Author: Gravistar

The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots

John Swanson Jacobs’s remarkable 1855 autobiographical slave narrative, The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots, was lost until I uncovered it in an Australian archive on October 26, 2016. Writing from Sydney, beyond the reach of American law and humanitarian authority, Jacobs—brother of Harriet Jacobs and friend of Frederick Douglass—demonstrates the potential of unfiltered, unapologetic Black writing to speak truth to power. This is the first opportunity that American audiences have had to read John Jacobs’s unadulterated words and to understand how, when liberated from invisible constraints, African ex-Americans were able to reconfigure the relationship between liberty and truth to call for new, more just worlds. In reckoning with John Jacobs’s world-altering words for the first time, one must reckon with America as a nation that, in 1776, commenced two experiments at once: one in democracy, the other in tyranny.

Accompanying the autobiography is my biography, No Longer Yours: The Lives of John Swanson Jacobs. Drawing upon a line of Black feminist historicism running from Toni Morrison through Saidiya Hartman and based on archival research on three continents and four oceans, it reconstructs the parts of Jacobs’s life that were unavailable to him in 1855 as resources for life writing. These lives are extraordinary: born a sixth-generation slave, Jacobs emancipated and educated himself. As a free man, he worked as an American and British abolitionist, a Californian and Australian gold miner, and a Black citizen-sailor of the world. He published not one but two autobiographies. If these parts of his life were not written into his autobiographies, they nevertheless invisibly underwrite them. By foregrounding acts of Black world-building and repair and by supplementing rather than supervising John Jacobs’s own words, this volume aims to create a model for undoing the white envelope / Black message structure of the slave narrative. The lives that John Jacobs led cannot be erased if we read wisely and imagine expansively.

This work was supported by long-term fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, American Antiquarian Society, and John Carter Brown Library, and short-term fellowships from Huntington Library, and the Library Company of Philadelphia.

Published in May 2024, the book has been profiled in, among other places: the Sunday New York Times, NPR’s All Things Considered, Boston Globe, The Public’s Radio, WNYC, ABC Radio National (Australia), KPFK’s Freedom Now with Gerald Horne, the Raleigh News & Observer, and selected as NPR’s Book of the Day.

Prisoners of Loss: An Atlantic History of Nostalgia

Prisoners of Loss: An Atlantic History of Nostalgia (under contract with Harvard University Press)

Far from the escapist’s favored retreat into a world elsewhere, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries nostalgia was a disease of worlds both Old and New, its victims invariably the soldiers, sailors, slaves, and prisoners who grew sick of being moved around the Atlantic world. Displaced and unable to return home, these individuals were said to grow so depressed that they died under the spell of nostalgia, a disease that imprisoned people in rapturous hallucinations of home so captivating that they inadvertently killed themselves.

Prisoners of Loss tracks the conceptualization of nostalgia in European Enlightenment medicine and its application to three American institutions of confinement: slavery, the military, and the prison. In the process, it tells a story about how labor became emotional, how emotion became racialized, and how nostalgia became a global historical emotion. This is a critical history in several senses. Most obviously, this study is a work of historical epistemology that describes nostalgia’s formation and transformations as a medical concept. As part of this work, it exposes the circular reasoning at nostalgia’s heart while showing how institutions found this medical illogic useful because it allowed them to justify and certify why ethnic and racialized populations were better suited for enslaved and coerced labor. For example, if a white ethnic migrant laborer or enslaved African became nostalgic, physicians said they suffered from the disease because they came from a certain kind of home; in turn, if they were from a certain kind of home, they were targeted as a population more likely to suffer from nostalgia. As scholars like Hannah Arendt demonstrate, European thought has long judged that disorderly emotion and motion are signs that certain individuals and groups lack agency, are controlled by appetites and necessities, and are accordingly in need of discipline and confinement. As the disease of unwilling travelers, nostalgia named both of these types of disorder.

Doubling down on the radical empiricism of Foucault, Daston, Hacking, and others by tapping into the potential of digital archives, this study examines how nostalgia was exported across the revolutionary and Black Atlantic. By mining the Google Books/HathiTrust dataset, I draw upon 25,000-plus instances of “nostalgia” to reconstruct both the concept’s routes from Europe to the Americas and the new definitions that it assumed within different colonies and nations’ respective institutions of confinement—each with different incentives and different groups bristling to be freed. In the course of tracing unstudied convergences between the history of medicine and the histories of race, ethnicity, and transnational migration, Prisoners of Loss argues that European moral preconceptions about emotion powerfully shaped the invention of ethnic and racialized groups, just as acts of resistance like desertion, marronage, hunger strikes, and suicide left profound marks on the shapes that nostalgia assumed during this period and into our present. Struggles across the Americas between enslaved, indentured, contractually bound, and incarcerated populations and their respective institutions produced powerfully different versions of this negative emotion and helped forge important lines of race and nation.

Lauren Berlant, A Reader

Lauren Berlant, A Reader, eds. Lauren Michele Jackson, Jonathan D. S. Schroeder, and Jean-Thomas Tremblay (under contract with Duke University Press).

Lauren Berlant is one of the preeminent thinkers of the last half-century. For four-plus decades, they created fields—queer theory and affect studies—and transformed disciplines: American studies, anthropology, critical legal studies, feminist studies, geography, and gender and sexuality studies, among others. Lauren Berlant, a Reader will represent the first collection of Berlant’s writings and constitute a gateway for readers to apprehend, analyze, and synthesize the range and intensity of Berlant’s contributions to intellectual, political, and public thinking. As editors, we have selected writings that bring Berlant’s entire career into focus and spotlight notable questions and themes. As former students, we see this volume as an occasion to pay homage to Lauren’s life’s work by helping it receive the extramural recognition that it began to obtain after the publication of Cruel Optimism (2011) and particularly in the last years of Berlant’s life. Given that even the best-versed scholars are still catching up with Berlant’s work, we anticipate that many readers will turn and return to this volume as Berlant’s conceptual idioms and frameworks continue to shape aesthetic, critical, and political-ethical discourses.

Ahab Unbound

Herman Melville’s Captain Ahab is perennially seen as the paradigm of a controlling, tyrannical agent. Ahab Unbound leaves his position as a Cold War icon behind, recasting him as a contingent figure, transformed by his environment—by chemistry, electromagnetism, entomology, meteorology, diet, illness, pain, trauma, and neurons firing—in ways that unexpectedly force us to see him as worthy of our empathy and our compassion.

In sixteen essays by leading scholars, Ahab Unbound advances an urgent inquiry into Melville’s emergence as a center of gravity for materialist work, reframing his infamous whaling captain in terms of pressing conversations in animal studies, critical race and ethnic studies, disability studies, environmental humanities, medical humanities, political theory, and posthumanism. By taking Ahab as a focal point, we gather and give shape to the multitude of ways that materialism produces criticism in our current moment. Collectively, these readings challenge our thinking about the boundaries of both persons and nations, along with the racist and environmental violence caused by categories like the person and the human.

Ahab Unbound makes a compelling case for both the vitality of materialist inquiry and the continued resonance of Melville’s work. For more, click here.

Contributors: Branka Arsić, Columbia U; Christopher Castiglia, Pennsylvania State U; Colin Dayan, Vanderbilt U; Christian P. Haines, Pennsylvania State U; Bonnie Honig, Brown U; Jonathan Lamb, Vanderbilt U; Pilar Martínez Benedí, U of L’Aquila, Italy; Steve Mentz, St. John’s College; John Modern, Franklin and Marshall College; Mark D. Noble, Georgia State U; Samuel Otter, U of California, Berkeley; Donald E. Pease, Dartmouth College; Ralph James Savarese, Grinnell College; Russell Sbriglia, Seton Hall U; Jonathan Schroeder, Brandeis U; Michael D. Snediker, U of Houston; Matthew A. Taylor, U of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Ivy Wilson, Northwestern U.

Slavery’s Legacies, Slavery’s Futures

“Slavery’s Legacies, Slavery’s Futures: New Horizons of the Study of Slavery,” Slavery & Abolition 41, no. 4 (Fall 2020): 856–63; review of Yogita Goyal, Runaway Genres, Laura T. Murphy, The New Slave Narrative, and Janet Neary, Fugitive Testimony

Scholars are beginning to catch up with the enormous wave of popular attention that human rights advocates and contemporary Black artists have brought to modern and nineteenth-century slavery over the last three decades. Three scholars in particular — Janet Neary, Laura T. Murphy, and Yogita Goyal — have recently published monographs that map out the key relationships and nodes that link slavery’s contemporary reception, representation, and reimagining. Though more different than alike, they all share a concern with the African American autobiographical slave narrative genre epitomized by Equiano, Douglass, and Jacobs. In Fugitive Testimony, Neary treats contemporary Black visual artists’ engagement with the slave narrative as an occasion to launch an inquiry into the decolonizing visual techniques of the slave narrative, devised by ex-slave narrators to interrupt and potentially dismantle the racializing gaze. In The New Slave Narrative, the first longform study of the recent reemergence of the slave narrative, Murphy constructs an archive of “first-person narratives of forced labor,” considers their relationship with the antebellum slave narrative, and brilliantly excavates the formal and moral expectations that these narrators write under, often due to the strong hand of supporting humanitarian organizations. Finally, Goyal’s Runaway Genres draws new routes between global Anglophone and African American literary studies in considering “what happens when the slave narrative goes global.” While independently important as scholarly contributions, these works collectively demonstrate the importance of unsettling disciplinary boundaries, while even more excitingly sketching out the potential for a new field altogether.

Linguistics and Social Sciences

Michel Foucault, “Linguistics and Social Sciences,” trans. Jonathan Schroeder and Chantal Wright, Theory Culture & Society 40, nos. 1–2 (Jan.-March 2023): 259–278

Shortly after the publication of The Order of Things (1966), Michel Foucault obtained a leave from the University of Clermont-Ferrand to teach philosophy at the University of Tunis. He moved to Sidi Bou Saïd in September 1966, and he stayed in post until October 1968. This brief period proved wildly transformative: Foucault drafted The Archaeology of Knowledge; at the same time, he was radicalised by a series of anti-colonial and anti-imperial student protests, which began as a response to the Six-Day War of 1967, were exacerbated by Hubert Humphrey’s visit to Tunisia in early-1968 and culminated on 15 March 1968, when thousands of Tunisian students gathered outside of the University of Tunis. “It wasn’t May of ’68 that changed me,” Foucault recalled, “It was March of ’68, in a Third World country” (1981/1991: 136).

The “Linguistics and Social Sciences” talk was given at the Centre d’études et de recherches économiques et sociales of the University of Tunis during the fateful month of March 1968. Though Foucault does not connect the talk to his career, he considers various epistemological problems “that linguistics in its modern form raises for the human sciences” that speak directly to Foucault’s own efforts to renovate the history of knowledge and, in 1968, to reconceive the relationship between his method and his politics (Davidson 1997: 3-20). What structural linguistics shows, Foucault suggests, is that it is possible for an empirical field that studies humans to use formal discovery procedures to move from simple observation to the analytic discovery of relations that are “independent…in their form,” and, as a result, are “generalisable” as types of relation.

As a historian (and an ‘archaeologist’), Foucault proposes to retool linguistic method to detect the traces of material processes on language, and, more specifically, knowledge. In contrast to linguistics, which reconstructs the grammaticality of language in order to predict what can be said, Foucault argues that the objective of history should be something different: deriving rules to predict what could have been said. With such a method, Foucault speculates, it would be possible to derive rules that would describe the laws of language in the sphere of its practical application. Written with the suppression of the Tunisian students by their own government in view, “Linguistics and Social Sciences” opens up a new horizon of study, and epitomises Foucault’s abiding interest in formulating new methods for studying the interaction of language and power.

Race, Ethnicity, and Migration in the Americas

This class explores the intersections and divergences that make up the history of race, ethnicity, and migration in the Americas. It begins by exposing the central presuppositions made in Enlightenment European knowledge, revealing that putatively universal claims about the potential of humanity need be understood as only intended for the few and not everyone. Weekly assignments cross disciplines, genres, and media, and will involve political theory, slave narratives, experimental poetry, film, and music. As a class that is equally literary and historical, these texts are organized in such a way as to allow for in-depth examinations as well as broader historical and theoretical accounts.

Our focus this year (2019-2020) is slavery and its legacies in the United States, with a particular focus on the institutions, movements, and aesthetics that shaped (and reshaped) race, ethnicity, and migration. In “provincializing” the U.S., we seek to consider how the modern concept of race was forged in the crucible of Enlightenment knowledge, the transatlantic slave trade and domestic slavery, and the humanitarian/sentimental abolition movement. The second half of the year will consider texts that critique the concept of race, often, as in the case of authors like Octavia Butler and N.K. Jemisin, by imagining futures and worlds where Black identity is radically reconfigured, reoriented, and revalued.