Substance/Matters of Transatlantic Literary Culture

This roundtable gathers together four scholars who address the significance of granular, malleable, elemental, and composite substances to writers, thinkers, and makers of the nineteenth-century Americas. Our roundtable asks... [ view full abstract ]

This roundtable gathers together four scholars who address the significance of granular, malleable, elemental, and composite substances to writers, thinkers, and makers of the nineteenth-century Americas. Our roundtable asks why these particular substances—baking powder, gold, clay, and poison—repeatedly rise to the surface of nineteenth-century literary and visual culture. Building on the work of Bill Brown, Monique Allewaert, Branka Arsic, and Mel Chen, we will discuss how our varied objects of inquiry enable us to limn the historically specific discourses around material agents and reagents in this period, and the ideas of race, gender, and personhood that these substances engendered or discomposed. We envision our roundtable as a collaborative session: each contributor will deliver a ten-minute pre-circulated paper on her substance of interest, followed by comments from the chair, Michele Currie Navakas, and discussion between audience and panelists. Presentations and discussion will be guided by the following questions, to be shared with the audience:

• What is the use value, and exchange value, of these substances? How are they reproduced, and what kinds of labor enact their production and exchange?

• How do material agents and the discourses that traverse them enhance or diminish the agency of particular human actors?

• What historically and geographically specific “thing theories” can we discern by examining the deployment and depiction of these substances? How might we tease out multiple ontologies embedded in a single object?

• The substances we examine are all products of, and actors in, varied environmental interactions and human manipulations, such as mixing, seeping, catalyzing, molding, and demolishing. How can the “ecological” lens to which they lend themselves also help describe the spread and interaction of different forms of knowledge and personhood?

• How can a focus on labile, active non-human matter help us better understand eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature, science, and political thought in the Americas?

Elizabeth Hopwood will look at textual depictions of emergent technology in the late 19th century. In particular, baking powder was represented as a modern technology that ostensibly constituted a transfer of labor from enslaved subject to household domestic servant to housewife: with baking powder, the labor of baking bread was dramatically shortened. But as cookbooks and colorful lithographs circulated, the textual depiction of the black female domestic servant was figured as both a conduit for technological innovation and a locus of nostalgic mourning for the antebellum era and, with it, a hold on the black female body (in the kitchen), her praxis (the art of cooking), and her effect on culture as a maker.

Elizabeth Polcha will read gold as a potent agent in The Female American, a Robinsonade novel published in several editions at the turn of the nineteenth century. The biracial Native American protagonist, Unca Eliza Winkfield, narrates her expedition on a Caribbean island, detailing her conversion of the indigenous population. Unca Eliza’s mission relies upon a “gold idol” in the shape of an androgynous human figure. Though she claims it “can yield me no real service,” by selling indigenous “gold treasure” in England and ritually destroying the idol, Unca Eliza enacts settler colonialism. Gold links The Female American to Latin American travel narratives, and represents New World excess, sexuality, and interracial relations for a nineteenth-century audience.  

Kate Simpkins will consider how two stories of maroon rebellion in Saint-Domingue speak to the role of early Caribbean ethnobotany in the formation of counter-cultural modernity. These articulations point to the ways in which African culture informed the development of scientific knowledge in the French Caribbean. Earliest records of maroon activity in pre-revolutionary Haiti include the history of a particular African healer and poisoner, François Makandal, sourced from a combination of judicial, military, and scientific archives. This examination traces Makandal’s “poison” story as it transitions into British pantomime and later, into American translations of the French novel.

Valeria Tsygankova will examine the work of enslaved potter and poet David Drake, active in the 1830-60s in South Carolina. Drake’s creations in clay—pots inscribed with poems about clay, pottery, geology, diet, ethics, slavery, and local economies—are traversed by multiple material meanings. In them, ideas about personhood and thingness from West and West Central Africa, Anglophone abolitionism, protestant Christianity, and the material culture of the US South converge. Drake’s works thus embody a wide-ranging transatlantic conversation around the status of subjects and objects, and raise questions about the interaction of varied ontologies in the Americas.

Michele Currie Navakas will serve as chair and respondent.