Moving Through Time (Dancing/Loitering/Skipping)

“Moving Through Time (Dancing/Loitering/Skipping)” centers on Civil War-era writers who, during the late 1850’s and 1860’s, write female (pre-) adolescence as disruptive, uncanny, and always out of time. Drawing on the... [ view full abstract ]

“Moving Through Time (Dancing/Loitering/Skipping)” centers on Civil War-era writers who, during the late 1850’s and 1860’s, write female (pre-) adolescence as disruptive, uncanny, and always out of time. Drawing on the writings Harriet Jacobs, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., and Elizabeth Stoddard, I delineate three major forms of childhood mobility—dancing, loitering, skipping—that represent distinct models of futurity and change, each responding to the absorption with revolutionary time that marks the zeitgeist. In re-forming conceptions of time and change through the visualization of “small,” often low-agency movements of girlhood, each of the authors in my study relies on some form of a slow “global time” (and even, in some instances, the massive- infinitesimal movement of “glacial time”) that develops under the Agassiz-Darwin framework, often overtly positioning these gestures as antagonistic to political discourses of their period.

This essay is influenced by scholars of “the child” such as Caroline Steedman and Rebekah Sheldon, but also theorizes the link between temporality and movement through thinkers like Christina Sharpe, Fred Moten, and Carrie Noland. Its purpose is to reveal a significant shift in American genre and epistemology during the Civil War, and to weave sexual, racial, and scientific histories together to produce a framework for thinking about temporality through the body.