| Gender, Race, and Nation in the U.S., 1780-1860 | Cherniavsky | MW 1:30-3:20 | 12884 |
Gender, Race, and Nation in the U.S., 1780-1860
My aspirations in this course are threefold. First, to engage a set of critical questions about nationalism – its mediation, publics, historiography, affects, spatializations, and organizations of bodily difference – that have rewritten the issues and methods of literary and cultural study with respect to the early national and antebellum United States. As a result of this critical reorientation, to think about “American Literature, 1780-1860 (as this category of literary historical study would be conventionally described) is to think about the constitution of national peoples, publics, counter-publics, and their literatures in the period spanning (roughly) the founding of the U.S. nation-state to what Michael Rogin terms “the American 1848.” Thus I hope the course will hail students with an interest in 18th and 19th-century U.S literatures. Second, to open a longer history to students with interests in gender, race, and nation in 20th century and contemporary U.S. contexts, broadly conceived (including comparative or multi-sited work in transatlantic, transpacific, or Americas study frameworks). In this regard, the course affords opportunity for students to take up genealogies of nationalist discourses and practices encountered in later historical moments. Third, to reflect in explicit, sustained, and critical fashion on the relation between critical questions, political stakes, and literary archives. How do we move from the conceptual to the political to the literary instance and how do we – indeed, should we – make the one accountable to the other? What does it mean to privilege a literary text in one’s work (to devote a chapter of the dissertation to it, for example)? The design of the course is meant to foreground this line of inquiry. Rather than attempt to survey or even narrowly to sample the “literatures of the period,” or, for that matter, the critical work on nationalism, we will read intensively a very small set of “touchstone” texts, in order to consider what is lost and gained by the selection.
I have not made final decisions on all materials, but the following are fairly certain: Susanna Rowson, Charlotte Temple; James Seaver (transcriber and editor), The Narrative of Mary Jemison; Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Martin Delaney, Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States; Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; as well portions of The Federalist Papers, selections from Michael Warner, Jacques Derrida, Anne McClintock, Etienne Balibar, Partha Chatterjee, Hortense Spillers, Ranajit Guha, Gayatri Spivak, Robyn Wiegman, Michael Rogin, Priscilla Wald, and CLR James’ Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways (this last most likely in its entirety).
Texts:
