American Literature

Tillman, Kacy Dowd

2024 American Literature

doi: 10.1215/00029831-11398647

Many early American novels feature at least one character who becomes physically isolated, is restricted access to communication, becomes ill, spreads their sickness, and then either dies or becomes permanently disabled. This repeated pattern of isolation, infection, information, and death/disability underscores just how concerned early Americans were with the potentially harmful effects of information silos. The concern with information siloing, at first glance, seems anachronistic to early America. Eli Pariser popularized the concept of a “filter bubble” in 2011 when lamenting the many ways that algorithms create echo chambers and political fragmentation. While this essay concurs that content-recommendation bubbles are exacerbated by new media technologies, early American novels suggest that people have been worrying about the regulation and isolation of information since the dawn of the new republic. Early American novels—particularly those published between 1789 and 1815—are often read as seduction narratives, didactic narratives, or both; this article argues that attending to this pattern offers a new way of reading early American fiction that underscores just how concerned readers and writers were with the potentially harmful effects of information silos and the regulation of information on the body, the body politic, and public health.

Traister, Bryce

2024 American Literature

doi: 10.1215/00029831-11398679

Although not typically read as either a religious text or a narrative preoccupied with religious issues, Herman Melville’s novella of maritime slave revolution and recontainment demonstrates how antebellum Americans came to “believe” in slavery. Focusing on the narrative’s staging of religious declension within the theater of enslavement aboard the San Dominick, this essay shows how the novella positions the practice of human slavery as an object of belief and obligation, thereby rendering human slavery into a coherent feature of the national landscape.

Huerta, Monica

2024 American Literature

doi: 10.1215/00029831-11398663

This essay uses the legal rearticulation of reputation as white heteropatriarchal property in an “Imperial Jim Crow” United States to piece apart the preoccupation with characters’ reputations in realist fiction. It focuses on two later-nineteenth-century arenas of what property theorist and legal scholar K-Sue Park has called the “generative dynamics” of racial capitalism: new markets in private commercial credit and the socio-legal (re)production of reputation. In so doing, the essay unearths realism’s invisiblized generic presupposition that the idea of reputations that help create modern literary characters are a neutral or self-evident category of experience.

Mitchell, Karah M.

2024 American Literature

doi: 10.1215/00029831-11398671

At the turn of the twentieth century, animal welfare work occupied an increasingly prominent position in the United States, with women’s animal autobiographies serving particularly formative roles in teaching child readers “humane” values. During this same period, felines in particular were increasingly brought into the home even as they were also increasingly racialized in larger discourse. This article focuses on three feline autobiographies from this period, arguing that they present the racialized animal as a site of biopolitical control that ultimately resides in the hands of white women. First, the article examines how humane education initiatives taught children to exert police-like roles in animal welfare work, capitalizing on existing cultural connections between children and animals to then teach children to disidentify from and ultimately help control racialized animal bodies. Then, the essay demonstrates how the three feline autobiographies ultimately advocate for the control and shaping of racialized nonhuman and human biological reproduction. The article’s argument emphasizes the importance of interrogating these texts, published during a formative historical moment in the development of humane education, as we work to transform children’s literature and animal welfare work into sites for anti-racist thought and action.

Kilbane, Matthew

2024 American Literature

doi: 10.1215/00029831-11398639

This article frames Langston Hughes’s 1947 collaboration with composer Kurt Weill on the “Broadway opera” Street Scene as a privileged opportunity to explore modern history’s extraordinary claims on poetic language and the limitations of allegoresis as a critical mode. Foregrounding Hughes’s understudied career as a pop songwriter, the article argues that the fragmented, unruly archive of the poet’s songwriting demands to be read allegorically, after the fashion of Walter Benjamin’s writings on Charles Baudelaire, whose own fusion of lyric and commodity forms anticipates Hughes’s pop lyrics. Ultimately, when we position Hughes as a successor of sorts to Benjamin’s Baudelaire, that “poet in the age of high capitalism,” we are invited at least temporarily to relieve the allegorical gaze of its restless search for hidden springs of critical agency and to relieve it, too, of its quest for the consolations of utopia. Hughes’s collaborative work on Street Scene instead teaches us how to locate and extol in seemingly compromised cultural artifacts an allegorical resourcefulness that precedes reception and is in fact synonymous, in Hughes’s case, with poetic making.

Liu, Rebecca N.

2024 American Literature

doi: 10.1215/00029831-11398655

This article examines the central role that the work contract plays in the production and reproduction of Asian diasporic worlds. In light of the history of Asian indentured contract labor in the Americas, the article proposes that the “Asian American contract” emerges as an affirmation of the exchange of useful labor for a sense of belonging and world for the Asian American subject—even when this exchange comes at the expense of life. Through readings of Ling Ma’s novel Severance (2018) and director Lee Isaac Chung’s film Minari (2020), the article demonstrates how the contract ultimately transforms Asian Americans’ reproductive labor—their childbearing and child-rearing—into their social reproduction as a racialized class of useful, compliant workers.