Shades of Green: Visions of Nature in the Literature of American Slavery, 1770-1860 (original) (raw)
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With a Barbarous Din: Race and Ethnic Encounter in Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Literature
This study re-examines the mid-1850s, a time that remains central to American literary studies, exploring new ways of looking at this cultural moment through the twentieth-century concept of ‘ethnicity.’ This approach uncovers the hidden subversiveness of American literature as it responded to scientific race theory in the debate over slavery and also highlights the ways in which the texts examined in this study – Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno (1855), Frederick Douglass’ ‘My Bondage and My Freedom’ (1855), Harriet Beecher Stowe’s ‘Dred’ (1856), Walt Whitman’s ‘Leaves of Grass’ (1855), and John Rollin Ridge’s ‘The Life and Adventures of Joaqín Murieta’ (1854) – powerfully resonate with ideas of affiliation and difference today. Focusing on a brief historical moment in the past from a decidedly twenty-first century perspective, the study reflects upon the texts’ movement through time and demonstrates how race and ethnicity in these texts have been transformed under the pressures of history.
Ecology of the color line: race and nature in American literature, 1895-1941
2012
In the Forethought to The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois prophesied that the “problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the colour line.” A hundred years later, ecological crises join racial crises as perhaps the emergent problems of the twenty-first century. In Du Boisian spirit, my project explores how the color line and what I call the ecological line— the line that runs between humans and their environment—intersect. “Race and Nature in American Literature, 1895-1941” reimagines many literary genres and critical disputes traditionally focalized through problematics of race and politics: the Washington—Du Bois debates on racial uplift, New Negro cultural nationalism, the Great Migration narrative, black Marxism, and ethnic proletarian literature. Employing methods of environmental historicism, archival research, and intersectional analysis, my project argues not only that intertwining racial and ecological problems erupted along the color line, but also that these...
American Literature in Context
2021
First published between 1982 and 1983, this series examines the peculiarly American cultural context out of which the nation's literature has developed. Covering the years from 1620 to 1830, this first volume of American Literature in Context examines a range of texts from the writings of the Puritan settlers through the declaration of Inde pendence to the novels of Fenimore Cooper. In doing so, it shows how early Americans thought about their growing nation, their arguments for immigration, for political and cultural indepen dence, and the doubts they experienced in this ambitious project. This book will be of interest to those studying American lit erature and American studies.
Syllabus, 2013
What does literature do? How does it move the mind? Incite the imagination? In “The Mirror and the Mask,” Borges writes about a storyteller who tells three tales in three different literary modes. It is the argument of this course that form invites a certain manner of thinking. What does each form do? To contemplate this question further we will engage the historical, in particular the historical social circumstances that enable different forms. We will explore the transnational connections amongst different literatures, regions, and languages of the Americas, imagined collectively as the “New World.” We will study a range of fiction and nonfiction texts that explore issues of power, identity and history in colonial times and their effects in the postcolonial period. The comparatist perspective of the course invites attention to the historical contexts for the emergence of (trans)national New World identities and discussions of literary exchange and influence across the Americas. We will raise such questions as: How does literature play a role in constructing people’s visions of the world? In what traditions do the texts we read participate? How do those traditions overlap and differ? We will address these questions by reading several texts from the “New World,” situating the texts with respect to one another, as well as texts from the “Old World.” Our readings will explore themes such as discovery and conquest, “the discovery self makes of the other,” romance, revolution, slavery and dictatorships (Todorov 3). We will examine how particular literary texts and genres are shaped by and intervene in these histories.
Our current political discourse is scattered with claims and accusations regarding which persons or groups qualify as “American,” “not American,” or “un-American.” This question has profound consequences that can range from the mundane—such as attempts at tarnishing a reputation—to the more serious, such as democratic in/exclusion, and legal and extralegal violence. What it means to “be American” was pivotal in the nation’s founding as Paine’s Common Sense and Crèvecœur’s Letters From an American Farmer make clear, but the politics of Americanness were negotiated, oftentimes violently, in the centuries of Colonial Era politics and culture that preceded the signing of the Declaration of Independence. It is arguably more critical now than ever to understand what “Americanness” is (or can be) and what made it this way—starting from the beginning (or close thereto). Focusing in pre-1800 American literature and culture, our endeavor will navigate through exploration and captivity narratives, US slavery and the trans- and circum- Atlantic slave trade, indigenous American literature, religion and the Puritan tradition, Enlightenment discourse, the ideological underpinnings of the American Revolution and the Constitution, early-American print culture (including the sentimental novel), gender studies, and perspectives in law and literature. Finding motivation in the problems, issues, and contradictions within the figuration of collective identity, we will better understand the political discourse surrounding “what it means to be American” as it was then, and therefore, as it is now.
2021
Paris is a metropolitan city with its urban characteristics that have been shaped by its artistic monuments and history. There was a wave of immigration by white Americans to Paris at the beginning of the twentieth century. This wave of immigrants included several artists, journalists, and writers, who were disillusioned by the promises of the New World, America. These were as Gertrude Stein's described created a 'lost generation' in Europe. At the second half of the twentieth century, there appeared another wave of immigration to Europe, this time mainly by African-Americans. Their experiences and conditions differed from that of white pioneers. They were more liberal and stood for freedom rather than getting lost in Paris. Their previous situation in America was one of restlessness; they had to run away from hatred levelled against their skin colour or sexuality. They pointed to social problems back in America and pronounced the freedom of speech they earned Paris. This article aims to explore the extent to which the African-American literary experience of Paris after World War II differed from that of white American writers earlier in the century. The paper critically compares the selected fiction by accomplished authors such as Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (1926), F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'Babylon Revisited' (1931), Richard Wright's The Outsider (1953) and James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room (1956). This article concludes that the two literary experience that were shaped in Paris vigorously differed in their motives and motivations in reflecting the expectations of exile, the experience of sexuality and the treatment of women.