Report // Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Health Humanities: Scholars in Conversation, 28 May 2024

Part One: Body Language

May of 2024 saw an unusually happy coincidence of Nineteenth Century-ists in Paris (to summon a symphony from another reality). Four scholars — Sari Altschuler, Shari Goldberg, Cynthia J. Davis and Justine Murison — were able to come together for an A19 session focussed on the health humanities. The session thus inaugurated a transatlantic conversation between A19, Project AmHealth and their American friends and collaborators: a conversation due to continue with a panel at MLA 25 in New Orleans this January. The meeting was also a chance to celebrate the publication of “Pain,” a special issue of American Literature edited by A19/Project AmHealth’s Thomas Constantinesco, and Sari Altschuler. The issue had been a long work of collaboration with pre-pandemic roots, and this in-person session was a fine testament to a collective scholarly and personal resilience over the last few years. The issue features essays from six writers (including Goldberg and Davis), each of which achieve the none-too-simple task of making a broad intervention suited to American Literature as host, while staying grounded in close, often startling textual analysis.  While pain was not the listed topic of the session itself, the shapes of thinking sketched by Altschuler and Constantinesco in the issue’s introduction flared up throughout the afternoon’s papers. To talk about health is to talk about pain: as health’s opposite, evidence of its diminishing, or as a troubling prerequisite for participation in emotionally “healthy” societies. The papers bore out what Altschuler and Constantinesco mark as the three ‘paradigm shifts’ in the study of pain (which is the study of health) after 2020: pain’s multiplicity, the simultaneity of its personal/political/historical dimensions, and the need to embrace new, non-empirical ways of its being known. The session thus offered a snapshot of health as a phenomenon uniquely, even vitally permeable to literary study, and its expertise in difference and resemblance. 

Sari Altschuler was first on deck, with an adapted version of a paper published earlier this year in PMLA: “Babo’s ‘Mute’-ny: Deaf Culture and Black Testimony in Antebellum America”. Having struggled to get my own puns through in the past, I am glad the editors let Altschuler’s stand. Like the best quibbles, it asks its own question: how can a mutiny, a collectively-voiced act of resistance, be mute? This riddle charges, or perhaps simply is, Melville’s Benito Cereno (1855), his fictionalised account of a revolt aboard a slave ship, led by the mute Babo. Altschuler offered A19 an accretive reading in which Babo’s muteness becomes profoundly and provocatively eloquent. To take from the article: “understood formally and historically, Melville’s representation of muteness moves readers beyond the dichotomies of words/deeds and speech/silence as frameworks for thinking about Black communication.” This is a reading firmly embedded in nineteenth-century disability cultures. While Babo is not himself deaf, Altschuler proposed that the growing visibility of deafness and signing in the midcentury allowed Melville to raise the possibility of different communicative methods and their value for otherwise unheard Black populations. This session came just as I had finished writing a chapter of my own on nineteenth-century deaf literature. Because this work ended later in the century, it had to deal with the corollary of the deaf/Deaf optimism which charged Altschuler’s talk. The years in which sign language was recognised as a viable communicative method, capable of an eloquence equivalent to spoken English, were few, and by the century’s end the campaign to remove signing from deaf schools was beyond assault. This longer history would be tricky to build into a reading of Benito Cereno, which is something of a closed system, taking place as it does on one of Melville’s ultra-formal ship-worlds, but Altschuler has opened such a vibrant connection between Blackness and deafness that I hope that work comes in time. 

I was also struck by the paper’s participation in a momentous (in the sense of having and gaining momentum) trend in Black literary studies: the undoing of the neoliberal search for ‘lost voices’ and a hidden history of Black feeling. I first encountered this movement in Jennifer Stoever’s The Sonic Color Line (2016), and it has since been given a manifesto in Xine Yao’s Disaffected (2021). These are very different works, but together they request a reset of what literary scholarship wants from and looks for in Black literary testimony. To seek out the sentimental, the textual open wound, is, Yao suggests, counterintuitively comforting to the white reader who expects or demands it. She asks, instead, “what we can apprehend if we stay with the negativity of unfeeling and suspend its rehabilitation”. For Yao, Babo is “the treacherous Black unfeeling object”. Altschuler’s essay complements and complicates this restorative devoicing, showing that Babo can be read as both silent and communicative, as long as we embrace the potential for expressive technique outside the white, abled norm. His voice isn’t lost, it just requires a different kind of listening. 

Shari Goldberg built upon Altschuler’s opening with a paper on another species of Black bodily eloquence, based on her piece for the American Literature special issue. She began with the kind of elegant provocation that I imagine many of us are daily searching for: what if we were to read the widespread language of heartbreak and heartache in slave narratives (and beyond) not only as sentimental trope, but as a documenting of physical symptoms? What if, in essence, sentiment was always also sensation? That is, Goldberg admitted, a hard pill to swallow. We might well be wary of “bringing literality to bear on what is usually taken metaphorically”, in case that literality undoes the figuration which carries it. But equally (and here again we are in the gravitational pull of Disaffected), what if sentiment is only what we wanted to find in the literature of suffering — what if our horizon of expectation is limited by our desire for emotionally legible Black subjects? Goldberg’s reading of Harriet Jacobs showed us how a reading of heartache as an always layered experience of emotional and physical pain can offer a productive challenge to scholars of slave narratives. She showed us what it would mean to refuse to read all heart talk as “mere convention for wrenching emotion”. Instead, she suggests, “each instance of heart refers to itself: the subject’s heart at a given moment, requiring context, nuance, and interpretation”. This taps into the expanded definition of pain promoted by Altschuler and Constantinesco’s introduction, a “multiscalar” understanding wherein pain’s emotional and physical dimensions are uniquely active even if they cannot be held apart by either the observer or the subject themself. That contradiction charges Goldberg’s “story of the heart”. 

The trickiness lies in what this reading (and, by extension, Yao’s) does to sentimentalism as form and genre. To talk about “mere convention” in a writer like Jacobs, who actively sought out the editorial backing of celebrity sentimentalists, might be to underplay her literary achievement. Goldberg shows that Jacobs could do both, that she could write a “simultext” which trades on convention even as it encodes a personal history of pain, but I wonder if that reading would have happened without a catalytic suspicion of the sentimental as inherently insufficient, unbefitting or problematic. I don’t have an answer to offer to this blog, but it seems like as good a place as any to ask the question. I would be the first one in the room to say that the search for overlooked complexity should remain the literary scholar’s basic task. That a heart can hurt both in and out of metaphor is a superb, pathfinding read, and I’ve filed Goldberg’s essay in the folder of “must teach”. But I suppose I would warn my students that reading the sentimental on its own terms must come first. If the genre seems to us too open and thus foreclosed to interpretation, that might be a challenge to face up to nineteenth-century pain as uniquely exposed and textually fungible, and to reckon with why that makes us uncomfortable. This is, in the end, exactly Goldberg’s point: we should listen when someone tells us their heart is aching, and not let one kind of pain forestall another. If we can focus on that layered pain in our reading without denigrating the genre that permits its expression as somehow “mere” or regrettable convention, we will surely reap the rewards.  

Jamie Fenton

 

Part Two: Inside Out

Bringing pain, one of the central loci of the health humanities, into focus, Cynthia Davis examined the social and historical dynamics involved in the valorisation of both highly privatised and singularly lively affective interiorities laid bare in Kate Chopin’s and Edith Wharton’s high realist fin-de-siècle novels. Chopin’s The Awakening (1899) and Wharton’s The Reef (1912) depart from the traditional schematisation that places pleasurable hedonic feelings above painful ones and instead classify affective experiences according to their (un)conventionality and outward expressiveness (or, more often, lack thereof), treating physical and/or mental anguish as an occasion for the authors’ upper-class white female protagonists to have a heightened experience and to enrich their already vast interiorities. As revealed by Davis’ selective close reading of the two novels, by consistently prioritising the feeling subject who simultaneously enjoys an intensely vibrant inner life, yet keeps it entirely contained behind an opaque façade, this coupling of affective dichotomies—typical vs. unique, private vs. public—extolls elite white subjects, whom these authors routinely invest with such (literally and figuratively) rich interiorities, and distinguishes them from the inferior emotional shallowness and demonstrativeness associated with marginalised race and class identities. Davis posited that both The Awakening and The Reef feature character pairings that hinge on accentuating the contrast between the “self-contained” emotions of the exceptional white socialite and the excessive animatedness of their racialised lower-class foil, where the latter novel takes on the additional negative connotation of typifying America itself. In this way, Chopin and Wharton subscribe to, as Davis put it, “a broader tendency, one that persists to this day, to reframe structural inequalities as individual affective differences.”

Perhaps the most striking element of Davis’ intervention was the impressively broad spectrum of historical interpretations that she put forth with the purpose of contextualising the two texts’ pointed valorisation of certain types of affective experiences over others. Davis saw the two authors’ preoccupation with individual uniqueness as at once a secular and feminised extension of the Emersonian philosophy of “Self-Reliance.” She likewise attributed Chopin and Wharton’s at times obsessive attitude towards privacy to their rapidly changing social conditions, which created anxiety around the modern American citizen’s right to an inviolate private life. Additionally, Davis proposed that the two authors resisted the growing pressure among the elites to display their affluence for the purpose of upholding their social standing, likely finding this alarming new tendency to flaunt one’s wealth personally distasteful. Finally, perhaps the most intriguing interpretation of all, was Davis’ idea that the US government’s adoption of statistical methods of classification triggered the upper-class individuals’ refusal to be reduced to statistical persons and to have their unique characteristics drowned in the void-like homogeneity of the average.

Sharing some of Davis’ concerns, Justine Murison’s paper likewise centred on privacy, though of a very different kind. Having a keen interest in the present and future of reproductive rights in the modern-day US in the aftermath of the Supreme Court overturning Roe vs. Wade in 2022, Murison gave a talk that at once exposed the long history of moral panics over public access to sexual health and elucidated literature’s role in the creation of laws that continue to haunt today’s political debate on reproductive rights. The laws in question are collectively referred to as the Comstock Act of 1873, also known as obscenity laws due to the fact that they placed a ban on circulating materials deemed “obscene” by post. Murison views this Act as something of a “Victorian zombie” resurrected in the public discourse by the pro-life movement, a zombie whose origins can be traced back to late nineteenth-century sensation fiction and several of its famous literary opponents. Through a series of close readings, namely of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Pink and White Tyranny (1871) and My Wife and I (1871), as well as of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868), Murison shed light on the birth of a figure that would go on to gain momentous importance in the following decades and even whole centuries: that of a vulnerable and impressionable white male boarding-school child, whose undiscerning mind is susceptible to be corrupted by “obscenities.” It was this highly susceptible reader, whose inadvertent exposure to even the most indirect or coldly scientific references to sex was guaranteed to lead to moral degradation, that was ultimately written into US law under the Comstock Act. As Murison showed, the moral protection of a hypothetical straw-child took precedence over American adults’ access to educational sexual health materials, in a mirrored version of today’s moral panic over the unregulated digital access to pornography (the definition of which, much like that of the word “obscenity,” often remains conveniently loose).

This fascinating talk on the history of the conflict between two kinds of freedom conceived as mutually exclusive, i.e. the freedom to exercise one’s religious rites and the freedom to make informed choices about one’s reproductive well-being, provided an insight into the depth of impact that literature can and does regularly have on people’s access to public health information and medical interventions, both essential and elective. In Murison’s case study, literature literally shaped the legal reality that dictates and limits the ways in which American women are able to care for their bodies today. In light of literature’s deep implication in the questions and praxes of public health, it is our job as scholars of health humanities to interrogate both its positive and negative contributions to US-specific and global medical landscapes alike.

The two scholars’ shared engagement with the question of privacy resulted in a productive exchange that highlighted literature’s often understated capacity to restrict (and, perhaps more crucially for health humanities scholars, to enable) the various social groups’ ability to access the care they need. If Murison’s research alerted us to literature’s role as a disease vector for moral panics, which misrecognise their main symptom, i.e. the demand for increased policing of people’s bodyminds, as their cure, Davis’ discussion of her archive elucidated that, despite the fact that the the capacity to feel acute suffering harbours a socially equalising potential, both the raw experience of pain and its expression are continuously inflected by unequal socio-economic and material conditions, exposing “how broader systems of bias can shape, while lending salience to, divergent manifestations of feeling.”

Anna Shmatenko

Report // Erin Forbes (University of Bristol) & Bridget Bennett (University of Leeds), “African American Letters,” 30 April 2024

Link to the original event here.

Thinking through the intertwined histories of racialisation and criminalisation, Erin Forbes (University of Bristol) turned her attention to the genre of eighteenth-century gallows literature, focusing specifically on the origins of the concept of criminal genius, which, she demonstrated, took root in the lived experiences of disenfranchised people. Using a methodology that she terms “corpus convicti,” designed to decouple humanity—particularly the humanity of criminalised persons—and its literary representations from excessive individualism characteristic of liberalist societies, Forbes located agency, power and, most pertinently, genius outside of the individual, instead finding it at the juncture between person and text, between the convict and the print culture generated by and around their crime.

Forbes analysed the public address and personal correspondence of one eighteenth-century convict in particular, Abraham Johnstone, a free Black man who, in 1797, was tried and executed for a murder he most likely did not commit. Leaning into rather than away from the conventions of gallows literature, which tended to dehumanise criminals and invest them with excessive animality, Johnstone, Forbes argued, was able to use “the law’s scaffold” to imagine alternative versions of human sociality for those who were forced to dwell outside of the purview of legality and full-fledged citizenship. Using key passages from Johnstone’s “Address,” Forbes tracked his deliberate inversion of the genre’s tropes, which he employed not in service of defending Black humanity but in order to criminalise those who sought to cast Black life out of the realm of the human. Thus, Forbes argued, Johnstone responds to the law’s violence by exposing its internal contradictions, which he achieves by demonstratively employing its inconsistencies to criminalise whiteness.

Forbes concluded her talk by discussing the philosophy of communal living and mutual interdependence that emerges across Johnstone’s “Address” and is further supported by the fusion of spiritual and material acts of care both represented and enacted by the letters he sent to his wife Sally, care that persists beyond death. His epistolary confessions of love for his spouse are accompanied by a bequest to her of his treasured possession, his white hat, which, Forbes argued, was intended to serve as a stand-in for his absent body. In this way, Johnstone transfigured the beliefs he articulates in his “Address” into concrete action, urging everyone who followed his deadly encounter with the law across various textual media to do the same.

Expanding on Forbes’ discussion on letter-writing, focusing in particular on this textual practice’s unique positioning between the realms of the private and the public, Bridget Bennett (University of Leeds) gave a talk on the largely forgotten, yet highly significant contextual details surrounding the publication of Thomas H. Jones’ narrative of enslavement. Remarking on the monumentality of the chance train encounter between Thomas H. Jones, a self-emancipated Black man, and Wilson Armistead, a Yorkshire merchant and abolitionist, on 15 July 1850, Bennett discussed the latter’s serialised travelogue about his trip to the US (Reminiscences of a Visit to the United States, in the Summer of 1850 (1850-2)), which contains what used to be the only UK edition of Jones’ narrative at the time.

Due to editorial limitations, Armistead elected not to publish the letters exchanged between Jones and his second wife Rynar alongside his narrative, which, Bennett argued, resulted in the edition’s upholding of a traditional abolitionist vision of heroic Black masculinity characteristic of the genre. In her discussion, Bennett challenged this clichéd “self-first” presentation of Black manhood by turning her attention to the very letters that Armistead chose to omit from his travelogue almost two centuries prior to our contemporary moment.

Bennett posited that by virtue of being located in the interstices between the private and the public, the act of exchanging letters, in which Jones extensively engaged, permitted him to seize freedom even whilst being or having his family deeply entrenched within the context of enslavement. Bennett emphasised the practical role that letters played in Jones’ navigation through slavery and his self-establishment as a free man in the North. For instance, he used correspondence as a tactical means to search for his first wife and children from whom he had been separated whilst still enslaved as well as a quasi-legal tool to announce a dissolution of their union after he had failed to locate her for years.

Letters were likewise strategically adopted by Thomas H. Jones and his second wife Rynar to communicate their mutual devotion to each other, despite being governed by several levels of constraint: not only did epistolary conventions delimit the scope of what types of information could be communicated and how, the pair knew that their letters, as Bennett elucidated, were never meant for each other’s eyes only. Initially subject to thorough scrutiny under the watchful gaze of enslavers, the spouses’ exchanges later appeared in print, drawing in an even greater number of spectators.

Safety concerns among other considerations dictated that the letters must contain strategic misdirection and suppress potentially dangerous information, leading the husband and wife to conceive of their private letters as always already public and incorporate that caution into their writing. And yet, Bennett argued, factual falsehood in no way diminished the authenticity of the couple’s deep devotion to one another with which they imbued each of their letters. This is why Bennett suggested that Jones and his wife engaged in what she calls “public intimacies”: in the same way that their loving family was forged within and despite the dehumanising context of slavery, the couple’s love letters emerged both under and despite the constant surveillance, external scrutiny, and tremendous constraint.

The interaction between the two speakers generated an insightful dialogue into the possibility for literary meaning to be reinvigorated in the conventional formalities that are reused from letter to letter. The horrors to which Black individuals were subjected throughout most of US history, be it criminalisation or enslavement, which made access to literacy alone a challenge, meant that much of Black writing was produced both in extreme circumstances and under heavy constraint. As a result, even a standard proclamation of love was capable of acquiring a deeper meaning, be it because it was uttered from the gallows or penned under the enslaver’s suspicious eye.

Report // Michael Boyden, “Choleraic Communication in the Nineteenth-Century Culture of Invalidism,” 27 March 2024

Link to original event here.

Invested in the conceptual evolution of the tropics in the cultural imaginary of the nineteenth-century United States, Michael Boyden presented a talk in which he explored how that period understood the interrelations between health, climate and the environment. Amid the simultaneous upsurge of interest in topographical medicine and clinicians’ contemporary attempts to deepen their appreciation of the complex relationship between disease and the locales in which it occurred, the tropics, namely the Caribbean islands, underwent a significant conceptual transformation at this moment in history. According to Boyden, they shook off their reputation as a largely uninhabitable setting and took up the role of health resorts and sanatoriums for white middle-class New England visitors, who were engaging in what can be understood as an early form of health tourism.

Referring to James Clark’s medical treatise titled The Influence of Climate in the Prevention and Cure of Chronic Diseases (1830), Boyden traced the tentative and gradual reimagining of the tropics and their influence on the patient’s body. Attempting to articulate a nuanced consensus on the environmental conditions of the Caribbean islands, Clark warns of the exciting influence that their excessive climate can have on healthy individuals, even as he insists on the restorative qualities that such conditions can provide for certain invalids, provided they are given adequate moral and material guidance. Boyden likewise consulted a different contemporary treatise—Abiel Abbot’s Letters Written in the Interior of Cuba (1828)—which both shares and adds to Clark’s sentiments. In it, Abbot engages in a topographic exercise of charting “sickly” locales, such as port cities and marshes, and differentiating these from the islands’ more healthful sites, which he believed to have been made such thanks to the frequent passage of wind.

Moreover, the examples selected by Boyden provided deep insights into the preconceived links between morality, disease and the environment. Prior to the widespread awareness of cholera’s arrival in the United States during the second cholera epidemic of 1836-1837, white Americans’ moralised view of geography regarded cholera as a disease endemic to the tropics, the unseemly symptoms of which uniquely affected the members of the uncivilised world. As Boyden pointed out, this view stood in direct opposition to the commonly held beliefs surrounding tuberculosis, which was at once associated with cold environments and civilised states, with spirituality and high morality, which led to the disease’s frequent and extensive aestheticisation during this period. These observations led Boyden to posit that the contemporary climate ideology viewed the relationship between civility and morality on the one hand and disease on the other as inversely proportionate.

This climate ideology both manifests itself and comes up against its limits in Sophia Peabody’s journal entries during her retreat to Western Cuba as well as in the letters of Edward Bliss Emerson, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s younger brother. While on the island, Peabody observed a cholera outbreak among the local enslaved population, and, following contemporary medical thought, concluded cholera to be a product of overstimulation, a combined result of poor working conditions and the tropical environment. Boyden demonstrated that Peabody’s implicit view of disease distribution along racial lines is shattered against the reality of the plantation owner’s death by cholera, challenging the disease’s presumed moralised geography and biology.

Edward Emerson’s encounter with cholera was likewise ideologically transformative, Boyden showed. Exhibiting a similar climate ideology that viewed disease, environment, and morality to be mutually interconnected, in his case framing cholera as a divine punishment and retribution, Emerson expressed anxiety that the Spanish colonies in the Caribbean remained unaffected, even as this deadly illness ravaged the free soil of the United States. Boyden reminded that in “Civilization” (1870), Ralph Waldo Emerson also mapped morality and civility onto various geographies, notably when he suggested that “The highest civility has never loved the hot zones,” only to refute this position later in the essay, thus defying the climate ideology that is often mobilised to justify slavery.

Inverting the question of climate ideology in connection with race, the audience joined the speaker in discussing the relationship between white female invalidism and the tropics, remarking on the anxieties surrounding this partial liberation of women’s bodies and thinking through the way their exposure to racialised bodies was used to confirm these women’s white gentility and femininity. Furthermore, Boyden addressed the problematic, yet unfortunately still prevalent discursive trope of anthropomorphising disease as a foreign intruder who disrupts local peace, which still persists to this day, especially in relation to contagious illnesses emerging from tropical countries. He asserted that although the racialised discourse of tropicality has not yet been entirely eradicated, the shift of focus towards crafting policy aimed at future outbreak prevention and international cooperation has ensured that certain places on the globe are no longer viewed as inherently sickly or unhealthy.

Finally, taking the swamp as an example of a site considered to be noxious in the tropics, the audience enquired into the different, even contrasting environmental imaginaries of the swamp, concluding that, in light of the absence of an established medical consensus, authors were at liberty to attribute qualities to various geographies in accordance with their personal aesthetic, cultural and even socio-political investments. Thus, Henry David Thoreau presented swamps as locales possessing health-restoring properties across the body of his work, while Harriet Jacobs commented on their disabling effects as much as on their liberating potentials in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), given their ambivalent role in facilitating her difficult escape from slavery.

Report // Paulin Ismard, Le Miroir d’Oedipe: Penser l’esclavage, 22 March 2024

Link to original event here.

A scholar of Ancient Greek history, Paulin Ismard gave a talk that illuminated the broader context of slavery—a subject that has rightfully commanded outmost attention in the field of American Studies over the past several decades—by rethinking its inception at the heart of Western civilisation’s earliest ancestors and first known slave societies. Tracing the presence of slavery in the works of such authors as Edgar Allan Poe and William Faulkner back to the very earliest roots of one of humanity’s most persistent and oppressive practices, Ismard’s talk revealed how the questions that animate our field are not unique to the national context of the United States of America and in fact have a long antecedence in ancient history.

Ismard began the talk by highlighting that there are very few extant texts that reflect on—let alone attempt to justify and legitimate—slavery in the Ancient Greek context, and, save for a few brief mentions, it is likewise absent from antique philosophy. Even in such politically-motivated meditations as Aristotle’s Politics and Plato’s Republic, works that acknowledge the unprecedented uniqueness of these thinkers’ socio-political world, the latter is the only of the two texts to mention slavery, which it does in a brief aside, despite the undeniable fact that Ancient Greece was one of the first human societies to rely on slave labour at such a massive scale. For Ismard, the preeminent question was this: how do we think and talk about the people who were omnipresent in this ancient world and yet had been entirely written out of this world’s narrative? It is this silence that motivated Ismard to turn to the very different socio-political and cultural context of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States, recognising the potential of borrowing from the distinctly Americanist approach to literature, which often involves identifying and inspecting slavery’s many invisible traces by reading between the lines and reconstructing its momentous presence out of absence.

This deafening silence complicates the intimate relationship that the modern Western world claims to have with Ancient Greece and its legacy, Ismard argued, which includes, most importantly, the West’s inheritance of the Greeks’ democratic tradition. Ismard emphasised that political freedom, the trophy that the West of today reclaims from the Greco-Roman history and for which Ancient Greece is tirelessly commemorated, was conceived in the first-ever slave society, democracy and slavery walking in step since long before the founding of the United States of America, joined together from the very moment of their twin birth. Ismard was particularly interested in how slavery affects the country’s cultural imaginary, how such a vast chasm between a people’s lofty conception of themselves and their oppressive actuality is inscribed into that country’s legacy, a question that is pertinent to discussions of both the Ancient Greek society and that of the nineteenth-century United States.

Following Orlando Patterson’s central metaphor and line of thinking, around which his seminal work Slavery and Social Death (1982) is organised, Ismard remarked on the age-long association between slavery and death that transcends individual societies and cultures. The transcultural imaginary’s attribution of subhuman status to the enslaved and their placement on the threshold between life and death calls for a dismantling and fundamental re-conception of the opposition between these two terms, such as the one undertaken by Jacques Derrida in his seminar La vie la mort (1975-6). Hoping to shed light on the connection between enslavement and death in the Ancient Greek context, Ismard followed Toni Morrion’s analysis in Playing in the Dark (1992), turning his attention to the recurrent image of the undead that inhabit much of Edgar Allan Poe’s writing, which is likewise deeply haunted by the spectre of slavery.

Ismard further remarked that the status of the body in Ancient Greek culture has not yet been thoroughly examined and interrogated by relevant scholarship, especially in light of the fact that one of the terms used to refer to slaves, “σῶμα” (“sôma”), was the same word as the one denoting the physical body. A host of telling examples suggesting the depth of the associative interconnection between these two terms can be found in contemporary books on dream interpretation, where enslavers are instructed to view dreams about their body parts malfunctioning as signs of their wavering rule over those they enslave. Conceived as both tools and organs, the age-old image of a slave as an integral part of the enslaver’s body presents an unsettling vision of slavery as an anxiety-ridden mutual interdependence, which is a nuanced metaphorical transformation that merits further analysis. Instead of disappearing with its world, Ismard noted that this unsettling vision came to haunt the literary imaginary centuries later within a vastly different context of the nineteenth-century United States. It appears in such texts as Poe’s short story “The Man Who Was Used Up,” where the tension between inalienable nature of flesh and the alienable of property is written into the body of the enslaved, which has been disturbingly co-opted into becoming the enslaver’s prosthesis.

Moreover, Ismard commented on Ancient Greece’s canonical textual productions and the too-often overlooked role of that the enslaved occupy therein. For example, Ismard discussed the role of the enslaved shepherd in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, who is the one to announce Oedipus’ incestuous transgression. Although the shepherd is a marginal character, foreign to the local community, his knowledge of the truth is absolute, making him akin to the gods. This revelation came as a result of Ismard’s examination of recurrent oedipal references in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom, a novel that is similarly replete with enslaved figures placed into the position of absolute knowledge, thus offering an important insight into the ancient tragedy that it incessantly references.

The post-presentation discussion followed three main axes of inquiry. The audience challenged Ismard’s choice to compare these two very distinct societies and their cultural productions, remarking on the great multitude of slave societies throughout history that were not included in the inquiry. While acknowledging the formal constraints, such as the inevitability of having to limit the archive, Ismard proposed a unifying principle, making a distinction between slavery and temporary servitude, and commenting on the difference between societies that happen to contain slavery and slave societies, which, unlike the former, are entirely structured by this oppressive system, as is the case for both Ancient Greece and the nineteenth-century United States. The second axis concerned the question of race and its centrality to American slavery, a question that is entirely irrelevant when considering the Ancient Greek reality, which makes the comparison between these two contrasting contexts at once thought-provoking and productive. It opened up the conversation about the incidental nature of slavery and the arbitrariness of its justifications, designed to protect the powerful group from falling victim to enslavement, within any given society, as is the case, for example, of the alleged biological differences between European and African Americans. Finally, the third axis pertained to the conception of the enslaved as existing on the border between life and death, and the evolution of this notion and the practices associated with it (e.g. mesmerism, zombification, hypnosis, etc.) throughout the ages and across various slave societies.

Report // Emma Thiébaut (LARCA), “Beyond Genus and Genre: the (Nonsense) Politics of Animality in the Life and Works of M.E.W. Freeman,” 1 March 2024

Link to original event here.

Emma Thiébault’s talk delved into Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s short stories and personal correspondence to uncover how her writing, whether fictional, semi-autobiographical or epistolary, repeatedly and deliberately queers the culture of pet-owning. A proud owner of several cats herself, Freeman revered the bonds that tie together pets and their owners, paying tribute to many of her beloved felines in her tales. Thiébault argued that, for Freeman, interspecies love becomes a creative space where queer affective identities are expressed and experimented with under the guise of a more innocent and childish attachment.

The first story Thiébault discussed was “An Object of Love” (1884), which centres on Ann, a celibate woman who loses her faith in God when her beloved cat Willy goes missing. Thiébault posited that Willy is himself the unmistakeable object of Ann’s devotion who acts as the nexus of Ann’s domestic spirituality and around whom her religious worship is structured, justifying how the disappearance of the cat results in the erosion of her faith. Noting the prevalence of the language of religious reverence in contemporary confessions of romantic love (notably, in personal correspondence), Thiébault demonstrated that Ann’s love for her cat is coded as not only spiritual but romantic, which is further reinforced by the story’s publication on Valentine’s day.

Despite the tale’s layered subtext, Thiébault noted that the word “love” only appears once and only in the story’s title, while being completely absent in the body of the text, much like Willy himself, who only returns at the end of the narrative. Willy’s disappearance makes it impossible for Ann to express her love for him, be it verbally or physically with the help of food and pets, all the more so because of the disapproval of her community. Consequently, all she can do is regret his absence, which, Thiébault showed, inscribes love in the negative space of the story. According to Thiébault, it is a love that will not acknowledge itself, will not “say its name,” drawing an obvious parallel with sapphic love and encoding queer affect into the inexpressible feelings that characterise the experience of pet ownership.

The second story that Thiébault read was “The Little Persian Princess” (1889), which is nestled deep within the context of Freeman’s private relationship with her editor, Mary Louise Booth. The women’s correspondence hints at Freeman’s romantic feelings for Booth, which she was careful to differentiate from a sisterly bond by filling her letters with romantic imagery borrowed from sentimental literature and adopting the epistolary persona of her addressee’s suitor. The exchange of letters and stories performed and deepened the affective proximity between the two women, culminating, as Thiébault demonstrated, in Freeman’s writing of “The Little Persian Princess,” a tribute to Booth, in which the latter secretly figures as a character.

In the story, two royals are transformed into cats and are subsequently adopted into the household of two ladies. Thiébault pointed out that the secret to these fictionalised women’s identities lies in the names they give to their new pets—“Vashti” and “Muff,” after Booth’s own two cats. Thiébault described the tale as one of “transformation and secret recognition” in that the felines’ names act as a key to accessing not only the women’s identities but also to revealing the queer nature of the ladies’ cohabitation, discretely unveiling the sapphic household. Thiébault argued that “The Little Persian Princess” is itself a kind of love-letter from Freeman to her beloved editor, one that perfectly embodies their relationship at the intersection between the intimately personal and the commercial.

In the final section of her talk, Thiébault explored yet another queer dimension of felinity, namely its haptic output. Petting or caressing, the central practice used to deepen the affective bonds between cat and owner in “The Object of Love” and “The Persian Princess,” is a non-penetrative gesture used to distribute mutual pleasure, evoking sapphic eroticism. This covert sensual practice is likewise extended to the reader, similarly implicating her in the clandestine sapphic bonds on the page, Thiébault noted, as holding the text is itself a form of a subtle caress. The childlike innocence of Freeman’s feline vocabulary (“Kitten,” “Pussy”) as well as of all the aforementioned tactile practices—stroking a cat’s fur, handling letters, holding a book—protects sapphic sexuality from unambiguous discovery by shrouding it in uncertainty. In Freeman’s creative tributes to pet ownership and interspecies love, queerness figures as a perpetual possibility: always there, yet never confirmed.

The subsequent discussion became a collaborative effort aimed at placing Thiébault’s discoveries in the larger context of pet-ownership in the nineteenth-century United States. Most notably, the conversation focused on urban middle-class practices of pet-keeping, in which cats were transformed into treasured companions, which contrasts sharply with their functional utility in more rural settings. The history of association between felinity and sapphic sexuality was likewise touched on by Thiébault and her audience.

Report // Julien Nègre, “Cute Berries and Dead Indians: Thoreau’s Environment,” 2 February 2024

Link to original event here.

Excursions are known to be Henry David Thoreau’s privileged mode of travelling and writing. In “Cute Berries and Dead Indians,” Julien Nègre (ENS de Lyon) followed this concept across Thoreau’s unpublished manuscripts, more commonly known as the Indian Notebooks, paying particular attention to the parallels between Thoreau’s explorations of the plant world and his encounters with the last representatives of decimated Indian tribes. The heterogeneous information amassed in the Indian Notebooks, such as references to Thoreau’s journal entries, original and copied maps, transcribed passages from colonial-era historical accounts, makes it an unstable, yet compelling text, all the more so as Thoreau’s intended use of it remains uncertain to this day.

Thoreau’s excursions are spurred on by the desire to learn more about his “neighbors” (“neighborliness” is yet another important concept in Thoreau’s work). Nègre argued that for Thoreau, “neighboring” is not simply a question of shared space but also of interactions between species across time. Nègre thereby shifted the focus away from the human towards plant and animal life. In Thoreau’s writing, he showed, excursions that take for their goal engagement with plants are imbued with purpose, all the more so as they are retrospectively aggrandised, politicised and historicised, as is the case in the European cranberry passage. Thus excerpt describes his excursion in search of the “European” cranberry (which, unbeknownst to Thoreau, is actually native to the Americas) that grows in the vicinity of his Concord home. The passage, Nègre showed, evokes colonial practices, namely land occupation, with its use of military vocabulary and an explicit allusion to the violent civil confrontations collectively known as Bleeding Kansas.

History is indeed not absent from Thoreau’s excursions. Thoreau’s mapping practices, Nègre showed, were largely inspired by a combination of his plant-centric excursions and his engagements with Native American history. For example, Thoreau diligently marks Native American heritage sites that are not present on the source maps from which he copied. In his talk, Nègre compared the language Thoreau uses to document his encounters with members of indigenous communities with the terms and epithets that appear in the accounts of his botanical excursions. Nègre particularly focused on two journal entries: those of October 1855 and June 1856. Encounters with Native Americans are characterised by a greater amount of verbal violence, he showed. Information is forcefully extracted rather than volunteered. Nègre argued, however, that Thoreau distanced himself from this violence by removing his characteristic heroic “I” from these passages and representing himself as the silent witness to his friend’s, Daniel Ricketson’s, aggressive interrogations of the surviving members of the local tribes. At the same time, as in the European cranberry passage, Thoreau often defers to a fixed lexical corpus of conventional images to describe the indigenous individuals he encounters. For instance, he reuses the same epithet–“half an acre of face”—to describe both the strangers he meets out on the lake, who self-identify as Native Americans, and later Martha Simons, a woman belonging to the dying Narragansett tribe.

While Thoreau’s portraits of Native Americans may be formulaic, Nègre also showed that Thoreau’s writing forges a strong connection between indigenous people and animality. Thoreau treats the former both as repositories of knowledge on the local flora and fauna and as themselves akin to animals. While discussions on the topic of the natural world—such as when Thoreau and Ricketson converse with the strangers about fish, or with Martha Simons about huskroot—create opportunities for cultural exchange, these moments of sincere communication are often undercut by Thoreau’s demotion of his interlocutors, such as when he makes a note of Simons’ reticence to talk to white men and describes her “vacant stare.”

Nègre concluded by commenting on the widespread fascination among the white middle-class men in Thoreau’s milieu with representing the last members of indigenous communities. These last Native American survivors of settler colonialist violence posed a particular representational challenge to the white artists wishing to portray them, Nègre remarked, as these individuals came to involuntarily signify the totality of their tribes. As these tribes’ only living members, their individuality was at once emphasised and undermined, lost in the collective identity of the group to which they formerly belonged. This fascination, manifested in Thoreau’s own journals through constant references to “dead Indians” or “last Indians,” naturalised the view of Native Americans as figures firmly rooted in the nation’s past, always already gone, explaining the communicational breakdown that characterises white men’s exchanges with living members of indigenous tribes, such as the ones documented in Thoreau’s journals. Thoreau’s maps, which register the locales that were significant to the local Native American communities, such as the Indian graveyard and “Betty’s Neck,” likewise contribute to this white supremacist worldview, Nègre suggested: these place names and the territories which they denote become ancient monuments, relics of bygone history rather than signs of America’s persisting indigenous presence.

Led by Nègre’s respondent, Michael Jonik (University of Sussex), the audience discussion primarily focused on the ethical questions surrounding the cultural work that Thoreau’s Indian Notebooks performed during his lifetime and continue to perform today. Although they are inevitably implicated in the appropriation of indigenous cultures, the Notebooks also memorialise instances of Native American resistance to white people’s violence by verbal extraction. They have likewise helped unearth previously lost indigenous topologies, which have since been put back on contemporary maps, emphasising today the very presence that they once used to deny.

Report // Stephen Rachman, “Pathoregimes: Poe, Pestilence, Space and Time,” 8 December 2023

Link to original event here.

Focusing on the four tales by Edgar Allan Poe that are set during epidemics, Stephen Rachman (Michigan University) foregrounded the process by which infectious disease usurps human authority, redraws urban geographies and alters normal temporalities, thereby establishing what Rachman terms a “pathoregime.” The name is inspired by the parallels between autocratic political regimes and the reign of disease. Both of these possess unclear beginnings and ends and their historical provenance is often obfuscated in favour of tracing them back to Biblical origins.

Recalling how the Red Death reorganises space into zones of safety and danger in “The Masque of the Red Death” (1842), Rachman demonstrated that the pandemic world of pathoregimes is intensely spatialised. This redrawing of borders is motivated by fear, the individual and collective psychologies of which are thoroughly tested and ruthlessly exposed by pandemics. The permanent state of fear is a characteristic feature of pathoregimes, Rachman argued, which is what endows these latter with the power to interfere with the normal passage and human perception of time; for instance, Rachman remarked that “Shadow—A Parable” (1835) unfolds during “a year of terror.” Rachman posited that such drastic alterations of spatio-temporal conditions on a massive scale likewise serve as a source of meteorological changes, as ambient weather conditions begin to mirror those of the disease sufferer, making a confrontation with epidemics’ at once internal and external threat of death inevitable for all unfortunate subjects of a pathoregime.

Rachman connected pathoregimes’ spatial regimentation of urban landscapes that is at work both in “The Masque of the Red Death” and “King Pest” (1835) with the salient realities of the global COVID-19 pandemic, recalling the overflowing hospital wards and funeral homes of our very recent past. Furthermore, Rachman argued that attempts to assign meaning to the different tints present in the seven chambers of Prospero’s castle in “The Masque of the Red Death” impede the recognition that such a division of space into colour-marked zones is subservient to the pandemic logic of spatialisation that dominates the disease-wracked world outside the Prince’s abode. Mirroring the Red Death’s infectiousness, the virality of fear enabled by the powers of human imagination ceaselessly conjures up the very thing it hopes to banish, Rachman posited, leading to the disease’s penetration of the “safe space” within the castle walls and thus reaffirming the undeniable authority of disease over humanity.

Rachman moreover recognised the potential of “The Masque of the Red Death” to be understood as a double allegory, commenting on the ability of pandemics to expose political and social infrastructures, most notably the class hierarchy. Deploying Michel Foucault’s idea of heterotopias, Rachman framed the aristocratic revellers inside Prospero’s castle as at once staging a consumerist utopia and performing the fantasy of immunity, as they attempt to maintain the illusion of separateness from the pathogen-bearing working classes. According to Rachman, Poe stages the revellers’ encounter with the Red Death as a moment of a double revelation, as they are faced with the dual discovery of mutual interconnectedness between the different strata of society and, as a result, of their own susceptibility to the threat of exposure and death by illness.

Through his subsequent analysis of “King Pest,” Rachman brought to light other infrastructural changes caused by pandemics, namely socio-economic and environmental. As one dynasty comes to an end with the usurpation of the throne by the new monarch, King Pest I, whole neighbourhoods—including the businesses contained therewith—are abandoned due to the collective fear of miasmatic emanations. For Rachman, such societal disruptions result in profound changes in the way that urban communities relate to disease and crime, as rates of criminality soar in areas made unsafe by pestilence. Additionally, Rachman pointed out that the socio-political impacts of pathoregimes are allegorised on the distorted bodily parts of the members of the Pest royalty. Rachman concluded that pandemics’ grotesque conditions both demand and easily lend themselves to allegorisation, on which propensity Poe clearly capitalises in his pestilential tales.

Prompted by questions from Sari Altschuler (Northeastern University), Rachman commented on the differences in the psychologies, temporalities, spatialities, as well as visibilities of the different diseases to which he referred throughout the talk, namely cholera, bubonic plague and COVID-19. Altschuler likewise remarked that Poe’s literary theorisation of pandemics through autocracy is borrowed from contemporary figurations of cholera, which used to be widely known by the name “King of Terrors,” sparking a conversation on Poe’s effective use of clichés with the purpose of eliciting fear in the reader, with Rachman bringing up the classic perspective shift in “The Sphinx” (1846) as an example. Likewise pertinent were Altschuler and Rachman’s collective meditations on the factors that determine which pandemics end up being recognised as such (and which do not), and whether pathoregimes can ever act as sources of democratic action, recalling Harriet Beecher Stowe’s deployment of cholera as an agent that disrupts the politics of slavery in Dred; a Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856). The audience discussion also touched on a number of aspects of Poe’s pandemic writing, including the literary figures that support, interact with and complicate his tales’ central allegories, the “healthfulness” of reading gothic texts that describe the disruptive work of pathoregimes by which they are produced, and the influence that specific historical conditions had on Poe’s works.

Report // Laird Hunt, 18 January 2024

Link to original event here.

This session was chaired by Anne-Laure Tissut and Anne-Julie Debare.

A few days before this meeting, Joe Biden (or at least his comms team) felt moved to tweet about the Civil War:

This was, to use a phrase potentially beneath the office of President, a subtweet, calling out the then Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley (she suspended her campaign in March 2024). At a December 2023 town hall meeting in New Hampshire, Haley had been asked, in simple terms, what had been the cause of the Civil War. As The Guardian put it, Haley ‘reacted as if she were being physically threatened’. She seemed to have to gather herself before giving her brief answer: ‘I think the cause of the civil war was basically how government was going to run, the freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do.’ The questioner pressed her for more, but she continued to spiral around ideas of government overreach: ‘Government doesn’t need to tell you how to live your life. They don’t need to tell you what you can and can’t do. They don’t need to be a part of your life.’ The news media was happy to report on this peculiar interaction, which gained enough memetic value that Biden’s team thought it worth taking to Twitter to put Haley right. And so another skirmish of the Civil War began, as the President’s replies devolved into a bizarre discussion thread on anti-bellum politics.

The Civil War didn’t end at Appomattox. That’s not news. But Biden’s tweet, while fundamentally uneducative in its actual content, proved by its form that there has been a shift in gears. The argument about the Civil War’s causes, real and Lost, has bubbled up from forum threads and onto a national (and therefore global) stage. The tweet was, essentially, bait, and the Twitter reply-bucket quickly filled up with a swirling mass of ‘um actuallys’, from both the website’s endemic right-wing reactionaries and its host of historical pundits, leaning on their undergraduate credentials to point out that President Biden didn’t have a clue what he was talking about.

The fact is that people on both sides of this argument are equally unwilling to dig up America’s bones. Slavery was the cause of the Civil War, as it was the cause of so many other lasting structures which continue to plague the country, and which neither party are willing to face up to. The implications of Biden’s entirely correct statement are not bound out in his policy. Haley, meanwhile, when she was asked the cause of the Civil War, gave a meandering, slightly panicked answer about freedom from government interference, without a single mention of slavery, as the questioner was quick to point out. It was a meta-interrogation, a posturing by both parties. ‘What do you want me to say about slavery?’ Haley asked, which about sums it up. Historical debate under TV lighting comes in pre-packaged boxes, void of curiosity. As so often, The Simpsons cut to the core of this problem in the 1990s. When Apu (himself a battlefield of the culture war) is taking his citizenship test, the examiner asks him the cause of the Civil War. ‘Actually,’ he replies, ‘there were numerous causes. Aside from the obvious schism between abolitionists and anti-abolitionists, economic factors, both domestic and international, played a significant role. Here the examiner cuts him off: ‘Hey, hey. Just say slavery’.

Search the clip on YouTube, and you’ll find the website’s right-wing house band playing the same tune they did under Biden’s tweet. The joke, they seem to think, is that you’re not allowed to think for yourself in America, that the ‘woke’ answer is the only one that’s allowed. I’d say the joke is more obviously that Apu has a more nuanced understanding of the country he has immigrated to than his natural-born neighbours. Knowing about America is, ironically, a good way to fail a citizenship test.

Some of these thoughts were with me at the start of Laird Hunt’s session, which was prefaced with a word of regret for its long postponement, the seminar having originally been planned to coincide with and celebrate the publication of Tissut’s French translation of Neverhome, Hunt’s 2014 Civil War novel. But nothing about it felt late, or stale. So it is with the Civil War: always timely, never done with. The session was a moderated Q&A interspersed with readings. Hunt, and his questioners, were wide-ranging, but the talk had a consistent undertone which pulled at the edge of elegy. Inevitable, perhaps, when war is the topic, but that tone came out in other, less expected places. One loss mourned was the library. Neverhome is the first-person account (the quasi-memoir, Hunt proposed) of Constance or Ash Thompson, an Indiana farmer who disguises herself as a man to go to war for the Union. It was written with the library stacks, Hunt recalled, and he offered a vignette of his bookish archaeologies, his happy accidents in the shelves. It’s true that the Civil War makes a lot of books. I remember at the start of my own Civil War PhD tracking the subject holdings of my university library across tens of meters of shelves, and wondering: a) how I was ever going to get myself up to speed, and b) what the worth would be in adding yet another brick to this already stalwart edifice. Hunt’s answers reminded me, though, that such an overbearing volume of material can in fact be creatively and academically freeing. When there’s that much to go on, each encounter will be a unique kind of alchemy.

This joy, though, was tinged with a sadness at libraries lost. Access to university libraries, while a privilege, often comes and goes at the mercy of contingent, short-term posts. The smaller public libraries Hunt grew up with are becoming scarcer, and increasingly asked to perform multiple social functions, often at the expense of the quality of their collections. I had been speaking to someone before the session about the (as of March 2024) ongoing disruption to the British Library, after the cyber attack of October last year. They had only just got a temporary catalogue running again, and the scope of the damage to their digital collections has not yet been divulged. Libraries are fragile repositories. They can’t protect themselves, or guarantee their own accessibility. But we need them if history isn’t going to be reduced to campaign speech dogwhistles and Twitter bait. The exchange at Haley’s town hall didn’t need footnoting. I think you could learn the manoeuvres, of both sides, in a short half hour.

This was the substance of the profounder elegy brimming from the talk: a rueful look at America’s feeble knowledge of its past. Feeble, despite the odds. As Hunt said, you don’t need to dig very deep to find America’s bones. But it still feels like an act of resistance, if not quite of protest, to hold them up to the light. Neverhome is part of what Hunt offers as his ‘dark America’ quartet: a set of novels which turn over the soil on the deep violences of slavery, war and witchcraft. They are insistent, haunting, and highly present. In talking of his undergraduate years, Hunt described himself as a history student who studied literature, and this two-sidedness has carried through the intervening years. His novels are superb research pieces, but in a different way, I think, to other kinds of historical fiction. While Hunt does more than his due diligence on the facts (he was distraught, he recalled, to be told that a heifer can’t be milked, as one of his novels had it), his books are voice and style-led, in the extreme. Style is what does the work in Neverhome, forcing a close encounter with the war by offering it in strange, divergent terms. The novel is difficult. But the difficulty is shared between author and reader, who both discover as they go the darker world on the reverse side of the American present. We would do well to push for this difficulty when we can.

Jamie Fenton