Black Geographies, Black Ecologies

Jarvis C. McInnis, Associate Professor of English, Duke University

Alex Alston, Assistant Professor of Literatures in English, Bryn Mawr College

 

This seminar invites papers exploring Black geographies and Black ecologies in the long nineteenth century. From slavery to freedom, Black people have been conflated with and compared to land, plants, and animals, paradoxically relegated to the “outdoors” of civic and discursive life while largely overlooked in the study of nonhuman life and the environment. Accordingly, we welcome papers that examine what nineteenth century Black literature and culture have to teach us about the intersections of race, personhood, geography, and environmentalism: from non-hierarchical visions and practices of the relationships between human and non-human life forms, to Black peoples’ unique relationship(s) to the Earth (land and water, soil and plants). For instance, what botanical knowledges did enslaved Africans bring with them to the Americas or cultivate upon their arrival on their provision grounds or slave garden plots? 

 

We also welcome papers that consider Black peoples’ relationship to space and place/making, from land acquisition and notions of property ownership to farming and agriculture. For instance, what do we make of the fact that many early historically Black educational institutions (what we now call HBCUs) were established on former plantations? How might we think of all-black towns such as Mound Bayou, Mississippi, and Eatonville, Florida, of Zora Neale Hurston fame, as maroon geographies alongside swamps, mountains, forests, jungles, or even Harriet Jacobs’s garret? On the other hand, the nineteenth century also witnessed Black people on the move, migrating to the northern, western, and midwestern United States, Canada, Liberia, Haiti, Indian Territory, the Panama Canal Zone, and elsewhere in pursuit of micro-climates of self-determination, freedom, and citizenship. As such, we also invite papers that explore Black people’s attention to climate, borders/borderlands, domestic and transnational migration, and diasporic relation. 

 

Other questions participants might take up include: Is there a relationship between genre, form, and the geographies and/or ecologies of Black nineteenth century literatures and cultures? How might the geographic and ecological knowledges and strategies of the nineteenth century help us to better understand and combat the environmental injustices Black people face today, such as the water crises in Flint, Michigan and Jackson, Mississippi or soil and air pollution in Louisiana’s Cancer Alley and Alabama’s Africatown?

 

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Bringing C19 Expertise to Mainstream Audiences

Sarah Mesle, Professor of Writing, University of Southern California

Koritha Mitchell, Professor of English, Boston University

 

A writing workshop focused on bringing C19 insights to non-specialist audiences, this seminar builds on offerings at past conferences. It also considers the specific pressures of our current moment, when both higher education and media are under attack. Though these attacks aren’t new, the amplification of long-standing destructive policies is yielding predictable results. Resources of all kinds — time, funding, even publication venues — are growing scarcer. Yet many of us still aspire to reach new audiences, understanding that the Humanities cannot be a public good if ordinary people don’t recognize it as such. As we work against the current of national conversations and public policy, various intellectual communities sustain us. We also know that every community we value must be cultivated on purpose. We therefore want to cultivate community among C19 researchers a bit more deliberately. 

 

Maybe you’ve never reached broad audiences via journalistic writing, creative nonfiction, and/or trade publications, but you want to. Maybe you’ve used myriad genres and commanded significant attention for several years. Maybe you’re somewhere in between. In our moment, conditions change so quickly that we all have much to learn. We invite you to join us as we share resources to keep working against the odds. Scarcity is being not only preached but deliberately imposed, so sharing resources can be an important way to create the worlds we actually want. One resource we can all share is our ability to read well and offer generative feedback! We invite scholars — of every background and research focus, at every career stage — to join us. 

 

Whatever about your C19 research makes you most passionate can be shared in a way that speaks to people outside your particular field and outside the academy. Here’s an opportunity to remind yourself and others of that fact. We hope you’ll take it.

 

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Buried (by) Books: Digging Into and Out of Nineteenth-Century Bibliomania

Elizabeth Fenton, Professor of English, University of Vermont

Jared Hickman, Associate Professor of English, Johns Hopkins University

 

In the nineteenth-century US, the codex form was invested with enormous power as both marker and medium of the highest human achievements—“civilization,” “culture,” “religion.” Millennia-old Eurasian valorizations of the written word had been compounded by Protestant declarations of sola scriptura and settler-colonial imperatives vis-à-vis Indigenous peoples whose literacies were nonalphabetic. This context fostered a going all-in on the category of peoples and religions “of the book” that drove an unprecedented proliferation of book-writing, -making, and -collecting. This “book madness,” as Denise Gigante has dubbed it, involved not only the pervasive fetishization of the codex form but also a crisis of distinction that arose from a particular historical irony: on the one hand, the ideological dearness of “the book,” and, on the other, the increasing material cheapness of books as objects. Nineteenth-century bibliomania generated ever-mounting piles of books that threatened to bury not just any given book but “the book” as such–that is, the authorizing function accorded the codex form in this particular mediascape; and, in so doing, provoked the search for buried books deemed to exercise that authorizing function. This dynamic can help explain a range of phenomena–from the purported unearthing of would-be American scriptures and Amerindian origin stories such as The Book of Mormon and Walam Olum to the leveling of the Babel of books by hyperbolic commitment to “the Bible alone”; from the canon-making curation of the nation’s first rare-book collectors and literary anthologists to the anti-obscenity crusade culminating in the Comstock Act; from the carving of proprietary authorship out of the chaotic “culture of reprinting” to the multiplication of anonymous and pseudonymous publications. 

 

This seminar will convene scholars of book, literary, media, and religious history to consider literal and figurative burials of and by books in this era. How did book writers, printers, publishers, sellers, readers, collectors, and archivists alike attempt to safeguard against such burials? For whom were books a bunker? For whom a grave? At what cost did nineteenth-century peoples engage in literary excavations and interments? What old and new media (re)surged in the midst of and against these bibliomaniac concerns and compulsions? We welcome all work that illuminates the nineteenth century’s bibliographic sublime–the felt sense that it was books all the way up and all the way down–but are especially interested in instances that throw into high relief the contingent contours of this mediascape, where the overdetermined status of “the book” is exposed, defamiliarized, and explicitly or implicitly questioned. For instance, how might we, following Joseph Rezek, think about the “racialization” not just of “print” as a whole but the codex form in particular? Where do we see “the book” being contested as a medium whose essence allegedly underwrites the ascendancy of a white settler collective? In an era shaped by the rapid mechanization of the paper and print industries, how might “a book” contend with the specter of “the book”?

 

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Disabled Children in the Long Nineteenth Century

Sarah E. Chinn, Professor of English, Hunter College, CUNY

Camille Owens, Assistant Professor of English, McGill University

 

Nineteenth century US literature is full of children who die, waste, and fade. As Anna Mae Duane has argued, suffering children were stand-ins for the fears of early colonizers about the world that surrounded them, and alibis for the violence they themselves were committing. But unlike studies of British literature of the nineteenth century – with its Tiny Tims, its Little Nells, its Katy’s in What Katy Did – that is chock-full of disabled children, US disability studies has focused primarily on adults with disabilities.

In this seminar we’ll be focusing on representations of disabled children in the American nineteenth century. Drawing on the work of scholars in both Childhood Studies and Disability Studies, the seminar will rest at the nexuses of African American, Afro-Carribean, Indigenous, Asian American, Class, Latinx, Gender, Sexuality, and Trans Studies. Among the questions we’ll ask are: how is disability in children generated and represented in systems of enslavement and indenture? Is racialization by definition a form of disablement in the context of slavery and other kinds of unfree labor, forced removal and displacement, and exoticization/orientalism? Are bourgeois children disabled differently from their working-class (and working) counterparts?

 

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Indigenous Waterways

Vicente Diaz, Professor of American Indian Studies, UCLA

Ashley Glassburn, Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies, University of Windsor

Phillip Round, Professor Emeritus, English/ NAIS, University of Iowa

 

Islands in Micronesia are known by their currents, which begin at the ocean floor and extend in and through multiple forms on upwards as currents, waves, swells, winds, clouds, stars, the cosmos. This expansive definition of islands owes to equally expansive Indigenous ways of self-knowing through kin-making and reciprocal obligations of mutual caring with other—and other than—humans (including the elements themselves) as taught and embodied in teachings, stories, and material and thus enlivened objects. In the islands, one can’t refer long to land without engaging water, and to these without referring to skies. Narrated and materially embodied Indigenous relationalities of kinship and reciprocity also mean that in the islands, one cannot talk about land, water, and sky interconnectivity without also referring to people. And the More than People. This intermediated sense of the human/nature/spirit world through story abounds across Oceania in a proverb about canoes and mobility: “the canoe is the people, and the people is the canoe.” It is also what sacralizes canoes as more than mere objects of transportation.

 

Indigeneity in North America is also known relationally. And archipelogically, as Turtle Island. Anishinaabe stories of a Great Flood likewise interrelate land, water, sky and peoplehood. In Dakota orality, Mni Sota, stolen and mangled as a state name by settler colonial discourse, still means “land whose waters reflect skies”; with their Lakota and Nakota relatives, Dakota selfhood is ideally operationalized by aligning with the kapemni, a principle that teaches cosmic symmetry between all that is above and all that is below.   North America’s largest body of water is not the Great Mississippi nor the Great Lakes – crucial waterways they remain for Turtle Islanders -- but the Ogallala Aquifer, which is underground.  Underground, too, is a system of waterways that connect the deserts and peoples of the Southwest to the Pacific Ocean, which Hopi call the  “the Mother of all Rains.” In House Made of Dawn,  N. Scott Momaday’s protagonist, Abel, has realized he has hit rock bottom when he wakes up from drunken stupor among flapping grunions who have themselves been beached in Southern California. Where the Pacific Ocean interlaps with Turtle Island, Abel begins the trek to healing back to his desert home.

 

This seminar, a tribute to Indigenous relationalities involving tributaries, considers Indigenous archipelogics through narratives and practices involving waterways and ways with water throughout the nineteenth-century Americas and Oceania, working to answer such questions as: How do tributaries facilitate relations between Indigenous peoples, settler colonial and other newcomer communities, and other-than-human beings?  How are water connections represented in Native art, language, technology, and writing?  What role do Indigenous waterways and other bodies of waters—lakes, rivers, wetlands—play in treaty negotiations, borders, commerce, politics, and resistance? How did nineteenth-century Indigenous peoples navigate changes to their waterways, including settler colonial and environmental disasters? How are waters literally and figuratively sites of immersion, drowning, confluence, flow, saturation, and resurgence?

 

Cincinnati, our conference location in 2026, was founded on the banks of an Indigenous waterway that came to be known as the Ohio River, one that had for thousands of years nourished the Native peoples of the region. In Mississippian iconography, these waterways

often were home to water spirits who embodied major cosmic power, sometimes represented as panther-like creatures or serpent-like entities. Water spirits were linked to deities associated with the "Beneath World," representing the cycle of life and death. These beings were crucial in religious rituals and were associated with the cycle of life and death, and were depicted on various media like ceramic vessels, copper objects, and shell gorgets.

 

We envision this seminar as an opportunity to build an intellectual support network for the growing community of scholars committed to working at the intersection of Indigenous Studies, American literatures and cultures, and Environmental histories. As such, we hope our seminar conversations will lead to additional collaborations and discussions after the conference and beyond its boundaries.

 

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Infrastructures and Undergrounds 

Richard Purcell, Associate Professor of English, University of Mississippi

Benjamin Williams, Assistant Professor of English, Marshall University  

 

This seminar is animated by this year’s C19 conference theme, “underground,” and emergent approaches to infrastructure studies in the humanities. The Latin prefix “infra” means both below and within, not unlike the idea of an underground. This suggests that infrastructures, like undergrounds, are not meant to be seen. Lara Langer Cohen tells us that in the nineteenth century, “underground names something indefinite and even undefinable,” embodying cultural, social, and political formations with an “aversion to visibility” and a reliance on “secrecy.” Infrastructure, similarly, can be undefinable, exhibit an aversion to visibility and feel secretive; occupying what Susan Leigh Star calls the “substrates” of social, political, economic, and cultural institutions that organize and run modernity.

 

Where undergrounds exist, both figuratively and structurally, to refuse the organizational structures of the social world, infrastructures are there to perpetuate them. They are, as Nikhil Anand states, the “banal” material operations that distribute both “life and harm.” We see the long nineteenth century, especially the gestalt in urban planning, as the foundational historical period for establishing many of the infrastructural aspects of how we imagine and organize contemporary life. To study infrastructures then, is to critically engage with the mundane and hidden but nevertheless, vital material and systemic institutions of the contemporary world: roads, sewers, plumbing, telephone lines, traffic signals, railways, postal systems, property, shipping and logistics, zoning and labor laws, maritime administration, as well as host of other elements of modern life. These infrastructural features, that exist relationally both “below” and within our social world, distribute resources and, according to Anand, contain within them “an accounting of the world that recognizes how past histories of injustice are remade and realized anew.” To study infrastructures is to explore material and cultural objects that contain these past and present histories of injustice, but also those objects and imaginative works that present the possibility of more just distributive alternatives of resources, rights, and political power.

 

This seminar seeks out work in Nineteenth-Century Studies that actively centers the methodological and interdisciplinary field of infrastructure studies. Many of the possible topics in the C19 call very much fall within this: print cultures, visibility, agriculture, geology, “underground” railroads, just to name a few. We are especially interested in how infrastructure studies engages with other humanities disciplinary and methodological approaches like Black Studies, Queer and Gender Studies, Media Studies, Marxism and Post-Marxism, Eco-Criticism, Indigenous Studies, Literary Historiography, Post/Decolonial Studies, and Science and Technology Studies. This is not an exhaustive list and we actively welcome other fields, subfields and methodological approaches than those listed above. 

 

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Meaning and Monumentalism 

Christopher Hanlon, Professor, School of Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies, Arizona State University

Elissa Zellinger, Associate Professor of English, Texas Tech University

 

In some ways monuments seem particularly ground-level objects—typically and literally built on the earth, they occupy space at eye level in order to assert their particular meanings as readily as possible. Thus, in the wake of public reckonings over US monuments and public memory, recent scholarship has turned to the nineteenth century to consider how commemorative structures shape, distort, or suppress national narratives. And yet, literature offers a means to subordinate visuality to textuality and in so doing, redirect attention from the surface dimensions of monuments toward more submerged avenues for understanding. This panel invites applicants to explore how nineteenth-century US literature engaged the “underground” dimensions of the monumental: how literary texts represented monuments, memorials and other objects of visual culture in order to reimagine their commemorative form, or in some instances to resist monumental logics altogether.

 

This seminar broadly considers literature written about monuments erected in the nineteenth-century United States to build on what Dana Luciano has termed “countermonumental vision.” Extending beyond the sculptural, the monumental is a conspicuous attempt to ensure historical endurance, dictate social meaning, and institute semiotic closure; this seminar will thus examine the ways that nineteenth-century texts worked to uphold, disrupt, reopen, or complicate monumental meaning. We hope to investigate how the visual and the textual interact within the spaces of understanding particular monuments communicate. This panel will also consider how literary texts—especially those shaped by gendered, racialized, and classed perspectives—engaged commemorative practices. We welcome papers addressing monuments and a wider array of countermonumental approaches to visual or material culture in the continental United States. We also welcome transnational and hemispheric discussions of how monuments and literary interpretations invoke US empire, settler colonialism, Native sovereignty, and racial knowledge.

 

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The Populist Underground: Excavating Populism in Nineteenth-Century Literature

Jason Stacy, Professor of History, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville

Stefan Schöberlein, Associate Professor of English, Texas A&M University–Central Texas

 

In the year of the United States Semiquincentennial, Populism—its potential and its dangers—is again on the forefront of political discourse. Ever since Richard Hofstadter identified a “paranoid style” in American politics and used nineteenth-century Populism as his exemplar, American academics have largely treated what Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick called the “populist impulse” in American politics to be, at best, a stepchild of more “serious” ideologies of the day. Literary critics have largely followed suit, downplaying the peculiar blend of nationalism, nostalgia, and conspiracy theorizing that mark populist themes in well-known authors like labor organizer George Lippard, Free Soiler Walt Whitman, and regionalist Edgar Lee Masters, while often ignoring others who were profoundly shaped by populist rhetoric, such as William Gallagher in the 1840s and Hamlin Garland in the 1890s. 

 

This seminar invites contributors to revisit individual authors and literary movements, both popular and forgotten, in light of nineteenth-century populism, broadly defined. We seek papers interrogating literary works in light of specific populist moments (from Barnburnerism and Wide Awakeism to postreconstruction Black Populism) as well as analyses of “populist style” in the poetry and prose of the long nineteenth-century and how it might invite us to reread canonical texts and (re)discover others. The goal of this seminar will be to illuminate the ways in which Elkins and McKitrick’s “populist impulse” shaped literary output, and open avenues for critical reengagement with nineteenth-century literature and its contemporary echoes.

 

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Trans Studies and the Nineteenth Century: Frameworks, Methods, Archives

Greta LaFleur, American Studies and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Yale University

 

Description forthcoming

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Underground Performance; or, Performing the Underground in 19th-Century America

Michael D’Alessandro, Associate Professor of English, Duke University

Matthew Rebhorn, Professor of English, James Madison University 

 

From minstrel plays to titillating burlesques, from Barnum’s American Museum to the Astor Place Riot, nineteenth-century American theaters were sites that capitalized on performing the energies of the underground—the illicit, the satiric, the dissenting—for a range of different audiences. As incubators of these roiling energies, conventional theaters were anything but conventional. In the give-and-take nineteenth-century theatrical experience, performing the underground on stage thus became a flashpoint for negotiating the circuits of power circulating among actors, across the footlights, and outside the theater doors. 

 

Meanwhile, in that space beyond the playhouse, there were all types of underground performance—from sexually explicit model-artist exhibitions to invite-only private theatricals to secret speakeasy monologues. Class-aspirational Americans—aristocratic-wannabe men and “painted women”—specialized in social performativity behind townhouse doors, while city-dwellers playacted roles in subterranean oyster saloons, gambling dens, and brothels. Nor were such enactments confined to any one region or station. Traveling north along the Underground Railroad and other pathways, enslaved people often assumed identities as children or as different sexes in order to escape the bonds of chattel slavery.

 

This seminar seeks to explore the notion of underground performance and performing the underground, broadly conceived, in nineteenth-century America. We welcome participants working in the fields of theater and performance studies, literature, history, music, art history, popular culture, cultural studies, and others. Because of the complex nature of nineteenth-century performance, we are especially interested in participants working at the nexus of several of these disciplines. Regardless, we invite anyone interested in studying the interface between performance and the underground in nineteenth-century America to join this seminar.

 

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Unearthing Lives: Writing Biographies of Nineteenth-Century Americans

Susanna Ashton, Professor of English, Clemson University

Mary Chapman, Professor of English, University of British Columbia

 

This seminar will address biography, with a particular focus on "underground lives," that is, writers, artists, activists, and others in the long American 19th century who are less known and/or who left behind less substantial archives.

 

This seminar responds to growing interest in biography signaled by the 2021 J19 Forum on “Biography and Evidence,” the recent C19 forum on the life and work of Charles Chesnutt, and the awarding of a Pulitzer Prize to Ilyon Woo for Master Slave Husband Wife, her biography of William and Ellen Craft. Scholars no longer accept the belief popularized by the New Critics that “an artist’s biography taints the integrity of the artist’s work” (Wineapple 41). Rather, scholars view biography as an opportunity to “populate” (Lindsay and Sweet, 1) anonymous history with deeply researched stories of those who have until now been marginalized and to come to richer understandings of artists’ works.

 

This seminar will bring together scholars writing a life (or lives) in some form, as well as those reflecting on the challenges of such projects. We hope papers will model or reflect on methodology--including interviewing techniques, archival investigation, filling gaps in the archive, organizing “archival buckshot” (Sensbach 103), and strategizing ways to piece through what John Ernest calls “autobiographical tricksterism.”

 

We also welcome papers that consider more theoretical matters--including what constitutes an “archive”, the role of speculation, the temptations of facile hindsight, and the limits of representativeness.

 

Finally, we welcome considerations of biographical form. What affordances do biographical glimpses offer that are more satisfying than cradle-to-grave overviews of a life? How does one write the life of a collective or family? What issues of privacy and consent are in play? How might we narrate lives in a rigorously ethical but boldly creative manner?  What can we unearth and what should we let lie?