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The usefulness of time and place as defining categories would seem
to be baked into the very notion of nineteenth-century American
literary studies, yet they have challenged scholars practically
since the field's inception. In Neither the Time nor the Place
seventeen critics consider how the space-time dyad has both
troubled and invigorated Americanist scholarship in recent decades
and make explicit how time and place are best considered in tandem,
interrogating each other. Taken together, the essays challenge
depictions of place and time as bounded and linear, fixed and
teleological, or mere ideological constructions. They address both
familiar and unexpected objects, practices, and texts, including a
born-digital Melville, documents from the construction of the
Panama Canal, the hollow earth, the desiring body, textual editing,
marble statuary, the sound of frogs, spirit photography, and
twentieth-century Civil War fiction. The essays draw on an equally
wide variety of critical methodologies, integrating affect studies,
queer theory, book history, information studies, sound studies,
environmental humanities, new media studies, and genre theory to
explore the unexpected dimensions that emerge when time and place
are taken as a unit. The pieces are organized around considerations
of citizenship, environment, historiography, media, and
bodies—five political, cultural, and/or methodological foci for
some of the most provocative new work being done in American
literary studies. Neither the Time nor the Place is a book not only
for scholars and students already well grounded in the study of
nineteenth-century American literature and culture, but for anyone,
scholar or student, looking for a roadmap to some of the most
vibrant work in the field. Contributors: Wai Chee Dimock, Stephanie
Foote, Matthew Pratt Guterl, Coleman Hutchison, Rodrigo Lazo,
Caroline Levander, Robert S. Levine, Christopher Looby, Dana
Luciano, Timothy Marr, Dana D. Nelson, Ifeoma C. Kiddoe Nwankwo,
Mark Storey, Matthew E. Suazo, and Edward Sugden.
The usefulness of time and place as defining categories would seem
to be baked into the very notion of nineteenth-century American
literary studies, yet they have challenged scholars practically
since the field's inception. In Neither the Time nor the Place
seventeen critics consider how the space-time dyad has both
troubled and invigorated Americanist scholarship in recent decades
and make explicit how time and place are best considered in tandem,
interrogating each other. Taken together, the essays challenge
depictions of place and time as bounded and linear, fixed and
teleological, or mere ideological constructions. They address both
familiar and unexpected objects, practices, and texts, including a
born-digital Melville, documents from the construction of the
Panama Canal, the hollow earth, the desiring body, textual editing,
marble statuary, the sound of frogs, spirit photography, and
twentieth-century Civil War fiction. The essays draw on an equally
wide variety of critical methodologies, integrating affect studies,
queer theory, book history, information studies, sound studies,
environmental humanities, new media studies, and genre theory to
explore the unexpected dimensions that emerge when time and place
are taken as a unit. The pieces are organized around considerations
of citizenship, environment, historiography, media, and bodies-five
political, cultural, and/or methodological foci for some of the
most provocative new work being done in American literary studies.
Neither the Time nor the Place is a book not only for scholars and
students already well grounded in the study of nineteenth-century
American literature and culture, but for anyone, scholar or
student, looking for a roadmap to some of the most vibrant work in
the field. Contributors: Wai Chee Dimock, Stephanie Foote, Matthew
Pratt Guterl, Coleman Hutchison, Rodrigo Lazo, Caroline Levander,
Robert S. Levine, Christopher Looby, Dana Luciano, Timothy Marr,
Dana D. Nelson, Ifeoma C. Kiddoe Nwankwo, Mark Storey, Matthew E.
Suazo, and Edward Sugden.
The story of the "American Mediterranean," both an idea and a
shorthand popularized by geographers, historians, novelists, and
travel writers from the early nineteenth century to the 1970s. The
naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, visiting the Gulf-Caribbean in
the early nineteenth century, called it America's Mediterranean.
Almost a century later, Southern California was hailed as "Our
Mediterranean, Our Italy!" Although "American Mediterranean" is not
a household phrase in the United States today, it once circulated
widely in French, Spanish, and English as a term of art and folk
idiom. In this book, Susan Gillman asks what cultural work is done
by this kind of unsystematic, open-ended comparative thinking.
American Mediterraneans tracks two centuries of this geohistorical
concept, from Humboldt in the early 1800s, to writers of the 1890s
reflecting on the Pacific world of the California coast, to writers
of the 1930s and 40s speculating on the political past and future
of the Caribbean. Following the term through its travels across
disciplines and borders, American Mediterraneans reveals a
little-known racialized history, one that paradoxically appealed to
a range of race-neutral ideas and ideals.
The story of the "American Mediterranean," both an idea and a
shorthand popularized by geographers, historians, novelists, and
travel writers from the early nineteenth century to the 1970s. The
naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, visiting the Gulf-Caribbean in
the early nineteenth century, called it America's Mediterranean.
Almost a century later, Southern California was hailed as "Our
Mediterranean, Our Italy!" Although "American Mediterranean" is not
a household phrase in the United States today, it once circulated
widely in French, Spanish, and English as a term of art and folk
idiom. In this book, Susan Gillman asks what cultural work is done
by this kind of unsystematic, open-ended comparative thinking.
American Mediterraneans tracks two centuries of this geohistorical
concept, from Humboldt in the early 1800s, to writers of the 1890s
reflecting on the Pacific world of the California coast, to writers
of the 1930s and 40s speculating on the political past and future
of the Caribbean. Following the term through its travels across
disciplines and borders, American Mediterraneans reveals a
little-known racialized history, one that paradoxically appealed to
a range of race-neutral ideas and ideals.
The United States has seldom known a period of greater social and
cultural volatility, especially in terms of race relations, than
the years from the end of Reconstruction to the First World War. In
this study, Susan Gillman explores the rise during this period of a
remarkable genre - the race melodrama - and the way in which it
converged with literary trends, popular history, fringe movements,
and mainstream interest in supernatural phenomena. "Blood Talk"
shows how race melodrama emerged from abolitionist works such as
"Uncle Tom's Cabin" and surprisingly manifested itself in a set of
more aesthetically and politically varied works, such as historical
romances, sentimental novels, the travel literature of Mark Twain,
the regional fiction of Kate Chopin and George Washington Cable,
and the work of W.E.B. Du Bois. Gillman then uses the race
melodrama to show how racial discourses in the United States became
entangled with occultist phenomena, from the rituals of the Klu
Klux Klan and the concept of messianic second-sight to the
production of conspiracy theories and studies of dreams and
trances. A work of ambitious scope and compelling
cross-connections, "Blood Talk" sets new agendas for students of
American literature and culture.
"Many persons have such a horror of being taken in," wrote P. T.
Barnum, "that they believe themselves to be a sham and are
continually humbugging themselves." Mark Twain enjoyed trading on
that horror, as the many confidence men, assumed identities, and
disguised characters in his fiction attest. In Dark Twins, Susan
Gillman challenges the widely held assumption that Twain's concern
with identity is purely biographical and argues that what has been
regarded as a problem of individual psychology must be located
instead within American society around the turn of the century.
Drawing on Twain's whole writing career, but focusing on the
controversial late period of social "pessimism" and literary
"incoherence," Gillman situates Twain and his work in historical
context, demonstrating the complex interplay between his most
intimate personal and authorial identity and the public attitudes
toward race, gender, and science.
Gillman shows that laws regulating race classification, paternity,
and rape cases underwrite Twain's critical exploration of racial
and sexual difference in the writings of the 1890s and after, most
strikingly in the little-known manuscripts that Gillman calls the
"tales of transvestism." The "pseudoscience" of spiritualism and
the "science" of psychology provide the cultural vocabularies
essential to Twain's fantasy and science fiction writings of his
last two decades. Twain stands forth finally as a representative
man, not only a child of his culture, but also as one implicated in
a continuing American anxiety about freedom, race, and identity.
Although W. E. B. Du Bois did not often pursue the connections
between the "Negro question" that defined so much of his
intellectual life and the "woman question" that engaged writers and
feminist activists around him, Next to the Color Line argues that
within Du Bois's work is a politics of juxtaposition that connects
race, gender, sexuality, and justice. This provocative collection
investigates a set of political formulations and rhetorical
strategies by which Du Bois approached, used, and repressed issues
of gender and sexuality. The essays in Next to the Color Line
propose a return to Du Bois, not only to reassess his politics but
also to demonstrate his relevance for today's scholarly and
political concerns. Contributors: Hazel V. Carby, Yale U; Vilashini
Cooppan, U of California, Santa Cruz; Brent Hayes Edwards, Rutgers
U; Michele Elam, Stanford U; Roderick A. Ferguson, U of Minnesota;
Joy James, Williams College; Fred Moten, U of Southern California;
Shawn Michelle Smith, St. Louis U; Mason Stokes, Skidmore College;
Claudia Tate, Princeton U; Paul C. Taylor, Temple U. Susan Gillman
is professor of literature at the University of California, Santa
Cruz. Alys Eve Weinbaum is associate professor of English at the
University of Washington, Seattle.
This book explores the purpose and politics of the field. The
contributors to this volume argue that for too long, inclusiveness
has substituted for methodology in American studies scholarship.
The ten original essays collected here call for a robust
comparativism that is attuned theoretically to questions of both
space and time. ""States of Emergency"" asks readers to engage in a
thought experiment: imagine that you have an object you want to
study - Which methodologies will contextualize and explain your
selection? What political goals are embedded in your inquiry? This
thought experiment is taken up by contributors who consider an
array of objects - the weather, cigarettes, archival material,
AIDS, the enemy, extinct species, and torture. The essayists
recalibrate the metrics of time and space usually used to measure
these questions. In the process, each contributes to a project that
redefines the object of American studies, reading its history as
well as its future across, against, even outside the established
grain of interdisciplinary practice.
This collection seeks to place "Pudd'nhead Wilson"--a neglected,
textually fragmented work of Mark Twain's--in the context of
contemporary critical approaches to literary studies. The editors'
introduction argues the virtues of using "Pudd'nhead Wilson" as a
teaching text, a case study in many of the issues presently
occupying literary criticism: issues of history and the uses of
history, of canon formation, of textual problematics, and finally
of race, class, and gender.
In a variety of ways the essays build arguments out of, not in
spite of, the anomalies, inconsistencies, and dead ends in the text
itself. Such wrinkles and gaps, the authors find, are the symptoms
of an inconclusive, even evasive, but culturally illuminating
struggle to confront and resolve difficult questions bearing on
race and sex. Such fresh, intellectually enriching perspectives on
the novel arise directly from the broad-based interdisciplinary
foundations provided by the participating scholars. Drawing on a
wide variety of critical methodologies, the essays place the novel
in ways that illuminate the world in which it was produced and that
further promise to stimulate further study.
"Contributors." Michael Cowan, James M. Cox, Susan Gillman, Myra
Jehlen, Wilson Carey McWilliams, George E. Marcus, Carolyn Porter,
Forrest Robinson, Michael Rogin, John Carlos Rowe, John Schaar,
Eric Sundquist
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