Nineteenth-century Representations Research Articles

Representations of Istanbul in A. S. Byatt's 'The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye

This paper explores how Istanbul fantasies in A. S. Byatt’s “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye” (1994) function as a critique of British patriarchal constructions of femininity. In Orientalism Postmodernism and Globalism, Bryan Turner argues that “the Orient in Western imagination is often perceived as the fantastic, it is associated with sexual fantasies” (98). Due to the European invention of Istanbul as “Oriental,” Byatt’s fifty-year-old female protagonist, Gillian Perholt, creates her own fairy tale by miraculously releasing a djinn from a Turkish glass vase in late twentieth-century Istanbul. The British narratologist imagines Istanbul through its nineteenth-century representations that picture the city as a fairytale-like place with Oriental daemons and magical vases. Istanbul’s association with sensuality, however, is problematized as Gillian realizes that her wish for eternal love will not come true with the djinn. In fact, Istanbul, the city that had been the metaphor for gender inequality due to women’s segregated lives in the Ottoman harems, becomes a setting, in Byatt’s novella, where British male standards of beauty and the ideals of happy-ever-after love in fairytales are critiqued.

Corsets, cages and embowered women in contemporary Victoriana on film

The article addresses the problem of representing Victorian female subjectivity in contemporary films set in the nineteenth century - including both film adaptations of Victorian classics (such as Campion's Portrait of a Lady [1996]) and examples of contemporary Victoriana (such as Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge! [2001], Burton's Sweeney Todd [2007] and the animated The Corpse Bride [2005], and Campion's The Piano [1993]). It focuses on the use of the corset and the practice of tight-lacing as visual and ideological shorthand in filmic representations of repressed Victorian female subjectivity. The stress of the analysis is on the recurring glorified image of the corseted woman, usually juxtaposed to a caged bird, placed inside cage-like interiors. Tracing the history of these images to the nineteenth-century representation of women in fine art, the article investigates the significance of these images for interpretations of female agency in contemporary Victoriana.

Pink and White Descriptions

This paper presents a discussion of ekphrasis and also engages in its practice as a means of encountering architectural conditions resisted by representation. Figurative language is employed with reference to images of the Pink and White Terraces, once located in the North Island of New Zealand and now destroyed. The practice of ekphrasis reveals a domestic condition in the nineteenth century representations of the Terraces, here linked to a contemporary film, Pink and White Terraces , which addresses suburbia. From colonial descriptions to present day representations of New Zealand suburbs ekphrastic writing is undertaken as an interruption of conventional flows of architectural history.

What's an ‘Archivist’? Some Nineteenth-Century Perspectives

Uncertainties about what archivists are, or do, have existed, along with many still-familiar stereotypes, since the term ‘archivist’ first appeared in the media. While the general public is generally clear about what ‘archives’ themselves (the materials) are, it finds defining ‘the archivist’ more difficult. This is due largely to the variety of roles undertaken by archivists at any one time. Nineteenth-century representations of archivists in The Times and other British publications portray archivists variously as custodians, historians, bureaucrats or, indeed, spies. Today, archivists continue to perform a multiplicity of tasks, though what these are is, similarly, not always understood. Paradoxically it is this inherent ambiguity of the archivist's role which has remained constant over time, a characteristic which might be positively interpreted as professional flexibility in response to society's changing requirements for what is wanted from the archives themselves.

Catholic Sensationalism and Victorian Literature (review)

Reviewed by: Catholic Sensationalism and Victorian Literature Patrick R. O'Malley (bio) Catholic Sensationalism and Victorian Literature by Maureen Moran; pp. 324. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2007. $99.76. Recent years have witnessed the emergence of a significant constellation of books devoted to the place of Catholicism in nineteenth-century British literature and culture. Among those with strong literary allegiances, there have been (to name only a few) Ruth Vanita's Sappho and the Virgin Mary (1996), Ellis Hanson's Decadence and Catholicism (1997), Kimberly VanEsveld Adams's Our Lady of Victorian Feminism (2001), Frederick S. Roden's Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture (2002), Susan Griffin's Anti-Catholicism and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (2004), Michael Wheeler's The Old Enemies: Catholic and Protestant in Nineteenth-Century Culture (2006), and Maria LaMonaca's Masked Atheism (2008). To this, of course, could be added those accounts of nineteenth-century Catholicism that ground themselves more specifically in traditional historical methods, published with some regularity since the end of the nineteenth century itself. As Maureen Moran suggests at the end of her vigorously argued and wide-ranging Catholic Sensationalism and Victorian Literature, the surprise should not, perhaps, be the recent proliferation of such studies but rather the relative dearth that preceded them, a dearth encouraged by an academic culture for which religion—especially a [End Page 236] religion like Catholicism—seems fundamentally opposed to "liberalism, secularism, rational science ... and other progressive, non-religious outlooks" (284, quoting Turner 6). The cultural studies approaches that could most add to the complexity of our understanding of nineteenth-century religious belief and practice have been, in some ways, most suspicious of religion's reactionary politics: The mapping of texts and authors on a faith-doubt continuum replicated the twentieth-century cultural myth endorsed by historians: that Victorian society grounded our own modernity through the move to a more "enlightened," non-spiritual understanding of the world. The embedding of critical and cultural theoretical discourses in the academy has certainly put paid to such grand narratives. Nonetheless, these traditions of intellectual activity have tended to eclipse the importance of religion to the Victorian literary imagination. (285) That is particularly unfortunate, Moran correctly insists, since "the saturation of nineteenth-century culture by Christianity and its denominational variants makes religion always and everywhere a presence" (3). As the list that opens this review suggests, Moran's book is certainly not alone in striving to fill the void, but it is one of the most intelligent and most cogently constructed. Moran's chapters are generally thematically (rather than chronologically) organized, each appearing under the rubric of a topic of importance to the nineteenth-century representation of Catholicism and focusing on two or three more or less canonical texts or sets of texts. Thus, a chapter on representations of Jesuits provides significant readings of Charles Kingsley's Westward Ho! (1855) and Wilkie Collins's The Black Robe (1881), while one on martyrdom highlights Grace Aguilar's The Vale of Cedars (1850) and George Eliot's Romola (1862-63). Poetry is represented by Robert Browning's monologues (paired with Charlotte Brontë's Villette in a chapter on nuns and priests) and the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Francis Thompson (in a chapter devoted to Art Catholicism). An effective epilogue nicely frames the book, gesturing toward modernism and, ultimately, our own contemporary moment. Moran situates the anchoring texts of each chapter within a clear and engaging set of historical events, other literary texts, and various archival documents; the bibliography that she has assembled is alone a valuable resource. Collins aside, Moran does not in general focus on the sensation novel but rather on a broader and conceptually more complex notion of "sensationalism," bringing together "the many and interrelated understandings of 'sensation' that haunted the period" (3). Related to the Gothic, and largely opposing realism, this Victorian sensationalism stresses heightened emotional states—"extreme, eccentric scenarios and language" (12), and it "replaces the passive, escapist comforts of the older genres with a somatic involvement—a physical frisson that moves the reader from shock to curiosity and thence to the active decoding [End Page 237] of a hidden truth" (13). In Moran's account, a culture of...

Uncommon women: gender and representation in nineteenth-century U.S. women's writing

Uncommon women: gender and representation in nineteenth-century U.S. women's writing

“Greatly Changed for the Better”: Free Kindergartens as Transatlantic Reformance

Historians such as Seth Koven and Carolyn Steedman have shown how visual and literary depictions of children helped move late-nineteenth-century middle- and upper-class audiences to join in child-saving philanthropy aimed at the deserving poor. This was certainly true of the promotional literature of the free kindergartens, an analysis of which forms the focus of this essay. Starting from the concepts of fact, truth, and intertextuality utilized by Koven in his analyses of nineteenth-century representations of child-saving, this essay analyzes texts written by free kindergartners (that is, teachers in free kindergartens) Kate Douglas Wiggin in San Francisco and Lileen Hardy in Edinburgh during the 1880s and 1910s, respectively. It contends that we can better understand the purposes, messages, and relatedness of Anglo-American free kindergartners' accounts—and the movements of which they were a part—if we read them as contemporary readers might have; that is, as “artistic fictions” in the mold of the late-Victorian evangelical “true narratives” and as depictions of how child-saving was consciously performed for and presented to multiple audiences.

Creating and destroying ‘the man who does not exist’: the peasantry and modernity in Welsh and Irish writing

The literature of both Wales and Ireland in the modern period has used the imagined figure of the peasant to emblematize the nation. Yet the peasant is a contradictory emblem, especially for modernity, since he is associated with the past and with stasis. Consequently, both literary traditions reveal a repeated pattern of creation of an idealized peasantry, followed by its destruction in order to make way for a reinvented form of national identity. To demonstrate this, the early nineteenth-century representations of the Irish peasantry in the work of William Carleton are compared with those of the Welsh peasantry in the work of Anne Beale, followed by a comparison of the constructions of the peasant in the late nineteenth-century Celtic revivals of both countries in the wake of the Blue Books Report in Wales and the Great Famine in Ireland. Finally, the satirical portraits of the peasantry in the twentieth-century short stories of George Moore and Caradoc Evans are considered side by side. Ultimately, the peasant may be seen as embodying the contradictions of nationalism itself in the context of modernity, since the figure contains both residual and emergent cultural formations. Thus, the peasant is continually resurrected in analogous ways by writers in both countries, revealing again the proximity of the Welsh and Irish constructions of cultural nationalism and literary history.

Dreams, Nightmares, and Lunacy in En rade: Odilon Redon's Pictorial Inspiration in the Writings of J.-K. Huysmans

This essay illuminates selected aesthetic approaches that are symptomatic of the key role that Symbolist art played in the evolution of the poetic topoi of folly and madness in fin de siecle French culture, as nineteenth-century Romantic representations of exalted poetic frenzy gradually moved towards twentieth-century Modernist visions of nightmarish absurdity. Arguably, while the former may lead to meaningful prophetic insight, the latter often trigger an acknowledgement of life’s meaninglessness, in European literature and painting alike. In the process of transition, French Symbolism paved the way for such major twentieth-century figures as Joyce or Yeats, among many others. Within this evolution, Huysmans’s novel En rade (1886), written during the author’s Symbolist phase, is a seminal text. For Huysmans in particular, Symbolism was in many ways defined as an antithesis to Naturalism: more specifically, he applied the former to his prose writing as an artistic method that focused on the irrational world of emotions, fantasies, and dreams. In En rade, similarly to the famous A rebours (1884) that preceded it as Huysmans’s first non-Naturalist novel, the Symbolist outlook finds expression in the protagonist’s rejection of contemporary society, nostalgia for the past, and escape from reality into elaborate fantasy and dream (which is often a decadent nightmare). Indeed, the foolishness (folly) of human society puts the protagonist of En rade, Jacques Marles, on the verge of insanity, or even lunacy. The procedure of inter-art comparison is essential for seeing the novel’s symbolic coherence, since the protagonist is assailed by grotesque nightmares that are largely inspired by Odilon Redon’s phantasmagoric drawings and lithographs of the late 1870s and the 1880s. Huysmans praises the latter in A rebours and in his prose poetry volume Croquis parisiens (second edition, 1886).

Cross-Cultural Misreadings: MacCann and Maddy’s Apartheid and Racism Revisited

Cross-Cultural Misreadings: MacCann and Maddy’s Apartheid and Racism Revisited Elwyn Jenkins (bio) and Elizabeth Muther (bio) This issue of The Lion and the Unicorn, with its focus on South Africa, marks a critical occasion in the short history of the international reception and evaluation of South African literature for children. It promises to offer new perspectives on the cultural mirror provided by literature for children in post-transition South Africa: the revisions of national story and of the identity of the “representative child” that have occurred during this period. It reflects the increasing visibility of this literature in the global marketplace. At the same time, it provides an opportunity to correct a sometimes problematic historical record—and to revisit a cluster of critical texts on South African children’s literature that provide an object lesson in the hazards of comparative cultural studies in the field. “Passionate trans-cultural engagements . . . will often reveal more about the aspirations and grievances of the people doing the comparing than about the people compared,” Rita Barnard remarks on the discourses of comparative history (“Of Riots and Rainbows” 404). Work on South African children’s literature produced outside of the methodological constraints of comparative studies may indeed create such distortions. Substantial critiques of recent South African youth literature are rare. The few that do exist are field-defining—and have disproportionately influenced the reception of this literature. American academic Donnarae MacCann’s critical work in the South African arena reflects such passionately invested cross-cultural readings. Her scholarship in South African children’s literature has had international visibility, and her status as a critic of racism in American books gives her opinions particular weight. Her books and articles—variously co-authored— have had a profound influence over the reception of important transitional South African cultural texts. Yet, for all of the productive energy and vitality of MacCann’s broader contributions, her studies of [End Page 237] South African children’s books sometimes blur cultural boundaries and distort the telescopic lenses used in this transnational work. In this essay, we address the assumptions that underlie MacCann’s analysis of South African cultural politics, especially as regards race relations— and begin to suggest the kind of comparative methodologies that might allow what Barnard has called a “transactional cultural analysis, alert to the ways in which historical actors on both sides of the Atlantic have interpreted and misinterpreted each other” (“Of Riots and Rainbows” 402). We focus on Apartheid and Racism in South African Children’s Literature, 1985–1995 by MacCann and Yulisa Amadu Maddy (2001), using that book and MacCann’s other writings and collaborative work on South African texts to explore the implications of transnational criticism in children’s literature.1 The Work of MacCann and Maddy Donnarae MacCann has a significant track record, dating back over thirty-five years, in what she has called antiracism work. She aligns her own early efforts with the impetus provided—and the interventions offered—by the Council on Interracial Books for Children (CIBC), an organization founded in 1965 as a direct product of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s (MacCann, “Editor’s Introduction” 339; Banfield 17). CIBC provided explicit guidelines for detecting the presence of exclusionary or racially demeaning content in trade books and textbooks for children (Banfield 18). MacCann’s first co-edited collection of essays (with Gloria Woodard), The Black American in Books for Children: Readings in Racism (1972), stands as a signal event in scholarship in children’s literature (Martin 53). Many of the essays were gathered from the CIBC’s Bulletin of Interracial Books for Children, and the book was republished in 1985 with many new and updated articles. The book—in both editions—pinpointed important cultural questions about the roles of black children’s authors and about representations of black Americans in books for children.2 MacCann won the 1998 Book Award from the Children’s Literature Association—an award given annually “to recognize outstanding book-length contributions to children’s literature history, scholarship, and criticism”—for her study of nineteenth-century representations of African Americans in children’s literature, White Supremacy in Children’s Literature: Characterizations of African Americans, 1830–1900...

A Brief History of Pin-Making

Reduced to journalistic cliché in our own time, Adam Smith's writing made up an important part of the cultural competence of a late eighteenth or early nineteenth-century intellectual. The article follows the most important of the illustrations Smith used. It studies the variants of the pin factory, the key image of mass production, from Chamber's Cyclopaedia (1728) to its definitive incarnation in The Wealth of Nations and then as it saturates nineteenth-century representations of labour, in Godwin, Hegel, de Tocqueville, Robert Owen, Charles Babbage, and Charlotte Tonna, amongst others. It suggests that the fine variations in the image (for instance, the number of operations it is supposed to require to manufacture a pin) correspond with, and reveal, each author's specific polemical and historical contexts. Moreover, it argues that the revisions of the image in the hands of so many readers of Smith constitute a process of ideological self-reflection through which the meanings of modernity were comprehended.

31 Days: Gerald Ford, the Nixon Pardon, and a Government in Crisis by Barry Werth

164 Michigan Historical Review Many readers will be familiar with the stereotypes of backward, racially corrupt, and passive Frenchmen that appeared in texts by nationalist writers such as Francis Parkman, George Bancroft, and Lyman Beecher. But while Watts interprets these writers in fresh ways, his great contribution is his discussion of authors who constructed very different images of a French past in their works. Writers such as Henry Marie Brackenridge, Margaret Fuller, and James Hall imagined the French in a positive light, portraying them as classless, communal, egalitarian, inclusive, free, and generous. Their positive images of the French, Watts illustrates, were used "to tell a different American story . . . [and] to remind American readers of a set of values the French had embodied and the Anglos had displaced, values that were more enlightened on subjects such as land, race, gender, religion, and nation" (p. 6). In This Remote Country adds to our understanding of how nineteenth century Americans constructed and debated a national identity, and it is a pleasure to read. Historians might worry that this study of an imagined French past occasionally seems to make assertions about the historical French who, it must be said, were not generally openminded protomulticulturalists practicing an anticapitalist and antihierarchical version of colonialism. As a study of nineteenth-century representations, however, this book is a remarkable contribution. It deserves a wide readership among scholars of nineteenth-century literature and historians. Robert Morrissey University of Tennessee, Knoxville Barry Werth. 31 Days: Gerald Ford, theNixon Pardon, and a Government in Crisis. New York: Anchor, 2007. Pp. 348. Bibliography. Index. Notes. Paper, $15.95. This interesting book chronicles the first thirty-one days of Gerald Ford's presidency, a term of office that lasted only thirty months. Ford took the oath of office at a unique time in the history of the United States. On August 9, 1974, Ford's predecessor, Richard M. Nixon, became the first president to resign. The previous autumn Nixon had nominated and Congress had confirmed the appointment of Ford as vice president, following the resignation of Spiro Agnew. Ford, therefore, became the first American president who had never run for office nationwide. Book Reviews 165 The book's subtitle outlines the major subjects that the author weaves through the narrative from day one to day thirty-one. Werth skillfully shifts from the media image of the new president; to theWhite House where Ford was establishing his own team while simultaneously dealing with his presidential duties; to Nixon's state of mind, health, attitudes, and actions; and finally to depicting the gradual process by which Ford decided to grant a pardon to the former president. On day thirty-one of his presidency, Ford granted Nixon "a full, free, and absolute pardon ... for all offenses" that he "committed or may have committed or taken part inwhile president" (p. 321). Ford's basic political and personal instincts served him well, according to Werth. Most members of the press saw Ford as a refreshing, drastic change from Nixon. For his press secretary Ford chose Jerald ter Horst, who had been a friend since childhood and was also a respected journalist. Ford nominated New York's Governor Nelson Rockefeller as his vice president and then relied on him and on Secretary of State Henry Kissinger as his chief policymakers. Werth opines that with Ford's reliance on these two men he "had opted for the strongest possible partners" (p. 113). In a speech before the Veterans of Foreign Wars Ford proposed a limited amnesty for Vietnam draft exiles. In two areas Werth portrays Ford as less than praiseworthy. The first concerns his handling of the ownership and control of the tapes and records of the Nixon presidency. The second was Ford's failure to elicit from Nixon any admission of illegal activities, only his acknowledgment of "mistakes and misjudgments" (p. 322). The Nixon pardon dissipated the widespread popularity Ford had enjoyed during his first thirty days in office. In his subsequent letter of resignation, ter Horst explained he could not "credibly defend" the pardon without a full pardon to "the young men who evaded military service as amatter of conscience" (p. 318) or pardons for former Nixon aides...

Situating Haiti: on some early nineteenth-century representations of Toussaint Louverture

Until recent years and with several notable exceptions, there appears to have been relatively little interest in Haiti among scholars in the field of francophone studies. The article takes this apparent absence as its starting point, and explores the possible ramifications of a renewed attention to Haitian history and culture for studies of francophone postcoloniality. Central to the discussion is a series of French and British representations of the Haitian revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture, dating from around the time of their subject's death in 1803, that have received only rare critical attention. The article suggests that any study of a postcolonial Toussaint, evident in the work of authors such as Aim Csaire, Bernard Dadi, Ren Depestre, Edouard Glissant and Jean Mtellus, should take these earlier representations into account in order to elaborate a more complex account of francophone history and culture. The conclusion develops this reflection on the association of the colonial and postcolonial by suggesting the ways in which a renewed awareness of the implications of the Haitian Revolution might impact on postcolonial analyses of France itself.

The Culture of History: English Uses of the Past 1800–1953 (review)

Reviewed by: The Culture of History: English Uses of the Past 1800-1953 Rosemary Mitchell (bio) Billie Melman , The Culture of History: English Uses of the Past 1800–1953 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), xii + 363 pages, illustrated, hardback, £60 (ISBN 0 19 929688 X). Melman's The Culture of History is an astonishingly wide-ranging exploration of Victorian and twentieth-century historical culture. She defines this culture as 'the productions of segments of the past, or rather pasts, the multiplicity of their representations and the myriad ways in which the English – as individuals and in groups – looked at this past … and made use of it' (4). The breadth of the project is ambitious, coveringa span of more than 150 years, and drawing on a wealth of sources – ranging from waxwork displays and historical novels to advertisements and operas – to construct a rich analysis of the construction of three significant historical sites/sights: the Paris and London of the French Revolution, the Tudor Tower of London, and the 'two bodies' of Queen Elizabeth. Melman presents us with a Victorian counter-culture of history, which is populist and urban, cross-class and cross-national, and transgressive in terms of genre and gender. Dangerous, disjointed,and dark, it is the history of revolutionary conflict and crime, of the dungeon and the prison. This is then overlaid with a commercial and democratic twentieth-century culture which offers apparently more comfortable and inclusive versions of the Tudor and Revolutionary pasts. Melman's introduction contextualizes her work within an expanding scholarship on Victorian and twentieth-century historical cultures which owes its genesis to works such as Stephen Bann's The Clothing of Clio (1984). She challenges three approaches and theses which, in her opinion, restrict this research field. Popular historical culture – aswell as academic and high profile historical writing – needs to be researched, she argues, to allow us to explore 'cross-class exchange between and through different yet interacting genres' (12). She stresses that scholarly focus on the representations of the rural landscape to construct English national pasts needs to be balanced by attention toan historical culture which was 'strongly urban and metropolitan',and promoted a past which was neither 'comfortable nor cosy' (11). Similarly, she argues for a challenge to our tendency to view Victorian historiographies as predominantly 'comfortable Whig interpretations', which stressed continuity and gradual improvement and 'distanced the [End Page 349] present from an unruly past' (9), purveyed through vehicles of state and elite social control such as museums. While much of this is, perhaps, more fully acknowledged in current scholarship than Melman allows, her call for us to counter our tendency to look at historical culture as 'something that is the clue to something else: a Liberal ideology and world-view, … the 'imagined' community, or the consolidation of the interests of the middle-classes' (8) is a timely admonition. Instead, Melman urges us to 'pay more attention to the actual dynamics of culture at work', recovering a past which is 'a place of danger, disorder, and degrees of violence' (11). This means acknowledging that 'production is only one part of the story', and validating and exploring the role of the individual consumer (some of the most original and effective parts of the book are case-studies of 'reader receptions'). This emphasis on the role of the varied audiences means for Melman that the exploration of modern historical culture involves reference to four 'modalities': 'the resonance of themes and images through various forms and genres and across classes', 'repetition in the patterns and dynamics of access to history and to knowledge about and usages of the past', 'democratization of the past', accompanied by a continued culture of 'distinction' between classes, and the globalization and 'cross-national' development of the national narrative(s) (20–2). Here she offers a coherent body of conceptual tools for developing a sharper and more sophisticated analysis of modern historical culture than many of us working in the same field have yet achieved. Part I offers a case-study employing these methodologies: nineteenth-century representations of the French Revolution, beginning with Mme Tussaud's Revolutionary and Napoleonic exhibits. Melman argues that the display constituted...

"There Was No Resisting John Canoe": Circum-Atlantic Transracial Performance

\ “There Was No Resisting John Canoe” Circum-Atlantic Transracial Performance —PETER REED John-Canoe is considered not merely as a person of material consequence, but one whose presence is absolutely indispensable. . . . There was no resisting John Canoe. —MATTHEW GREGORY LEWIS, Journal of a Residence among the Negroes in the West Indies (1816, published 1845) In her 1861 autobiography Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs writes of popular holiday slave performances she calls “Johnkannaus.” The performances , appearing in various guises throughout the Atlantic world, once spread up the eastern seaboard of the United States and survive today in the Caribbean. Their movements—geographical as well as cultural—make them some of the most compelling and slippery performances in the nineteenthcentury Atlantic world. In its various forms, the acts performed black Atlantic culture to a variety of observers. Anglo-Jamaican planter and playwright Matthew G. Lewis (perhaps best known for helping to create gothic melodrama back in England) sensed Jonkonnu’s allure in the ¤rst decades of the 1800s. He found “John Canoe”just as compelling as Jacobs did, calling the act’s main character “indispensable,” even irresistible. As Lewis’s journal suggests, the performance meant much to audiences both white and black.For slave and slaveholder alike,the actrepresentsacompellingmoment of interracial interaction.Jonkonnu generated its broad appeal in a series of shifting reinventions, revealing mobile { 65 } and active concepts of race and identity at play inthenineteenth-century circumAtlantic world.1 Broadly speaking, Jonkonnuactsevolved from Caribbean and North American planter society performances, through Atlantic street performance, to the stage, eventually ¤nding their way into Jacobs’s memoir. The collective performance histories of Jonkonnu, then, reveal geographical movement accompanied by generic movement: its performances do not passively remain in one location or in any one form. As the act traveled, it jumped generic boundaries, insinuating its characters and scenes ¤rst into institutionalized theatre and eventually into literary culture. This movement, of course, happened repeatedly, de¤ning nineteenth-century theatre culture. Jonkonnu’s movements also point to elaborate and complicated dynamics of attraction and exploitation, rebellion and collusion in nineteenth-century representations of race. Jacobs’s use of the popular performance in her emancipatory memoir suggests that Jonkonnu enacted some liberatory potential, even if resistance was only masked and momentary . At the same time, Lewis’s journal entry reveals that the act exercised a compelling attraction to white audiences, despite its riotously disruptive potential . Such tensely competing claims reveal the importance of Jonkonnu acts to Atlantic theatre culture. Jacobs’s account of antebellum American slave life, with one of the bestknown descriptions of Jonkonnu, can give us a sense of some of the act’s prominent elements. Jacobs remembers a collective, group-oriented event: “They consist of companies of slaves from the plantations, generally of the lower class. Two athletic men,in calico wrappers,have a net thrown over them,covered with all manner of bright-colored stripes. Cows’ tails are fastened to their backs, and their heads are decorated with horns. A box, covered with sheepskin, is called the gumbo box.A dozen beat on this,while others strike triangles and jawbones, to which bands of dancers keep time.” Jacobs describes the performances as elaborately staged and thoroughly prepared events. For some time leading up to the festivities, participants composed songs for the occasion. The performance event itself provided a pretext for barely controlled revelries hinting at threatening reversals of slavery’s power structures. Jacobs recalls the license granted on these occasions: “companies, of a hundred each, turn out early in the morning , and are allowed to go round till twelve o’clock, begging for contributions.” The actors used the contributions of rum and money for “carousals”authorized but not supervised by the masters.2 Such are the classical elements of American Jonkonnu performances of the nineteenth century. It took place during the winter holidays, tolerated and even encouraged in the break between Christmas and the New Year.3 Dancers (usuPETER REED { 66 } ally male), costumed in a variety of disguises, performed the act on the street or the grounds of a plantation. In descriptions, spectators frequently use the name “Jonkonnu” to refer to the leading character as well...

The Le Souëf box: Reflections on imperial nostalgia, material culture and exhibitionary practice in colonial Victoria

The Le Souëf box, a decorated chest containing a set of miniaturised Aboriginal weapons, was made by Albert and Caroline Le Souëf a decade after the frontier period in the colonial state of Victoria, Australia. Invested with many key concerns of the nineteenth century's apprehension and representation of Australian Aboriginal peoples, this complex composite object of images, text and diminutive objects is animated by many cultural and scientific narratives of the era, including ethnography, typology, museology, miniaturisation and the fetishisation of indigenous weaponry. The Le Souëf box is a transitional object, reflecting the shifting colonial ideologies of the 1860s and the gradual move from ethnology to the harder and more formalised racial sciences. Yet the box also reveals the personal and psychological desires of it makers, showing a genuine interest in Aboriginal people as well as an imperial nostalgia for an untainted past and an idealised pre‐contact Aboriginal life. This paper seeks to bring an explorative postcolonial attention to the study of the Le Souëf box, and considers the potential of reading European nineteenth‐century objects of material culture that represent Aboriginal people as sources, and queries their historical reliability. The paper reflects on the implicit relationships between nineteenth‐century European exhibitionary practices, memory work and Australian history, with material representations of Australian Aboriginal culture in a settler‐colonial period that was marked by violent dispossession of Aboriginal people.

KIND OF MAN ARE YOU?: Beckettian Anthropology, Cultural Authenticity, and Irish Identity

Situating Beckett's writing in relation to anthropological accounts of Ireland, this article examines how his postcolonial parody of ethnographic discourse serves to critique the notion of cultural authenticity. Since the late nineteenth-century anthropological representations, from A.C. Haddon's studies for The Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland to Conrad Arensberg's ethnographies of western Ireland, had incorporated native culture into a fundamentally primitivist perspective. In , however, Beckett revises this perspective to offer overtly constructed images of authentic Irishness, which refuse the hegemonic modes of cultural identification and epistemological mastery implicit in more conventional anthropological representations of Ireland.

Out in Public: Configurations of Women's Bodies in Nineteenth-Century America, and: Victoria Woodhull's Sexual Revolution: Political Theater and the Popular Press in Nineteenth-Century America (review)

Reviewed by: Out in Public: Configurations of Women's Bodies in Nineteenth-Century America, and: Victoria Woodhull's Sexual Revolution: Political Theater and the Popular Press in Nineteenth-Century America Patricia Okker Out in Public: Configurations of Women's Bodies in Nineteenth-Century America. By Alison Piepmeier. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. 288 pp. $49.95/$19.95 paper. Victoria Woodhull's Sexual Revolution: Political Theater and the Popular Press in Nineteenth-Century America. By Amanda Frisken. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. 208 pp. $37.50. Organized as a series of case studies, Piepmeier's Out in Public focuses on the female body with specific explorations of five women: Anna Cora Mowatt, Mary Baker Eddy, Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells, and Sarah Josepha Hale. In addition to her material and discursive analysis of the body, Piepmeier offers a wide range of visual images of women in public, particularly of women's athleticism. Together, the analyses of these texts provide an "alternative iconography" to the familiar images both of men in public and of women in private, domestic settings (19). One of the many strengths of this book is its rich interdisciplinarity. Piepmeier reads Mowatt's Autobiography of an Actress, for example, in the context of nineteenth-century representations of acting, travel narratives, freak shows, and sentimental portrayals of female invalidism. Mary Baker Eddy's Science and Health is situated within discourses of science, including medicine and astronomy. Sojourner Truth's "Ain't I a Woman?" speech is likewise read within models of nineteenth-century oratory and the tradition of tall tales. This emphasis on cultural contexts and polyvocalism undergirds Piepmeier's boldest accomplishment—the dismantling of the still popular nineteenth-century binaries of public and private, agent and victim. Rather than completely abandoning these dichotomies, Piepmeier instead targets their instabilities, the "fluid interactions between public and private and the simultaneity of victimization and agency" (5). As Piepmeier makes clear, the body is an ideal site for such investigations: The female body is the defining feature of the private sphere and of the victim paradigm, often coming synechdochally to stand for domesticity and victimization. However, the body is also a site which is mobile and malleable, able to change in response to changing circumstances and able to be configured in terms of various spaces, from the home to the podium. (9) Testament to this malleability is the impressively diverse configurations of embodiment that Piepmeier uncovers. For example, while Ida B. Wells rejects any association of black female embodiment with victimization and instead uses the image of fully embodied black women to challenge discourses both of lynching and of racialized nationalism, Anna Mowatt uses her own experiences with illness as a "sentimental mask" that "conceals her sensational body" (45). Piepmeier's nuanced reading of Sarah Hale's identification of her corporeality with Godey's Lady's Book similarly shows how print culture "allowed her to exceed the boundaries of that binary and call it into question" (174). The collective result of these five case studies is an often surprising view of nineteenth-century womanhood, one that avoids the stereotypes of domesticated woman and defiant rebel. Most important, Piepmeier's work demonstrates the extent to which nineteenth-century women responded strategically to the varying and often competing discourses surrounding them. Like Out in Public, Amanda Frisken's Victoria Woodhull's Sexual Revolution explores public womanhood in nineteenth-century America, [End Page 211] in this case by focusing on one unconventional woman. The subject of three recent biographies—Lois Beachy Underhill's The Woman Who Ran for President (1995), Mary Gabriel's Notorious Victoria (1998), and Barbara Goldsmith's Other Powers (1998)—Victoria Woodhull is certainly a woman deserving of our attention. She was a vocal advocate for radical sexual politics, owned the first women's brokering firm on Wall Street, and in 1872 she served as the Equal Rights Party's nominee for President of the United States. Although much of Woodhull's life remains a mystery—the authorship of many of her speeches is uncertain, for example, and her own accounts of her life are often unreliable—Frisken's new book offers a compelling addition to these recent...

(Not) Dying of Shame: Female Sexual Submission in 1890s' Erotica

Presented here is part of an on-going project concerned with nineteenth-century representations of sexuality that play with or deploy power hierarchies for erotic purposes. While there is a growing body of work documenting the ethics, practice, and pleasures of BDSM (a portmanteau acronym meaning Bondage and Domination, Domination and Submission, Sadism and Masochism),2 one cannot of course assume that the ends of the nineteenth century and twentieth century share an understanding of sexual activity where representations of power construct the relationships and acts in a (semi)playful scenario. However, for some BDSM participants the notion of 'play' is anathema since they regard BDSM as a lifestyle choice that defines their entire existence.3 Much of the nineteenth-century critical apparatus exercised upon representations of sexual power-play derive from a pathology of desire, the perversion of normative 'healthy' sexuality. Terminology is the first difficulty and its problems describe the nature of the theoretical difficulties in engaging with this material. In relation to the kind of material I will be discussing here, the terms most often invoked to define the sexual activity are masochism and sadism, neither of which has a particularly flattering lilt to it, since the words, as commonly defined, describe a self-destructive or destructive violence exercised through sex. We have been bequeathed the word masochism not by Leopold Sacher-Masoch, author of the prototype dominatrix novel Venus in Furs (1870), and the word sadism not by the Marquis de Sade, but by a paradigm which seeks to explain the pathological origins and performances of a man's desire to be forced to submit, sexually and mentally to a woman, or his desire to brutalise

Lawrence Alma-Tadema and the Modern City of Ancient Rome

This paper argues that Alma-Tadema's representations of the ancient city of Rome can be seen as significant explorations of urban experience, parallel to the more familiar nineteenth-century representations of modern Paris. Alma-Tadema distinguishes clearly between the small-town environment of Pompeian subjects and the metropolitan environment of pictures set in the capital. Using techniques such as oblique viewpoints and edge cropping, Alma-Tadema presents the “shock” experience characteristic of the modern city in urban theory. The late nineteenth-century notion of the city's modernity thus provides a novel perspective on traditional fascination with Rome as the ultimate paradigm for the urban.