No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
Other Times: Herman Melville, Lewis Henry Morgan, and Ethnographic Writing in the Antebellum United States
Abstract
My knowledge of my mother is very scanty, but very distinct. Her personal appearance and bearing are ineffaceably stamped upon my memory. She was tall, and finely proportioned; of deep black, glossy complexion; had regular features, and, among the other slaves, was remarkably sedate in her manners. There is in Prichard’s Natural History of Man, the head of a figure—on page 157—the features of which so resemble those of my mother, that I often recur to it with something of the feeling which I suppose others experience when looking upon the pictures of dear departed ones.
Frederick Douglass’s citation of James Cowles Prichard’s Natural History of Man (1843) is surely one of the best-known representations of reading in the social sciences in the history of American letters. Following Douglass’s reference, his own readers have found themselves looking at an etching of the Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II, and have puzzled over what to make of this moment in Douglass’s second published autobiography. While one interpretation considers the gesture as the sign of Douglass’s deep ambivalence, perhaps unconscious, over his own genealogy of racial mixture, a more convincing approach reads the passage in light of his continuing engagement with the American School of Ethnology. 1 As “The Claims of the Negro, Ethnologically Considered”—an address that he delivered approximately a year before the 1855 publication of My Bondage and My Freedom—makes clear, Douglass claimed a historical relationship between ancient Egypt and contemporary descendants of the African diaspora as a way of defying race scientists such as Samuel Morton, George Gliddon, and Josiah Nott, whose theories of polygenesis played a significant role in the antebellum politics of slavery. Mia Bay has documented that Douglass was hardly alone among African American intellectuals of his time in contesting the racial science of ethnology, nor was his response—which both asserted the unity of humanity and yet made its own claims about distinct racial traits—unique.2 The similarity that Douglass finds between the remembered face of his mother and the outlines of an Egyptian king may have been a rhetorical gesture meant to evoke the depths of his emotional loss in being torn from his mother, but it was also a strategic maneuver that served as an ironic commentary on those who would use science to justify the enslavement of his kin.
For the purposes of this article, I am not going to elaborate fully the context of antislavery politics in which Douglass wrote this passage, nor am I going to place this moment within a fuller interpretation of his autobiographical writing. Instead, what I am interested in is the way that the passage figures a particular type of reading, one that pushes Douglass’s autobiography from the domain of ethnology (the scientific account of race) to the domain of ethnography (the scientific description of culture). Douglass begins with the physical features of his mother—the “tall, finely proportioned” body, the “deep black, glossy complexion,” and the “regular features” of the face—all of which he presumably finds in the etching that appears in Prichard’s book. Yet the connection surpasses physical genealogy; the “sedate manners” are reminiscent to Douglass, one assumes, of royalty. The body of the mother, moreover, has been replaced by the physical object of the printed text. Racial genealogy has been supplanted by textual referentiality; we are out of a world in which bodies simply exist, and into one where they must be described, historicized, and documented. Small wonder that the chapter in which this passage appears, “The Author’s Parentage,” will be followed by another that enters fully into the mode of ethnographic description, “A General Survey of the Slave Plantation.” In leading readers from his slim memories of his mother to the pages of Prichard’s Natural History, Douglass is signaling a larger move from personal history to generalizable knowledge about a social system and the people it has ensnared. We might say that even though he describes himself as reading an ethnological text, he does so to produce an ethnographic effect.
This scene of reading, most significantly, performs its disruption of...
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any citations for this publication.
This is an up-dated and revised version of the essay I originally published in the Massachusetts Review (Spring 1987): 43-65. I presented a condensed version during our expedition of Nuku Hiva and this is the full account, which has been revised in light of what I learned during the conference in Tahiti and Nuku Hiva.
Historical studies of white racial thought focus exclusively on white ideas about the "Negroes". Bay's study is the first to examine the reverse - black ideas about whites, and, consequently, black understandings of race and racial categories. Bay examines African-American ideas about white racial character and destiny in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In examining black racial thought, this work also explores the extent to which black Americans accepted or rejected 19th century notions about innate racial characteristics.
Sur le contexte anthropologique et psychanalytique du parallelisme entre cannibalisme et homosexualite dans les romans de M. - la representation de ces deux concepts y renvoyant tout a la fois aux relations d'amour et de pouvoir
American Literature 75.4 (2003) 723-749
One hundred four years after the anthropologist Franz Boas published his translation of "It°ᾱ'lapas Iᾱ'kxanam," a story he heard from Charles Cultee (Chinook) during field research along the Columbia River in 1890, "Coyote—His Myth" found a new textual home in The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Part of a new section of Native American trickster stories added to the fifth edition (1998), Coyote's interrogation of his feces in his attempts to fish for salmon resides in volume 1, along with Hawthorne's musings in the Custom-House and Ahab's fulminations on the quarterdeck.
As translated by Boas and printed in Chinook Texts (1894), a Bulletin of the Bureau of American Ethnology, Cultee's story revolves around Coyote's repeated attempts, sometimes with companions, to catch salmon. After failing, he defecates. His feces first insult him and then offer detailed instructions about the proper methods for catching and preparing salmon. Following this advice, Coyote is at first successful but then fails. He defecates again, only to hear from his feces that there are further rules and proscriptions, often for a particular geographic location. In the end, Coyote learns the proper procedures but is exhausted by his efforts. "Even I got tired," he says.
The inclusion of "Coyote—His Myth" in the Norton's fifth edition exemplifies the recent victories of those advocating a pluralistic, multicultural approach to American literary history—an advocacy now so familiar that its arguments have become, in a word, canonical. Paul Lauter, for instance, contends that transcriptions of Native American oral expression epitomize the way a pluralist approach to American literature can destabilize claims to universality and throw into question the most basic assumptions of literary reading. Because the "literary encounter lift[s] the tale from the tribal context in which it takes its living shape," these texts assure students and teachers alike that no scene of literary interpretation is neutral. Including oral, indigenous texts in American literature thus "provides us with an opportunity to explore the important problem of how responses to a work differ according to the circumstance in which it is encountered and depending on the reader's or listener's own position in the world." Lauter implies that such works generate the beginning of a process through which students learn that readers and texts are embedded in the relations of power governing the world they both inhabit. Such texts, moreover, figure prominently in Lauter's successful rival to the Norton and have been included as the first works of every edition of his Heath Anthology of American Literature.
If Lauter is correct in suggesting that the inclusion of American Indian oral texts in literary anthologies can overturn notions of an elite and distinct sphere of aesthetics, then the trickster figure of Coyote would appear to be an ideal candidate for this pedagogical project. In many North American tribal storytelling traditions, the trickster is both a transformative and a comic character. As Paul Radin puts it, he is "at one and the same time creator and destroyer, giver and negator, he who dupes others and who is always duped himself." More recently, the figure of the trickster has seemed to many students of Native American expression to dovetail neatly with poststructuralist strategies of reading that emphasize textual instability and the indeterminacy of meaning. Gerald Vizenor (Anishinaabe), for example, calls the Anishinaabe figure Naanabozho a communal, "agonistic sign" capable of uncovering "the distinctions and ironies between narrative voices." "The tribal trickster," he asserts, "is a liberator and healer in narrative, a comic sign, communal signification and a discourse with imagination." Vizenor's language represents...
differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 13.3 (2003) 121-142
(“Notices of New Books: The House of the Seven Gables." United States Magazine and Democratic Review 28 May 1851)
(Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables 202�03)
When the United States Magazine and Democratic Review erroneously praised Nathaniel Hawthorne for foregoing “idioms and barbarisms,” it set a lasting precedent. Several ingenious studies have explained how the nineteenth-century novels known as American historical romances, by authors such as Hawthorne, contributed to the early consolidation of American national identity. Yet the romance's characteristic recourse to dialect writing has suffered from a kind of benign critical neglect. We can attribute this omission to the fact that the dialect writing in these novels delivers an unwelcome message about the making of Americans. It informs us that the project of nationalism failed in nineteenth-century America, and not only in those historically obvious ways that come immediately to mind. Dialect writing reveals that nationalism failed because, in these novels, as elsewhere, “time” itself was arrayed against the nation.
The current view of American historical romances holds that they provided “a basis for the nation's identity in something other than a break from the British past” (Pease 8), with scholars in recent years growing especially concerned to show that these novels were “part of the process by which the nation was forming itself and not merely a reflection of an accomplished fact” (Arac 608). Benedict Anderson's writing on nationalism in Imagined Communities often reinforces this view that America was successfully “engineered” by “bourgeois and aristocratic” authors such as Hawthorne, Cooper, and Sedgwick (Gould 14). Anderson famously argues that nineteenth-century novels represented “time” as “homogeneous,” which allowed readers to imagine their “simultaneity” with fellow citizens. As Anderson explains it, novels represent time in only one way: as an infinite sequence of evenly spaced “moments” lining up one after another, with each new moment differing absolutely from those that precede it. In Anderson's model, it is as if an utterly thin line divides each passing moment from the one that follows it. Anderson's moments thus resemble a sequence of regularly spaced paving stones that rise up to meet the world and allow it to move forward; in novels, time is composed of an infinite number of these paving stones, not one of which precisely resembles its predecessors.
This division of time into a sequence of moments allows what Louis Althusser calls a coupe d'essence or essential section: “a break in the present such that all the elements of the whole revealed by this section are in an immediate relationship with one another” (94). In this view, American romances encouraged their readers to imagine themselves united with their fellow citizens in their shared occupation of a single moment and an imagined “immediate relationship with one another.” Anderson explains, for example, that an “American will never meet, or even know the names of more than a handful of his [. . .] fellow-Americans. He has no idea of what they are up to at any one time. But he has complete confidence in their steady, anonymous, simultaneous activity” (26). Although the fellowship of physical proximity eludes the incipient American, “novel time” leads him to believe that at the very least he inhabits the same moment as those Americans who remain permanently outside his orbit (Anderson 22–36). Hawthorne begins his account of the House of the Seven Gables and its occupants by stating that “we shall commence the real action of our tale at an epoch not very remote from the present day”; Anderson would have us believe that in so doing...
Philosophers and historians have long been suspicious of modal and counterfactual claims. I argue, however, that historians often legitimately use modal and counterfactual claims for a variety of purposes. They help identify causes, and hence help explain events in history. They are used to defend judgments about people, and to highlight the importance of particular events. I defend these uses of modal claims against two arguments often used to criticize modal reasoning, using the philosophy of science to ground the truth of modal claims. This analysis puts several important points into perspective, including how certain we can be about our claims about what might have been, and the role that determinism plays in those claims. The proper analysis of modality shows, I argue, that counterfactual claims are legitimate and important, if often uncertain, and that issues of determinism are irrelevant to the modal claims used in historical analysis.
American Literature 74.4 (2002) 911-931
What is non-Newtonian time? No ready answer comes to mind. Its opposite—Newtonian time—hardly fares better. Neither term is idiomatic or even vaguely recognizable because time is rarely qualified by these adjectives, or qualified at all. In more than just a grammatical sense, time seems to come all in one piece, in one flavor. It is an ontological given, a cosmic metric that dictates a fixed sequence of events against a fixed sequence of intervals. It is present everywhere, the same everywhere, independent of anything we do. It carries no descriptive label and has no need to advertise or to repudiate that label.
When seen as this uniform background, time is quantifiable. Its measurable segments are exactly the same length, one segment coming after another in a single direction. This unidirectionality means that there is only one way to line up two events, one way to measure the distance between them. Apparently, we need to imagine time in this concrete form—as a sort of measuring rod—to convince ourselves of its absolute existence. One year, one month, one minute—these unit lengths have to be "real" unit lengths, objectively measurable. And as proof of that objective measurement, they have to come already stamped with a serial number. And so we speak of one particular minute as, say, 10:10, followed by the next minute, 10:11, just as we speak of one year as, say, 1965, followed by the next year, 1966. This serial designation puts time completely under the jurisdiction of number.
Most of us take this step quite innocently. Without much thought, we refer to a particular year as 1965, because a numerical bias is so deeply entrenched in our thinking that it works as a kind of mental reflex. Dates thus acquire a summary authority, with great descriptive and explanatory power. We don't doubt that a number, 1965, can be assigned to one particular slice of time and that this meaningful numerical designation exercises a binding power over all the events that happen within its duration. Number, in this way, works as a kind of automatic unifier: it imposes an identity across-the-board. Because this numerical chronology standardizes time into a sequence of equal units, the location of any event and its proximity to any other is fixed by this sequence. 1965 is separated by only 20 years from 1945, and so it has got to be closer to this year than to the year 65, from which it is separated by 1900 years.
This numerical bias is the unspoken norm for humanists no less than for scientists. Under new historicism, this norm has sometimes turned into a methodological claim, producing a spate of scholarship whose very ground of analysis is numerical time. It is routine for us to seize upon one particular number—the date of a text's composition—and use it to set the limits of an analytic domain, mapping the scrutinized object onto a time frame more or less standardized. One year, five years, ten years: these are the numerical units we use, as a matter of course, when we try to contextualize. Defined in this way, contextualization is based almost exclusively on synchrony. Events are deemed pertinent to one another only if they fall within the same slice of time, which is to say, if they are bound by two serial numbers so close to being consecutive that the distance between them is measurable by single digits. This short duration is supposed to be adequate, to capture both cause and consequence: the web of relations leading to the making of the text and the web of relations flowing from its presence in the world.
Elsewhere I have argued against this synchronic model, offering instead a conception of literary history based on extended duration, what I call "deep time." Here I want to take issue, more specifically, with the numerical bias at work in a synchronic model. What does it mean to construct an analytic domain bound by two serial numbers with a minimum degree of separation? As a time frame, how adequate is this brief duration and serial alignment? What...
For varying interpretations of this passage in Douglass' s second autobiography, see The Mind of Frederick Douglass (Chapel Hill Moral Choices: Memory, Desire, and Imagina-tion in Nineteenth Century American Abolition
- Waldo E Martin
- Jr
- F Peter
- Walker
For varying interpretations of this passage in Douglass' s second autobiography, see Waldo E. Martin Jr., The Mind of Frederick Douglass (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 5; Peter F. Walker, Moral Choices: Memory, Desire, and Imagina-tion in Nineteenth Century American Abolition (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978), 252–54;
Picturing the Mother
- Chaney
Chaney, " Picturing the Mother, " 402.
Dialect Writing and Simultaneity in the American Historical Romance I would also like to acknowledge the influence of a lecture Figures of Print, Orders of Time: The Rhetoric of American Modernity in Antebel-lum Literature
- Lloyd Pratt
Lloyd Pratt, " Dialect Writing and Simultaneity in the American Historical Romance, " differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 13, no. 3 (2002): 121–42. I would also like to acknowledge the influence of a lecture delivered by Pratt at Emory University, " Figures of Print, Orders of Time: The Rhetoric of American Modernity in Antebel-lum Literature, " February 2, 2006.
134; hereafter cited in the text. Douglass Jerrold's Shilling Magazine
- Herman Melville
- Typee
Herman Melville, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 134; hereafter cited in the text. Douglass Jerrold's Shilling Magazine [London], April 1846, rprt. in Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker, Herman Melville: The Contemporary Reviews (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 29.
His World and His Work
- Andrew Delbanco
- Melville
Andrew Delbanco, Melville: His World and His Work (New York: Knopf, 2005), 78.
s Marquesan Encounters: Melville and the Meaning of Civilization) offers a full reading of these other accounts of the Marquesan Islands and situates Typee among them
- T Walter Herbert Jr
T. Walter Herbert Jr.' s Marquesan Encounters: Melville and the Meaning of Civilization (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980) offers a full reading of these other accounts of the Marquesan Islands and situates Typee among them.
Dilemma: The Masking of Subversion in Ethnographic Description Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley: Uni-versity of California Press, 1986), 51 The Ethnographic Present: A Reinvention
- Vincent Carapanzo
Vincent Carapanzo, " Hermes' Dilemma: The Masking of Subversion in Ethnographic Description, " in James Clifford and George E. Marcus, eds., Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley: Uni-versity of California Press, 1986), 51; Kirsten Hastrup, " The Ethnographic Present: A Reinvention, " Cultural Anthropology 5, no. 1 (February 1990): 45–61.
The Sign of the Cannibal: Melville and the Making of a Postcolonial Reader
- Geoffrey Sanborn
Geoffrey Sanborn, The Sign of the Cannibal: Melville and the Making of a Postcolonial Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 114.
League of the Iroquois [originally titled League of the Ho-de'-no-sau-nee]
- Lewis Morgan Henry
Lewis Henry Morgan, League of the Iroquois [originally titled League of the Ho-de'-no-sau-nee] (New York: Citadel, 1962), n.p.; hereafter cited in the text.
The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca Vintage Books, 1972), 251; Wallace reiterates this judgment in " Origins of the Longhouse Religion of Handbook of North American Indi-ans, gen
- Anthony F C Wallace
Anthony F. C. Wallace, The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca (1970; New York: Vintage Books, 1972), 251; Wallace reiterates this judgment in " Origins of the Longhouse Religion, " in Bruce G. Trigger, Northeast, vol. 15 of Handbook of North American Indi-ans, gen. ed., William C. Sturtevant (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1978), 442–48;
League of the Iroquois
- Morgan
Morgan, League of the Iroquois, 169–70.
Though its historical focus is earlier, Daniel K. Richter' s The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization
- Wallace
- Death
and Wallace, Death and Rebirth of the Seneca, 111–83 and 266–77. Though its historical focus is earlier, Daniel K. Richter' s The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992) has been another invaluable resource.
Limits of Multiculturalism
- Michaelsen
Michaelsen, Limits of Multiculturalism, 97–99.
15. I should mention that both Evans and I have been influenced by the work of Wai Chee Dimock on tempo-rality and literature. See, for instance, her articles " Non-Newtonian Time Deep Time: American Literature and World History
- Chicago
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 15. I should mention that both Evans and I have been influenced by the work of Wai Chee Dimock on tempo-rality and literature. See, for instance, her articles " Non-Newtonian Time: Robert Lowell, Roman History, Vietnam War, " American Literature 74 (2002): 911–31, and " Deep Time: American Literature and World History, " American Literary History 13 (2001): 755–75.