Author: Gravistar

This essay argues that Ahab constitutes a rebuttal to the normative understanding of monomania pioneered by Melville’s father-in-law, Lemuel Shaw. According to the chief justice’s criteria set out in the landmark 1844 case Commonwealth vs. Rogers, Ahab would be adjudged not guilty in a court of law because of his monomania and because of his sincere, albeit insane belief that he is acting under the direction of a higher power. It is extremely unlikely, however, that a white sovereign like Ahab would even have been diagnosed with monomania, let alone put on trial, since baked into this concept were preconceptions about where different groups fell on the ladder of life and, consequently, which people were susceptible to diseases of the passions like monomania. 

Thus, by diagnosing Ahab with monomania, Moby-Dick turns the tables on medicine, the law, and Shaw, taking away the sovereign figure’s get-out-of-jail free card. The novel’s object is not to lay blame on Ahab, however, but rather to go beyond the law’s parameters to lay out the conditions for Ahab’s insanity so that guilt can be appropriately distributed for producing an Ahab. By opening up an examination of how American whaling transformed a group of pacifist outcasts into “fighting Quakers,” and in doing so creating the material and social conditions for an Ahab—an American Psycho before the fact—the novel leads us to consider where responsibility lies for the mass destruction of the lives of sperm whales and the humans on board the Pequod.

“The Wreck of Reason: Nostalgia by Land and by Sea,” in The Cultural History of the Sea in The Eighteenth Century, eds. Margaret Cohen and Jonathan Lamb (Bloomsbury, 2021), 135–153

This essay concerns two major turning points in the history of medical nostalgia: the sea and the colony. In the eighteenth century, physicians conceptualized nostalgia as a disease of forced or coerced migration that ethnic Europeans, including Swiss mountaineers, Scottish Highlanders, and Laplanders, were particularly vulnerable to on account of their stronger “local attachments” to their homelands. At the turn of the nineteenth century, however, the sea became a stubborn fact that physicians had to reckon with when they carried the concept of nostalgia from Europe to the Americas in the late eighteenth century, initially for the purpose of mastering a motley assortment of masterless men and women, the mariners, renegades, and castaways who populated the early republic of the United States and dominated the archipelagic imagination of the Caribbean. In so doing, the sea supplied authors with a vocabulary for the degeneration of the body and an occasion for resistance against bondage. Poems like William Wordsworth’s “The Brothers” (1800) and Herman Melville’s “On a natural monument in a Field of Georgia” (1866) use this vocabulary to mount humanitarian critiques of war, economy, and medicine, which habitually ignored the role of labor conditions in inducing mental illnesses like nostalgia.

“Nostalgia,” in The Routledge Handbook of Reenactment Studies, eds. Vanessa Agnew, Jonathan Lamb, and Juliane Tomann (Routledge, 2020), 156–59.

[In lieu of an abstract, here is the opening paragraph]

Nostalgia designates a domain of historical practice that is often said to be antithetical to historiography’s production of historical meaning.Whereas this latter mode is typically predicated upon the exercise of reason, narrative figuration, historical distance, and a focus on shared experience, nostalgia designates a mode that prioritizes affect, imagery, intimacy with and absorption in the past, and autobiographical experience. In other words, nostalgia belongs to, as philosopher Steven Galt Crowell puts it,“spectral history—not the story of the public unfolding of a self, but an experience of the past as impossibly one’s own, a return of the dead, evidence of the ego’s resistance to the all-unifying structure of time” (Crowell, 1999, p. 84; emphasis in original). It is on the basis of its particular weave of desire with emotion, memory and commemoration, body and embodiment, and the quest for authenticity that nostalgia is frequently linked with practices of reenactment, and often distrusted by historians, anthropologists, poststructuralists, and others who use negative valuations of the concept to shore up their own group identities.

“What Was Black Nostalgia?” American Literary History 30, no. 4 (Fall 2018): 1–24

This article describes the bifurcation of nostalgia over the course of its dispersion from Europe to the Americas from the 1790s to the 1860s. Nostalgia had previously been diagnosed in European ethnics who were displaced from home by compulsory service and were said to sadden and die due to a natal weakness to forced mobility. In the Americas, it was introduced into slave medicine and racialized, resulting in a new version of nostalgia that assigned to black bodies a different manner of dying—suicide—and a different cause of death—weakness to forced immobility, that is, captivity. Yet if this new biopolitical narrative captured the struggle between physicians and slaves over the significance of death (as a manifestation of freedom or illness), it only emerged in non-anglophone slave societies. In the anglophone New World, nostalgia was apparently never used as a diagnosis in slaves. Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) implies that this non-use was deliberate, arguing that American medicine is distinguished by its strategic neglect of the affective health of the black body. To attend to black nostalgia is to attend to the affective conditions of death as a radical act of freedom.

This article works to draw critical attention to the aesthetic history of local color, and, more broadly, to the underrecognized relation between local color and realism. In returning local color to its long aesthetic history within painting, Schroeder argues that its primary purpose within realism was not the delineation of regions, but rather the production of an affective and aesthetic engagement with the cosmopolitan project of self-cultivation. The local-color detail was generally not used as a representative detail of a place, but rather, by the late-nineteenth century, as an indexical trace of the invisible truths of an object, and particularly the invisible processes that made human populations distinctive. By bringing this attention to local color’s color, Schroeder aims to move critical debates away from considerations of place-based content of local-color stories and toward a recognition of how local color constituted an aesthetic that could be configured in radically antithetical ways by an archrealist like Mary Murfree and an impressionist like Hamlin Garland. Ultimately, local color helps us see realism not as an indiscriminate, antiliterary, transparent representation of the world, but rather as a highly discriminating, distinctive style that was consistently engaged with the twin principles of human self-cultivation and the neoclassical economy of representation. The example of Garland’s Crumbling Idols has proven so illuminating for this essay precisely because of how it reacts against this formation, as well as how it suggests an alternative, unconscious receptivity to the detail that foreshadows American modernism and regionalism.