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Thesis advisor: Robert S. Lehman / Thesis advisor: Jennifer Greiman / “American Imperception” explores how early American writers investigated the role that political economy plays in the relation between sensory perception and knowledge. This dissertation argues that nineteenth-century American writers used literature to teach their readers to understand how economic forms and forms of economic activity fundamentally shape and train the sensorium to sense in historically and contextually specific ways. In “American Imperception,” I show how literature can make legible otherwise insensible forms of social and economic relations. The impossibility of sensing social and economic form—and the way in which that impossibility is rendered through literature—is what I call in this project “imperception.” Imperception describes the way in which literary form makes intelligible the structures of social, political, and economic life: structures that themselves cannot be sensed directly and which therefore cannot be directly represented by literature. “American Imperception” is focused on how literature interacts with social life within a capitalist modernity defined by the value form and the commodity form, and how literature formalizes the structures of social life through a specifically literary logic, transforming them into something that can be read where they cannot be seen, heard, felt, or represented. This dissertation draws on Karl Marx’s thinking on the senses and the suprasensible to consider how U.S. writers of the nineteenth-century mobilized literary form to make thinkable forms of sociality that cannot be contained by the imperceptible nature of sociality under capital. As I show in this dissertation, the political economy of social life determines what can be sensed, just as what can be sensed marks the horizon of political and social possibility. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2021. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

<p>In the first half of the nineteenth century, historians in the United States described their work as an aesthetic practice. The romantic nationalist George Bancroft claimed that historical writing ought to provide readers with a series of beautiful images that would "secure the affections" of the American people for the U.S. Constitution. William H. Prescott, author of volumes on the age of conquest, introduced his most popular work by claiming that he wanted to present his readers with a "picture true in itself" and, through his vividly imaginative descriptions, "to surround them in the spirit of the times." For this generation of historians, their magisterial texts were not simply more or less true accounts of European experience in the New World or the story of the nation's revolutionary origins, they were paintings in words--expressionistic and romantic images that would make the passions, conflicts, and virtues of previous generations available to their readers as an imaginative experience.</p><p>Scholars have long understood the various forms of historical consciousness of the nineteenth-century as producing national, imperial, and racial orders in their imagination of the United States as the locus of a linear and progressive flowering of liberty in the New World. My project supplements these totalizing accounts by examining the central texts of nationalist history through the lens of literary analysis to demonstrate how their aesthetic dimensions both enabled and disrupted such a political and temporal imagination. Romantic history emerged in an era of pronounced temporal crisis for the United States. On the surface, these historians sought to provide readers with experiences of an otherwise inaccessible revolutionary past that would help bind a nation confronting fears about dissolution in exponential westward growth, immigration, and the sectional crisis over slavery. Yet, when we look closer at these texts, we realize that they contain covert recognitions of the vitality of struggles for freedom taking place elsewhere--in Haiti, Mexico, or West Indian abolition--that exceeded the terms of U.S. racial republicanism and claimed futures at odds with nationalism's sense of historical preeminence. Both compelled and horrified by the assertion of black freedom throughout the Atlantic world, the beautiful and haunted images of romantic history registered the irruptive force of transatlantic political movements nominally inadmissible within U.S. historical discourse.</p><p> </p><p>While romantic historians developed aesthetic norms for confronting and disavowing alternatives to national orders of time and political progress, abolitionist writers held fast to these disruptions to construct an aesthetics of slave revolution. In the second half of my dissertation, I examine the trajectory of this black radical tradition from the abolitionist historians of the antebellum period to the twentieth-century thinkers who adapted and transformed these aesthetics into a comprehensive anti-imperialism. Considering writings by William C. Nell, Martin R. Delany, W.E.B. Du Bois and C.L.R. James I argue that this tradition did more than reconstruct histories of black political life that had been suppressed by white supremacist orders of knowledge. These writers vitalized history with alternate models of freedom as immediate, proliferating, and eruptive--even when they also sought for signs of racial progress in a linear model. In their vivid descriptions of an experience of freedom that was irreducible to linear models of progress, these texts produced what Walter Benjamin once described as "the constructive principle" in materialist history: "where thinking suddenly halts in a constellation overflowing with tensions, there it yields a shock to the same." This shock of overflowing tensions is the moment when history becomes aesthetic--when imaginative excess overturns the narrative form of history. I ultimately argue that the aesthetics of history can help us reconsider the political stakes of historical scholarship, allowing us to think about the writing of history as an ongoing encounter with freedom that always exceeds the limits of factual, analytical and discursive accounts of what has been.</p> / Dissertation

As a result of the groundbreaking success of his debut film Boyz N the Hood (1991), filmmaker John Singleton gained worldwide acclaim, the respect of major film industry figures and became the topic of both scholarly and popular culture film conversations. He also made history, becoming the youngest and the first African-American to be nominated for the Academy Award for excellence in directing. However, the lukewarm critical reception for his sophomore release Poetic Justice (1993) countered the promise many felt he had shown earlier and initiated a lack of interest in Singleton’s subsequent films, rendering him almost obsolete from any future cinematic analysis. This dissertation seeks to resurrect the discussion of John Singleton as a substantial contributor to the world of cinema by bringing attention to the voice that he has given young African-American men and women in the works that comprise what he calls his “hood trilogy,” which includes the aforementioned films and Baby Boy (2001). Specifically, the dissertation addresses this topic by examining how Singleton’s own discussion of black masculinity via film is an extension of the same conversation about maleness began by writers Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, how the South Central Los Angeles environment has had a tremendous effect on the behaviors and attitudes of the young people that populate the area, the influence of hip hop culture on gender dynamics, and the strain often placed on black male/female relationships in urban settings. The methodological approach of the dissertation combines film, literature, music, and cultural and sociological studies in the effort to locate Singleton and these films as meaningful components in the investigation of film, popular culture and African-American history and culture. In analyzing these films that, as a result of their subject matter and setting, find the filmmaker at his most assured both narratively and cinematically, the intent of the dissertation is to confirm the potential that Singleton revealed in his debut and also bring awareness to the significant effect his work has on African-American youth culture at large. / text

"Spirited Media" analyzes distributed structures of authorship in the reform literature of the nineteenth-century United States. The literature that emerged out of reform movements like abolitionism often was a product of complex negotiations between speech and print, involving multiple people working across media in relationships that were sometimes collaborative, sometimes cooperative, and sometimes antagonistic. The cultural authority of print and individual authorship, often unquestioned in studies that focus on major or canonical figures of the nineteenth century, has tended to obscure some of this complexity. Moving from phonography, to Josiah Henson and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, to spiritualism, to Sojourner Truth and Walt Whitman, I consider four cases in which reporters, amanuenses, spirit mediums, and poets revived and remediated the voices of abolitionists, fugitive slaves, and figures from American history. By separating publication into events—speech, inscription, revision, and print—I show that "authorship" consisted of a series of interactions over time and across media, but that in the case of reform, the stakes for proving that authorship was a clear and indisputable characteristic of print were high. For abolitionist, African American, and spiritualist speakers and writers, authority depended on authorship, which in turn depended on the transparency of the print or the medium, or the perception of a direct relationship between speaker and reader. Like authorship, this transparency was constructed by a variety of social actors for whom the author was a key site of empowerment. It was authorized by appeals to revelation and race, two constructs often sidelined in media histories, yet central to discussions of society and politics in nineteenth-century America. Thinking of authorship as a distributed phenomenon disrupts models of the unitary subject and original genius, calling attention instead to uncanny acts of reading and writing in nineteenth-century literature. This dissertation argues that we should think about the transformative power of U.S. literature as located in revelation, not just creation, and in congregating people, not just representing them. / text

“Women of the Apocalypse: Feminist Afrospeculative Writers,” seeks to address the problematic ‘Exodus narrative,’ a convention that has helped shape Black American liberation politics dating back to the writings of Phyllis Wheatley. Novels by Zora Neale Hurston, Octavia Butler, and Alice Walker undermine and complicate this narrative by challenging the trope of a single charismatic male leader who leads an entire race to a utopic promised land. For these writers, the Exodus narrative is unsustainable for a number of reasons, not the least of which is because there is no room for women to operate outside of the role of supportive wives. The mode of speculative fiction is well suited to crafting counter-narratives to Exodus mythology because of its ability to place marginalized voices in the center from the stance of ‘What next?’ My project is a hybrid in that I combine critical theory with original poems. The prose section of each chapter contextualizes a novel and its author with regard to Exodus mythology. However, because novels can only reveal so much about character development, I identify spaces to engage and elaborate upon the conversation incited by these authors’ feminist protagonists. In the tradition of Black American poets such as, Ai, Patricia Smith, Rita Dove, and Tyehimba Jess, in my own personal creative work, I regularly engage historical figures through recovering the narratives of underrepresented voices. To write in persona or limited omniscient, spotlighting an event where the reader possesses incomplete information surrounding a character’s experience, the result becomes a kind of call-and-response interaction with these novels.

1 Abstract The thesis analyzes three novels with utopian features written by African American authors: Sutton E. Griggs's Imperium in Imperio (1899), George S. Schuyler's Black Empire (1936-1937) and Toni Morrison's Paradise (1997). The novels and their description of alternative all-black spaces are analyzed on the background of Michel Foucault's theory of heterotopias. In the first part of the thesis, I provide the introduction to the genre of utopia and its brief history, and I state a definition of utopia for the purposes of the thesis. Next I discuss the specificity of American context and introduce the concept of heterotopias as opposed to traditional utopias. The crucial features are simultaneity, juxtaposition, mutual relationships and mirroring. In the latter part of the thesis, I proceed to the analysis of the novels themselves, stressing mainly their treatment of race and racism. In Griggs's Imperium in Imperio, I describe the parallels between the white and black world in their use of rhetoric and in the Imperium's inspiration by the American War of Independence. I also examine the role of Du Boisian double-consciousness and its working in the concept of heterotopia. In the analysis of Schuyler's Black Empire, I focus on the fascist rhetoric resembling that of Italy in Italo-Ethiopian War,...

This dissertation explores the entanglements of racialized histories and experiences in America with conceptions of animals and animality and examines how African American and Native American writers render these intersections in early-twentieth-century American literature. While animals, with their physical and behavioral features and subordinate status within Western cultural frameworks, were fundamental figures in the US racial imaginary, which relied on dehumanization as a weapon of control, animals (and conceptions about them) also curiously offered a way around and outside of the categorically demeaning declarations of “the human.” Through literary explorations of the nonhuman, the writers in this project reveal forms of interspecies affinity and understanding that affirm biotic connection and also make fantastically strange creatures with whom humans share domestic and proximal space. The figure of “the human” as separate, above, and radically distinct from other life becomes not only strange as well through these readings, but becomes visible as a prominent obstacle to social egalitarian and ecologically cooperative ways of living. I build on research in animal studies and critical race studies approaches to posthumanism to observe how race inflects literary animal representations while also tracking how animality interacts with various notions of personhood. While animalization often coincides with racialized and dehumanized personhood status, writers like Anita Scott Coleman and Zitkala-Ša rupture those associations and engage the animal (comparisons to it and becomings with it) as a fundamentally humanizing figure. On the flip side, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God demonstrates how a racialized animalization trope operates in the novel to defend the killing of a black man. These writers all collapse the binary between human and animal while demonstrating how that binary operates in concert with racial binaries in an American context that extols the human. Reading animals through a lens that acknowledges how race and animality intersect ultimately opens routes for rethinking what it means to be human and defining how we view the nonhuman.

This essay examines Frederick Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom in a liminal space between disciplinary lines of inquiry. In imagining his work within this space, I utilize Kenneth Burke’s notion of identification and cooperation as a means of understanding how Douglass enacts rhetoric and for what end. The rhetorical situation Douglass faces is highly fraught: other people’s lives are at stake, and the institution of slavery forces him to make legible the atrocities being done to African American bodies. My conceptualization of Douglass’s text as rhetorical theory in practice proffers a new way of understanding what shape and form rhetoric and narrative can take, especially for Douglass. Rhetorical theory in practice builds upon Barbara Christian’s understanding of what theory and theorization looks like within African American communities of practice. She argues that African American theory “is often in narrative forms, in the stories [they] create, in riddles and proverbs, in the play with language” (68). In My Bondage and My Freedom, I examine the ways in which Douglass locates rhetorical theory in the lived experiences of enslaved people. While doing this, he pays homage to four narrative forms: the captivity narrative, the criminal confession, the travel narrative, and the picaresque novel. He borrows from these forms to display his literary dexterity but also to enact a sort of rhetorical theory. His descriptions, sequence of events, and the way in which he orchestrates his text enact a rhetorical framework for advocating for the humanity of enslaved African Americans. Subsequently, he develops a rhetorical theory in practice that emerges out of his lived experiences.