J. Samaine Lockwood
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781469625362
- eISBN:
- 9781469625386
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469625362.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American Colonial Literature
In this thought-provoking study of nineteenth-century America, J. Samaine Lockwood offers an important new interpretation of the literary movement known as American regionalism. Lockwood argues that ...
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In this thought-provoking study of nineteenth-century America, J. Samaine Lockwood offers an important new interpretation of the literary movement known as American regionalism. Lockwood argues that regionalism in New England was part of a widespread woman-dominated effort to rewrite history. Lockwood demonstrates that New England regionalism was an intellectual endeavor that overlapped with colonial revivalism and included fiction and history writing, antique collecting, colonial home restoration, and photography. The cohort of writers and artists leading this movement included Sarah Orne Jewett, Alice Morse Earle, and C. Alice Baker, and their project was taken up by women of a younger generation, such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, who extended regionalism through the modernist moment. Lockwood draws on a diverse archive that includes fiction, material culture, collecting guides, and more. Showing how these women intellectuals aligned themselves with a powerful legacy of social and cultural dissent, Lockwood reveals that New England regionalism performed queer historical work, placing unmarried women and their myriad desires at the center of both regional and national history.Less
In this thought-provoking study of nineteenth-century America, J. Samaine Lockwood offers an important new interpretation of the literary movement known as American regionalism. Lockwood argues that regionalism in New England was part of a widespread woman-dominated effort to rewrite history. Lockwood demonstrates that New England regionalism was an intellectual endeavor that overlapped with colonial revivalism and included fiction and history writing, antique collecting, colonial home restoration, and photography. The cohort of writers and artists leading this movement included Sarah Orne Jewett, Alice Morse Earle, and C. Alice Baker, and their project was taken up by women of a younger generation, such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, who extended regionalism through the modernist moment. Lockwood draws on a diverse archive that includes fiction, material culture, collecting guides, and more. Showing how these women intellectuals aligned themselves with a powerful legacy of social and cultural dissent, Lockwood reveals that New England regionalism performed queer historical work, placing unmarried women and their myriad desires at the center of both regional and national history.
Molly Farrell
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780190277314
- eISBN:
- 9780190277338
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190277314.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American Colonial Literature, American, 18th Century and Early American Literature
Quantifiable citizenship—in the form of birth certificates, census forms, and immigration quotas—is so ubiquitous that today it appears ahistorical. Yet before the modern colonial era, there was ...
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Quantifiable citizenship—in the form of birth certificates, census forms, and immigration quotas—is so ubiquitous that today it appears ahistorical. Yet before the modern colonial era, there was neither a word for “population” in the sense of numbers of people, nor agreement that monarchs should count their subjects. Much of the work of naturalizing the view that people can be represented as populations took place far outside government institutions and philosophical treatises. It occurred, instead, in the work of colonial writers such as Mary Rowlandson, who found, in the act of counting the “vast numbers” of Indians who held her captive, a way to imagine fixed boundaries between intermingling groups. This book explores the imaginative, personal, and narrative writings that performed the cultural work of normalizing the enumeration of bodies. By repositioning and unearthing a literary prehistory of population science, the book shows that representing individuals as numbers was a central element of colonial projects. Early colonial writings that describe routine, and even intimate, interactions offer a window into the way people wove the quantifiable forms of subjectivity made available by population counts into everyday life. Whether trying to make sense of plantation slavery, frontier warfare, rapid migration, or global commerce, writers framed questions about human relationships across different cultures and generations in terms of population.Less
Quantifiable citizenship—in the form of birth certificates, census forms, and immigration quotas—is so ubiquitous that today it appears ahistorical. Yet before the modern colonial era, there was neither a word for “population” in the sense of numbers of people, nor agreement that monarchs should count their subjects. Much of the work of naturalizing the view that people can be represented as populations took place far outside government institutions and philosophical treatises. It occurred, instead, in the work of colonial writers such as Mary Rowlandson, who found, in the act of counting the “vast numbers” of Indians who held her captive, a way to imagine fixed boundaries between intermingling groups. This book explores the imaginative, personal, and narrative writings that performed the cultural work of normalizing the enumeration of bodies. By repositioning and unearthing a literary prehistory of population science, the book shows that representing individuals as numbers was a central element of colonial projects. Early colonial writings that describe routine, and even intimate, interactions offer a window into the way people wove the quantifiable forms of subjectivity made available by population counts into everyday life. Whether trying to make sense of plantation slavery, frontier warfare, rapid migration, or global commerce, writers framed questions about human relationships across different cultures and generations in terms of population.
Jonathan Elmer
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780823229406
- eISBN:
- 9780823240982
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823229406.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American Colonial Literature
What are we talking about when we talk about sovereignty? Is it about formal legitimacy or practical authority? Does it require the ability to control the flow of people or goods across a border; is ...
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What are we talking about when we talk about sovereignty? Is it about formal legitimacy or practical authority? Does it require the ability to control the flow of people or goods across a border; is it primarily a principle of international recognition; or does its essence lie in the power to regulate the lives of a state's citizens? Political theorists, historians, scholars of international relations, lawyers, anthropologists, literary critics all approach the dilemmas of sovereign power with a mixture of urgency and frustration. In this book, the author argues that the logic of sovereignty that emerged in early modern Europe and that limits our thinking today must be understood as a fundamentally racialized logic, first visible in the New World. The modern concept of sovereignty is based on a trope of personification, the conjunction of individual and collective identities. In Grotius, Hobbes, and others, a fiction of sovereign autonomy enabled states to be personified as individuals, as bodies politic, even as individual humans could be imagined as miniature states. The contradictions of this logic were fully revealed only in the New World, as writers ranging from Aphra Behn to Thomas Jefferson and Herman Melville demonstrate. The racialized sovereign figures examined in this book are always at once a person and a people. They embody the connection between the individual and the collectivity, and thereby reveal that the volatile work of sovereign personification takes place in a new world constituted both by concepts of equality, homogeneity, and symmetry and by the realities of racial domination and ideology in the era of colonial expansion.Less
What are we talking about when we talk about sovereignty? Is it about formal legitimacy or practical authority? Does it require the ability to control the flow of people or goods across a border; is it primarily a principle of international recognition; or does its essence lie in the power to regulate the lives of a state's citizens? Political theorists, historians, scholars of international relations, lawyers, anthropologists, literary critics all approach the dilemmas of sovereign power with a mixture of urgency and frustration. In this book, the author argues that the logic of sovereignty that emerged in early modern Europe and that limits our thinking today must be understood as a fundamentally racialized logic, first visible in the New World. The modern concept of sovereignty is based on a trope of personification, the conjunction of individual and collective identities. In Grotius, Hobbes, and others, a fiction of sovereign autonomy enabled states to be personified as individuals, as bodies politic, even as individual humans could be imagined as miniature states. The contradictions of this logic were fully revealed only in the New World, as writers ranging from Aphra Behn to Thomas Jefferson and Herman Melville demonstrate. The racialized sovereign figures examined in this book are always at once a person and a people. They embody the connection between the individual and the collectivity, and thereby reveal that the volatile work of sovereign personification takes place in a new world constituted both by concepts of equality, homogeneity, and symmetry and by the realities of racial domination and ideology in the era of colonial expansion.
Russ Castronovo
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- August 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199354900
- eISBN:
- 9780199354931
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199354900.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American Colonial Literature
This book considers the extent to which the dispersal and circulation—indeed, the propagation—of information and opinion across the various media of the eighteenth century helped speed the flow of ...
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This book considers the extent to which the dispersal and circulation—indeed, the propagation—of information and opinion across the various media of the eighteenth century helped speed the flow of transatlantic republicanism. Long a pejorative word since its associations with flag—waving and jingoism, propaganda would hardly seem a useful concept for understanding democracy. After all, spreading false information, manipulating citizens, and other propaganda techniques are preferred by totalitarian states, not democratic ones. This book questions such conventional wisdom by examining how the formation of popular consent and public opinion in early America relied on the spirited dissemination of rumor, forgery, and invective. Instead of pinning meaning to Enlightenment rationality or national consensus, propaganda infused print culture with the ferment of transatlantic republicanism to widen political discourse beyond either the strictly empirical or official public opinion. The spread of Revolutionary material in the form of newspapers, pamphlets, broadsides, letters, songs, and poems across British North America created multiple networks that spawned new and often radical ideas about political communication. These networks also encompassed the Caribbean and France after 1789, which became flash points for reflecting on the changing meanings of the American Revolution. Across the Atlantic of the late eighteenth century, communication itself became revolutionary in ways that revealed circulation to be propaganda’s most vital content. By examining the kinetic aspects of print culture, the book shows how the mobility of letters, pamphlets, and other text amounts to political activity par excellence.Less
This book considers the extent to which the dispersal and circulation—indeed, the propagation—of information and opinion across the various media of the eighteenth century helped speed the flow of transatlantic republicanism. Long a pejorative word since its associations with flag—waving and jingoism, propaganda would hardly seem a useful concept for understanding democracy. After all, spreading false information, manipulating citizens, and other propaganda techniques are preferred by totalitarian states, not democratic ones. This book questions such conventional wisdom by examining how the formation of popular consent and public opinion in early America relied on the spirited dissemination of rumor, forgery, and invective. Instead of pinning meaning to Enlightenment rationality or national consensus, propaganda infused print culture with the ferment of transatlantic republicanism to widen political discourse beyond either the strictly empirical or official public opinion. The spread of Revolutionary material in the form of newspapers, pamphlets, broadsides, letters, songs, and poems across British North America created multiple networks that spawned new and often radical ideas about political communication. These networks also encompassed the Caribbean and France after 1789, which became flash points for reflecting on the changing meanings of the American Revolution. Across the Atlantic of the late eighteenth century, communication itself became revolutionary in ways that revealed circulation to be propaganda’s most vital content. By examining the kinetic aspects of print culture, the book shows how the mobility of letters, pamphlets, and other text amounts to political activity par excellence.
Viet Thanh Nguyen
- Published in print:
- 2002
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780195146998
- eISBN:
- 9780199787890
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195146998.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American Colonial Literature
This book argues that Asian American intellectuals have idealized Asian America, ignoring its saturation with capitalist practices. The idealization of Asian America means that Asian American ...
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This book argues that Asian American intellectuals have idealized Asian America, ignoring its saturation with capitalist practices. The idealization of Asian America means that Asian American intellectuals can neither grapple with Asian American ideological diversity nor recognize their own involvement with capitalist practices such as “panethnic entrepreneurship”, the selling of race and racial identity. The book's controversial thesis contradicts the widespread view among Asian American intellectuals — a class that includes academics, artists, politicians, and activists — that contemporary Asian America is a place of resistance to capitalist and racist exploitation. Making its case through a wide range of Asian American literature, which remains a critical arena of cultural production for Asian Americans, the book demonstrates that the literature embodies the complexities, conflicts, and potential future options of Asian American culture and politics.Less
This book argues that Asian American intellectuals have idealized Asian America, ignoring its saturation with capitalist practices. The idealization of Asian America means that Asian American intellectuals can neither grapple with Asian American ideological diversity nor recognize their own involvement with capitalist practices such as “panethnic entrepreneurship”, the selling of race and racial identity. The book's controversial thesis contradicts the widespread view among Asian American intellectuals — a class that includes academics, artists, politicians, and activists — that contemporary Asian America is a place of resistance to capitalist and racist exploitation. Making its case through a wide range of Asian American literature, which remains a critical arena of cultural production for Asian Americans, the book demonstrates that the literature embodies the complexities, conflicts, and potential future options of Asian American culture and politics.
Adam Lifshey
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780823232383
- eISBN:
- 9780823241187
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823232383.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American Colonial Literature
This book posits America as not a particular country or continent but a foundational narrative, in which conquerors arrive at a shore intent on overwriting local versions of humanity, culture, and ...
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This book posits America as not a particular country or continent but a foundational narrative, in which conquerors arrive at a shore intent on overwriting local versions of humanity, culture, and landscape with inscriptions of their own design. This imposition of foreign textualities, however dominant, is never complete because the absences of the disappeared still linger manifestly. That apparent paradox results in a haunted America, whose conquest is always partial and whose conquered are always contestatory. Readers of scholarship by transatlanticists such as Paul Gilroy and hemispherists such as Diana Taylor will find new conceptualizations here of an America that knows no geographic boundaries, whose absences are collective but not necessarily interrelated by genealogy. The five principal texts at hand — Columbus's diary of his first voyage, the Popol Vuh of the Maya-K'iche', Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Evita's Cuando los Combes luchaban (the first African novel in Spanish), and Pynchon's Mason & Dixon — are examined as foundational stories of America in their imaginings of its transatlantic commencement. Interspersed too are shorter studies of narratives by William Carlos Williams, Rigoberta Menchú, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, José Martí, Mark Knopfler (former lead singer of Dire Straits) and Gabriel García Márquez. These texts are rarely if ever read together because of their discrete provenances in time and place, yet their juxtaposition reveals how the disjunctions and ruptures that took place on the eastern and western shores of the Atlantic upon the arrival of Europeans became insinuated as recurring and resistant absences in narratives ostensibly contextualized by the Conquest.Less
This book posits America as not a particular country or continent but a foundational narrative, in which conquerors arrive at a shore intent on overwriting local versions of humanity, culture, and landscape with inscriptions of their own design. This imposition of foreign textualities, however dominant, is never complete because the absences of the disappeared still linger manifestly. That apparent paradox results in a haunted America, whose conquest is always partial and whose conquered are always contestatory. Readers of scholarship by transatlanticists such as Paul Gilroy and hemispherists such as Diana Taylor will find new conceptualizations here of an America that knows no geographic boundaries, whose absences are collective but not necessarily interrelated by genealogy. The five principal texts at hand — Columbus's diary of his first voyage, the Popol Vuh of the Maya-K'iche', Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Evita's Cuando los Combes luchaban (the first African novel in Spanish), and Pynchon's Mason & Dixon — are examined as foundational stories of America in their imaginings of its transatlantic commencement. Interspersed too are shorter studies of narratives by William Carlos Williams, Rigoberta Menchú, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, José Martí, Mark Knopfler (former lead singer of Dire Straits) and Gabriel García Márquez. These texts are rarely if ever read together because of their discrete provenances in time and place, yet their juxtaposition reveals how the disjunctions and ruptures that took place on the eastern and western shores of the Atlantic upon the arrival of Europeans became insinuated as recurring and resistant absences in narratives ostensibly contextualized by the Conquest.
Sarah Rivett
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- November 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780190492564
- eISBN:
- 9780190492595
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190492564.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American Colonial Literature
From their earliest encounters in the Americas, Europeans struggled to make sense of the words spoken by the numerous indigenous tribes that surrounded them. Unscripted America recounts a colonial ...
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From their earliest encounters in the Americas, Europeans struggled to make sense of the words spoken by the numerous indigenous tribes that surrounded them. Unscripted America recounts a colonial struggle between peoples of European descent who aspired to map native languages according to Christian and Enlightenment cosmologies and indigenous resistance to this ascribed meaning. Unscripted America reconstructs an archive of indigenous language texts in order to present a new account of their impact of comparative philology on the formation of US literary culture. American Indian language texts reveal poignant and contradictory histories of preservation through erasure: each stands as a record of colonial destruction as well as an archive ready for recovery and recuperation. Unscripted America places American Indian languages within transatlantic intellectual history, while also demonstrating how American letters emerged in the 1810s through 1830s via a complex and hitherto unexplored engagement with the legacies and aesthetic possibilities of indigenous words. What scholars have more traditionally understood through the Romantic ideology of the noble savage, a vessel of antiquity among dying populations, was in fact a palimpsest of still-living indigenous populations whose presence in American literature remains traceable through words.Less
From their earliest encounters in the Americas, Europeans struggled to make sense of the words spoken by the numerous indigenous tribes that surrounded them. Unscripted America recounts a colonial struggle between peoples of European descent who aspired to map native languages according to Christian and Enlightenment cosmologies and indigenous resistance to this ascribed meaning. Unscripted America reconstructs an archive of indigenous language texts in order to present a new account of their impact of comparative philology on the formation of US literary culture. American Indian language texts reveal poignant and contradictory histories of preservation through erasure: each stands as a record of colonial destruction as well as an archive ready for recovery and recuperation. Unscripted America places American Indian languages within transatlantic intellectual history, while also demonstrating how American letters emerged in the 1810s through 1830s via a complex and hitherto unexplored engagement with the legacies and aesthetic possibilities of indigenous words. What scholars have more traditionally understood through the Romantic ideology of the noble savage, a vessel of antiquity among dying populations, was in fact a palimpsest of still-living indigenous populations whose presence in American literature remains traceable through words.
Anna Brickhouse
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- October 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199729722
- eISBN:
- 9780199399307
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199729722.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American Colonial Literature
This book explores the career and legacy of Don Luis de Velasco, an early modern indigenous translator of the sixteenth-century Atlantic world who traveled far and wide and experienced nearly a ...
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This book explores the career and legacy of Don Luis de Velasco, an early modern indigenous translator of the sixteenth-century Atlantic world who traveled far and wide and experienced nearly a decade of Western civilization before acting decisively against European settlement. The book attends specifically to the interpretive and knowledge-producing roles played by Don Luis as a translator, acting not only in Native-European contact zones but in a complex arena of interindigenous transmission of information about the hemisphere. The book argues for the conceptual and literary significance of unsettlement, a term enlisted here both in its literal sense as the thwarting or destroying of settlement, and as a heuristic for understanding a wide range of texts related to settler colonialism, including those that recount the story of Don Luis as it is told and retold in a wide array of diplomatic, religious, historical, epistolary, and literary writings from the middle of the sixteenth century to the middle of the twentieth. Tracing accounts of this elusive and complex unfounding father from the colonial era as they unfold across the centuries, This book addresses the problems of translation at the heart of his story and speculates on the implications of the broader, transhistorical afterlife of Don Luis for the present and future of hemispheric American studies.Less
This book explores the career and legacy of Don Luis de Velasco, an early modern indigenous translator of the sixteenth-century Atlantic world who traveled far and wide and experienced nearly a decade of Western civilization before acting decisively against European settlement. The book attends specifically to the interpretive and knowledge-producing roles played by Don Luis as a translator, acting not only in Native-European contact zones but in a complex arena of interindigenous transmission of information about the hemisphere. The book argues for the conceptual and literary significance of unsettlement, a term enlisted here both in its literal sense as the thwarting or destroying of settlement, and as a heuristic for understanding a wide range of texts related to settler colonialism, including those that recount the story of Don Luis as it is told and retold in a wide array of diplomatic, religious, historical, epistolary, and literary writings from the middle of the sixteenth century to the middle of the twentieth. Tracing accounts of this elusive and complex unfounding father from the colonial era as they unfold across the centuries, This book addresses the problems of translation at the heart of his story and speculates on the implications of the broader, transhistorical afterlife of Don Luis for the present and future of hemispheric American studies.
Philip Gould
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199967896
- eISBN:
- 9780199346073
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199967896.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American Colonial Literature, American, 18th Century and Early American Literature
Why has Revolutionary literary studies largely ignored the writings of those who opposed the American Rebellion? This study of the literature of politics reconsiders the place of the British American ...
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Why has Revolutionary literary studies largely ignored the writings of those who opposed the American Rebellion? This study of the literature of politics reconsiders the place of the British American Loyalists in early American literary history. By imagining the Revolution as an episode in transatlantic literary history, it explores the relations between aesthetics and politics during a crucial transitional period in which both Loyalists and Patriots were redefining their respective relations to “English” culture. Rather than pointing the ambivalence expressed by Loyalists writings, however, it argues for the dislocation and alienation Loyalists experienced, and thereby challenges the traditional image of this group as the only true Anglophiles in British America. Each chapter goes on to discuss an important literary and aesthetic form that shaped—and was shaped by—Revolutionary politics. It recasts the literature of politics as the place where British Americans were also working out their cultural identities and identifications with the British nation.Less
Why has Revolutionary literary studies largely ignored the writings of those who opposed the American Rebellion? This study of the literature of politics reconsiders the place of the British American Loyalists in early American literary history. By imagining the Revolution as an episode in transatlantic literary history, it explores the relations between aesthetics and politics during a crucial transitional period in which both Loyalists and Patriots were redefining their respective relations to “English” culture. Rather than pointing the ambivalence expressed by Loyalists writings, however, it argues for the dislocation and alienation Loyalists experienced, and thereby challenges the traditional image of this group as the only true Anglophiles in British America. Each chapter goes on to discuss an important literary and aesthetic form that shaped—and was shaped by—Revolutionary politics. It recasts the literature of politics as the place where British Americans were also working out their cultural identities and identifications with the British nation.
