Wendy Harding | Université Toulouse II Jean Jaurès (original) (raw)

Papers by Wendy Harding

The spectacle lynchings of the early 20th century performed a ritual that assigned roles and dist... more The spectacle lynchings of the early 20th century performed a ritual that assigned roles and distributed racial identities in American society. Representation was an essential component of the ritual, ensuring its diffusion in the images and narratives produced in response to the events. Beginning with a discussion of the lynching photography gathered in James Allen’s Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America, this essay goes on to consider the difficulties that African American writers confront in responding to the images that cast their people in the role of victims. Richard Wright’s poem “Between the World and Me” illustrates how representations of the lynching ritual induce a recurrent cycle of terror that haunts his black speaker. Ta-Nehisi Coates’s 2015 book demonstrates how the political, literary and existential problem endures. Recognizing how representation ensures the replication of racial divisions, Toni Morrison evokes the lynching spectacle in ways that scramble its categories and suggest new configurations of power.

Visitors to the Lava Beds National Monument discover a site where the National Park Service has t... more Visitors to the Lava Beds National Monument discover a site where the National Park Service has to orchestrate features of geological, historical, and environmental interest. This article examines the way in which it presents one of these features, «Captain Jack's Stronghold», the site of a confrontation between the U.S. army and a small band of Modoc Indians that took place in 1872-73. In following the self-guided tour, visitors engage in a quasi-theatrical performance that encourages them to «emplace» themselves in the present through a commemorative act that reconstructs the past in order to conciliate conflicts in the contemporary community and to define the nation in the present. This article reflects on the power of landscape to create a sense of history and to foster a sense of place. The former battleground is the site of an inevitably disputed process of collective emplacement.

Cherokee artist Jimmie Durham, the creator of the Caliban Codex, is a bricoleur and a trickster w... more Cherokee artist Jimmie Durham, the creator of the Caliban Codex, is a bricoleur and a trickster who turns around Shakespeare’s Caliban, exploring the dimensions of the system of representation in order to transform it. The Caliban Codex shows the contradictions of colonialism though Caliban’s imperfect attempt at mimicry. Caliban’s attempts to master the representational system in his efforts at writing, drawing and sculpture reveal its biases and its underlying violence, showing how it deprives the dominated of the capacity to represent themselves. To evade this trap, Durham uses the trickster’s oblique tactics. He takes ready-made structures apart and offers the fragments for inspection. The artist champions confusion as a means to overturn inherited frames of meaning. The Caliban Codex suggests that representation is itself a colonial mechanism that should be abandoned so as to liberate people, places, and objects from their pre-assigned functions and to permit them to enter into new relationships.

Medieval Women, Modern Scholars, 2004

The Medieval Review, Oct 1, 2004

The Modern Language Review, 2006

... meeting of the 1. C. David Benson, Chaucer&amp;amp;#x27;s Drama of Style (Chapel Hill... more ... meeting of the 1. C. David Benson, Chaucer&amp;amp;#x27;s Drama of Style (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986): &amp;amp;quot;The Canterbury Tales: Personal Drama or Experiments in Poetic Variety.&amp;amp;quot; The Cambridge Chaucer Companion, ed. Plero Boitani and Jill Mann (Cambridge ...

African American Review, 1996

Due to its unusual publishing history, E. Jane Gay’s Choup-nit-ki: With the Nez Percés has not re... more Due to its unusual publishing history, E. Jane Gay’s Choup-nit-ki: With the Nez Percés has not received the critical attention it deserves. Through the book’s photographs and text, Gay stages a migratory, polyvocal narrator who rejects the unitary identity that establishes both the writer’s and the colonizer’s authority. This article studies textual features such as shifting focalization, the splitting of the writing subject into multiple personae, and the humor extracted from social contradictions to show how Gay’s book both cites and challenges nineteenth century conventions governing genre and gender. Contemporary theory (Deleuze and Guattari, Braidotti, Butler) provides concepts that can aid our appreciation of the text’s originality. Gay’s self-presentation cracks the restrictive nineteenth century mold of femininity and liberates the subject, even as, ironically, the author collaborates in the project of imposing on the Nez Perce the constraints legislated through the Dawes Act. Gay’s book illustrates the author’s ambivalence about the Allotment policy that attempted to end tribal organization on the Nez Perce reservation.

A work of art can be seen as a crossroads at which various historical movements converge, but it ... more A work of art can be seen as a crossroads at which various historical movements converge, but it is also in motion, tracing its own trajectory. Drawing on actor-network theory, particularly as developed by Bruno Latour, this article situates Thomas Moran’s "The Chasm of the Colorado" (1873-74), in relation to contemporaneous events—notably Powell’s explorations of the Colorado River (1869; 1872) and Congress’s purchase of Moran’s painting (1874)—to show how it was taken up in the project of defining the territory of the young American republic. To become hegemonic, the territorial network in which the painting partakes had to fulfill the three functions of discovery, diffusion and potentiality. In other words, it had to come into existence, to become known, and to be rendered usable. The painting is one of the interconnected inscriptions that together create the Grand Canyon for the American public; among these are the heroic canyon, the pictorial canyon, and the strategic canyon. Finally the painting is not so much a singular object as a hybrid assemblage traversed by the various trajectories that bring it into existence and perpetuate it.

Wretched Refuge : Immigrants and Itinerants in the Postmodern, 2010

Journal of American Studies of Turkey, 2009

Nature writers confront the irreconcilable gap between experience and discourse while assigning t... more Nature writers confront the irreconcilable gap between experience and discourse while assigning themselves the impossible task of giving it expression. This is most acutely felt in writing about the wilderness, which is, by definition, a place where man is not supposed to belong. Using Don Scheese's "The Inhabited Wilderness" as a model, this article offers a new method of analysis for nature writing. Remaining close to the text, it shows how the writer organizes a montage of scripts centering on events, places, people and ideas. These scripts trace mental geographies in which references to actual places are fertilized by a human response, and conversely, interaction with non-human elements shapes thought. The scripts are deployed around a center that remains unexpressed. In leaving gaps and zones of indeterminacy, the writer creates a space for imagining more responsible forms of connection with place. To script the wilderness is a way to inhabit it, to mark it with a human trace while still conserving it.

In 1865 Frederick Law Olmsted read to the Yosemite Commissioners a report detailing his ideas abo... more In 1865 Frederick Law Olmsted read to the Yosemite Commissioners a report detailing his ideas about California’s newly reserved natural space and his recommendations for its development as a “public park or pleasure ground.” His text, “The Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Big Trees: A Preliminary Report,” was lost for almost a century until his biographer Laura Wood Roper unearthed it, pieced it together, and published it. In spite of the lack of response it obtained at the time of it was written, Olmsted’s text is now held up as a foundational document for both the National Parks system and environmentalism. This paper investigates how the stillborn proposal came to achieve canonical status in the late twentieth century and how legends concerning it have accrued. The report has become the road not taken; it allows people to imagine what the Yosemite National Park might have remained if it had not been subject to intense development. Taken up by contemporary environmentalists, Olmsted’s text is made to authorize a myth of origins that is simpler and more inspiring than the tangled reality of events. This article analyses the report to show how the contradictions in Olmsted’s vision for the park would not have permitted its preservation in the condition in which nineteenth century visitors found it.

Transatlantica, 2011

When confronted with animals, Western subjects inevitably cast themselves in the superior role of... more When confronted with animals, Western subjects inevitably cast themselves in the superior role of knowing subjects who take for granted that the whole natural world is knowable. Occasionally, though, in descriptions of encounters between humans and animals disturb that complacency. These strange encounters occasion perplexity concerning the status and the
limits of human knowledge. They invite us to query not so much what we know about animals but rather what animals force us to (ac)know(ledge) that we want to ignore, or in other words, what is hidden from us in the act of knowing. This paper first looks at the ways in which two accounts of confrontations with cats pose this problem; then it examines a series of texts by American writers that explore the gap that our culture opens between humans and animals.

A travers les descriptions ekphrastiques de Underworld, Don DeLillo définit la place et la nature... more A travers les descriptions ekphrastiques de Underworld, Don DeLillo définit la place et la nature de l'art dans la société américaine postmoderne tout en affirmant son art du roman. Dans la métropole postmoderne l'espace public est saturé par les signes et les systèmes de l'activité mercantile. Les artistes représentés dans le roman doivent regagner l'attention du public et proposer leur propre forme de communication. Ils doivent se réapproprier les surfaces disponibles et y superposer leurs images et leurs couleurs. En explorant l'esthétique de ces artistes de fiction et du graphiste Ismael Muñoz en particulier, DeLillo nous livre son propre manifeste esthétique. Son roman laisse entendre qu'à la fin du XXème siècle, le rôle de l'artiste est de répondre aux sollicitations visuelles et intellectuelles que les médias font subir au public, d'abord en plaçant les productions dominantes sous un jour ironique, et en transformant ensuite ces modes d'expression discrédités en de nouvelles formes culturelles. Le roman accueille et même adopte l'impulsion des graffitis urbains tout en leur donnant certaines dimensions inaccessibles aux arts visuels. Ainsi se trouvent rassemblés, dans un récit à la fois temporel et spatial, les images fragmentaires et éparpillées de la ville. A partir des détritus du capitalisme contemporain Underworld crée de nouveaux mythes qui réhumanisent une culture déshumanisée par sa propre technologie.

Voix de femmes au Moyen Age, Paris: AMAES, 2010

Margery Kempe's account of her mystical experience reveals a major fault line of late medieval so... more Margery Kempe's account of her mystical experience reveals a major fault line of late medieval society, where the authorities come into conflict. The new, highly personal strain of devotion she embraces confronts the clergy with the problem of controlling and channelling the powerful emotional expressions that result. The book documents Margery's quest for trustworthy and sympathetic spiritual counsellors, a search that is never quite resolved. Christ seems to represent the ideal confessor, speaking from and in the penitent's heart. Still, in order to confirm their authenticity, Margery must disclose her 'feelings' to clerical authorities, and the response to her revelations is ambivalent. To make interpretation more difficult, Margery frequently proclaims that inner experience is impossible to represent; she does not have the vocabulary to translate it for her judges. In The Book of Margery Kempe the fluctuation between feelings of doubt and conviction, dread and relief, exposes the interpretative difficulties that spiritual experience poses in the later Middle Ages.

Everyman : Actes des colloques de janvier 2009, Nancy-Université et Toulouse-Le Mirail, , 2009

Dans Everyman, la représentation des sacrements et, en particulier, du sacrement de pénitence, in... more Dans Everyman, la représentation des sacrements et, en particulier, du sacrement de pénitence, invite à une réflexion sur les problèmes et les spécificités de l'allégorie dramatique et sur la façon dont la pièce les traite. L'étude de la représentation de Confession dans la critique en tant que personnage et sacrement sous-estime son caractère problématique en imposant des schèmes médiévaux conventionnels sur les scènes concernées ou en proposant de résoudre ces problèmes en suggérant des artifices de mise en scène. Bien que les sacrements occupent une position centrale dans la pièce, ils apparaissent de façon décousue et floue. La communion et l'extrême-onction n'apparaissent pas sur la scène. Bien que Everyman rencontre un personnage dénommé Confession, les étapes de sa pénitence n'apparaissent pas dans l'ordre prescrit par les traités religieux. De plus, Everyman ne fait pas une complète confession publique de ses péchés sur scène. La représentation pour le moins étrange des sacrements dans la pièce trouve en partie une explication dans le contexte culturel. Alors que les sacrements de pénitence et de communion étaient soumis à la critique des Lollards et autres mouvements dissidents, il est plausible que le dramaturge ait rechigné à les désacraliser en les représentant sur la scène. Au lieu de cela, il évoque les sacrements en présentant leurs effets sur le protagoniste. Il est probable que ce choix reflète l'accent mis par la devotio moderna sur les pratiques spirituelles intérieures plutôt qu'extérieures.