on Reading the American Novel 1780-1865 by Shirley Samuels
Shirley Samuelsâs Reading the American Novel 1780-1865 (2012) is an installment of the Reading the Novel series edited by Daniel R. Schwarz, a series dedicated to âprovid[ing] practical introductions to reading the novel in both the British and Irish, and the American traditions.â While the volume does offer a âpractical introductionâ to the American novel of the antebellum eraâits major themes, cultural contexts, and modes of productionâits primary focus is the expansion of the American literary canon, particularly with regard to nineteenth-century women writers. In this respect, Samuelsâs book continues a strong tradition of feminist cultural and historicist criticism pioneered by such landmark studies as Jane Tompkinsâs Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction 1790-1860 (1985) and Cathy N. Davidsonâs Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (1986). Tompkinsâs explicit goal was to challenge the view of American literary history codified by F.O. Matthiessenâs monumental work, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941). In particular, Tompkins was concerned with reevaluating what she wryly termed the âother American Renaissance,â namely the âentire body of workâ 1 of popular female sentimental writers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Maria Cummins, and Susan Warner, whose narratives âoffer powerful examples of the way a culture thinks about itself.â 2
Recent decades have witnessed a growing scholarly interest in not only expanding the literary canon through the rediscovery of âlostâ works by women writers such as Tabitha Gilman Tenney3 and P.D. Manvill4, to name a few, but also reassessing how the study of nineteenth-century sentimentalism and material culture might complicate, extend, and enrich our present understandings of the works of such canonical figures as Cooper, Hawthorne, and Melville. In this critical vein, Samuels asks, âwhat happens when a student starts to read Nathaniel Hawthorneâs The Scarlet Letter (1850), not simply in relation to its Puritan setting but also in relation to the novels that surround it?â (160). Reading the American Novel engages in both of these critical enterprisesârediscovery and reassessment of nineteenth-century American literatureâby promoting what she describes as ânot a sequential, but a layered readingâ (153). In her âAfterward,â Samuels explains:
Such a reading produces a form of pleasure layered into alternatives and identities where metaphors of confinement or escape are often the most significant. What produces the emergence of spatial or visual relations often lies within the historical attention to geography, architecture, or music as elements in this fiction that might re-orient the reader. With such knowledge, the reader can ask the fiction to perform different functions. What happens here? The spatial imagining of towns and landscapes corresponds to the minute landscape of particular bodies in time. Through close attention to the movements of these bodies, the critic discovers not only new literatures, but also new historiesâ (153).
It is this ârichly texturedâ (2) type of readingâa set of hermeneutic techniques to be deployed tactically across textual surfaces (including primary texts, marginalia, geographical locations, and âparticular bodies in timeâ [153])âthat leads, eventually, to Samuelsâs, and the readerâs, greatest discoveries. The reader may find Samuelsâs approach to be a bit disorienting initially. This is because Reading the American Novel traces not the evolution of a central concept in the way that Elizabeth Barnes, in States of Sympathy: Seduction and Democracy in the American Novel (1997), follows the development of seduction from late eighteenth-century to the domestic fiction of the 1860s. Rather, Samuels introduces a constellation of loosely-related motifs or what she later calls âpossibilities for readingâ (152)ââreading by waterways, by configurations of home, by blood and contractâ (152)âthat will provide the anchoring points for the set of disparate and innovative readings that follow.
Samuelsâs introductory chapter, âIntroduction to the American Novel: From Charles Brockden Brownâs Gothic Novels to Caroline Kirklandâs Wilderness,â considers the development of the novel from the standpoint of cultural production and consumption, arguing that a nineteenth-century audience would have âassumed that the novel must act in the worldâ (4). In addition, Samuels briefly introduces the various motifs, themes, and sites of conflict (e.g. âViolence and the Novel,â âNationalism,â Landscapes and Houses,â âCrossing Borders,â âWaterâ) that will provide the conceptual frameworks for her layers of reading in the subsequent chapters. If her categories at first appear arbitrary, this is because, as Samuels points out, âthe novel in the United States does not follow set patternsâ (20). The complex conceptual topography introduced in Chapter 1 reflects the need for what she calls a âfractal critical attention, the ability to follow patterns that fold ideas into one another while admiring designs that appear to arise organically, as if without volitionâ (20).
The second chapter of the book, âHistorical Codes in Literary Analysis: The Writing Projects of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Elizabeth Stoddard, and Hannah Crafts,â examines the value of archival research by considering the ways in which âhistorical codes . . . include[ing] abstractions such as iconography as well as the minutiae derived from historical research . . . are there to be interpreted and deciphered as much as to be deployedâ (28). Samuelsâs reading of Hawthorne, for example, links the fragmentary status of the authorâs late work, The Dolliver Romance (1863-1864), to the more general âideological fragmentationâ (28) apparent in Hawthorneâs emotional exchange of letters with his editor, James T. Fields, concerning the representation of President Lincoln and his âincreasing material difficulty of holding a penâ (25).
Samuelsâs third chapter, âWomen, Blood, and Contract: Land Claims in Lydia Maria Child, Catharine Sedgwick, and James Fenimore Cooper,â explores the prevalence of âcontracts involving women and bloodâ (45) in three early nineteenth-century historical romances, Childâs Hobomok (1824), Cooperâs The Last of the Mohicans (1826), and Sedgwickâs Hope Leslie (1827). In these works, Samuels argues, the struggle over national citizenship and westward expansion is dramatized against the âpowerfully absent immediate contextâ (45) of racial politics. She maintains that in such dramas âthe gift of womenâs bloodâ (62)âoften represented in the guise of romantic desire and sacrificeâ âboth obscures and exposes the contract of landâ (62).
Chapter four, âBlack Rivers, Red Letters, and White Whales: Mobility and Desire in Catharine Williams, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville,â extends Samuelsâs meditation on the figure of womenâs bodies in relation to âthe promise or threat of reproductionâ (68) in the narrative of national identity; however, in her readings of Williamsâ Fall River (1834), Hawthorneâs The Scarlet Letter (1850), and Melvilleâs Moby Dick (1851), the focus shifts from issues of land and contracts to the representation of water as symbolic of ânational dispossessionâ (68) and âanxieties about birthâ (68).
Samuelsâs fifth chapter, âPromoting the Nation in James Fenimore Cooper and Harriet Beecher Stowe,â returns to the question of the historical romance, critically examining how Cooperâs 1841 novel, The Deerslayer, might be read as evidence of âambivalent nationalismâ (102), as it links âearly American nationalism and capitalism to violence against women and childrenâ (109). Samuels then considers the possibility of applying such ambivalence to Stoweâs abolitionist vision for the future of America limned in Uncle Tomâs Cabin (1852), a vision founded, in part, on Stoweâs conceptual remapping of the Puritan jeremiad onto the abolitionist discourse of divine retribution and national apocalypse (111-112). Because Stowe âset out to produce a history of the United States that would have become obsolete in the moment of its tellingâ (111), Samuels argues that we witness a break in the development of historical fiction caused by the Civil War, a âgapâ during which âthe purpose of nationalism with respect to the historical novel changesâ (113).
Chapter six, âWomenâs Worlds in the Nineteenth-Century Novel: Susan B. Warner, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Fanny Fern, E.D.E.N. Southworth, Harriet Wilson, and Louisa May Alcott,â and the bookâs Afterwardâin my opinion, the strongest sections of the bookâsurvey a wide variety of nineteenth-century American women writers, including: Warner, Fern, Southworth, Wilson, Alcott, Caroline Kirkland, and Julia Ward Howe, among others. These discussions explore the ways in which writing functions as a type of labor which âgives the woman a face with which to face the worldâ (145). Samuels seeks to challenge the over-simplification of âseparate spheresâ ideology (153) by offering careful critical attention to the ways in which the labor of writing shapes identities in a multiplicity of distinct cultural locations. Hence, Samuels writes: âIt is difficult to summarize motifs that appear in womenâs writing in the nineteenth century. To speak of womenâs worlds in the novel raises the matter of: what women?â (143).
Admittedly, there are moments when Samuelsâs layered readings necessitate extended swaths of summary; the works that become the primary focus of Samuelsâs analyses, such as Catharine Williamsâ Fall River and the novels of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps and E.D.E.N. Southworth, may be unfamiliar to many readers. At other instances, the very intricacy, novelty, and ambitiousness of Samuelsâs reading performances begin to challenge the readerâs desire for linear consistency. Her interpretive strategies, which prioritize reading at the margins, the textual rendering of historical codes, and provocative juxtapositions, produce, at times, a kind of tunneling effect. The reader is swept breathlessly along, relieved when the author pauses to say: âBut to return to my opening questionâ (82). Ultimately however, Samuelsâs critical approaches throughout this book pose an important challenge to our conventional ways of assigning value and significance to nineteenth-century popular fiction. By reading canonical works such as Moby Dick and The Scarlet Letter with and against the popular crime novel Fall River, for example, she is able to map similarities between all three works in order to create âa more complete fictionâ (83). All of these novels, she writes, âlure New Englanders to die. To read them together is to recover the bodies of laboring women and men from watery depthsâ (83). This type of creative reading, to invoke Ralph Waldo Emersonâs phrase, allows us potentially to tease out significant conflicts and tensions in well-known works that might have otherwise remained invisible in a conventional reading. âWhat happens,â she asks, âwhen we remember that Captain Ahab is a father?â (83). Because Samuels offers not only insightful interpretations of nineteenth-century American novels but also introduces new and creative ways to readâand ways to think about the meaning of reading as a critical practiceâReading the American Novel must be viewed as a valuable addition to American literary scholarship.
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Sean J. Kelly is Associate Professor of English at Wilkes University. His articles on nineteenth-century American literature and culture have recently appeared in PLL, The Edgar Allan Poe Review, and Short Story.
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notes: 1. Tompkins, Jane. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction 1790-1860. New York: Oxford UP, 1985. 147 Back to the essay
3. Tenney, Tabitha Gilman. Female Quixotism: Exhibited in the Romantic Opinions and Extravagant
Adventures of Dorcasina Sheldon. 1801. Intro. Cathy N. Davidson. New York: Oxford UP, 1992. Back to the essay
4. Manvill, P.D. Lucinda; Or, the Mountain Mourner: Being Recent Facts, in a Series of Letters, from Mrs.
Manvill, in the State of New York, to Her Sister in Pennsylvania. 1807. Intro. Mischelle B. Anthony. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 2009. Back to the essay
Petra Dierkes-Thrun interviews Susan Stryker, leader of an unprecedented initiative in transgender studies at the University of Arizona, and one of two founding co-editors of the new journal TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly (together with Paisley Currah). Stryker is Associate Professor of Gender and Womenâs Studies, and Director of the Institute for LGBT Studies at the University of Arizona. The author or editor of numerous books and articles on transgender and queer topics for popular and scholarly audiences alike, she won an Emmy Award for the documentary film Screaming Queens: The Riot at Comptonâs Cafeteria, a Lambda Literary Award for The Transgender Studies Reader, and the Ruth Benedict Book Prize for The Transgender Studies Reader 2.
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Transgender Studies initiative at the University of Arizona. Left to Right (Front): Paisley Currah, Susan Stryker, Monica Casper, Francisco Galarte; (Back): Eric Plemons, Max Strassfeld, Eva Hayward. Not pictured: TC Tolbert. Photo by Paisley Currah.
DIERKES-THRUN:Â Â The University of Arizona recently initiated an unprecedented cluster hire in transgender studies and is actively working towards a graduate degree program in transgender studies. Can you tell us a bit more about the history and the thinking behind this strong, coordinated move at your institution?
STRYKER: After the University of Arizona (UA) recruited me away from my previous job to direct the Institute for LGBT Studies in 2011, I came in saying that I wanted to put equal emphasis on the âTâ in that acronym, and they were supportive of that. But none of us anticipated that the T was going to become the tail that wagged the dog, so to speak. It would not have happened had I not been courted by another, much more prestigious university during my second year on the job. UA asked what it would take to retain me, and I said I wanted to do something unprecedented, something I would not be able to do at that other university, something that would transform my field, while also putting UA on the map in a bold new way. I said I wanted to launch a transgender studies initiative, which represents my vision of the fieldâs need to grow. The institution said yes to what I proposed, and to the upper administrationâs credit, they saw an opportunity in what I pitched.
The truly unprecedented institutional commitment came in the form of strategic hiring support for a transgender studies faculty cluster. As UA has been quick to point out to conservative critics of this initiative, no new funds were identified to create these faculty linesâthey came from existing pools of discretionary funds, and represent a shifting towards emerging areas of study of faculty lines freed up by retirement or resignation. That said, no university anywhere in the world has ever conducted a faculty cluster hire in transgender studies. Four lines were made available: two in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, and two in colleges elsewhere in the University. We wound up filling three of those positions last yearâhiring in medical anthropology, feminist science and technology studies, and religious studiesâand are in negotiations about where to place the remaining line.
UA has a strong institutional culture of interdisciplinary collaboration, as well as a good track record of supporting LGBT issues, so this fit right in. They understand that transgender issues have a lot of cultural saliency at the moment, and that studying the rapid shifts in contemporary gender systems, including the emergence of historically new forms of gender expression, particularly in the context of the biomedical technologization of âlife itself,â is a legitimate field of study and research. Pragmatically, they saw the initiative as a way to attract and retain innovative and diverse faculty members, to bring in out-of-state tuition dollars, to compete for external research grants, and to push back against the popular misconception that Arizona is only a politically reactionary place. From the institutionâs perspective, there was no advocacy agenda at work here, just an opportunity to increase the bottom line by building on existing faculty and research strengths.
The lowest-hanging fruit, which can be accomplished with relatively little bureaucracy, is a graduate concentration, minor, or designated emphasis in transgender studies, and there is definitely support for that. We hope to have that in place within a year. It is also possible that a currently existing MA program in Gender and Womenâs Studies could be adapted relatively easily to accommodate a transgender studies emphasis, but that involves a lot of inside-the-ballpark negotiation with current GWS faculty. Actually creating a new, stand-alone graduate program at the stateâs land grant university would require approval by the Arizona Board of Regents, and ultimately by the Governorâs Office, so that will be a longer and tougher row to hoe.
The final element of the initiative is approval to pursue establishing a new research enterprise called the âCenter for Critical Studies of the Body.â The rationale here was to provide a non-identitarian rubric that could bring transgender studies into dialog with other interdisciplinary fields, such as the study of disability, trauma, sports, medical humanities, etc. No funds were provided for this, just a green light for starting the process of cobbling a center together.
Of course, itâs vital to ask the question why, in an era when the teaching of Chicano/a studies is literally being outlawed in Arizona public schools, when xenophobic attitudes inform the stateâs border politics, attention to transgender identities and practices can appear palatable. How does institutional investment in transgender studies at this particular historical juncture play into a deep logic of âmanaging differenceâ through expert knowledges, or get positioned as less threatening than calls for racial and economic justice? As the person heading up this initiative, I want to be attentive to ways I can use trans studies to advance other concerns that currently have a harder time getting traction in Arizona. I think my deepest challenge in trying to spearhead this initiative lies in resisting the ways that transgender studies can be co-opted for neoliberal uses that fall short of its radical transformative potential.
DIERKES-THRUN: The University of Arizona also provided financial and logistical support for the establishment of a new journal of record for the field of transgender studies, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, published by Duke University Press in 2014, with you and Paisley Currah (Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center) as founding co-editors. How did that come about?
STRYKER: Launching this journal had been a long-term project of mine and Paisley’s and was already well underway before the opportunity to launch the broader transgender studies initiative came up, but it nevertheless constitutes an important element of what has become the bigger project. UA has significantly supported the establishment of  TSQ by contributing about one-third of the start-up costs. Those funds were cobbled together from a lot of different institutional sources, including the Provostâs Office, the office of the Vice President for Research, the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, the Department of Gender and Womenâs Studies, and the Institute for LGBT Studies.
DIERKES-THRUN:Â For our readers who are just now becoming acquainted with transgender studies as a diverse intellectual and academic field, how would you summarize its most important constants and changes over the past two decades? What are some important subareas and affiliated fields for transgender studies?
STRYKER: Iâd recommend taking a look at the tables of contents in the two volumes of The Transgender Studies Reader. The first volume, from 2006, offers a genealogy of field formation, highlighting historical ties to scientific sexology, feminism, and poststructuralist theory.
It includes work from the âtransgender momentâ of the early 1990s that changed the conversation on trans issues and tackles many of the topics that were of interest in the fieldâs first decadeâquestions of self-representation, diversity within trans communities, the increasing visibility of trans-masculinities. The second volume, from 2013, showcases the rapid evolution of the field in the 21st century, which is self-consciously moving in strongly transnational directions away from the Anglophone North American biases of the fieldâs first decade. There has been much more attention paid to the relationship between transgender issues and other structural forms of inequality and injustice, and, post 9/11, to questions about borders, surveillance, and securityâand the ways that non-conventionally gendered bodies experience heightened scrutiny and limitations on movement, and can be seen as posing a terroristic threat to the body politic. There are increasing affinities with posthumanist work, as well as with animal studies, critical life studies, and the so-called ânew materialism.â The first several issues of TSQ suggest something of current directions in the field: they address decolonization, cultural production, population studies, transanimalities, higher education studies, archives, transfeminism, political economy, sex classification, translation, surgery, sinophone studies, and psychoanalytic theory.
DIERKES-THRUN: Can you say something about the trans- and international context of transgender studies today? What are the most important challenges there and why should we be thinking about them?
STRYKER: The field has indeed been moving in a strongly transnational direction for more than a decade. I was particularly pleased that The Transgender Studies Reader 2 was awarded the 2013 Ruth Benedict Prize from the Association for Queer Anthropology/American Anthropological Association, precisely because the field of transgender studies challenges us to think anew about how we understand sex/gender/identity cross-culturally. I think one of the biggest intellectual challenges has to do with fully acknowledging that some of the fundamental categories that we use to understand âhuman beingââlike man and womanâare not ontologically given, but rather are themselves historically and cultural variable and contingent. Translation is also a huge problemâhow do we facilitate the exchange of knowledge across language and culture, when the very categories we use to organize and recognize our own being and that of others can be so deeply incommensurable?
DIERKES-THRUN:Â In the introduction to the inaugural issue of TSQ, the editors write, âTransgender studies promises to make a significant intellectual and political intervention into contemporary knowledge production in much the same manner that queer theory did twenty years ago.â What are some of the most needed intellectual and political interventions that you anticipate transgender studies can and will make?
STRYKER:Â First and foremost, I see it creating more space for critical conversations that involve transgender speakers. Bringing trans studies into the academy is one way of bringing more trans people into the academy. Of course Iâm not arguing that trans studies is something that on trans people can participate in. Far from itâanybody can develop an expertise in this area, or feel that they have some sort of stake in it. But just as disability activists said in the 70s and 80, ânothing about us without us.â Whatâs most significant is creating an opportunity for the privileged and powerful kinds of knowledge production that takes place in the academy (about trans topics or any other area that involves people) to be not just objectifying knowledge, what we might call âknowledge of,â but also âknowledge with,â knowledge that emerges from a dialog that includes trans people who bring an additional kind of experiential or embodied knowledge along with their formal, expert knowledges. Itâs the same rationale for any kind of diversity hiring initiative. People have different kinds of âsituated knowledgesâ that derive from how they live their bodily differences in the world. Itâs important to have people in critical conversations who come from different perspectives based on race/ethnicity, gender, ability, national origin, first languages, etc. Transgender represents a different kind of difference that offers a novel perspective on how gender systems, and therefore society, work.
DIERKES-THRUN:Â You also say, in the same TSQ introduction, that transgender studies âoffers fertile ground for conversations about what the posthuman might practically entail (as well as what, historically, it has already been).â The posthuman is a topic of interest to many of our readers. Could you map out for us what specific or broader contributions transgender studies can make to past and future discussions of the posthuman?
STRYKER:The first thing we say of a new child is âItâs a girlâ or Itâs a boy.â Through the operation of language, we move a body across the line that separates mere biological organism from human community, transforming the status of a nonhuman âitâ into a person through the conferral of a gender status. It has been very difficult to think of the human without thinking of it through the binary gender schema. I think a lot of the violence and discrimination trans people face derives from a fundamental inability on the part of others to see us as fully human because we are considered improperly gendered, and thus lower on the animacy hierarchy, therefore closer to death and inanimacy, therefore more expendable and less valuable than humans. A transgender will to life thus serves as a point from which to critique the human as a universal status attributed to all members of the species, and to reveal it instead as a narrower set of criteria wielded by some to dehumanize others.
DIERKES-THRUN: The journal description announces that TSQ âwill publish interdisciplinary work that explores the diversity of gender, sex, sexuality, embodiment, and identity in ways that have not been adequately addressed by feminist and queer scholarship.â What have been some of feminist and queer theoryâs most important blind spots when it comes to thinking about the transgender experience?
STRYKER:Transgender Studies emerged as an interdisciplinary field in the early 1990s, at roughly the same time as queer theory. Thereâs been a robust conversation about the relationship between the two, especially given the simultaneous formation of whatâs come to be called the âLGBTâ community. I contend that trans studies, as it was first articulated, shared an agenda with queer studies in the sense that it critiqued heteronormative society from a place of oppositional difference. It argued that âqueerâ was not just a five letter word for homosexual, but rather that queer encompassed a range of âdifferent differencesâ that all had a stake in contesting various sorts of oppressive and coercive normativities related to sex, sexuality, identity, and embodiment. As queer theory developed, however, issues of sexuality really did remain in the forefront. From a transgender studies perspective, the whole distinction between homo and hetero sexualities depends on a prior agreement about what constitutes âsex,â on whoâs a man and whoâs a woman. Destabilizing those material referents, or needing to account for their sequentiality, their fuzzy boundaries, their historicity or cultural specificity, or their hybridity really opens up a whole different set of questions. In addition, trans studies is not organized primarily around issues of sexuality; equally important are questions of gender, bodily difference, heath care provision, technology studies, and a host of other things that have not been central to queer studies. So the debate between queer and trans studies has been about whether they are different parts of the same big intellectual and critical project, employing the same transversal methodologies for bringing into analytical focus and contesting oppressive normativities, or whether they overlap with one anotherâsharing some interests but not othersâor whether they are really two different enterprises, concerned with different objects of study.
My personal answer is all of the above, sometimes. At its most radical, trans studies offers a critique of the ways in which gay and lesbian liberation and civil rights struggles have advanced themselves by securing greater access to citizenship for homosexuals precisely through the reproduction of gender normativitiesâthe liberal âIâm just like a straight person except for who I have sex withâ argument. What actually provides the commonality there between homo and hetero is an agreement about who is a man and who is a woman, and how we can tell the difference between the two. Trans studies puts pressure on that tacit agreement.
With regard to feminism, I think the major innovation transgender studies offers has to do with how gender hierarchies operate. In the most conventional feminist frameworks, what has seemed most important is to better understand and thereby better resist the subordination of women to men. Without contesting that basic tenet, transgender studies suggests that it is also necessary to understand how contesting the hierarchized gender binary itself can increase vulnerabilities to structural oppression for those people who donât fit in, or who refuse to be fixed in place. That is, in addition to needing to address power structures that privilege normatively gendered men and masculinity over normatively gendered women and femininity, we also need to address a wide range of gender nonnormativities, atypicalities, transitivities, and fluidities. I see this as extending, rather than challenging, fundamental feminist insights.
DIERKES-THRUN: Many of our readers may not know this, but traditionally, the relationship between queer theory and transgender studies and activism has been quite contentious. Is the fact that there is now a separate academic journal for trans studies indicative of an ongoing divide with queer studies, despite what you call the recent âtransgender turnâ?
STRYKER:Thereâs a big enough and deep enough conversation on trans topics to merit and sustain an independent journal for the field, thatâs all. There is more publishable scholarship on trans issues and topic than will ever fit into GLQ, given that journalâs broader scope, or that can ever fit into one-off special issues of disciplinary or interdisciplinary journals devoted to trans topics. Worrying that the advent of TSQÂ signals a divergence or parting of the ways between queer and trans studies is an overblown concern. Personally, Iâd hate to see queer and trans studies drift further apart, because I feel strongly committed to both. I think trans studies is expansive enough to encompass a lot of queer scholarship on sex/gender nonnormativity, while also advancing scholarship on transgender-related topics that queer studies has never been particularly interested in.
DIERKES-THRUN: As someone who has worked as a historian, social activist for trans rights and documentary filmmaker on trans history, how would you describe the state of our societyâs understanding and attitudes towards transgender today? Does it feel like the tide has finally shifted?
STRYKER:I think it is a mixed bag. Pretty much everybody today knows that there is this thing called âtransgenderâ, but they canât say exactly what it is. They know if they want to be considered progressive they are supposed to be OK with it, even if they secretly feel squeamish or judgmental or confused. Thatâs an improvement over the situation in decades past, when pretty much everybody agreed that there were these sick people and freaks and weirdoes who wanted to cross-dress or take hormones or cut up their genitals, but they were not important, and society really didnât have to pay any attention to such a marginal and stigmatized phenomenon. So yes, there has been a shift, but yes, there is still a long way to go.
DIERKES-THRUN: Which projects are you working on now?
STRYKER:I have a really heavy administrative load right now. I was already trying to run a research institute, teach, commute between my job in Tucson and my home in San Francisco, and launch a new peer-reviewed journal, before the trans studies initiative became a possibility. That has definitely been a âbe careful what you ask forâ lesson, in terms of workload. I feel like I donât write anything these days that doesnât start with the words âExecutive Summaryâ and end with the words âTotal Budget.â It will probably be like that for a couple more years, especially until I complete my agreed-upon term of service as director of the Institute for LGBT Studies at the end of 2016.
But there are a couple of projects percolating along on the back burner. At the time I came to Arizona, I was working on an experimental media project called Christine in the Cutting Room, about the 1950s transsexual celebrity Christine Jorgensen, who burst onto the global stage when news of her sex-change surgery made headlines around the world. The project was sparked for me by a comment Jorgensen made in an interview with television journalist Mike Wallace. She was talking about her pre-fame job as a film cutter in the newsreel division at RKO Studios in New York, and said that she âused to work on one side of the cameraâ because she âdidnât know how to appear on the other side.â That gave me the idea of approaching the question of transsexuality from an aesthetic perspective, as a technique of visualization, accomplished through media manipulation. I saw Jorgensen using cinematic techniques of media cutting, suturing, image creation, and projection to move her from one side of the camera to the other, by moving herself from one kind of âcutting roomâ to another. I have always been interested in ways of exploring trans experience outside the pervasive psychomedical framework, and this project lets me do that. I mix archival audiovisual media of Jorgensen herself, found sound and images, electronic glitch music, and a scripted voice-over narration performed by an actress playing Jorgensen. At some point I hope to edit this material into a narrative film, but I have found it also works well as a multimedia installation in galleries and clubs.
I am also trying to write a book. Iâve finally hit on a way to piece together into one overarching argument lots of fragments of abandoned or incomplete projects on embodiment and technology, the early Mormons, members of San Franciscoâs elite Bohemian Club, transsexuals, urban history, and popular music. My working title is Identity is a War Machine: The Somatechnics of Gender, Race, and Whiteness. Itâs about the processes through which we incorporateâliterally somaticizeâculturally specific and historically revisable categories of individual identity within biopolitical regimes of governmentality. I wonât say any more about it at this time, because this book itself could be one of my many unfinished projects.
DIERKES-THRUN: Transgender as a topic of public curiosity seems to be everywhere in U.S. media culture these days, from Laverne Cox and Orange Is the New Black to Chelsea Manning, Andreja Pejic and others. (There is also a lot of naĂŻve conflation with drag and cross-dressing, as the media treatment of Conchita Wurst illustrates.) Do you worry about the glamorization and commodification of certain kinds of trans bodies in the media and the silence around others? Are famous celebrity spokespeople like Laverne Cox or Janet Mock good or bad for the movement, from your perspective?
STRYKER:In the wake of the repeal of the U.S. militaryâs Donât-Ask-Donât-Tell policy regarding homosexual service members, and after the Supreme Court decisions on marriage equality, transgender has emerged in some quarters as the ânext big thingâ in minority rights. I have a lot of problems with that way of framing things, and am very leery of the ways that story functions as a neoliberal progress narrative, and of the ways in which protecting trans people (now that gays have been taken care of) can exemplify the values of inclusivity and diversity, so that the US or the West can use support for trans rights to assert influence over other parts of the world who purportedly do not do as good a job on this front. What is truly amazing to me, after having been out as trans for nearly a quarter century, is the extent to which it is now becoming possible for some trans people to access what I call âtransnormative citizenship,â while at the same time truly horrific life circumstances persist for other trans people. Race really does seem to be the dividing line that allows some trans people to be cultivated for life, invested in, recognized, and enfolded into the biopolitical state, while allowing others to be consigned to malignant neglect or lethal violence. The contemporary celebrity culture of transgender plays to both sides of this dichotomy. Itâs increasingly possible to see trans people represented as successful, beautiful, productive, or innovative (and I salute those trans people who have accomplished those things). At the same time, you see people like Laverne Cox and Janet Mock using their platform to call attention the persistence of injustices, particularly for trans women of color. I am truly inspired by the way they both speak out on race, classism, the prison-industrial complex, and sex-work.
~ Twenty-five years ago, in the early hours of June 4, the peopleâs government in Beijing turned its guns on the people of the city who had risen in protests that spring to express their frustration with Party despotism and corruption. The refusal to this day to acknowledge the crime is matched by continued criminalization of those who still live under the shadow of Tiananmen, and with courage continue to pursue the goals it had put on the political agenda â some from within the country, others from exile. The Tiananmen democracy movement brought to a head the contradictions of âreform and openingâ that had acquired increasing sharpness during the decade of the 1980s. The successful turn to global capitalism in the aftermath of the suppression has been at least as important as the censorship of memories in the âforgettingâ of Tiananmen among the PRC population. In historical perspective, Tiananmen appears as one of a series of popular uprisings around the globe that have accompanied the globalization of neo-liberal capitalism. The discussion throughout stresses foreign complicity â including that of foreign China scholars and educational institutions â in covering up this open sore on so-called âsocialism with Chinese characteristicsâ.
Read the full article here. in International Journal of China Studies
Vol. 5, No. 2, June/August 201 4, pp. 295-329
“The true scandal is not in the proposition of analogy between the Haitian and Tunisian revolutions, but in this epistemological failure, which perpetuates the refusal to recognize that they are not derivative analogues of the French Revolution or the European Spring of Revolution, but are distinctive events of social transformation, which while in part stimulated by a certain set of Enlightenment concepts and institutions, have taken a course that cannot be charted according to the dominate mapping of our common modernity…”
Given on May 17 2014 at The Tunisian Revolution: Causes, Course and Aftermath Conference, Saint Anthonyâs College, Oxford University, Oxford UK
So, then, rather than locating the Tunisian Revolution in its international dimension, I raise, and will try to address the question of what and how it is meaningful as an earthly historic human event. The most succinct answer to this question is that the Tunisian Revolution, âwhich we have seen unfolding in our day, whether it may succeed or miscarry . . . finds in the hearts of all spectators (who are not engaged in the game themselves) a wishful participation that borders closely on enthusiasm, the very expression of which is fraught with danger; this sympathy, therefore, can have no other cause than a moral predisposition in the human race.â The last sentence sums things up: this revolution is evidence that humanity can progress of its own accord. That, I think, is the significance of the Tunisian Revolution of Dignity in all the details of its events beginning in Gafsa in 2008 up through to the moment. And, in that regard, it is far more analogous to the events that shook the Caribbean Island of Saint Domingue from 1791-1804, when the independent republic of Haiti was established,1 than it is to either those that transformed France from 1789 to 95, or those from 1848 to 71, which ushered in the hegemony of the European bourgeois liberal nation-state. I know this seems like a radical provocation. I do not, however, intend it as a scandalous remark, but rather as a serious proposition aimed at getting us to think something else. Its seeming scandalous has to do with its incomprehensibleness, which in turn has to do with a failure of knowledge regarding those events of Haiti that, as the Haitian anthropologist, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, asserted in 1990, persist as ââunthinkableâ facts . . . for which one has no adequate instruments to conceptualize.â2 The true scandal is not in the proposition of analogy between the Haitian and Tunisian revolutions, but in this epistemological failure, which perpetuates the refusal to recognize that they are not derivative analogues of the French Revolution or the European Spring of Revolution, but are distinctive events of social transformation, which while in part stimulated by a certain set of Enlightenment concepts and institutions, have taken a course that cannot be charted according to the dominate mapping of our common modernity.
What I am proposing, then, is that in order to address the significance of the Tunisian Revolution, to seriously ask what this is as an earthly historic human event, we need another historiography of revolution, one that not only makes use of alternative archives but also deploys an alternative anthropology. In addressing the question what is this, we need ask what does it look like; hence, my answer: Haiti. To the extent that this entails locating the Tunisian Revolution within an international milieu, it means situating it in the lineage of, to put it bluntly, âother-than-Europeanâ popular revolution. This does not mean non-European, which would assume that the question of Europe itself is settled; which it is not, remaining instead the principal conundrum of modern political science, as well as human sciences: What are we and how can we see ourselves in common? The incomprehensibleness of the commonality of the Haitian and Tunisian revolutions to the current political and sociological analysis is indicative of the utter failure of these sciences to adequately address that question. In the case of Haiti, this is expressed as an outright hostility to the possibility of there ever being let alone ever have been a revolution. In the case of Tunisia, it is manifested as an equally assertive indifference. Both responses have a similar effect: the blockage of destructive neglect of the revolutionary momentum. There are two specific points of analogy to which I wish to draw attention today. The first has to do with why both Haiti and Tunisia are incomprehensible as revolutions in their own right. The second has to do with, incomprehensibleness notwithstanding, the Haitian and Tunisian revolutionsâ function in common as actual catalysts for worldwide revolution. Both are emblematic of the movement of les damnes of modernity to realize the better aspirations of humanist modernity: Universal human dignity and rights. This has certainly been so for Haiti historically, which has long been an emblem of radical revolutionary freedom among radicals, and not just Black radicals for 200 years despite, no precisely because of the efforts of the great powers to erase it. Tunisia may perhaps, and this is the aspirational bit, come to be the same for our era.
Taking up the first point, Iâll remark what I am sure many of you already noted, which is that my proposition the Tunisian Revolution is evidence humanity can progress of its own accord is a paraphrasing of Immanuel Kantâs assessment of the French Revolution given in his treatise on education, Der Streit der FakultĂ€ten (The Conflict of the Faculties). Kantâs pronouncements of revolution have come under considerable scrutiny among political philosophers of late in accordance with a renewed investment in his conception of cosmopolitanism; the reason having to do with the idea that we may be indeed approaching such a world order. Of course, Kant is notoriously counterrevolutionary, precisely because, as Lewis Beck and even Chris Surprenant have pointed out, his theory of the deontological foundation for the origins of civil society dictates absolute prohibition on violent rebellion. Nonetheless, he did publicly express enthusiasm for the French Revolution, seeing in the events of 1789 to 1798, when he wrote The Conflict, a mode of thinkingâwe might best call it, daring to correct him, an emergent intelligenceâthat âdemonstrates a character of the human race at large and all at once.â That this should have emerged all at once, spontaneously, among the populous without the benefit of the discipline, Zucht, achieved through cultured pedagogy, trending toward instituting a civil constitution is precisely what recommends it as evidence of human progress. It was evidence of the inherent universal human tendency of progressive change, where the movement is towards realizing a common association of life and living. The fact that even though, for Kant, this is expressly a communicative association in reason, its conceptual schemata is principally a function of imagination need not concern us here. I merely want to mark it as a useful insight for understanding the eventfulness of Abou el-Kacem Chebbiâs 1933 poem, âIf the People One Day Will to Live,â in the spontaneity of the Tunisianâs popular uprisings and their manifesting a certain sort of sovereignty as self-conscious autopoesis; and that it is precisely the unlawfulness of such collective imagination that inclined Kant to view the events unfolding on Saint Domingue during the same time as those in France as the purest instance of collective irrational emotionâ in the sense of ill-directed public commotion and unrest: riotsâacting against moral-reason, and so absolutely an illegitimate eruption of violence against not only government but also civil society. By that same token, Iâll not rehearse Kantâs account of the origins of civil society, with its complicated elaboration of duties of rightâvirtue to the self and justice to othersâand his notion of authorized reciprocal coercion, which lays the foundation for his views on revolution. It suffices to remark here that his account turns on the postulate that humankind is comprised of individuals who, even in the state of nature, are all rational, autonomous beings. These two aspects of Kantâs thinking are key reasons why all he could see happening in Saint Domingue was a Negro slave rebellion. It is crucial we understand that this was not a failure of personal morals, or some kind of irrational reaction to human difference. It was a fundamental function of Kantâs transcendental deduction, which is to say his account of what is our reality and how we have it, and so what it means to be a free human subject capable of enlightenment, of warranting the motto Sapere Aude. In his assessment of all that, the Negro is a type of hominid firmly situated in the natural domain of things governed by physical law, but not so fully within the supranaturalistic domain of persons governed by the rational moral law. In that light, the basis of the Haitian Revolutionâs incomprehensibleness Trouillot references has precisely to do with the priority of the individual in the tradition of European political philosophy; it is because the Negro can not be admitted into the ranks of rational cosmopolitan individuals, and so cannot be the generator of civil society that the prospect of a revolution forming a republicâthat is, constituting a civil societyâis unfathomable, and nearly unimaginable. My point hereâ and it is a complicated one that I shall have to make quickly yet I hope coherentlyâis not about race. Rather, what gets expressed in Haitiâs case as a problem of race is indicative of a more fundamental problem of anthropological psychology and philosophy. That is the long enduring premise that only one mode of subjectivity drives the history of knowledge, as well as history, and it has a definitive singular formation.
The Haitian Revolutionâs being a contradictory corrective to this premise was announced by Jean-Jacques Dessalines on April 28 1804, when he justified the recriminatory violence that had just taken place against the islandâs whites with the words: âWe have paid these true cannibals back in full; war for war, crime for crime, outrage for outrage. . . . I have saved my country. I have avenged America.â Just fourth months earlier, Dessalines had declared the establishment of the Republic of Hayti, in his capacity as its first president. Naming the new country by the assumed Taino term for the island of Hispaniolaâthe very first place to see the arrival of Iberian colonists and the emergence of Europeans on the world stageâwas a symbolically powerful statement, as was his reversing the accusation of cannibalism that had long justified the autochthonous peopleâs enslavement and murder. Dessalinesâ April 28 statement signified an act of solidarity with not only all the oppressed populations, les damnes, of the Western hemisphere, but also the entire world, as was made explicit in the language of the 1804 constitution. One is inclined to agree with Nick Nesbitt and recognize in that constitution the first attempt to construct a society in accordance with the radical Enlightenment axioms of universal emancipation and universal human autonomy, in which all human subjects retain their autonomous constituent power. Dessalines thus defined the Haitian Revolution as a war of worlds, one that in âsavingâ Haiti from colonial slavery had avenged an entire hemisphere. In so doing, he expressly took up the Radical Enlightenment, further radicalizing in turn that very Enlightenment, which had refused to address anyone other than Whites as full subjects of human rights. As Nesbitt characterizes it, the Haitian Revolution amounted to an âinvention of an egalitarian freedom unknown in the North Atlantic.â One might quibble with the term âinvention,â preferring manifestation, yet concur fully with the assessment of the revolutionâs scope, articulating a distinctive historical subjectivityâthat is, distinct in its formation from that of the bourgeoisie of the Enlightenment. This articulation was remarked by the first properly Haitian theorist and polemicist for the revolution, Pompee-Valentin baron de Vastey, in his An Essay on the Causes of the Revolution and Civil Wars of Hayti where he writes of a population that only twenty-five years earlier was âin slavery and the most profound ignorance, with âno idea of human societies, no thought of happiness, no kind of energy, yet through massive spontaneous individual autodidactic effortâ many of them learned to read and write of themselves without an instructor. They walked about with books in their bands, inquired of persons whom they met, whether they could read; if they could, they were then desired to explain the meaning of such a particular sign, or such a word â produced in the span of one generation a corps of indigenous Haitian notaries, barristers, judges, statesmen, that âastonished every one by the solidity of their judgment.â Even more significant than this being a direct contradiction of Kantâs dismissal of the Negro as an inferior more natural hominid, is that the facts of Haitian auto-didacticism is in evidence of his theory of humankindâs capacity for autopoetic progression, and that, even more than the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution proves this. So what the incomprehensibleness of the events of the Haitian Revolution clearly indicates is not merely that they are unthinkable in accordance with the reigning cosmology, but that the cosmology is woefully, on its fundamental premises, incapable of yielding any truly adequate knowledge about the eventfulness of humankind, about how the societies in which we actual live are as they are. Which is to say they are a far ways away from giving a full picture of how humanity lives life in our world.
I draw your attention here to this distinction between the processes of market- driven subjectivity and the capacity of the Tunisian revolution to create new forms of collectivity. In both instances, we are talking about some process of individuation that has the practical and very material function of socialization, of creating a certain type of individual suitable for a certain type of sociality. The individuation process of the capitalist market â and I mean throughout its history from the early commodity markets of tenth-century Europe to the current neoliberal market of global finance â may indeed have engendered the normative subjectivity of the market through its endless refashioning and management of desire and imagination, but it also engendered something else, as is evidenced by the Tunisian Revolution. This something else is what Zygmnt Bauman termed an aesthetic sociality, the spontaneity of subjective feeling into volatile and unpredictable occasions of consensus. As he says: âThe instantaneous sociality of the crowd is a counter-structure to socializationâs structures.â We can understand by this that the cumulative institutionalized practices of disciplining normality, the genealogies of which Foucault elaborated under the lose rubric of biopoliticsâto which Bauman includes the legislative rationality of cognitive space thereby referencing the methodological practices of the human sciences in the universityâare interrupted by the faceless agency of the crowd.
notes: 1. Make note that when President Boyer secured Franceâs recognition of the republic in 1825 at a devastating cost, he effectively ended the revolutionâs political expression. Back to the essay
Between 2010-2012, Anthony Bogues and Geri Augusto convened a critical global humanities summer institute at Brown University. As part of that program Bogues was invited to Addis Abbba, Ethiopia to continue these conversations. This is a short documentary on these conversations held in Addis Abba. Here Ethiopian scholars discuss their own practical and theoretical approaches to humanistic work, which draws on African thought and experience.
Video by the Watson Institute for International Studies.
Henry Veggian establishes Literature & Politics review:
What intellectual traditions, political movements, writers and critics shape our understanding of the relationships between literature and politics in the United States? By what means do we identify such things, and to what ends? And how do these questions and others invite us to consider emergent configurations of critical thought? What possible futures might they suggest?
The Literature & Politics section of The b2 Review solicits and invites original book reviews from interested contributors. We ask reviewers to evaluate critical works that consider how literary writers and writings engage forms of political thought, philosophy, history and action, as well as to evaluate figures, studies and traditions concerned with the dynamics between politics and the literary arts.
We ask for reviews of an intermediate length but word count is not as important as style; we ask that you write reviews for the specialist as well as for the interested reader. Reviews will appear on the boundary 2 website.
Petra Dierkes-Thrun commits The b2 Review to a focus on Gender & Sexuality:
It is with great pleasure that I have agreed to join the collective as an advisory editor to launch a new online initiative for Gender and Sexuality Studies for The b2 Review. While boundary 2 has a longstanding interest in the best scholarly work of any kind, it is both fitting and necessary that gender and sexuality become a more obvious area of interest for the journalâs intellectual inquiry. The new Gender and Sexuality section aims to provide a flexible and mobile platform for the discussion of important new work both in feminist and LGBTQ studies. We will publish brief essays on current trends or events, interviews, and reviews of interesting books and other projects (including digital ones), keeping in mind boundary 2âs commitment to identifying and pinpointing important contemporary intellectual, conceptual and performative topics and trends that affect society at large.
As more new topics and ideas start influencing the journalâs scope and focus, we embrace a wide variety of topics, theoretical approaches, ideas and interests, and warmly welcome readersâ suggestions. Contact boundary 2 with inquiries.
