Editor's Note: Past Lives

Abstract

Editor's NotePast Lives Marion Rust As our copyeditor patiently awaits this last piece of the puzzle for 55.3, academic time has rendered me mute. How write in early June to readers who will see this in late October, seemingly seconds before the most significant US presidential election most if not all of us will ever have experienced? How predict whether Trump will have successfully turned the military against the populace, or know the outcome of protests that now fill city streets in response to decades of police brutality rooted in centuries of white supremacy and systemic racism? Is social distancing now a memory, or a permanent feature of many interpersonal landscapes? Do we have a vaccine? Is it being fairly distributed? Are people using it? Are these even the right questions to ask? Not only is there no way to clearly anticipate what the short-term future will bring, but I also find myself uncertain about how to respond to the present in the pages of a journal rooted in past lives. Even the phrase past lives suggests the complexity of any such endeavor. Right now, it means lives taken: George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, to list just three names that have filled the air night after night for the past two weeks, even in my modest-sized city. But of course past lives also refers, sometimes jokingly, to prior iterations of present selves, thereby making clear that no death can sever connections between what was and what is. In fact, past lives insists on this very continuity: take lives as a verb, and the past lives on. Given this continuity, many students of the past now speak publicly of the present relevance of their work. Belying a long-standing scholarly skepticism toward the demand that postsecondary education justify all learning according to its present-day pragmatic applications, an unprecedented number of posts, tweets, and titles now encourage us to read a seemingly distantly related treatise based on what it has to say about contemporary injustice. Publishers, university presidents, and no small number of professional [End Page 599] academics invite readers to appreciate their role in combatting everything from the COVID-19 pandemic to systemic bias and structural racism. There is good reason for this change of heart. Moments that seem incomprehensible as they occur—just for the sake of argument, let's imagine chemical spray used on peaceful protestors in the service of a presidential photo op—cannot be recognized, let alone processed, without the contextualization that scholarship provides. For this reason, I commend those who have drawn from the toolboxes of their specific disciplines and areas of specialization to make the intolerable visible and therefore impermanent. In the case of early American studies, these tools may seem almost self-evident. Neither mass contagion nor systemic racism is anything new to our field. Nor are war crimes, abuses of state power, environmental devastation in the name of economic progress, religious intolerance, obscene concentrations of capital, or related oppressions of the many by the few through atrocities ranging from enslavement to the displacement of populations to a classed and racialized heteronormativity that diminished every minute of most lives throughout the periods discussed in this journal. Not only are these occurrences depicted, commemorated, and unthinkingly inscribed in practically every archive and repertoire; they are also romanticized, legitimized, minimized, occluded, protested, and, yes, sometimes overcome. Yet there is a risk that drawing parallels between highly distinct instances of atrocity, accommodation, and resistance can become self-serving. Equally important, it can deprive readers of one solace all learning can provide: the opportunity, for even a few minutes, to attend elsewhere when immediate anguish weighs heavy. One reason we want a just world is so that we have the opportunity to look beyond it. All of which is to say, I will not be writing about the articles in this issue of Early American Literature based on what they tell us about the present. All I will claim is, the interdependencies are there, as they are everywhere. The past lives. And now to 55.3. This issue begins with original takes on two wellknown authors in early American studies—Anne...