Jacques Rancière re-inflects Aristotle's famous maxim to claim that 'man is a political animal because he is a literary animal'. He goes on to relate this characteristic of 'literarity' to Plato's ...description of written language as an 'orphan letter', to a process of 'disincorporation' and to a distinction between a 'body' and a 'quasi-body'. These founding assumptions of Rancière's theory of politics have attracted significant attention among commentators. Yet existing commentary on Rancière's work has left a number of key questions unresolved. Does the power of 'literarity' depend on the development of mass literacy, of the institution of literature and the development of the printing press? What, precisely, is the value of the distinction between a 'body' and a 'quasi-body'? Is, as many critics have argued, Rancière's notion of 'literarity' fundamentally ahistorical, falsely universalising and hence politically naive? Through close readings of Rancière's interpretations of Hobbes's Leviathan and Balzac's novel, Le Curé de village, alongside its own reading of an incident in Solomon Northup's Twelve Years a Slave, this article seeks to elucidate these questions. It argues that 'literarity' does indeed function as a transhistorical constant in Rancière's work but that this does not justify accusations of ahistoricism or naivete.
After living as a free man for the first thirty-three years of his life, Solomon Northup was drugged, kidnapped, and sold into slavery, leaving behind a wife and three children in New York. Sold to a ...Louisiana plantation owner who was also a Baptist preacher, Northup proceeded to serve several masters, some who were brutally cruel and others whose humanity he praised. After years of bondage, he met an outspoken abolitionist from Canada who notified Northup's family of his whereabouts, and he was subsequently rescued by an official agent of the state of New York.Twelve Years a Slaveis his account of this unusual series of events. Northup describes life on cotton and sugar cane plantations in meticulous detail. One slave narrative scholar calls his narrative "one of the most detailed and realistic portraits of slave life." He also leavens his account with wry humor and cultural commentary, making many parts of the narrative read more like travel writing than abolitionist literature.Twelve Years a Slavepresents the remarkable story of a free man thrown into a hostile and foreign world, who survived by his courage and cunning.A DOCSOUTH BOOK. This collaboration between UNC Press and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library brings selected classic works from the digital library of Documenting the American South back into print. DocSouth Books uses the latest digital technologies to make these works available as downloadable e-books or print-on-demand publications. DocSouth Books are unaltered from the original publication, providing affordable and easily accessible editions to a new generation of scholars, students, and general readers.
This dissertation explores the unhomely nature of the slave system as experienced by fugitive and captive slaves within slave and neo-slave narratives. The purpose of this project is to broaden the ...discourse of migration narratives set during the antebellum period. I argue that the unhomely manifests through corporeal, psychological, historical, and geographical descriptions found within each narrative and it is through these manifestations that a broader discourse of identity can be generated. I turn to four slave and neo-slave narratives for this dissertation: Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave (1853), Frederick Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979), and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987).
In an effort to comprehend the exclusionary dimensions of racial and sexual normativity and alterity, the concept of "the Other" has become invaluable to American literary studies. In Locating New ...Orleans, I explore how the racial, gendered, and sexualized Other has been projected onto New Orleans and has resulted in its designation as a "foreign" landscape within the United States. The study utilizes critical discourse analysis and archival research of serialized novels, travel writing, slave narratives, cartography, printmaking, and theatre to illuminate four pivotal moments in the evolution of New Orleans as the Other. These moments include the making of early maps and landscapes of the Louisiana Purchase; the emergence of the city as a haunted setting; the nascent descriptions of New Orleans as a travel destination; and the postbellum battle over “Creole” nomenclature. While the dissertation charts the representation of a single city, it is not parochial. The local is of value, because it is not a small and withdrawn place but rather a tangible site of the transnational. For example, the second and third chapters recover New Orleans as an important yet fleeting motif within US abolitionism and the revolutionary discourses of Hungarian and German émigrés. White, Red, Black: Sketches of American Society in the United States (1853) by Francis and Theresa Pulszky, the autobiographical account of Twelve Years a Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northup (1853), and The Curse of Caste; or The Slave Bride (1865) by Julia C. Collins construct lasting representations of the city as a place of abject blackness, blackness on display, decadence, and sexual impropriety. Likewise, as evinced in the first and last chapters, depictions of New Orleans as the savage native, tropical siren, and oriental concubine within visual culture—A Plan of New Orleans & Its Environs (1803), A View of New Orleans taken from the plantation of Marigny (1803), and Discovery of the Mississippi by De Soto (1853)—and theatre—The Creole Show (c. 1889-97)—mimic and revise the cultures of French, Spanish, and British imperialisms. In all, the project reveals how nineteenth-century representations of New Orleans as the foreign exotic not only translated American discourses of nationalism, race, and sex but refashioned and constructed those very discourses within a global context. Locating New Orleans intervenes in and contributes to literary studies, cultural studies, critical race theory, and cultural geography. It supplements scholarly debates regarding the colonial nature of American nationalism and finds the origins of this cultural practice at the imagined New Orleans of the United States’s first imperial acquisition—the Louisiana Purchase. Through its intersection of spatialization and coloniality, Locating New Orleans generates a conceptual model and a local case study, which demonstrates the way in which places are othered. Without being additively intersectional, the project assesses the constitutive relationship amongst race, gender, sexuality, and geography. Place is significant, because cultural practice exists within a particular context and reproduces real and imagined settings that are sometimes of great consequence.
This dissertation understands the slave narrative to be a mode of cultural critique which utilizes the visual objectification of blackness against the logic of racial slavery. By reading narratives ...which have been relatively marginal within the study of the slave narrative—Elizabeth Keckly’s Behind the Scenes, Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave, and William Craft’s Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom—and analyzing work by contemporary visual artists who use slave narrative conventions within their work—Glenn Ligon, Kara Walker, Ellen Driscoll and others in the 1990s—this project reconsiders the logic of racial slavery by tracing it to the conventions of visuality within the slave narrative itself. I argue that slave narratives deploy a complex visual logic that relies, paradoxically, on language rather than image. In addition to redrawing the genealogy of the slave narrative, the project demonstrates how the confluence of visual speculation, linguistic determination, and social performance at work in racial slavery shore up the visual practices and prejudices that create the “color line” of the twentieth century. Additionally, I identify how ex-slave narrators of the texts I examine confront the dominance of the visual by producing what I call “representational static” within the narrative. That is, I show how literary and visual discourses are juxtaposed, revealing their non-correspondence and, therefore, the limits of each to determine black subjectivity. By combining an analysis of literary, visual, and social forms, the project presses a reconsideration of the limits of the literary slave narrative and allows for an expanded notion of what has been called the neo-slave narrative. More broadly, it offers visuality as a complication in the staged conflict between white literacy and black orality, taken to be the foundational scene of an African American literary tradition in, for example, Gates’s analysis of the trope of the talking book. The project’s focus on the recursive nature of the form unifies what have been three distinct phases of slave narrative criticism within the academy—historical, literary, and cultural studies approaches—and contributes to the historiographical contours of Atlantic studies.
In this dissertation, I argue that nineteenth-century American literary and nationalist identity was characterized by a deep ambivalence about the progress of imperial expansion across the continent. ...This ambivalence manifested itself through an anxiety about what I term "wrong-way migrants": migrants who contest the teleology of westward expansion by traversing the continent from west to east. These migrants--of Asian, African, and Native American extraction, as well as whites of European extraction returning from a frontier that had transformed them--were seen as geographically "wrong-way"; more profoundly, however, they were seen as culturally "wrong-way," representing a retrograde movement in the drive towards cultural perfection. Further, over the course of the nineteenth century, as the logic of manifest destiny intensified, wrong-way migrants became progressively more racialized figures, and their presence at the heart of American identity soon came to embody the dilemmas of a multi-cultural nation in an age of accelerating imperialism. Building from this historical and cultural premise, I examine texts that negotiate the ambivalent trajectories of migration, territorial expansion, and national identity. The Introduction examines Chinese-language newspapers published in California between 1850 and 1880, arguing that these texts show Chinese immigrants to the United States attempting to escape the label of "wrong-way migrant" and to write themselves into the approved pattern of migration and American expansion. In Chapter 1, I examine Washington Irving's shift from valorizing wrong-way migrants as the touchstone of American identity to a later stance externalizing and repudiating them, in the process transforming the wrong-way from a cultural to a racial category. In Chapter 2, I discuss the intersection between the north-south orientation of abolition and the east-west orientation of manifest destiny through a reading of Uncle Tom's Cabin and Solomon Northup's Twelve Years a Slave. Chapter 3 considers the territorial negotiations of Huckleberry Finn and Roughing It as critiques of manifest destiny and celebrations of wrong-way migration. Chapter 4 continues the focus on Mark Twain, examining the way that his presentation of Chinese migrants ultimately undermines the foundations of the right-way/wrong-way distinction.
This dissertation analyzes the role which narratives of travel through the antebellum South played in the construction of an American national identity during the years between the Revolutionary and ...Civil wars. As the writers of these intra-national travel texts struggled with the significance of a region that was both America and “other,” their accounts performed cultural work long ignored by critics because of an emphasis on texts which cross national boundaries. In Crevecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer, for instance, the narrator's definition of the American as farmer is qualified by the importance placed on travel in the text. Bartram's Travels similarly recreates the narrator as a representative national figure, but in Bartram's text European Enlightenment rationality is combined with a “native,” proto-Romantic sensibility. While Frederick Douglass's Narrative and Solomon Northup's Twelve Years a Slave both mirror this creation of the narrator as representative man, in these slave narratives the complex relationship between travel and slavery highlights the struggle over the meaning of space and movement in nineteenth-century American society. Fanny Kemble's Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation and Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, on the other hand, explore the intimate relationship between women's travel and the construction of an ideal domestic space. Frederick Law Olmsted, whose popular The Cotton Kingdom is still praised for its objectivity, sought through his travels not only to reform the southern economy but also to expand a New England yeoman ideology throughout the nation. Finally, the published narratives of Union Civil War soldiers suggest that the simple fact of travel was perhaps one of the most significant aspects of the war for many of the participants, as travel has been perhaps the most significant freedom enjoyed or denied the inhabitants of this country since its very beginnings.
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