Pub Date : 2022-08-18DOI: 10.1215/00029831-10084512
Emily Gowen
This essay reconsiders literary engagements with the figure of the newsboy in terms of their own ambivalences, critiques, and calls for social reform. Taking Horatio Alger’s dime novels as a primary case study, this piece explores Alger’s sense that the growth of literary business relied too heavily on the exploitation of poverty conditions produced by and disseminated through the medium of popular print.
{"title":"“Ain’t Any Chance to Rise in the Paper Business”: Horatio Alger, Newsboys, and the Racialization of Poverty","authors":"Emily Gowen","doi":"10.1215/00029831-10084512","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-10084512","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay reconsiders literary engagements with the figure of the newsboy in terms of their own ambivalences, critiques, and calls for social reform. Taking Horatio Alger’s dime novels as a primary case study, this piece explores Alger’s sense that the growth of literary business relied too heavily on the exploitation of poverty conditions produced by and disseminated through the medium of popular print.","PeriodicalId":45756,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN LITERATURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-08-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47697668","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 : 2022-03-03DOI: 10.1215/00029831-9779064
Hannah Manshel
This article reads Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) alongside Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas (2017) to argue that both texts challenge the ideology of property ownership that has long been central to Black and Indigenous subjugation. By reading these texts through Cedric Robinson’s theorization of the Black Radical Tradition, which “never allowed for property,” this essay argues that both texts bring into being a world that precedes and exceeds the violence of legal regulation. Jacobs and Long Soldier both locate an alternative to law in the radical divinity of maternal care. Through Jacobs’s and Long Soldier’s discussions of holy maternal care, we can recognize the interrelation of Black and Indigenous freedom struggles in a way that’s not solely defined by shared subjugation.
{"title":"“Never Allowed for Property”: Harriet Jacobs and Layli Long Soldier before the Law","authors":"Hannah Manshel","doi":"10.1215/00029831-9779064","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-9779064","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article reads Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) alongside Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas (2017) to argue that both texts challenge the ideology of property ownership that has long been central to Black and Indigenous subjugation. By reading these texts through Cedric Robinson’s theorization of the Black Radical Tradition, which “never allowed for property,” this essay argues that both texts bring into being a world that precedes and exceeds the violence of legal regulation. Jacobs and Long Soldier both locate an alternative to law in the radical divinity of maternal care. Through Jacobs’s and Long Soldier’s discussions of holy maternal care, we can recognize the interrelation of Black and Indigenous freedom struggles in a way that’s not solely defined by shared subjugation.","PeriodicalId":45756,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN LITERATURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-03-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46050199","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 : 2022-03-03DOI: 10.1215/00029831-9779078
Sam Reese
During the mid-twentieth century, loneliness became the dominant affect in American fiction, reflecting a broader cultural narrative that social and demographic changes had led to a crisis of loneliness. This affective shift is captured in Richard Yates’s 1962 short story collection, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness—but Yates’s deliberate framing of his stories as “eleven kinds” implies a second object of critique. Reading Yates’s work for social and psychological types, this article proposes that personality tests, corporate typing, and social typologies had a major role in the rise in loneliness in midcentury America—a relationship borne out by contemporary sociology, most prominently The Lonely Crowd (1950) by David Riesman, Nathan Glazer, and Reuel Denney. This article further argues that by reading midcentury fiction more broadly for type, we can understand loneliness not merely as a bad feeling but as a space of contest between individuality and group belonging, intimately connected to larger political and social narratives. Setting Yates’s stories against midcentury novels by Ralph Ellison and Mary McCarthy, this article reframes American loneliness in light of the cultural changes of the midcentury and writers’ struggles with the possibilities and limitations of type.
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Pub Date : 2022-03-03DOI: 10.1215/00029831-9779036
Danny Luzon
This article explores the American Yiddish theater’s creative reworkings of William Shakespeare, a practice epitomized by the presumed parodic dictum “translated and improved” (fartaytsht un farbessert). It argues that this theater’s translational politics of chutzpah strives to breach fixed literary and familial lineages by treating the high-canonical Anglo text as a porous space, open to endless cultural attachments. Through revisionary acts of intercultural exchange, the Yiddish theater and its followers envision literary inheritance as something that is not bounded by familial descent and dissent but rather is open to alternative modes of kinship. Specifically, this late nineteenth-century strategy is carried forward by authors such as Anzia Yezierska and Grace Paley, who turn to the Yiddish theater’s proclaimed improvement of Shakespeare in their multilingual English works in order to envision a radical fluidity of the American self. Writing on the periphery of US literary production, the authors studied in this article Judaize, Yiddishize, and queer Shakespearean characters, insisting on both the semantic and semiotic ways in which translations can democratize the linguistic economy of Anglo-American literature.
本文探讨了美国意第绪语剧院对威廉·莎士比亚的创造性改编，这一实践体现在假定的戏仿格言“翻译和改进”（fartaytst un farbessert）中。它认为，这部戏剧大胆的翻译政治试图打破固定的文学和家族谱系，将高度规范的盎格鲁文本视为一个多孔的空间，向无尽的文化依恋敞开。通过跨文化交流的修正行为，意第绪语剧院及其追随者将文学继承视为一种不受家族血统和异议限制的东西，而是对其他亲属模式开放的东西。具体来说，这一19世纪末的策略是由安齐亚·叶齐尔斯卡和格蕾丝·帕利等作家提出的，他们转向意第绪语剧院在其多语言英语作品中对莎士比亚的改进，以设想美国人自我的激进流动性。本文立足于美国文学生产的边缘，研究了犹太化、意第绪化和莎士比亚的酷儿角色，坚持翻译可以使英美文学的语言经济民主化的语义和符号方式。
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Pub Date : 2022-03-03DOI: 10.1215/00029831-9779092
Christy L. Pottroff
In 1860, Harriet Jacobs and Walt Whitman signed nearly identical contracts with Boston-based publishers Thayer and Eldridge. This article tells the story of Jacobs’s and Whitman’s intersecting journeys to and from Thayer and Eldridge, and considers what this convergence can teach us about the antebellum book market and our scholarly evaluations of it. The first section of the article illuminates the publishing histories of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) by Jacobs and the third edition of Leaves of Grass by Whitman (1860) from the vantage of Thayer and Eldridge, their shared publisher. Thanks to the vast economic support of Thayer and Eldridge, Whitman brought his artistic vision into the literary marketplace, but he did so at the expense of Jacobs. Thayer and Eldridge went bankrupt printing and promoting Whitman’s book, leaving Jacobs without a publisher. Jacobs, in turn, published Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by herself. The article’s second section leaves Whitman and Thayer and Eldridge behind to follow Jacobs on her postpublication book tour. Her efforts in these years—traveling from place to place, meeting with readers, and selling her books—are the reason we have Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl today.
{"title":"Incommensurate Labors: The Work behind the Works of Harriet Jacobs and Walt Whitman","authors":"Christy L. Pottroff","doi":"10.1215/00029831-9779092","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-9779092","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In 1860, Harriet Jacobs and Walt Whitman signed nearly identical contracts with Boston-based publishers Thayer and Eldridge. This article tells the story of Jacobs’s and Whitman’s intersecting journeys to and from Thayer and Eldridge, and considers what this convergence can teach us about the antebellum book market and our scholarly evaluations of it. The first section of the article illuminates the publishing histories of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) by Jacobs and the third edition of Leaves of Grass by Whitman (1860) from the vantage of Thayer and Eldridge, their shared publisher. Thanks to the vast economic support of Thayer and Eldridge, Whitman brought his artistic vision into the literary marketplace, but he did so at the expense of Jacobs. Thayer and Eldridge went bankrupt printing and promoting Whitman’s book, leaving Jacobs without a publisher. Jacobs, in turn, published Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by herself. The article’s second section leaves Whitman and Thayer and Eldridge behind to follow Jacobs on her postpublication book tour. Her efforts in these years—traveling from place to place, meeting with readers, and selling her books—are the reason we have Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl today.","PeriodicalId":45756,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN LITERATURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-03-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41254270","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 : 2022-03-03DOI: 10.1215/00029831-9779106
J. Casey, S. Salter
This essay calls for the concerted study of editorship as a distinct mode of cultural expression. Given that the collaborative craft of editors is often invisible, the study of editorship requires attending to the practices, habits, and techniques of editing as themselves historically contingent and significant objects of inquiry. This essay analyzes a cross section of editorial practices in 1862 when a controversy during the Civil War over slavery and emancipation entangled editors from Horace Greeley and Frederick Douglass to their less conspicuous peers at L’Union (a bilingual, Black Creole weekly in New Orleans). These examples reveal the practical language of editorship expressed through serial formats. By reading editing on its own terms, in the patterns of established formats and formal innovations, it becomes possible to envision the broader study of editorship not only for nineteenth-century Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and multilingual print cultures but also in the wider firmaments of literary and cultural history.
{"title":"With, Without, Even Still: Frederick Douglass, L’Union, and Editorship Studies","authors":"J. Casey, S. Salter","doi":"10.1215/00029831-9779106","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-9779106","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay calls for the concerted study of editorship as a distinct mode of cultural expression. Given that the collaborative craft of editors is often invisible, the study of editorship requires attending to the practices, habits, and techniques of editing as themselves historically contingent and significant objects of inquiry. This essay analyzes a cross section of editorial practices in 1862 when a controversy during the Civil War over slavery and emancipation entangled editors from Horace Greeley and Frederick Douglass to their less conspicuous peers at L’Union (a bilingual, Black Creole weekly in New Orleans). These examples reveal the practical language of editorship expressed through serial formats. By reading editing on its own terms, in the patterns of established formats and formal innovations, it becomes possible to envision the broader study of editorship not only for nineteenth-century Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and multilingual print cultures but also in the wider firmaments of literary and cultural history.","PeriodicalId":45756,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN LITERATURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-03-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44179161","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 : 2022-03-03DOI: 10.1215/00029831-9779050
Stephen Knadler
“Neurodiverse Afro-Fabulations” focuses on the neglected cognitive biopolitics in post-Reconstruction debates over African American progress and full democratic citizenship, in order to trace an unmarked African American neurodiverse disability history, or the antiableist imagining of neurological, cognitive, and psychological variations that existed before and persisted alongside the emergence of modern evolutionary- and hereditary-based diagnostic categories of intelligence. At the same time, “Neurodiverse Afro-Fabulations” argues for the importance of an abjected Blackness in the critical genealogy of modern neurodiversity, which has largely been associated with recent movements to recognize people with autism or ADHD and has focused on the middle-class white child. Through an examination of Pauline Hopkins’s essay series for the Colored American Magazine, “Famous Women of the Negro Race” (1901–2), this essay first recovers Hopkins’s ambivalent relation to the compulsory neurotypicality of racial uplift politics. “Neurodiverse Afro-Fabulations” then turns to Hopkins’s novel Contending Forces (1900) to foreground how her fiction is interrupted by scenes of neurodiverse Afro-fabulation that do not simply refute claims of Black inferiority through a representational politics of counterfacts, but fabulate, exaggerate, and deliberately foreground eccentric, excessive, and “irrational” ways of knowing that have their roots in diasporic epistemologies. Ultimately, “Neurodiverse Afro-Fabulations” raises questions about the way an engagement with a history of Black neurodiversity affects how we think about the political, especially as antiblackness and cognitive disability have often served as overlapping technologies in the formation of a white liberal humanism.
{"title":"Neurodiverse Afro-Fabulations: Pauline Hopkins’s Counterintelligence","authors":"Stephen Knadler","doi":"10.1215/00029831-9779050","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-9779050","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 “Neurodiverse Afro-Fabulations” focuses on the neglected cognitive biopolitics in post-Reconstruction debates over African American progress and full democratic citizenship, in order to trace an unmarked African American neurodiverse disability history, or the antiableist imagining of neurological, cognitive, and psychological variations that existed before and persisted alongside the emergence of modern evolutionary- and hereditary-based diagnostic categories of intelligence. At the same time, “Neurodiverse Afro-Fabulations” argues for the importance of an abjected Blackness in the critical genealogy of modern neurodiversity, which has largely been associated with recent movements to recognize people with autism or ADHD and has focused on the middle-class white child. Through an examination of Pauline Hopkins’s essay series for the Colored American Magazine, “Famous Women of the Negro Race” (1901–2), this essay first recovers Hopkins’s ambivalent relation to the compulsory neurotypicality of racial uplift politics. “Neurodiverse Afro-Fabulations” then turns to Hopkins’s novel Contending Forces (1900) to foreground how her fiction is interrupted by scenes of neurodiverse Afro-fabulation that do not simply refute claims of Black inferiority through a representational politics of counterfacts, but fabulate, exaggerate, and deliberately foreground eccentric, excessive, and “irrational” ways of knowing that have their roots in diasporic epistemologies. Ultimately, “Neurodiverse Afro-Fabulations” raises questions about the way an engagement with a history of Black neurodiversity affects how we think about the political, especially as antiblackness and cognitive disability have often served as overlapping technologies in the formation of a white liberal humanism.","PeriodicalId":45756,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN LITERATURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-03-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41967068","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 : 2022-01-27DOI: 10.1215/00029831-9696959
Patrick Jagoda, Jennifer A. Malkowski
In 2017, the American game designer Momo Pixel released the single-player, browser-based game Hair Nah. In this game, you play as Aeva, a Black woman taking trips to locations that include Osaka, Havana, and the Santa Monica Pier. As you move through levels on your journey—a taxi ride, airport security, sitting on the plane—you must slap away increasingly aggressive white hands that reach into the frame to touch your hair. Though Hair Nah taps into the genre of a casual button-mashing game, this interactive experience also explores the topic of microaggressions via unwanted hair touching. If you slap away enough hands on your travels, you reach a screen welcoming you to your destination with the message “YOU WIN!” but the caveat, “The game is over, but this experience isn’t. This is an issue that black women face daily. So a note to those who do it STOP THAT SHIT.” How did video games move from a medium oriented toward adolescent male consumers and characterized by violent actions, such as shooting or fighting, to one that could also accommodate a playfully serious and cathartic exploration of a Black woman defending herself against racist bodily intrusions? Though video games still privilege violent mechanics and are far from diverse, especially in terms of designers and developers in the industry, the early twenty-first century has seen an expansion of the form of, and the culture surrounding, games. This has included a proliferation of game genres: puzzleplatforms (a hybrid that combines spatial or cognitive puzzles with jumps across platforms as in Super Mario Bros. [Nintendo, 1983]); survival horror games (action-adventure games in which the player must persist in a threatening environment without adequate resources);
{"title":"Introduction: American Game Studies","authors":"Patrick Jagoda, Jennifer A. Malkowski","doi":"10.1215/00029831-9696959","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-9696959","url":null,"abstract":"In 2017, the American game designer Momo Pixel released the single-player, browser-based game Hair Nah. In this game, you play as Aeva, a Black woman taking trips to locations that include Osaka, Havana, and the Santa Monica Pier. As you move through levels on your journey—a taxi ride, airport security, sitting on the plane—you must slap away increasingly aggressive white hands that reach into the frame to touch your hair. Though Hair Nah taps into the genre of a casual button-mashing game, this interactive experience also explores the topic of microaggressions via unwanted hair touching. If you slap away enough hands on your travels, you reach a screen welcoming you to your destination with the message “YOU WIN!” but the caveat, “The game is over, but this experience isn’t. This is an issue that black women face daily. So a note to those who do it STOP THAT SHIT.” How did video games move from a medium oriented toward adolescent male consumers and characterized by violent actions, such as shooting or fighting, to one that could also accommodate a playfully serious and cathartic exploration of a Black woman defending herself against racist bodily intrusions? Though video games still privilege violent mechanics and are far from diverse, especially in terms of designers and developers in the industry, the early twenty-first century has seen an expansion of the form of, and the culture surrounding, games. This has included a proliferation of game genres: puzzleplatforms (a hybrid that combines spatial or cognitive puzzles with jumps across platforms as in Super Mario Bros. [Nintendo, 1983]); survival horror games (action-adventure games in which the player must persist in a threatening environment without adequate resources);","PeriodicalId":45756,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN LITERATURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-01-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48615425","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 : 2022-01-27DOI: 10.1215/00029831-9697057
Gary Kafer
Game media have long participated in projects of nation building by remediating historical, political, and social relations in ways that reinforce affective processes of national belonging. The genre of border games in particular is well-known for staging the discursive and symbolic value of national boundaries through the deployment of specific gameplay mechanics and storytelling elements. However, as this essay argues, border games do more than merely represent borders in games; they reflect how borders themselves might be experienced as games within the cultural logic of gamification. Through an analysis of Lucas Pope’s independently produced American video game Papers, Please (2013), this article interrogates gamification as a rhetorical process that communicates how play dynamics sustain the procedural logics of border security and citizenship. Such logics, the game suggests, are marked by the installment of a series of rule-based interactions that modulate affect within the sociotechnical mechanics of state-sanctioned racism to enable the proper flow of both play and mobility. However, through failure, the game also reveals gamification to be an incomplete diagram of control, one where the priming of affect rubs up against the sociopolitical frictions that shape individual play experiences. Ultimately, this article argues that border games like Papers, Please enable players to experiment with the forms of national belonging that subtend our experiences of gamification.
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Pub Date : 2022-01-27DOI: 10.1215/00029831-9697043
Katrina Marks
This article discusses the popular video game Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018) by Rockstar Games, which follows Arthur Morgan, a white outlaw, during the decline of the “Wild West” in 1898 and 1899. Taking up conversations of fugitivity in critical ethnic studies, this article maintains that fugitivity operates as a rhetorical trope that stands in for racial identity where the logic of postracialism denies investments in race. Analyzing the narrative, spatial, and kinesthetic elements of the game, this article argues that Morgan, and by extension the player, is aligned with historically and geographically racialized others through a fugitive relationship to space. While Rockstar, as a video game studio, may not see itself explicitly intervening in a racialized and racializing political imaginary in its fictional worldbuilding, the kinesthetic, narrative, and cartographic strategies the studio employs respond to a set of cultural assumptions rooted in the rhetoric of postracialism. As such, Red Dead Redemption 2 serves as a multifaceted text through which to interrogate the dynamics of that rhetoric as it is mobilized in representations of fugitivity and identity.
本文讨论了Rockstar Games的热门电子游戏《Red Dead Redemption 2》（2018），该游戏讲述了1898年和1899年“狂野西部”衰落期间白人亡命之徒亚瑟·摩根的故事。本文讨论了批判性种族研究中关于赋格性的对话，认为赋格性是一种修辞修辞，代表了种族认同，而后种族主义的逻辑否认了对种族的投资。通过分析游戏的叙事、空间和动觉元素，本文认为摩根，以及玩家，通过与空间的逃亡关系，与历史上和地理上种族化的其他人结盟。虽然Rockstar作为一家电子游戏工作室，可能不会在其虚构的世界构建中明确干预种族化和种族化的政治想象，但该工作室采用的动觉、叙事和制图策略回应了一系列植根于后种族主义修辞的文化假设。因此，《Red Dead Redemption 2》是一部多方面的文本，通过它来质疑这种修辞的动态，因为它被动员起来代表了赋格性和身份。
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