In Queer Times: Race, Sexuality and Citizenship

This seminar focuses on three eras of modern and late modern US history that exemplify what I am calling “queer times.” Nineteenth century (social) scientists introduced these odd temporalities as “arrested development,” “atavism,” degeneration,” “regression,” and, most significantly, “atavism”: that is a person, population, culture, object, or event that is deemed to be chronologically out of place. Insofar as anachronism was used to designate the survival of “primitivism” alongside of or within “civilized” nations or the persistence of “infantilism” within adults, it did little more than bundle the previous temporalities under a single name. However, anachronism was also, if less frequently, employed to signify the emergence of the future perfect conditional within the present and to code that emergence as vital to organic development—an index of normal life

These queer temporalities enter the American lexicon in the late-nineteenth century when they are taken up by biological and social scientists, medical practitioners, public officials, fiction writers, film-makers, journalists, and others. They are employed to figure both the devolution of the nation and its future perfection, to reinforce normative constructions of racial and sexual difference and to contest them. At stake in these texts is the question of self-governance and with it not only the rights and responsibilities of citizenship but the fate of US democracy.

Novels offer a complex vantage point on these queer times. I may add additional novel, but at present the required ones are: Frank Norris’ McTeague (1899); Charles Chestnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition (1902); James Baldwin’s Another Country; and Lawrence Chua’s Gold by the Inch. A course packet situates these literary works in historical and critical contexts. Engaged participation in seminar discussions, 8 page-length critical responses to assigned readings and a final 8-10 page paper are required.