Browsing by Subject "African American literature"

"The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions," writes Thoreau: "Let us spend our lives in conceiving then." This dissertation depicts how Thoreau's fellow antebellum antislavery writers discerned the power of concepts to shape "the universe." Wishing for a new universe, one free of slavery, they spent their lives crafting new concepts. "Ground Plans" argues that antebellum antislavery writers confiscated the concept of nature from proslavery forces and fundamentally redefined it. Advocates of slavery routinely rationalized slave society by referencing a particular conception of nature--as static, transhistorical, and hierarchical--claiming that slavery simply mirrored the natural, permanent racial order. This dissertation demonstrates that to combat slavery's claim to naturalness, antislavery writers reconceptualized nature as composed of dynamic species and races, evolving in relation to one another. In four chapters on David Walker, Harriet Jacobs, William Wells Brown, and Gerrit Smith, it shows that this theory of nature enabled these writers to argue for the complete transformation of society to bring it into line with what they characterized as nature's true principles. This dissertation thus restores the concept of nature as a crucial intellectual battleground for abolitionism. Moreover, it shows these politically-charged antebellum debates over nature's meaning to be crucial to the story of natural science, showing that abolitionists speculated on the natural principles that would eventually constitute the founding insights of ecology.

This dissertation argues that the American conception of individuality underwent a significant cultural and intellectual revision between the 1870s and 1910s, which laid the groundwork for what would eventually become the neoliberal individual. Where the individual of liberalism was primarily characterized by Property ownership, the last few decades of the 1800s witnessed an increase in efforts to tie individuality to choice-making. The narrative that began to gain prominence in the 1870s was the story of an individual carefully assessing its desires and, through its choices, directly expressing these wishes to the world. This association between choice and the individual did not mean that Property ceased to matter as a category; rather, Property became so fundamental an assumption that its origins––at least to some parts of the population––ceased to require an explanation.I trace this shift from property-owning to choice-making individuality through the two genres of writing that, since the advent of modernity, have consistently articulated what it means to be the subject of capitalism: economics and the novel. Neoclassical economics famously introduced the rational, utility-maximizing individual to the discipline in the 1870s, which would come to be a highly influential narrative in the quantitative social sciences of the twentieth century. As Chapter One shows, this development in economics was paralleled by an increase in novelistic depictions of self-interested decision making as ethical, which constitutes a marked departure from the sentimental logic of earlier nineteenth-century literature. This narrative did not go unchallenged, however: Economists and novelists from Thorstein Veblen to W.E.B. Du Bois pointed out that choice-making individuality is only a believable narrative for those who fit the White middle-class mold. As I show in Chapter Two, “The Conditioned Individual,” novelists like Theodore Dreiser and Edith Wharton, as well as Veblen and the institutional economists he inspired, depicted social milieu is the primary determinant of tastes and desires. As such, they argued, what one ostensibly wants does not amount to an authentic expression of self. Du Bois and his fellow African American novelists, we see in Chapter Three, mount an even more fundamental critique: the Property presupposed by the choice-making individual, they demonstrate, relies on a long-standing practice of expropriating a racial Other. Along with Pauline Hopkins and Sutton Griggs, Du Bois shows that sharecropping and Jim Crow legislation established a social order in which Black self-ownership remained tenuous, thus reinforcing a dividing line crucial to White identity, namely the one between the Propertied and the Unpropertied. Hopkins’s, Griggs’s, and Du Bois’s insistence on the importance of Property in the White imaginary suggests that at least one reason for the rising popularity of the choice narrative in the late nineteenth century was that it served to conceal the deep reliance of Whiteness on Property and its racial Other––a project particularly urgent in the wake of the abolition of slavery.

This project charts the emergence of a postrace aesthetic in American fiction. It examines how American novels respond to the pressures of what has been called the paradox of the postrace era: that our images and rhetoric portray a nation moving toward racial equality while our statistics actually reveal the opposite. I argue that through the use of features such as futuristic orientation, racially unmarked characters, and the reconfiguration of racial groupings, postrace novels attempt to unsettle our notions of race – a paradoxical endeavor, for attempts to unsettle a category ultimately invoke it again. Capable of interrogating emergent cultural phenomena, postrace novels provide a crucial vantage point from which we can interpret the shifting operations of race in the 21st century.

Posthumous Persona(r)e: Machado de Assis, Black Writing, and the African Diaspora Literary Apparatus analyzes the life writings of Machado de Assis (1839-1908) in light of the conditions of his critical reception and translation in English as a basis for scholarly production and pedagogy. The concept of the posthumous and its emergence as a major theme of Machado’s literary production links the dissertation’s independent chapters in exploration of a tripartite topography; the 1) the canon of African American literature; 2) the history of African diaspora peoples; and 3) in his own life and writings.

A simple question motivates the entire project which expands in order to unpack the signifying manners of black texts: “what is writing?” The term “black writing” says no more than the word “writing” in context of a Machadian literary praxis that understands reading as a black thing. I argue, from the standpoints of phenomenology, sociolinguistics, and literary theory that the powers of black writing represent the sine qua non of basic literacy in Machado’s oeuvre and the history of writing itself.

The interrelation of writing, personhood, and posthumousness in Machado’s lifework questions writing through writing, and race through race, meditating on descent and creation in exile. Posthumous Persona(r)e casts a wide theoretical net for the critical overhaul and comparative analysis of his African diasporic contemporaries, illuminating a vast record of archival and spiritual correspondences all housed under the capacious milieu of the posthumous. Ultimate findings on the nature of writing in African diaspora reveal ways in which Machado’s writings and global renown have come to evince the resolute victory of the posthumous over worldly forces, and of what is written over what is effaced, even as his legacy has outlived successive regimes of domestic and international silencing of black individuals and communities.

In attempting to translate subtleties of the Afro-Brazilian cultural, linguistic, and historical matrix, the trajectory of which uniquely distinguish the writings and thought of Machado de Assis, I make references to classic works of criticism, anthropology, religious studies, and ethnography in order to demonstrate under-appreciated modes and traditions of writing fathomed by his literary production. In the course of reviewing notable works and critical trends in Machadian scholarship in the English language and in Portuguese, I offer an overview of significant moments of erasure that Machado's “literary life” have resiliently endured. Tracking poetic and theoretical material in its stylistic development rom the beginnings of his publishing career, in 1854, to the advent of his national fame with the publication of The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, in 1881, the dissertation fancies itself a posthumous memoir of his abiding youth.

The study of the conditions under which black writing in the Americas is performed functions as prolegomena to the study of African diaspora literatures in translation from immanent theoretical groundings. Posthumous Persona(r)e finds black writing in the Americas a record of African lifeways and worldviews in diaspora that express coherences of the social and spiritual life shared in common across the imagined borders of self, community, and the living. By referring to works of literature and criticism by Machado de Assis, W.E.B. Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, and James Weldon Johnson in the reading of Machado’s own lifework against the historical backdrop of their respective investments in print culture, a topography of the social network and literary apparatus of the black press comes into view as an historical entity which exists in relation to a social network in the history of quilombo.

"Reading the Street" chronicles the rise of black pulp fiction in the post-civil rights era from the perspective of its urban readership. Black pulp fiction was originally published in the late 1960s and early 1970s; it consisted of paperback novels about tough male characters navigating the pitfalls of urban life. These novels appealed mainly to inner-city readers who felt left out of civil rights' and Black Power's promises of social equality. Despite the historic achievements of the civil rights movement, entrenched structural inequalities led to America's ghettos becoming sites of concentrated poverty, rampant unemployment, and violent crime. While mainstream society seemed to turn a blind eye to how these problems were destroying inner-city communities, readers turned to black pulp fiction for the imaginative resources that would help them reflect on their social reality. In black pulp fiction, readers found confirmation that America was not on the path toward extending equal opportunities to its most vulnerable citizens, or that the rise of Black Power signaled a change in their fortunes. Yet in black pulp fiction readers also found confirmation that their lives as marginalized subjects possessed a value of its own, and that their day-to-day struggles opened up new ways of "being black" amid the blight of the inner city.