R-3 Repository :: Browsing by Author "Levander, Caroline Field"

Browsing by Author "Levander, Caroline Field"

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"A most terrible spectacle": Visualizing racial science in American literature and culture, 1839--1929
(2005) Reid, Mandy Aimil; Levander, Caroline Field
My dissertation, "'A Most Terrible Spectacle': Visualizing Racial Science in American Literature and Culture, 1839--1929," uses a wide range of visual artifacts---books, cartes-de-visite , and photographs---to chart how an emerging nineteenth-century visual culture develops and disseminates scientific accounts of race. Taking seriously Robyn Wiegman's contention that any broad analysis of race must analyze "the visual moment as itself a complicated and historically contingent production" (American Anatomies [1995] 24), my project explores how developing nineteenth-century scientific accounts of race depend on the often-overlooked interdependencies between visual and literary cultures in order to solidify the idea of essential racial difference. More particularly, I analyze how literary depictions of race by Anglo-American writers like Harriet Beecher Stowe and African American writers like Pauline Hopkins and Martin R. Delany engage with contemporary visual media in their literary depictions of race. A wealth of critical commentary on nineteenth-century visual culture by scholars such as Laura Wexler and Shawn Michelle Smith has attended to visual culture's myriad representations of racial difference, but has tended to overlook, first, the complex interplay between nineteenth-century visual forms like photography and literary forms like the novel, and second, how this dialogue helps to disseminate popular scientific theories of race. By analyzing such diverse texts as Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, Truth's cartes-de-visite, Delany's African American ethnology, and Hopkins' Contending Forces, I show how evolving visualizations of race circulate through and shape nineteenth- and early twentieth-century U.S. culture. As my chapters collectively suggest, we cannot fully understand nineteenth-century literary texts without recognizing their vital engagement with visual culture. This engagement, as I have shown, is one integrally involved in disseminating to a popular audience shifting scientific models of race. Recognizing literary reliance on the visual enables us to recognize the full extent to which literary texts engage in debates about race.
Aural fictions: Sound in African American literature
(2010) Messmer, David; Levander, Caroline Field
This dissertation explores the importance of representations of sound in the African American literary tradition. Beginning with Frederick Douglass's descriptions of the slave songs and working through depictions of jazz in the early moments of the Civil Rights movement, I show that the aural dimension of African American culture has mediated black writers' engagement with written public discourse. Looking at such diverse works as slave narratives, essays, music books, serial fiction, autobiography, and the novel, this project demonstrates that the tension between aurality and the printed word motivates much of the political work that African American literary texts accomplish. By excavating the various strategies that black writers use to resolve this tension I argue that sound, especially music, functions in African American literature to allow black writers to engage in intertextual discourses that utilize aurality to speak across temporal and stylistic boundaries that have previously limited our critical inquiries. While critics have afforded substantial attention to African American musical culture and its influence on black writing---most notably Houston A. Baker's work on the "Blues Matrix" and Alexander G. Weheliye's notion of "Sonic Afro-Modernity"---this criticism has focused on specific musical forms as structuring agents that exert a direct influence upon black literature. My dissertation not only expands the site of critical inquiry to include non-musical sound, but also focuses on the ways that black writers foreground aurality as more than a means of accessing black musical traditions, but also to create an inter-textual connection to a black literary tradition as well. My dissertation shows that the African American aural tradition, and the inherent problems that accompany any attempt to represent it in writing, has provided black writers a common site from which they can enter into literary genres and styles that are otherwise racially coded as non-black while still maintaining a strong connection to the African American literary tradition.
Bawdy talk: The politics of women's public speech in nineteenth-century American literature and culture
(1995) Levander, Caroline Field; Minter, David L.
Throughout the pages of nineteenth-century American fiction men remain fascinated by the sound of women's speech. Literary depictions of men's intense interest in women's pleasing and distinct utterance occur with a frequency that suggest not so much that there "are" unalterable differences between American men's and women's speech, but that the imagining of that difference is central to the nation's understanding of itself as a distinct entity or to the creation of what Lauren Berlant calls a "national symbolic." These lengthy depictions of women's speech thus participate in cultural work of a profound, enduring, and to date unspecified nature. It is the project of this dissertation to describe the cultural burden placed on women's language in mainstream nineteenth-century American literature and, then, to carve out new ways of thinking about the public significance of women's speech and its impact on the nineteenth-century political arena. In chapter one, I analyze the writings of, among others, Henry James, Sarah Hale, and Noah Webster in order to show that the separation of women's speech from the public arena was a process that depended for its success on the attention that men paid to the sound of women's talk and to the desire that sound produced. In short, I establish a clear relation between the creation and reinforcement of the public sphere and the depictions of women's speech that occur repeatedly in American fiction. In my second chapter, however, I show that by mid-century a minority of American writers, including Herman Melville and E. D. E. N. Southworth had begun arguing that the sexually explicit subject matter, rather than eroticized sound, of women's language recenters their speech in the public sphere. Using their figuration as a departure point, I show, in chapters three through six, how Maria Monk, Caroline Lee Hentz, Harriet Jacobs, Lillie Devereux Blake, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps employed and foregrounded this alternative paradigm of women's speech in their political fictions in order to influence, respectively, the nativist, pro-slavery, abolitionist, women's suffrage, and labor reform movements. My analysis thus revises the critical consensus that nineteenth-century women's speech failed to impact America's political life.
Fashioning Slavery: Slaves and Clothing in the U.S. South, 1830–1865
(2014-04-24) Knowles, Katie; Boles, John B.; Hall, Randal L; Levander, Caroline Field; Eaton, Linda S.
This dissertation examines such varied sources as Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Eastman Johnson’s genre paintings, runaway advertisements, published narratives, plantation records, the WPA ex-slave narratives, and nearly thirty items of clothing with provenance connections to enslaved wearers. The research presented in the following pages seeks to reveal the complexities surrounding clothing and slave life in the antebellum South by examining a variety of sources in combination. Enslaved people resisted race-based slavery by individualizing their appearance when working and when playing, but they were ultimately unsuccessful in resisting their exclusion from the race-based American fashion system. In bringing together previous scholarship on slavery in the American South, material culture, and fashion studies, this project reveals the deep connections between race and fashion in the antebellum United States. Enslaved people struggled against a racist culture that attempted to exclude them as valid participants in American culture. The individuality expressed by slaves through personalizing their clothing was a tactic of resistance against racism and race-based slavery. In many instances, enslaved people chose to acquire and dress in fashionable Euro-American clothing, a method of resistance because it was an attempt by them to disrupt the racially exclusionary fashion system of the antebellum United States. Though relatively few garments survive today, the voices of enslaved people and the records of their oppressors provide a rich narrative that helps deconstruct the many ways in which slaves encountered clothing. Clothing played an integral part in the daily life of enslaved African Americans in the antebellum South and functioned in multi-faceted ways across the antebellum United States to racialize and engender difference, and to oppress a variety of people through the visual signs and cues of the fashion system. By combining written, visual, and material sources, this study demonstrates the imperative that dress be a central part of the analysis as scholars continue to explore the history of race and slavery in the United States.
Religious liberties: Anti-Catholicism and liberal democracy in United States literature and culture, 1774--1889
(2006) Fenton, Elizabeth; Levander, Caroline Field
Late-eighteenth-and nineteenth-century American texts abound with representations of Catholic malevolence. But rather than simply indicating authorial bias against Catholic practitioners, these representations reveal anti-Catholicism's fundamental importance to the U.S.'s emerging liberal democratic tradition. Catholicism stands in texts of this period at the intersection of the religious and the national, as writers across decades and genres struggle to reconcile liberal democracy's promises of egalitarianism and tolerance with Catholicism's ostensibly tyrannical hierarchy and dogmatism. Thus in addition to demarcating a religious identity and set of theological practices, Catholicism has long operated as a test case for the efficacy of liberal democratic notions of privacy, pluralism, and equality. Excavation of U.S. liberal democracy's religious roots illuminates the ways in which that political tradition has aligned the nation with Protestantism and thereby ensured the mutual dependence, rather than the "separation" we so often take for granted, of church and state. From the earliest writings of the Continental Congress to the late-nineteenth-century novels of Mark Twain, U.S. discourses of freedom and self-governance construct Catholics as political subjects aiming, as John Jay put it, to "reduce the ancient free Protestant Colonies to the same state of slavery with themselves." Significantly, the drama of Protestant-Catholic conflict often played itself out when Anglo-Protestant writers considered the U.S.'s place within the American hemisphere. Thus the passage of the 1774 Quebec Bill inspired contemporary discourses of religious privacy (chapter one); debates over U.S. expansion into western and especially Mexican territories produced discussions of pluralism and representational governance (chapters two and three); and mid-century contemplations if Haitian Catholicism (chapter four) forced many U.S. citizens to confront liberal democracy's failure to adequately address the fact of racial as well as religious difference within the nation. In its insistence that U.S. political culture cannot be understood apart from anti-Catholicism, this dissertation demonstrates that, in their efforts to construct a religiously free public sphere, proponents of liberal democracy have over time rehearsed a discourse that fuses nation and religion.
Sacred geographies: Religion, race, and the Holy Land in U.S. literature, 1819--1920
(2009) Robey, Molly K.; Levander, Caroline Field
This dissertation explores how representations of the Holy Land shaped nineteenth-century Americans' conceptions of racial identity in the emerging United States. In the nineteenth century, Americans physically encountered Palestine for the first time, exploring, mapping, and essentially inventing the Holy Land during a century of U.S. nation-building, expansion, and imperialism. "Sacred Geographies" reveals how the Holy Land provided a durable and fertile resource for writers wrestling with the place of race in the burgeoning nation. Analyzing a variety of "national" writings, including frontier romances, Gothic tales, slave narratives, and domestic novels, I demonstrate U.S. writers' engagement with a rapidly growing Holy Land industry. Attention to this often overlooked fascination with the Holy Land highlights the interdependence of racial and religious histories in U.S. culture. By examining the Holy Land's fundamental impact on U.S. perceptions of racial and national belonging, "Sacred Geographies" exposes the flexibility of the racial categories used to constitute U.S. culture, and it demonstrates the vital role religious identity played in the development of U.S. racial ideologies.
The Slaveholding Crisis: The Fear of Insurrection, the Wilmot Proviso, and the Southern Turn Against American Exceptionalism
(2012-09-05) Paulus, Carl; Boles, John B.; McDaniel, W. Caleb; Levander, Caroline Field; Walther, Eric H.
On December 20, 1860, South Carolinians voted to abandon the Union and sparked the deadliest war in American history. Led by a proslavery movement that viewed Abraham Lincoln’s place at the helm of the federal government as a real and present danger to the security of the South's system of slavery, southerners—both slaveholders and nonslaveholders—willingly risked civil war by seceding from the United States. Rather than staying within the fold of the Union and awaiting the new president’s conduct regarding slavery in the territories and in the slave states, secessionists took bold action to change their destiny. By acting on their expectations of what the new president would do instead of waiting for his actual policy initiatives, they wagered on the possibility of a different future. This dissertation contends that the southern fear of slave insurrection, which was influenced by the Haitian Revolution, and the belief that northern antislavery forces would use violent uprising to end southern slavery shaped the planter ethos over the arc of the antebellum period, affecting national politics. Furthermore, this project explains why secessionists viewed Abraham Lincoln's support of the Wilmot Proviso as a valid reason for disunion.

Browsing by Author "Levander, Caroline Field"

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