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.
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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.
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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.
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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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Pub Date : 2023-09-13DOI: 10.1215/00029831-10950753
Anna Muenchrath
Abstract This essay explores the possibilities of thinking about the production, circulation, and reception of books through the form of the network. Using archival material of the Council of Books in Wartime, the essay reassembles some of the many attachments that formed the Armed Services Editions during World War II, one of the largest enterprises in the history of publishing. The essay traces the selections of the council, the networks of soldier-readers created by the books themselves, and the acts of reading constrained and made possible by these attachments across front lines and through bureaucratic memos. This assembly provides the backdrop for a consideration of the text of Thomas Mann’s “Mario and the Magician,” a short story published in the Armed Services Editions in 1944, whose plot not only mirrors the tension between authority and free will manifested in the geopolitical conflict of World War II, but also elucidates the dialectic of power and agency modeled by the form of the network as articulated in the council’s reader-producing experiment itself. What is ultimately at stake in positing an uneven network of actors who negotiate, maintain, extend, and possibly even subvert vectors of cultural power is a reconsideration of the agency attributed to readers in sociological studies of literature.
摘要本文探讨了通过网络的形式思考图书的生产、流通和接受的可能性。本文利用战时图书委员会的档案材料，重新组装了二战期间形成武装部队版的许多附件中的一些，这是出版史上最大的企业之一。这篇文章追溯了委员会的选择，书籍本身创造的士兵读者网络，以及这些跨越前线和官僚备忘录的附件限制和使阅读行为成为可能。这个集会为托马斯·曼(Thomas Mann)的《马里奥与魔术师》(Mario and the Magician)的文本提供了思考的背景，这是1944年发表在《武装部队版》(Armed Services Editions)上的一篇短篇小说，其情节不仅反映了二战地缘政治冲突中权威与自由意志之间的紧张关系，还阐明了权力与代理的辩证法，这种辩证法是由委员会的读者产生实验本身所阐述的网络形式所塑造的。在文学社会学研究中，假设一个不平衡的行动者网络来协商、维护、扩展，甚至可能颠覆文化权力的载体，最终的利害关系是重新考虑读者的代理。
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Pub Date : 2023-09-13DOI: 10.1215/00029831-10950727
Bradley Dubos
Abstract This article traces a long trajectory of hymnic placemaking within the Brothertown Indian Nation from the late eighteenth century to the present day. Since their tribe’s inception, Brothertown people have repurposed the forms and rituals of Christian hymnody in order to maintain connections to ancestral homelands, navigate and interpret unfamiliar terrain, and construct and shape tribal spaces. Samson Occom’s (Mohegan/Brothertown) A Choice Collection of Hymns and Spiritual Songs; Intended for the Edification of Sincere Christians, of all Denominations (1774) cultivated this distinctive mode of placemaking within the Native community that formed at Brothertown, New York. Opening up several key moments in the hymnal’s nearly two-hundred-and-fifty-year history, this article reads the Collection’s figures of place in relation to the embodied engagements it has prompted over time, from the daily travel it motivated across the eighteenth-century town to the hollow square formation Brothertown Indians used in 2018 when performing hymns at Yale. By foregrounding the bodily orientations toward place that are promoted by sung hymn-texts and develop alongside their sustained use, the article demonstrates how sonic expressions continue to supply materials for Indigenous placemaking among Brothertown singers today. This hymn-singing tradition, tied to specific homelands and yet remarkably portable, illuminates the situatedness of Indigenous poetic practice under the conditions of settler colonialism.
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Pub Date : 2023-04-28DOI: 10.1215/00029831-10679209
Sylvie Boulette
This article follows the transsensory pathways opened by peyote, a mood-altering entheogen, as it diffused among Native peoples living under and along the edges of colonial occupation around the turn of the twentieth century. It traces that movement through the pulsions of temporal and sensorial animacy created in the episodic narration of The Autobiography of a Winnebago Indian (1920), the life story of a Ho-Chunk man named Sam Blowsnake. Apprehended by settler governance as a “craze,” anti-assimilationist currents of the Peyote movement met with intensifying attempts to constrain the biochemical flux of “intoxication” through Native bodies. Modern campaigns against “peyote worship” mounted by government agents, progressive reformers, and sensationalist press in the early twentieth century exploited scripts of revulsion and prurient fascination to target the border-crossing “mind poison” for prohibition. Just beneath the scenes of psychotoxicity and sexual disorder projected by the antinarcotic imaginary of the craze, this article posits, there ran an ongoing struggle over the restrictive capacitation of property and personhood within the settler-capitalist regime of allotment. Against the norms enforced by that policy, in peyote meetings the alteration of sentience could unbind the day-to-day reproduction of property-bearing personhood. Lines of collective transport opening from the passage of ecstasy thus composed a historical moment in refusal of allotment drives for schizochronic individuation.
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