Climate as Signifier in Reconstruction-era Poems

This session explores five different approaches to "climate" as they inform intersecting subfields across Americanist scholarship. These presentations will be both informative and provocative. Our five panelists represent... [ view full abstract ]

This session explores five different approaches to "climate" as they inform intersecting subfields across Americanist scholarship. These presentations will be both informative and provocative. Our five panelists represent diverse approaches, and their 10-minute talks will cover some of the major changes in U.S. culture across the long nineteenth century: from emergent economic and climatological theories in the 1840s; to transhemispheric antebellum practices of--and debates about--labor, including (northern) factory and (Caribbean) plantation management; to influential media climates in the 1850s as constructed by popular periodicals; to the political climate during the Civil War, with a focus on Lincoln, treason, and the suspension of habeas corpus; and finally, to Reconstruction-era representations of "literal" climate as they speak to postwar concerns with region and difference.

This roundtable will explore the cultural functions and ramifications of these climates: how archipelagic island plantocracies led to the environmental wreckage of the salt industry in the Bermudian archipelago; how the emerging disciplines of political economy and climatology construed "volatility" as normative, and how writers like Herman Melville discerned and critiqued these "objective" discourses; how Robert E. Bonner cultivated a climate of celebrity for antebellum women poets published in the New York Ledger in a way that changed the media landscape; how Lincoln's vision of the political climate has been theorized by legal historians and cultural theorists in terms of a "state of war"; and finally, how metaphors of climate in postbellum poems represented and evaded the ruptures of Reconstruction