C19: "Unsettling,": March 17-20, 2016, State College, PA

Abstract

C19: "Unsettling,"March 17-20, 2016, State College, PA Hannah Lauren Murray (bio), Christy L. Pottroff (bio), Christine Yao (bio), William Hunt, and Anthony G. Cohen (bio) The 2016 C19 conference theme was "Unsettling," an indication that the fourth biennial meeting would feature work dedicated to new perspectives and revitalizing critiques. "Unsettling" necessarily called for revisionist approaches "to the methodologies, geographies, languages, and texts that disturb, divert, and reconstitute" the field, and it drew scholars prepared for the occasion. Race was a major analytical vector that helped destabilize such fields as print and material culture, science studies, law, and liberalism. Interdisciplinarity and intersectionality played important roles in topics including urban planning, nationalism, food studies, and religiosity, which unsettled canonical texts and scholarly methodologies. This unsettling resulted in a number of provocative tectonic shifts in nineteenth-century American literary studies. Program Link: https://c19conference.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/2016-conference-program-updated-3-3.pdf unsettling race, nation, and the borderline Presenters on the "Conversions: Race, Religion and the Politics of Belonging" panel considered how race manifests in antebellum religious texts. Ben Bascom examined Christianity as a tool against colonialism and slavery in Boyrereau Brinch/Jeffrey Brace's The Blind African Slave (1810). Bascom argued that through religious practice, Christians foster inclusion and change; in contrast, when [End Page 144] they adhere to the institution of slavery, they legitimize exclusion. Duncan Faherty investigated another slave narrative, on Omar Ibn Said's 1831 Arabic autobiography. Said's decision to write in Arabic and transcribe Koranic suras from memory, Faherty contended, demonstrates resistance against his state-imposed identity. Faherty asked what other texts may have been lost through white America's ignorance and mistranslation of enslaved persons' non-English expressions. Shelby Johnson read William Apess' "Eulogy on King Phillip" (1836) as a revisionary interpretation of Christian thought that materializes history and refuses Native American spectralization. In Apess' eulogy, a disinterred child's corpse bears material witness to suffering and thus, Johnson argued, forcefully indicts white apathy to Native displacement. Ashley Reed argued that Bayard Taylor's short story "Confessions of a Medium" (1860) illuminates white middle-class male anxieties concerning immigration and integration through spiritualist performance. When a white female medium channels spirits such as Blackhawk from the nation's unsettled borders, Reed noted, spiritualism's unruly world threatens to destabilize ideas of race, gender, and sexuality. Liberalism was another concept that conference participants interrogated. In "Race and the Fault Lines of Liberalism: Sex, Fashion, Food," contributors assessed how networks of communication and exchange in the Black Atlantic defy Eurocentric assumptions about the liberal subject and public sphere. In her discussion of Leonora Sansay's novel Zelica: The Creole (1820), Carroll Smith-Rosenberg questioned how the text's backdrop in the Haitian Revolution undermines the raced, gendered, and heterosexed attributes that the Ages of Revolution and Enlightenment too frequently assumed. Reconnoitering the print culture in nineteenth-century Harlem, Carla Peterson compared the society periodicals disseminated by publishers such as Philip Bell and James McCune Smith to [End Page 145] those of Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, and Washington Irving. For Peterson, the print culture activities of these "Black Gothamites" bespeak the presence of an African American public sphere and cultural consciousness, championing the adoption and refinement of a middle-class gentility. Reviewing the work of African American cookbook authors in the nineteenth century, Rafia Zafar understood the compiled recipes as reflecting the culinary knowledge and sensibilities of the African diaspora and an emergent black hospitality industry. According to Zafar, in works by chef-authors such as Malinda Russell and James Hemings, authors intimate first-hand experience with American chattel slavery to enhance recipes' authenticity. This attention to unconventional forms of writing and language likewise informed "The Poetic of Community: From Abolition to Post-War Reunion." The panel questioned how politicized instances of citation, intertextuality, and collective poetics might forge a new understanding of the circabellum's dynamic reading and writing publics. Faith Barrett presented on African American abolitionist Amos Gerry Beman's prolific scrapbooking efforts. According to Barrett, Beman's pairing of newspaper clippings with acrostic poems celebrates black leaders in the American antislavery movement while supplying examples of veneration, contemplation, and political...