. I juxtapose ... more Chapter four turns from students and observers of medicine to medical practitioners. I juxtapose texts by two writing practitioners, William Wells Brown and Edward H. Dixon and the ways they relate blood with and medical practice. Above, we already read from Brown’s collection The Anti-Slavery Harp, but most scholars focus on his 1853 novel Clotel, which builds on the Jefferson-Hemings rumors and follows the fates of this imagined daughter’s children in the antebellum nation.
Brown was born a slave and despite learning to read and write only after his escape in 1834, became a popular lecturer and abolitionist speaker and author. He was also a masterful observer of social dynamics, and in Clotel presents a complicated antebellum critique of identities under slavery, as Paul Gilmore explains, as well as the minstrel critique of racism that itself replicates racist stereotypes (Genuine 65-7).
Recently, literary critics have turned their attention to Brown. Ann DuCille, and Ivy Wilson have further developed theories of Brown’s complex plays with characters and his dazzling wealth of allusions. Robert S. Levine recently read Brown’s temperance as a means of simultaneous individual and social reform for all victims of white supremacy, expressing a far-reaching social ideal of moderation (“Temperance and Race” 107-8). Beyond editing Clotel and Other Writings, Ezra Greenspan just published a new biography, which explores many areas of Brown’s life that biographers have thus far left unexplored, even correcting Brown’s actual place of birth (Life 26-7).
Yet with all this current attention, Brown’s 1874 The Rising Son has escaped any serious attention save Carole Lynn Stewart’s contribution. Drawing on Levine, she reads Brown’s life-long work in the temperance movement as structuring The Rising Son. Stewart points out that if we read Brown’s counter-history of African civilization as a narrative of the civilizing process, then the convalescence-through-habitus of psyche, body, and society propagated by temperance societies gives his work a far sharper critical edge than if we dismiss his engagement as opposition to alcohol (5).
Drawing on this recent surge in scholarship, “Blood of a Nation” argues that Brown always considers practice and theory in conjunction, and especially so in medicine. Greenspan mentions what many Brown scholars disregard and what I emphasize: Brown received medical training and assisted in medical practice while still enslaved and was a practicing physician from his return from 1860 until his death (Life 34, 51). Brown’s own experiences as both formerly enslaved person and a black practitioner show that the bodily fluid in medical practice was never free of racial connotations.
Brown’s many careers make him more qualified than any of his contemporaries to help us understand the cultural, social, and political dimensions of medical practice. I argue that he sees medical practice not as an a-political, so-called objective act, but a social transaction, a performance of class and race. Typical for his love for multiple editions, Clotel and his last finished text, My Southern Home (1880) echo the same scene in which an enslaved black doctor’s apprentice treats other slaves with the painful so-called heroic therapies of orthodox medicine. In the minstrel performance of this scene describing the black enslaved practitioner, Brown especially criticizes the shedding of blood during phlebotomy. The scarce material on his practice indicates that Brown’s own therapeutics were in contrast rather bloodless; relying on the latest eclectic medical technology, he especially spared his patients phlebotomy.
Beyond that, in 1873 he even manages to avoid bloodshed in an escape from the Ku Klux Klan by hiding his medical intervention in a minstrel performance of conjuring. In a complicated play with social dynamics and identities, Brown the practitioner dissembles medical expertise to be able to alleviate pain and save his own life. He complicates the notion of avoiding blood in the nation by pointing out that shedding blood, even in medical practice, may be racist violence. His interest in new, progressive medical therapeutic technologies mirrors Brown’s antebellum minstrel critique of bloodletting while his post-bellum semi-factual encounter with the Ku Klux Klan shows the logic of minstrelsy still at play, now helping him dissemble his bloodless therapy.
Chapter four pairs Brown’s texts with writings about medical practice, medical theory, and a novella written by Edward H. Dixon, the New York orthodox physician, editor, publisher, reformer of medical education and anti-masturbation crusader we already encountered above. Dixon’s medical narratives in his periodical The Scalpel show us a practitioner whose medical and social theory almost compulsively return to blood. Among writing practitioners Dixon stands out for the plethora of medical writings he left behind. As scholarship on Dixon is scant, I rely on his publications to place him in the medical history detailed above, especially drawing on Michael Sappol’s delineation of the medical case narrative as a prose genre (“Knowlton” 468-71).
Nineteenth-century medical practitioners communicated through prose narratives, and my reading of blood between the case narrative and the novella demonstrates the importance of the genre. In his medical narratives, Dixon by way of practice negotiates social identities by way of medical theory. The case narrative begins by observing patients and their symptoms and so Dixon often writes about physical blood. He also communicates his observations and findings about blood to the fraternity of practitioners. Beyond that, though, he constructs a universal medial theory that divorces blood from its context and abstracts it, thereby providing his own lens through which he then reads the next patient’s symptoms in a circular confirmation of social bias. This process of negotiating blood in the case narrative is possible because of the semantic slipperiness of blood.
The discontinuities and paradoxes between medical practice and theory visible in Dixon’s texts help us analyze the relation between blood, race, and medicine in the national frame. Blood is both material and metaphor, and Dixon’s texts oscillate between these two senses of “blood.” The semantic slipperiness makes possible the transposition of blood from a threatening return of sovereign violence to a moment of diagnosis, a case to be narrated, and a puzzle for the physician to solve. This puzzle, however, ultimately turns out to be a justification for social interventions by way of physiological theory.
Dixon also stands out because his only non-medical text is a gory sensational novella about the KKK, the 1872 The Terrible Mysteries of the Ku-Klux Klan, in which individuality, language, and reality dissolve into an occult blood, the mysterious, unknowable and unspeakable essence of race. Dixon’s sensational novella silences the practitioner’s authority to develop the occult blood free of all cultural associations in a new, race-based ideology of blood.

To broaden this discussion of race, medical practice, and occult blood, chapter five considers th... more To broaden this discussion of race, medical practice, and occult blood, chapter five considers the role of blood in the rise of antebellum scientific racism and Reconstruction rejoinders. Blood is especially important to theories of polygenism, a group of loosely associated theories that all insisted on the existence of distinct, immutably different human races, which originate in separate act of divine creation.
“Blood of a Nation” focuses on the temporal aspect of scientific racists, i.e. their insistence that the blood of an individual is an immutable matrix for collective racial qualities stemming from the first days of mankind, which simultaneously justifies and naturalizes the enslavement of black bodies. Justifying the construction of white supremacy, racist scientists found the intersection of two axes in blood, first the synchronic, clinical observations about and measurements of blood, and second the diachronic, occult notions of eternal qualities drawn from selective interpretations of the Hebrew bible as natural history. That is why medical narratives of racist theorists turn out to be less about medicine than arguments over whether one act of creation led to one human blood with mutable qualities or whether several acts of creation led to different, immutable kinds of blood—among them the so-called black blood.
This chapter focuses on the specific theory of Samuel A. Cartwright. In 1849, the Medical Association of Louisiana ordered a commission inquiry into the physical differences and diseases of enslaved African Americans. Three years later, well-known Louisiana practitioner and medical researcher Samuel Adolphus Cartwright published the first version of his “Report on the Diseases and Physical Peculiarities of the Negro Race” in the New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal. This apology for human enslavement combines observations about enslaved African Americans with speculative arguments from natural history based on the Hebrew Bible and establishes the link between observation and argument through blood.
Cartwright develops an entire physiological-anthropological theory around what he argues is black blood: the essence of human race, the immutable blood created at the dawn of time, which dooms individuals to eternal physiological and intellectual inferiority. He thereby quantified and specified the vague notions of contemporaries like Dixon and also made the metaphor of blood-as-race made compatible with white supremacists beyond a medical audience. For instance, white supremacist, physician, and ethnologist John H. Van Evrie published Cartwright’s “Report” with the 1856 Dred Scott decision of the Supreme Court. Jim Crow laws codified the occult “black blood” and made it part of the nation state’s legal order.
Brown’s The Rising Son attacks this notion of so-called black blood in all its dimensions. Brown argues that adaptation to climate alone causes of changes in humans and insists on the Christian doctrine of “one blood,” which restores agency and the prospect of liberation and progress to African Americans. His commentary on biblical history and the curse of Ham answers Cartwright’s polygenist theory, especially the construction of universalized, fixed, physiologically inferior “black blood” as the result of divine creation, while his historiography aims to inscribe the black narrative of into the progress of civilization. The crucial difference between black and white blood in the nineteenth century turns out to be between stasis and change.
This chapter also addresses a problem of scholarship. To fully address the complexity of “black blood,” critics need to address medicine, legal, and theological sources, as well as history. Texts that defend or attack the concept of so-called black blood draw on the same range of sources including natural history, national histories, and the Hebrew and Christian bibles. This seeming disorder is a direct response to the original sources of racist scientists.

Finally, chapter seven looks both back to Thomas Jefferson and the rise of statistical calculatio... more Finally, chapter seven looks both back to Thomas Jefferson and the rise of statistical calculations of blood quantum in chattel slavery, and forward, to new conceptions of community that imagine the possible subversion of the nation state’s racist blood laws through a maternal narrative and the reconstitution of the black family. The chapter focuses on the legacy of slavery and its legal, social, political, and cultural post-Emancipation reiterations with reference to Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894) and Elizabeth Pauline Hopkins’ Of One Blood (1903).
I argue that by the end of the century, blood becomes impossible to speak beyond the medicalized fiction of race. Knowledge of blood history itself is now occult, while white theories of “black blood” are objective fact. This chapter draws on scholarship about the two novels and about constructions of so-called black blood admixture at the end of the century, especially by Susan K. Gillman, Barry Wood, Ellen Samuels, Holly Jackson, Claudia Tate, and Homi K. Bhabha. However, the chapter overall follows Hortense J. Spillers’ questions about the possibility of recovering a black maternal narrative and black fatherhood under the legacy of chattel slavery and the Jim Crow legal order of so-called black blood admixture.
In three sections, the chapter moves from the legal calculation of racial blood quantum in the nation state to the gothic haunts that alone allow for the negotiation of alternative truths, and to the specific counter-narrative of the maternal history that functions outside the father-enslaver’s blood to restore the family.
Beginning with descriptions of regulations of blood quantum under chattel slavery, I detail Thomas Jefferson’s 1815 elaboration on blood fractioning and the totalitarian nature of his system in which his knowledge of animal husbandry gives way to U.S. legal narratives about race as a state of perpetual enslavement, especially in the inheritance through the mother or partus sequitur ventrem. Twain and Hopkins echo the enslaver-father’s obsession with tables, ledgers, and blood fractions. Twain plays this out in the confrontation between Virginian gentry and racist science, while Hopkins imagines a vicious cycle of the past possessing the present, with generation after generation reenacting the father’s sins. Jefferson’s blood math structures society around an abject “black blood,” which racist science overcomes only to bring about even more pain and suffering for individuals.
In both novels, mothers and children can only know and speak the messy truth of blood in a gothic specter, especially in haunted houses. Twain’s anteblleum nostalgia of the South describes exactly the spectral nation Reizenstein’s Geheimnisse foresaw. However, as Hopkins makes clear, by 1900 there is no alternative to the nation state’s racist order. Though the conflict between maternal narrative against blood math may end in a triumph of the maternal narrative over the father’s laws inside the haunted house, this knowledge of blood is no longer legally or politically speakable or comprehensible in the father-enslaver’s national imaginary. The complete history of blood is an epistemic impossibility.
While the mathematical-legal abstraction of blood justifies the enslaver-father’s nation state, witnessing the messiness of blood and speaking to its semantic slipperiness disables this calculation and opens a path to new conceptions of community for individuals in the nation. Twain ends on a pessimistic note, but Hopkins indicates that by conceiving of new national imaginaries, the blood of the nation may come to mean something more than just the blood of Thomas Jefferson—even, perhaps, the blood of Jefferson’s daughter.

Conference Panels Organized by Sören Fröhlich

Medical Humanities panel CFP. C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists March 17-20, ... more Medical Humanities panel CFP.
C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists
March 17-20, 2016 at Pennsylvania State University
Chair: Sari Altschuler
Deadline: August 16, 2015.

Chair: Sari Altschuler, Emory University

Rebecca Rosen, Princeton University,
“The Bodies of Others: Slavery and Anatomy in the Early Republic”

Patrick Prominski, Michigan State University,
“Seasoning and Snakebites: Popular Authors and the Professionalization of the Physician on the American Frontier, 1815-1830”

Anna Mae Duane, University of Connecticut,
“Tending to ‘the Little Bushman’: Uplifting Medicine at the New York Colored Orphan’s Asylum”

Emily Waples, University of Michigan,
“Sick Time: Toward a Temporal Poetics of American Medicine”

"Recent scholarship in the ‘temporal turn’ has raised fundamental questions in the intersection o... more "Recent scholarship in the ‘temporal turn’ has raised fundamental questions in the intersection of time and cultural representations. However, this scholarship frequently side-steps cultural representations of time as malleable and non-rational, as well as supernatural temporalities. Thinking alongside the 2014 PAMLA Conference theme “Familiar Spirits,” this panel invites papers that consider the relation between magic and time.

What happens when we consider that at once relative and all-pervasive dimension of time through the lens of the imagination, the cultural, and the irrational? Whose time is it that counts, and how can it be manipulated? This panel invites discussions of time in representation of magic including, but not limited to literature, art, film, and history.

Topics might consider questions like:

Is there a connection between legacies of racism, sexism, or gender discrimination and time?
Does time differ in the conception of magic across disciplines?
How do religious and magical notions of time cooperate or clash?
Can temporal changes associated with trauma and anxieties be represented through magic?
How are nostalgia and magic related temporally?
What characterizes magic temporality or the temporality of magic?
Which questions about time does the historiography of magic offer?
How can narrative dimensions of time be manipulated to convey a sense of magic?
How do magical manipulations of time relate to retrospective or futuristic projections?
Can time be the different between good and bad magic?

To submit, please follow the directions on

http://www.pamla.org/2014/topics/“-old-black-magic”-temporality-magic

Note: PAMLA proposals cannot be submitted by email. In order to fill out a paper proposal, proposers simply:
1. register at and log in to the PAMLA clearinghouse form at http://www.pamla.org/2014,
2. fill out a paper proposal, including a paper title, a brief abstract and long proposal (max. 50 and 500 words, respectively), and
3. indicate whether the use of a laptop connected to a projector is needed.

For further detail on the proposal submission procedure, please visit:
http://www.pamla.org/2014/guidelines-and-procedures,
or email: Sören Fröhlich, University of California, San Diego (sfrohlic@ucsd.edu)."

From the bloody birth in Hemingway's "Indian Camp" and Rosasharn Joad's breast milk to Douglass' ... more From the bloody birth in Hemingway's "Indian Camp" and Rosasharn Joad's breast milk to Douglass' "cold sweat of death" and Albee's incontinent, old woman A, bodily fluids are liminal markers of transitions in life. This panel invites papers on the affective dimension of bodily fluids in literature and popular culture.

Editor by Sören Fröhlich