Pub Date : 2024-03-07DOI: 10.1215/00029831-11218879
Cynthia J. Davis
In this essay, novels by Kate Chopin and Edith Wharton serve to elucidate more widely resonant value-laden distinctions between publicly embodied and quietly internalized responses to pain and pleasure. This fictional archive denigrates the demonstrativeness it associates with people marginalized by ascriptive identities of race and class while endorsing the uncommonly vibrant inner lives of particular elite white subjects. Pain and pleasure are valued for arousing hidden depths of feeling that distinguish a singular subject’s affective life from purportedly commonplace and conformist incarnations. Conceptions of selfhood and otherness hinge on distinctions between a subject afforded a purportedly uncommon, deeply vibrant affect molded by an equally uncommon responsiveness to hedonic stimuli and a person or set of persons whose discernable, often simulated or conventional hedonic feelings are represented as typifying a comparatively depreciated racialized, classed, or gendered norm, or some combination of the three. This high-cultural literary investment in a nonnormative, nonreproducible affective interiority strengthened amid debates about privacy rights, an increasing cultural preference for performative self-presentations, and efforts to standardize the US population into types. Drawing on this context along with both affect theory and affective science, the essay demonstrates these novels’ importance to understanding how an unexpressed inner vitality emerged as distinction’s volitionally unattainable vital sign.
{"title":"“Alive in Every Fibre”: Chopin and Wharton on Pain, Pleasure, and Private Feeling","authors":"Cynthia J. Davis","doi":"10.1215/00029831-11218879","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-11218879","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In this essay, novels by Kate Chopin and Edith Wharton serve to elucidate more widely resonant value-laden distinctions between publicly embodied and quietly internalized responses to pain and pleasure. This fictional archive denigrates the demonstrativeness it associates with people marginalized by ascriptive identities of race and class while endorsing the uncommonly vibrant inner lives of particular elite white subjects. Pain and pleasure are valued for arousing hidden depths of feeling that distinguish a singular subject’s affective life from purportedly commonplace and conformist incarnations. Conceptions of selfhood and otherness hinge on distinctions between a subject afforded a purportedly uncommon, deeply vibrant affect molded by an equally uncommon responsiveness to hedonic stimuli and a person or set of persons whose discernable, often simulated or conventional hedonic feelings are represented as typifying a comparatively depreciated racialized, classed, or gendered norm, or some combination of the three. This high-cultural literary investment in a nonnormative, nonreproducible affective interiority strengthened amid debates about privacy rights, an increasing cultural preference for performative self-presentations, and efforts to standardize the US population into types. Drawing on this context along with both affect theory and affective science, the essay demonstrates these novels’ importance to understanding how an unexpressed inner vitality emerged as distinction’s volitionally unattainable vital sign.","PeriodicalId":45756,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN LITERATURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-03-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140258313","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 : 2024-03-07DOI: 10.1215/00029831-11218858
Sari Altschuler, Thomas Constantinesco
{"title":"Pain after 2020, An Introduction","authors":"Sari Altschuler, Thomas Constantinesco","doi":"10.1215/00029831-11218858","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-11218858","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45756,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN LITERATURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-03-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140258603","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 : 2024-03-07DOI: 10.1215/00029831-11218865
Shari Goldberg
“Taxonomy of an Enslaved Heart” opens up the figuration of heartache, so common to sentimental writings, to consider how it can signify anatomical pain as well. What does it mean to read figuratively—accepting that every instance of a heart broken or throbbing or heavy indexes emotional pain addressing the reader’s sympathy—and, at the same time, to literalize these instances, so that each one refers to a specific episode in the history of a circulatory system? This essay attempts to hold both in tension, even as they resist each other. Attending to texts by Harriet Jacobs, Mary Prince, Sojourner Truth, and James Baldwin, the essay argues for what it calls the story of the heart: a minoritized account of pain that deforms sentimental language to register at once somatically, mentally, and intersubjectively. Because of its insecure legibility, the story of the heart subverts the biopolitical logic of legitimacy that traps many patients who are Black, disabled, or both today. What emerges from holding figuration with literalization subtly shifts the illnesses we know and the conditions by which we know them.
{"title":"Taxonomy of an Enslaved Heart","authors":"Shari Goldberg","doi":"10.1215/00029831-11218865","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-11218865","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 “Taxonomy of an Enslaved Heart” opens up the figuration of heartache, so common to sentimental writings, to consider how it can signify anatomical pain as well. What does it mean to read figuratively—accepting that every instance of a heart broken or throbbing or heavy indexes emotional pain addressing the reader’s sympathy—and, at the same time, to literalize these instances, so that each one refers to a specific episode in the history of a circulatory system? This essay attempts to hold both in tension, even as they resist each other. Attending to texts by Harriet Jacobs, Mary Prince, Sojourner Truth, and James Baldwin, the essay argues for what it calls the story of the heart: a minoritized account of pain that deforms sentimental language to register at once somatically, mentally, and intersubjectively. Because of its insecure legibility, the story of the heart subverts the biopolitical logic of legitimacy that traps many patients who are Black, disabled, or both today. What emerges from holding figuration with literalization subtly shifts the illnesses we know and the conditions by which we know them.","PeriodicalId":45756,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN LITERATURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-03-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140077620","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 : 2024-03-07DOI: 10.1215/00029831-11218872
Jess Libow
This essay traces the visual cultures that emerged around Civil War soldiers’ pain and argues that the method of portraiture has much to offer the field of health humanities. It begins by tracing the visual cultures that emerged around Civil War soldiers’ pain in both popular and clinical media before turning to hospital accounts by Louisa May Alcott and Walt Whitman that adopt the trope of portraiture in order to make soldiers’ suffering legible to a wider audience. This essay argues that these ekphrastic accounts make visible not only soldiers’ suffering but also the act of observing and interpreting it, and the essay concludes by suggesting that by bringing into focus the process of perceiving another’s pain, the study of portraiture offers an important complement to both the field of narrative medicine and health humanities approaches to studying visual art.
这篇文章追溯了围绕内战士兵的疼痛而出现的视觉文化，并认为肖像画的方法可以为健康人文领域提供很多帮助。文章首先追溯了围绕内战士兵的疼痛在大众和临床媒体中出现的视觉文化，然后转向路易莎-梅-奥尔科特（Louisa May Alcott）和沃尔特-惠特曼（Walt Whitman）对医院的描述，这些描述采用了肖像画的特例，以便让更多读者了解士兵的痛苦。文章最后指出，肖像画研究通过聚焦感知他人痛苦的过程，为叙事医学领域和研究视觉艺术的健康人文方法提供了重要的补充。
{"title":"“A Face of Anguish”: Pain and Portraiture in the Civil War Hospital","authors":"Jess Libow","doi":"10.1215/00029831-11218872","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-11218872","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay traces the visual cultures that emerged around Civil War soldiers’ pain and argues that the method of portraiture has much to offer the field of health humanities. It begins by tracing the visual cultures that emerged around Civil War soldiers’ pain in both popular and clinical media before turning to hospital accounts by Louisa May Alcott and Walt Whitman that adopt the trope of portraiture in order to make soldiers’ suffering legible to a wider audience. This essay argues that these ekphrastic accounts make visible not only soldiers’ suffering but also the act of observing and interpreting it, and the essay concludes by suggesting that by bringing into focus the process of perceiving another’s pain, the study of portraiture offers an important complement to both the field of narrative medicine and health humanities approaches to studying visual art.","PeriodicalId":45756,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN LITERATURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-03-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140259998","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 : 2024-03-07DOI: 10.1215/00029831-11218900
Catherine Belling
The communication of pain has been figured, in both the canonical work of Elaine Scarry and in biomedical discourse, as bringing pain up from bodily depths to a surface where it is visibly manifest to others. This study of acute physical pain in three popular American narrative texts and their film adaptations suggests that the oculocentrism of such accounts has elided the significant role of sound, both verbal and nonverbal, in the expression and witnessing of physical pain. Instances of what was classified in the nineteenth century as sensation literature, these three texts produce direct sensory effects. Scott Smith’s The Ruins (2006) is a horror novel, William Goldman’s Marathon Man (1974) a thriller, and Aron Ralston’s Between a Rock and a Hard Place (2004) (film: 127 Hours) an adventure-survival memoir. Reading pain in each of three triple texts—book, film, and the screenplay transmitting pain from one to the other—opens up a new archive of pain texts that promise sensation rather than relief, offering a new perspective on the imaginative—and paradoxically ameliorative—creativity brought into being by the notorious recalcitrance of pain. This essay argues for attention to the protolinguistic pain language of groans and screams; for a poetics of “ouch.”
{"title":"Ouch: Pain, Heard and Referred","authors":"Catherine Belling","doi":"10.1215/00029831-11218900","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-11218900","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The communication of pain has been figured, in both the canonical work of Elaine Scarry and in biomedical discourse, as bringing pain up from bodily depths to a surface where it is visibly manifest to others. This study of acute physical pain in three popular American narrative texts and their film adaptations suggests that the oculocentrism of such accounts has elided the significant role of sound, both verbal and nonverbal, in the expression and witnessing of physical pain. Instances of what was classified in the nineteenth century as sensation literature, these three texts produce direct sensory effects. Scott Smith’s The Ruins (2006) is a horror novel, William Goldman’s Marathon Man (1974) a thriller, and Aron Ralston’s Between a Rock and a Hard Place (2004) (film: 127 Hours) an adventure-survival memoir. Reading pain in each of three triple texts—book, film, and the screenplay transmitting pain from one to the other—opens up a new archive of pain texts that promise sensation rather than relief, offering a new perspective on the imaginative—and paradoxically ameliorative—creativity brought into being by the notorious recalcitrance of pain. This essay argues for attention to the protolinguistic pain language of groans and screams; for a poetics of “ouch.”","PeriodicalId":45756,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN LITERATURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-03-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140077063","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 : 2024-03-07DOI: 10.1215/00029831-11218886
Cera Smith
Taking seriously Ralph Ellison’s interest in the sympathetic nervous system and his involvement in the Black hospital movement, this article demonstrates how the protagonist’s pain in Invisible Man’s factory hospital scene influences the narrator’s writerly “choices” in the novel’s frame narrative. Scholarship on the novel thoroughly attends to the trope of the protagonist’s invisibility but regularly overlooks his corporeal presence. Invisible Man experiences social invisibility, not as a metaphor but as an embodied, somatic state initiated through racializing violence. This essay offers a psychobiologically attentive reading of the factory hospital scene to investigate the potentialities of the Black protagonist’s embodied living. In the scene, racist doctors injure the protagonist’s brain through electroshock torture, disrupting his cognition and sympathetic nervous system. However, the protagonist’s corporeal development of a new consciousness through racist injury has unintended consequences; his resilient brain charts new pathways of thought, undermining his domination through emotional self-awareness. This essay argues that the protagonist’s patient narrative—written following brain injury—functions as a countertechnology to the doctors’ racializing machine.
{"title":"Shocking Therapy: Narrating Racism’s Psychobiological Injuries in Ralph Ellison’s Factory Hospital","authors":"Cera Smith","doi":"10.1215/00029831-11218886","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-11218886","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Taking seriously Ralph Ellison’s interest in the sympathetic nervous system and his involvement in the Black hospital movement, this article demonstrates how the protagonist’s pain in Invisible Man’s factory hospital scene influences the narrator’s writerly “choices” in the novel’s frame narrative. Scholarship on the novel thoroughly attends to the trope of the protagonist’s invisibility but regularly overlooks his corporeal presence. Invisible Man experiences social invisibility, not as a metaphor but as an embodied, somatic state initiated through racializing violence. This essay offers a psychobiologically attentive reading of the factory hospital scene to investigate the potentialities of the Black protagonist’s embodied living. In the scene, racist doctors injure the protagonist’s brain through electroshock torture, disrupting his cognition and sympathetic nervous system. However, the protagonist’s corporeal development of a new consciousness through racist injury has unintended consequences; his resilient brain charts new pathways of thought, undermining his domination through emotional self-awareness. This essay argues that the protagonist’s patient narrative—written following brain injury—functions as a countertechnology to the doctors’ racializing machine.","PeriodicalId":45756,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN LITERATURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-03-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140260892","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 : 2024-03-07DOI: 10.1215/00029831-11218893
Alex O’Connell
In light of abortion’s recurrent political centrality in the United States, examining abortion narratives remains critically urgent. This article analyzes the abortion narratives found in the 1993 anthology The Worst of Times compiled by Patricia G. Miller, which collects individual stories of illegal abortions from the post–World War II years. It analyzes these narratives in the context of the postwar period’s growing sensational political fascination with abortion pain, alongside the second-wave feminist positioning of abortion as the paramount feminist issue and inherent basis of feminist community. Against these discourses, the semi-anonymous narrators of The Worst of Times disrupt hierarchized, universal, and exclusionary models of pain. Rather, this article argues that, in constructing life writing centered around the painful experience of illegal abortion, the narrators’ experiences cohere into relational clusters that evince commonalities while also maintaining differences. In engaging with their painful abortion experiences, these narratives reshape the medical, national, and feminist power structures that attempted to define the pain that abortion signified. In a moment when abortion legislation faces continued assaults, these narratives invite a consideration of how the embodied, personal pain of abortion can facilitate creative models of community that rethink the power structures that restrict reproductive autonomy.
鉴于人工流产在美国一再成为政治中心，研究人工流产叙事仍是当务之急。本文分析了帕特里夏-米勒（Patricia G. Miller）1993 年编撰的《最糟糕的时代》（The Worst of Times）选集中的堕胎叙事，该选集收集了二战后非法堕胎的个人故事。文章分析了这些故事的背景，即战后对堕胎之痛日益增长的耸人听闻的政治迷恋，以及第二波女权主义将堕胎定位为最重要的女权主义问题和女权主义群体的固有基础。与这些论述相反，《最糟糕的时代》中的半匿名叙述者打破了等级化、普遍性和排斥性的疼痛模式。相反，本文认为，在构建以非法堕胎的痛苦经历为中心的生命书写时，叙述者的经历凝聚成了既体现共性又保持差异的关系群。这些叙述者在讲述自己痛苦的堕胎经历时，重塑了试图定义堕胎所带来的痛苦的医学、国家和女权主义权力结构。在堕胎立法面临持续攻击的时刻，这些叙事促使人们思考，堕胎所体现的个人痛苦如何能够促进创造性的社区模式，从而重新思考限制生育自主权的权力结构。
{"title":"National Wounds and Gendered Harm: Reframing Abortion Pain in The Worst of Times","authors":"Alex O’Connell","doi":"10.1215/00029831-11218893","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-11218893","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In light of abortion’s recurrent political centrality in the United States, examining abortion narratives remains critically urgent. This article analyzes the abortion narratives found in the 1993 anthology The Worst of Times compiled by Patricia G. Miller, which collects individual stories of illegal abortions from the post–World War II years. It analyzes these narratives in the context of the postwar period’s growing sensational political fascination with abortion pain, alongside the second-wave feminist positioning of abortion as the paramount feminist issue and inherent basis of feminist community. Against these discourses, the semi-anonymous narrators of The Worst of Times disrupt hierarchized, universal, and exclusionary models of pain. Rather, this article argues that, in constructing life writing centered around the painful experience of illegal abortion, the narrators’ experiences cohere into relational clusters that evince commonalities while also maintaining differences. In engaging with their painful abortion experiences, these narratives reshape the medical, national, and feminist power structures that attempted to define the pain that abortion signified. In a moment when abortion legislation faces continued assaults, these narratives invite a consideration of how the embodied, personal pain of abortion can facilitate creative models of community that rethink the power structures that restrict reproductive autonomy.","PeriodicalId":45756,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN LITERATURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-03-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140259097","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: 10.1215/00029831-11092084
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.
{"title":"“Beyond Railroads and Internment”? Japanese American Wartime Incarceration Literature and the Foundations of Asian American Literary Studies","authors":"Rei Magosaki","doi":"10.1215/00029831-11092084","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-11092084","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 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.","PeriodicalId":45756,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN LITERATURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-12-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138596587","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: 10.1215/00029831-11092071
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.
{"title":"Data-Driven Childhoods: Settler Colonialism and Numeracy in the Boys’ Literature of Francis La Flesche and Francis Rolt-Wheeler","authors":"Laura Soderberg","doi":"10.1215/00029831-11092071","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-11092071","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 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.","PeriodicalId":45756,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN LITERATURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-12-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138595519","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: 10.1215/00029831-11092045
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":null,"pages":null},"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}
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