Pub Date : 2023-12-06DOI: 10.1215/00029831-11092084
Rei Magosaki
This article sees post–World War II wartime incarceration literature as a multigenerational corpus and reassesses the handling of this material in Asian American literary criticism and cultural analysis. As a way of addressing the expanding corpus of wartime incarceration literature, which includes generations of descendant writers, the article proposes a cognitive mapping of the ten major spaces of Japanese American Wartime Relocation Authority (WRA) mass incarceration sites, which were built in spatial overlap or in geographic proximity to Native American historic sites of violent conflict and confrontation throughout the nineteenth century. It argues for the centrality of this intergenerational Japanese American corpus in Asian American and US literary and cultural studies, anchored as the body of work is in the historical trajectories of US imperialism and settler colonialism.
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Pub Date : 2023-12-06DOI: 10.1215/00029831-11092071
Laura Soderberg
The turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century marked a time of intensified data collection in the United States focused especially on childhood. This article explores how two children’s narratives, Francis La Flesche’s The Middle Five (1900) and Francis Rolt-Wheeler’s The Boy with the U.S. Census (1911), reflect and respond to this conjunction of boyhood, settler colonialism, and official surveillance. Read together, these texts provide a window into the ways that data collection mediated between the everyday lives of children and the bureaucratic machinations of US colonial governance, marking those data as a site at which governance could be asserted or contested. The colonizing discourse with which these texts engage treats numeracy (rather than the more common literacy) as the threshold for citizenship and reduces Indigenous people, in particular, to the passive objects of measurement and administration. More surprisingly, though, these books also display the role that children’s literature played in placing children themselves in a relationship with numerical data collection, either as enthusiastic and active participants or wary counteragents. While Rolt-Wheeler portrays bureaucracy as an imperialist adventure in which white boys should joyfully partake, La Flesche offers a portrayal of the harm that this incessantly quantitative thinking did to Native children, but he also adds a nuanced critique of the epistemologies underlying such thinking.
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Pub Date : 2023-12-06DOI: 10.1215/00029831-11092045
Kyle Keeler
This article draws on Native American theory and archival sources, and colonial archival sources, to reframe land as an agent, partner in cultural production, and ally in resistance to colonialism. The article explains how land structures Haudenosaunee and Mohegan society in narrative and law. It examines how land’s agency appears in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Mason Land Case. It does so first from a colonial perspective, where land is inert property and Native peoples are unable to comprehend land as such, then from a Mohegan perspective, where land is a societal member and partner in resisting colonialism. Mohegan recognition of land’s agency and land’s influence on Native resistance is representative of what this essay calls literature of landed resistance. This framework elucidates how Native authors situate their relationships to land in order to move across colonial boundaries, continue active relationships with land in spite of colonialism, and resist colonialism alongside land. Through literature of landed resistance, this article shows how Mohegan leaders Uncas, Appageese, and Samson Occom detail responsibility to land that allows them to represent land’s agency in a manner not seen in settler texts and legislation, and to partner with land in acts of resistance. Understanding land as an active member of society and legislator shows land’s role as an agent and influence in community- and nation-building. (Re)animating land across history opens up new avenues in environmental justice studies to think about history, cultural production, and rights beyond the human and strengthens Native sovereignty through evidence of historic Native relations to land beyond property law.
{"title":"Toward a Literature of Landed Resistance: Land’s Agency in American Literature, Law, and History","authors":"Kyle Keeler","doi":"10.1215/00029831-11092045","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-11092045","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article draws on Native American theory and archival sources, and colonial archival sources, to reframe land as an agent, partner in cultural production, and ally in resistance to colonialism. The article explains how land structures Haudenosaunee and Mohegan society in narrative and law. It examines how land’s agency appears in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Mason Land Case. It does so first from a colonial perspective, where land is inert property and Native peoples are unable to comprehend land as such, then from a Mohegan perspective, where land is a societal member and partner in resisting colonialism. Mohegan recognition of land’s agency and land’s influence on Native resistance is representative of what this essay calls literature of landed resistance. This framework elucidates how Native authors situate their relationships to land in order to move across colonial boundaries, continue active relationships with land in spite of colonialism, and resist colonialism alongside land. Through literature of landed resistance, this article shows how Mohegan leaders Uncas, Appageese, and Samson Occom detail responsibility to land that allows them to represent land’s agency in a manner not seen in settler texts and legislation, and to partner with land in acts of resistance. Understanding land as an active member of society and legislator shows land’s role as an agent and influence in community- and nation-building. (Re)animating land across history opens up new avenues in environmental justice studies to think about history, cultural production, and rights beyond the human and strengthens Native sovereignty through evidence of historic Native relations to land beyond property law.","PeriodicalId":45756,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN LITERATURE","volume":"55 6","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-12-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138594987","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-12-06DOI: 10.1215/00029831-11092058
Isaac Kolding
John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) was enormously popular in the nineteenth-century United States. This article shows that abolitionists appropriated that text, as well as the reputation and biography of its author, as a guide to their own political action. References to Bunyan and The Pilgrim’s Progress in abolitionist print culture, including newspapers and book-length responses to The Pilgrim’s Progress, reveal that abolitionists saw Bunyan as a virtuous progenitor who helped to legitimate and unify their political movement while representing both political commitment and religious toleration.
{"title":"John Bunyan in Abolitionist Print Culture","authors":"Isaac Kolding","doi":"10.1215/00029831-11092058","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-11092058","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) was enormously popular in the nineteenth-century United States. This article shows that abolitionists appropriated that text, as well as the reputation and biography of its author, as a guide to their own political action. References to Bunyan and The Pilgrim’s Progress in abolitionist print culture, including newspapers and book-length responses to The Pilgrim’s Progress, reveal that abolitionists saw Bunyan as a virtuous progenitor who helped to legitimate and unify their political movement while representing both political commitment and religious toleration.","PeriodicalId":45756,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN LITERATURE","volume":"8 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-12-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138597125","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-12-06DOI: 10.1215/00029831-11092097
Patrick S. Lawrence
US economic policy in the late twentieth century privileged the financial sector by advancing generous tax breaks for wealthy Americans and traders, and prioritizing union-busting and cuts to social programs, producing a violence of deprivation against the poor and marginalized others. Simultaneously, the Reagan administration sought to shore up its political coalition in the post-Watergate era by appealing to a newly engaged Christian right with conservative social policies including pushback against the sexual revolution and the formation of the Meese Commission to study restrictions on pornography. These significant changes in culture found their way into a wealth of media including journalism, films, and novels that processed the seemingly contradictory moral claims underlying these policies: greed is good; sex is bad. This article draws on financial and literary theory to examine how two iconic novels from the era, Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) and Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991), exploit representations of sexualized violence to ramify and then explore the latent links among sex, violence, and finance. Each novel satirizes Wall Street’s violent indifference by embodying it in a figure of elite, white masculinity whose privilege is expressed through sex. The novels’ critiques, however, turn out to be self-contradictory, as their disavowal of the fictionality of finance is bound up with a concomitant investment in regressive sexual politics. In so doing, the novels demonstrate that culture-industry efforts to push back against economic deregulation may be allied with the cultural systems that support that deregulation or enable it.
{"title":"The Erotic Fictions of Finance Capitalism in The Bonfire of the Vanities and American Psycho","authors":"Patrick S. Lawrence","doi":"10.1215/00029831-11092097","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-11092097","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 US economic policy in the late twentieth century privileged the financial sector by advancing generous tax breaks for wealthy Americans and traders, and prioritizing union-busting and cuts to social programs, producing a violence of deprivation against the poor and marginalized others. Simultaneously, the Reagan administration sought to shore up its political coalition in the post-Watergate era by appealing to a newly engaged Christian right with conservative social policies including pushback against the sexual revolution and the formation of the Meese Commission to study restrictions on pornography. These significant changes in culture found their way into a wealth of media including journalism, films, and novels that processed the seemingly contradictory moral claims underlying these policies: greed is good; sex is bad. This article draws on financial and literary theory to examine how two iconic novels from the era, Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) and Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991), exploit representations of sexualized violence to ramify and then explore the latent links among sex, violence, and finance. Each novel satirizes Wall Street’s violent indifference by embodying it in a figure of elite, white masculinity whose privilege is expressed through sex. The novels’ critiques, however, turn out to be self-contradictory, as their disavowal of the fictionality of finance is bound up with a concomitant investment in regressive sexual politics. In so doing, the novels demonstrate that culture-industry efforts to push back against economic deregulation may be allied with the cultural systems that support that deregulation or enable it.","PeriodicalId":45756,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN LITERATURE","volume":"29 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-12-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138597164","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-09-13DOI: 10.1215/00029831-10950740
Brandon Truett
Abstract This article asserts the critical role of art and literature in the resistance against fascism by situating the aesthetic work of African Americans as central to the transnational phenomenon of the Spanish Civil War. This article highlights the prehistory to the African American support of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 when news of Benito Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia galvanized members of the Harlem Renaissance. These two conflicts triangulated the imaginaries of the United States, Spain, and Ethiopia, producing a distinct form of antifascist Black transnationalism that extends work by Brent Hayes Edwards, Robert F. Reid-Pharr, and Nadia Nurhussein. To manifest this argument, this article examines Paul Robeson’s speeches at rallies in London that he later reprinted in his autobiography Here I Stand (1958) and Claude McKay’s posthumously published novel Amiable with Big Teeth about 1936 Harlem. Using archival research, this article analyzes the collage aesthetic of the scrapbook that the activist Thyra J. Edwards compiled in 1937 to record the actions of the Negro People’s Committee to Aid Spain. In sum, this article demonstrates the integral role of African American visual culture and literature to the development of twentieth-century antifascist ideology within a transnational perspective.
本文通过将非裔美国人的美学作品定位为西班牙内战跨国现象的核心，断言艺术和文学在抵抗法西斯主义中的关键作用。这篇文章强调了非裔美国人在1936年支持西班牙内战的前史，当时贝尼托·墨索里尼入侵埃塞俄比亚的消息激发了哈莱姆文艺复兴运动的成员。这两场冲突将美国、西班牙和埃塞俄比亚的想象三角化，产生了一种独特形式的反法西斯黑人跨国主义，延伸了布伦特·海斯·爱德华兹、罗伯特·里德·法尔和纳迪亚·努尔侯赛因的作品。为了证明这一观点，本文考察了保罗·罗布森在伦敦集会上的演讲，他后来在他的自传《我在这里》(1958)中转载了这些演讲，以及克劳德·麦凯死后出版的关于1936年哈莱姆区的小说《和蔼可亲的大牙齿》。本文运用档案研究的方法，分析了活动家Thyra J. Edwards于1937年为记录黑人人民委员会援助西班牙的行动而编写的剪贴簿的拼贴美学。总而言之，本文在跨国视角下展示了非裔美国人的视觉文化和文学对20世纪反法西斯意识形态发展的不可或缺的作用。
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Pub Date : 2023-09-13DOI: 10.1215/00029831-10950792
Hayley C. Stefan
Abstract This article outlines a crip archival analysis of Karen Tei Yamashita’s creative family memoir Letters to Memory (2017) and the separate Yamashita Family Archives; the analysis revolves around the concept of disorder. The book and digital archives move the daily lived experience of incarceration out of chronological order, encouraging new connections across a massive collection of materials: letters, photographs, federal surveillance documents, paintings, sermons, and other ephemera surrounding World War II Japanese American incarceration. Their respective acts of assembling and retelling destabilize the dominant narrative of a resolved family or national trauma to reflect divergent embodied experiences of distress and disability effected by racial debilitation. Offering concentric analysis of textual and archival reordering via Asian American studies, disability studies, and digital humanities, this article adds alternative dimensions to the ongoing legacy of incarceration by inviting readers to create new constellations of meaning through examining temporal and embodied disorder. Reading the physical book and digital archives together also acts as a model for how literary studies scholars might complicate our attention to embodiment beyond narrative analysis, by thinking about disability and madness in the design and structure of texts and digital media. Through cripping the archive, the author calls for a reconceptualization of mad and disabled bodyminds as not only content to be examined, but also users and creators whose disorder animates alternative ways of knowing personal and state violence.
本文概述了对Karen Tei Yamashita的创造性家庭回忆录Letters to Memory(2017)和单独的Yamashita family Archives的档案分析;分析围绕着无序的概念展开。这本书和数字档案将监禁的日常生活经历从时间顺序中移开，鼓励在大量材料之间建立新的联系:信件、照片、联邦监视文件、绘画、布道和其他围绕二战日裔美国人监禁的短暂事件。他们各自的组合和重新讲述的行为破坏了一个已解决的家庭或国家创伤的主导叙述，以反映种族衰弱影响的痛苦和残疾的不同具体经历。本文通过亚裔美国人研究、残疾研究和数字人文学科对文本和档案的重新排序进行了集中分析，通过邀请读者通过研究时间和具体的混乱来创造新的意义体系，为监禁的持续遗产增加了另一种维度。同时阅读实体书和数字档案也可以作为文学研究学者如何通过思考文本和数字媒体的设计和结构中的残疾和疯狂，使我们对叙事分析之外的体现的关注复杂化的一个模型。通过对档案的整理，作者呼吁重新定义疯狂和残疾的身心，不仅是被检查的内容，而且是用户和创造者，他们的紊乱为了解个人和国家暴力提供了另一种方式。
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Pub Date : 2023-09-13DOI: 10.1215/00029831-10950766
Kodai Abe
Abstract American racial politics during the long Korean War formed what this essay terms Afro-Asian antagonism, a racial hate between African Americans and Asians (and Asian Americans). When the Truman administration issued Executive Order 9981 and proclaimed its commitment to military racial integration in 1948, two years before the outbreak of the Korean War, it seemed to signal a significant step of racial progress. Black servicemen who enlisted in the “liberalized” military, however, were strategically deployed to represent American national violence, especially to the eyes of Asians who were internalizing antiblack racism imported from the United States through the military apparatus. In the face of decolonization and an upsurge in civil rights movements, this article argues, the executive order molded Black Korean War veterans into an instrument to abort Afro-Asian connections while promoting racial liberalism to a global audience. The Korean War inaugurated the American Cold War racial formation that endures into the twenty-first century. Contrasting two Korean War novels written by Asian American and African American authors—Nora Okja Keller’s Fox Girl (2002) and Toni Morrison’s Home (2012)—this article traces how Afro-Asian orphans and a Black veteran internalize and challenge the Afro-Asian antagonisms of the long Korean War.
{"title":"Afro-Asian Antagonism and the Long Korean War","authors":"Kodai Abe","doi":"10.1215/00029831-10950766","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-10950766","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract American racial politics during the long Korean War formed what this essay terms Afro-Asian antagonism, a racial hate between African Americans and Asians (and Asian Americans). When the Truman administration issued Executive Order 9981 and proclaimed its commitment to military racial integration in 1948, two years before the outbreak of the Korean War, it seemed to signal a significant step of racial progress. Black servicemen who enlisted in the “liberalized” military, however, were strategically deployed to represent American national violence, especially to the eyes of Asians who were internalizing antiblack racism imported from the United States through the military apparatus. In the face of decolonization and an upsurge in civil rights movements, this article argues, the executive order molded Black Korean War veterans into an instrument to abort Afro-Asian connections while promoting racial liberalism to a global audience. The Korean War inaugurated the American Cold War racial formation that endures into the twenty-first century. Contrasting two Korean War novels written by Asian American and African American authors—Nora Okja Keller’s Fox Girl (2002) and Toni Morrison’s Home (2012)—this article traces how Afro-Asian orphans and a Black veteran internalize and challenge the Afro-Asian antagonisms of the long Korean War.","PeriodicalId":45756,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN LITERATURE","volume":"67 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135742171","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-09-13DOI: 10.1215/00029831-10950779
T. J. Martinson
Abstract While postmodern metafiction (or reflexive fiction) is commonly positioned outside the scope of the Ontological Turn due to metafiction’s association with postmodernism’s insistence on “world as text,” this article argues that metafiction’s proximity to scientific theories of reflexivity engenders a shift toward what the article calls body as text, a shift that is synchronous with reflexivity’s evolution from cybernetics to biological autopoiesis. To trace metafiction’s aesthetic evolution from world as text to body as text, the article examines Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “The Circular Ruins” (1940) alongside early-order cybernetic theories of reflexivity before examining Salvador Plascencia’s The People of Paper (2005) alongside later theories of biological autopoiesis. While both narratives demonstrate an interest in the world-building powers of the text, the article argues that Plascencia’s novel demonstrates reflexivity’s autopoietic ability to examine the interstitial relationship between material embodiment and nonhuman agencies. By moving away from Borgesian self-regulation toward self-assembly, The People of Paper gradually sheds the epistemological preoccupations of its world-as-text aesthetic in favor a more ontological body-as-text aesthetic, thereby opening up the possibility of interpreting Plascencia’s novel as an aestheticization not of the construction of reality but of the construction of the body itself. In marking a distinction between world-as-text metafiction and body-as-text metafiction, the latter emerges as a uniquely useful heuristic in the Ontological Turn for modeling molecular embodiment and nonhuman agency.
虽然后现代元小说(或反思性小说)通常被定位在本体论转向的范围之外，因为元小说与后现代主义坚持“世界作为文本”的联系，但本文认为，元小说与反思性的科学理论的接近导致了一种向文章所说的身体作为文本的转变，这种转变与反思性从控制论到生物自创生的进化是同步的。为了追溯元小说从以世界为文本到以身体为文本的美学演变，本文考察了Jorge Luis Borges的短篇小说《圆形废墟》(1940)和早期的反身性控制论，然后考察了Salvador Plascencia的《纸上的人》(2005)和后来的生物自创生理论。虽然这两种叙述都表现出对文本世界建设力量的兴趣，但文章认为，普拉森西亚的小说展示了反身性的自创生能力，可以检查物质体现和非人类机构之间的间隙关系。通过从博尔赫斯式的自我调节走向自我组装，《纸上的人》逐渐摆脱了认识论上对世界作为文本美学的关注，而更倾向于本体论上的身体作为文本美学，从而开启了将普拉森西亚的小说解读为一种审美化的可能性，这种审美化不是对现实的建构，而是对身体本身的建构。在区分作为文本的世界元虚构和作为文本的身体元虚构时，后者在本体论转向中作为一种独特有用的启发式出现，用于建模分子具体化和非人类能动性。
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