Description
Book SynopsisIn Unsettled States, Dana Luciano and Ivy G. Wilson present some of the most exciting emergent scholarship in American literary and cultural studies of the long nineteenth century. Featuring eleven essays from senior scholars across the discipline, the book responds to recent critical challenges to the boundaries, both spatial and temporal, that have traditionally organized scholarship within the field. The volume considers these recent challenges to be aftershocks of earlier revolutions in content and method, and it seeks ways of inhabiting and amplifying the ongoing unsettledness of the field.
Written by scholars primarily working in the minor fields of critical race and ethnic studies, feminist and gender studies, labor studies, and queer/sexuality studies, the essays share a minoritarian critical orientation. Minoritarian criticism, as an aesthetic, political, and ethical project, is dedicated to finding new connections and possibilities within extant frameworks. Unsettled
Trade Review
Innovative and thought-provoking, this collection will be of broad interest, opening up discussions on an array of texts, critical approaches, and developing conversations in the study of of nineteenth-century literature. With essays that are accessible, lucid, and utterly fascinating,Unsettled Statesoffers arresting analyses andmakes a real contributionto the field. -- Dana Nelson,author of Bad for Democracy
Unsettled Statessheds light on the papers long swept under the rug ranging from early Hispanic literature to polar periodicals. More importantly, the authors of the articles conscientiously build up their discussions in relation to contemporary literature and critical theory, which makes the collection even more distinguishing and valuable for the twenty-first century reader. * American Studies Journal *
Table of Contents
Contents Introduction: On Moving Ground 1 Dana Luciano Part I: Archives Unbound 1. Confederates in the Hispanic Attic: The Archive against Itself 31 Rodrigo Lazo 2. Historical Totality and the African American Archive 55 Lloyd Pratt 3. Race, Reenactment, and the "Natural-Born Citizen" 76 Tavia Nyong'o 4. Doing Justice to the Archive: Beyond Literature 103 Shelley Streeby Part II: States of Exception 5. Unsettled Life: Early Liberia's Epistolary Equivocations 119 David Kazanjian 6. The News at the Ends of the Earth: Polar Periodicals 158 Hester Blum 7. Feeling Like a State: Writing the 1863 New York City Draft Riots 189 Glenn Hendler 8. Impersonating the State of Exception 232 Jonathan Elmer Part III: Speculative Sexualities 9. Eat, Sex, Race 245 Kyla Wazana Tompkins 10. Connecticut Yankings: Mark Twain and the Masturbating Dude 275 Elizabeth Freeman 11. What Came Before 298 Peter Coviello P.S.: A Coda 307 Ivy G. Wilson About the Contributors 315 Index 317
